"I wish I had a river/ I could skate away on"

This Sunday, the last one in May, finds me singing Joni Mitchell. 

Oh, I wish I had a river
I could skate away on
I'm so hard to handle
I'm selfish and I'm sad...

I wish I had a river so long
I would teach my feet to fly

My dream at the moment is to fly somewhere quiet and alone. I would take my writing and try to find a way into it that pleases me, that stirs the heat below my surface until sparks turns to flames and I'm flying a writer's high. I think of Samuel Beckett's lines

“Perhaps my best years are gone. When there was a chance of happiness. But I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire in me now. No, I wouldn't want them back.”

My problem is that I want them back. I feel as if I wasted so much time, that I have left all too late. Where does one find courage? 

"engulfed by a tide of sadness mingled with flashes of pure happiness"

 I am reading "A Single Rose" by Muriel Barbery that takes place in Japan. 

"'Life is painful,' said Rose... 

The Englishwoman looked away, lost in contemplation of the pavilion.

'If a person is not ready to suffer,' she said, 'they are not ready to live.'"

I feel as if my life is almost over though admittedly, I've always felt like this. I did not expect to live this long and I wonder if this thought has shaped my life. I have dared myself to do things that others have judged selfish even reckless. I regret nothing although many of my actions have caused me discomfort even pain, and worse - sometimes I was responsible for another's pain. 

Over thirty years ago, a male friend said that I would always be unsatisfied. I expect too much from life. Do I? I see living as work. There is so much work, drudgery even, doing all that must be done. I am talking about housework, paperwork, personal hygiene, and even the responsibility that I feel for others - especially my children when they were young - and yet, more often than not, these responsibilities brought "flashes of pure happiness". 

I'm now thinking in song...

When Kris Kristofferson wrote "Freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose," he said that he was "trying to show that  freedom is a double-edged sword and that you may be free, but it can be painful to be that free..."

I love Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire". 

"I saw a beggar leaning on his wooden crutch

He said to me, "you must not ask for so much"

And a pretty woman leaning in her darkened door

She cried to me, "hey, why not ask for more?"

Oh, like a bird on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried in my way to be free"

I am still trying. A friend once asked me how I'm doing and I replied, "I think I'm happier than I think I am."

A Trembling Camellia

 "I begin to cry, quietly, slowly, a trembling camellia in my breast." 

Is that not the most beautiful image? 

I am reading "The Elegance of the Hedgehog" by Muriel Barbery and I am enthralled. 

In one scene towards the end of the novel: a young man returns to his former apartment and asks the concierge the name of the flowers planted in the garden. She tells him "camellias" and he tells her "when I was in a really bad way I would think about those flowers, and it did me good... it practically saved my life." 

"'Jean, you cannot imagine how happy I am that you came by here today.'"

"'But why?'"

"Because a camellia can change fate."

Other Writers

 I was thinking that my reader(s) may think me lazy because I love quoting other writers and then I remembered Nancy Mairs' "Voice Lessons" and a passage that made me happy because it gave me permission to quote others. (Throughout my life writers have given me permission to think what I think and not what I think I should think.) In this particular passage that I remember had me sighing with relief (because I do love a good quote) Mairs quotes Jane Tompkins ("Me and My Shadow"):

"I find that having released myself from the duty to say things that I am not interested in, in a language I resist, I feel free to entertain other people's voices. Quoting them becomes a pleasure of appreciation rather than the obligatory giving of credit, because when I write in a voice that is not struggling to be heard through a language, I no longer feel that it is not I who am speaking, and so, there is more room for what others have said."

She also quotes Carolyn Heilbrun who I adore: "Lives do not serve as models, only stories do that. And it is a hard thing to make up stories to live by. We can only retell and live by the stories we have read or heard. We live our lives though texts."

I understand better now why I have been devouring books this past year. I am looking for a new novel way to live my final act. 

More food for thought (for me and Lisa)

 Another quote from "The Little Paris Bookshop":

"'Do you know that there's a halfway world between each ending and each new beginning? It's called the hurting time, Jean Perdu. It's a bog; it's where your dreams and worries and forgotten plans gather. Your steps are heavier during that time. Don't underestimate the transition... between farewell and new departure. Give yourself the time you need. Some thresholds are too wide to be taken in one stride.'"

Fauci

 During the pandemic, we agreed to take a kitten into our home. We thought it male and in a bow to Dr. Fauci, we decided to name him after this good doctor. When we learnt that Fauci was a girl, we called her Miss Fauci though most often we drop the Miss. 

I find myself in love with this small creature and wondered why beyond the idea that she is regal and Egyptian (or in my head she is - "Egyptians believed cats were magical creatures, capable of bringing good luck to the people who housed them.") so I did a little research. 

One article noted:

"I believe that a major reason we love cats is because of an uncanny ability that few humans possess: they register our tactile presence in a deeply felt way. They really know how to let us in! They’re right there in the delectable moment receiving our touch.

Delighting in our physical presence, they may begin to purr and perhaps roll on their backs, exposing their vulnerability. As if to say, “I trust you. Give me some love and make me feel good.” Their gift to us is that they receive us deeply, without any troubling cognitions or disturbing memories of less savory moments, such as when we forgot to feed them or clean their litter box. They let all of that go. They’re just here with us right now.

Perhaps you’re blessed to have a partner who receives you in a deep way. What a gift to sense that your partner is really letting you in. But sadly, most of us have blocks to receiving deeply and freely. Perhaps past conflicts or traumas have muddied the waters. Or, we’ve been taught that giving is nobler than receiving and we believe that we’re selfish if we receive uninhibitedly.

Cats teach us that this ain't so. Most likely, we don’t judge cats as being selfish; we relish how openly they let us in. Or, perhaps we think they're selfish, but we don't mind. Humans could use more healthy narcissism in regard to receiving people more deeply.

Research has shown that cats can be very healing for us. A 10-year research study suggests that cat owners were less likely to die of heart attacks than people who have never owned one. The latter group was 40 percent more likely to die from heart attacks and 30 percent more likely to die from cardiovascular disease. Other studies confirm that cats can lower our blood pressure and release dopamine and serotonin, which reduce stress and improve immune functioning.

Cats can also help release oxytocin, which is associated with the feeling of being in love. As we know, love heals, and perhaps an important aspect of this healing is the bonding created by their ability to receive us deeply. I have fond memories of my now deceased cat slowly sauntering toward me and lying on my chest, purring. It’s a precious feeling that puts us into a relaxed state...

Be a cat. Get out of your head, take a deep, easy breath, and be mindfully present with how it feels in your body to receive a hug and affection from a loved one. Whether from a cat or human, letting in love just might heal you."

Habit

 "Habit is a vain and treacherous goddess. She lets nothing disrupt her rule. She smothers one desire after another: the desire to travel, the desire for a better job or a new love. She stops us from living as we would like, because habit prevents us from asking ourselves whether we continue to enjoy doing what we do."        ~  Nina George (The Little Paris Bookshop)

I will think on habit today and return to discuss habit and whether I am enjoying what I do. 

I Want to Dance

"Dance is the hidden language of the soul of the body."        Martha Graham

***

I've decided amid all in this messy world, I must find something of beauty, and the two things that I truly think beautiful are dance and books. Yesterday I finished "The Little Paris Bookshop" by Nina George and  I felt so happy, I'm reading it again to write quotes. 

"With all due respect, what you read is more important in the long term than the man you marry...

"Surrender to the treasures of books instead of entering pointless relationships with men, who neglect you anyway, or going on crazy diets because you're not thin enough for one man and not stupid enough for the next...

Books keep stupidity at bay. And vain hopes. And vain men. They undress you with love, strength and knowledge. It's love from within."

Just Call Me Pathetic...

Lots of thoughts thunk but do they find their way to paper? Rarely.

David Reid suggested that I read "French Braid" by Ann Tyler. He tells me that Tyler loves family and he found this novel curious and interesting. Susan (who is listening to the audio version) says it has no bite. She wants to read a book that gives some insight into her close relationships. I'm with Susan. I need some light right now.

I dwell on dying too often. The world is not a happy one. My baby sister wrote about her happiness in a FaceBook post and questioned herself. How dare she be happy when the world is so unhappy? Another friend who had booked a trip to France cancelled at the last moment. She did not want to leave her family when another world war might happen. How do we live our lives at this time? 

I have begun Ann Patchett's "These Precious Days" - a compilation of essays about her thoughts when the pandemic was raging, still rages. 

"Death always thinks of us eventually. The trick is to find the joy in the interim and make good use of the days we have."

I feel as if I am nearing my expiry date and I don't want my last days (hopefully years) to be filled with doom and gloom. I want to find a way to give and enjoy the time I have left. 

 

Tempus Fugit

 I think about writing all the time. I devour books but do I pick up my pen? Margaret Atwood reminds me that : "If I waited for perfection, I would never write a word."

I'm going to try to write again here - imperfectly - even if it is only a sentence or two. 

Bisous

Revised "Three Hundred Days of Indulgence"

Chapter One: Summer

 “[T]he only creatures that seem to survive  / Are those that give themselves away in flash and sparkle / And gay flicker of joyful life; / Those that go glittering abroad / With a bit of splendour.”                                                                                          - D.H. Lawrence (Self-Preservation)

Before he leaves for work, Matt wakes Annie with a light nudge on the shoulder. She slowly uncurls her body, stretches, rolls out of bed and heads to the kitchen to say goodbye only to find that he has already left. She pours herself a cup of coffee, wondering if he remembers that he won’t see her and his children for four months.

A year earlier, on their 19th wedding anniversary, they went to a Greek restaurant to celebrate but Matt brought his work, not romance, to the candlelit table. He ranted and raved about working long hours in the cold and wet on film sets with incompetent directors who did not respect his expertise. He hated his job. Annie suggested he leave. He laughed bitterly. She cried. A few glasses of wine later, he calmed and together they came up with an escape plan. They would take their three children to France for a year.  In a bubble of excitement, Annie spent the next twelve months studying French, and organising their financial and home affairs so all would be taken care of in their absence. Matt spent the year working and worrying. At the last moment - too anxious about leaving his livelihood - he accepted another four month film. Annie and the children would have to cope without him. 

After a second coffee, Annie scrambles about throwing last minute items into suitcases before waking her three children. By the time the taxi arrives to drive them to the airport, the house is littered from one end to the other with surplus clothes, books, toys and toiletries that cannot be squeezed into their carryons. Matt will be upset, she knows, when he returns that evening to find himself surrounded by the debris. For the first time, she doesn’t give a sweet fuck. There is nothing like illness, death, and a plane to catch, to put things into perspective. 

Yesterday, she nursed a friend through an anxiety attack, too anxious herself to administer real sympathy. In the afternoon, she said goodbye to another friend whose disease will literally choke her to death before Annie returns. In the evening, she and the children met friends for a last supper. They left early to pack but it was well after midnight before Annie climbed into bed beside a snoring Matt. She had hoped they would make love their last night  together but as she watched his chest rise and fall, she couldn’t wake him. How could she disturb a man who insists he needs ten solid hours of sleep? She burrowed her head into the pillow willing sleep to come but it refused. Rolling onto her back, her eyes alit on Klimt’s Danae, framed in gold, illuminated by the moon. She had bought the print to celebrate her freedom the first time that she left Matt. During long lonely evenings, she talked to the ancient goddess, mother of Perseus. Over time, her words became a silent chant:

Danae, you lie in defenceless sleep upon Byzantine silk, your body curled into itself, one breast exposed to the world.  Does your white flesh speak of your virginity? Have you always been chaste or are you a virgin in the ancient sense of the word?  The latter, I think.  Your siren red hair, one leg provocatively raised, and the gold, which pours from your core, do not suggest innocence.  After being imprisoned by your father so no man could plant his seed in your lush flesh, were you also ambivalent about men?

Annie rolled onto her side and stared at her husband so peaceful in sleep. She wanted to snuggle into his warmth, rub her nose in the soft fleece of his chest so she could carry his scent with her. In the twenty years that they'd been married, they had never been apart for more than two months. How would she endure four? How would he?. Sometimes she wishes she could climb into his head so she would know better how to love him. She closed her eyes and drifted to sleep. 

Driving through the southern French countryside, past fields of sunflowers and vineyards, Annie feels the same sense of freedom that she felt when she first got her driver’s license. She would drive for hours pretending, like Walter Mitty, that she was on various missions of vital importance to the nation before returning to Matt and their small, one-bedroom apartment: her world expanded behind the wheel of the car. Twenty years later, she is once again behind a steering wheel on a mission but this one is playing in real time. Joseph her eleven year old is sitting in the front seat beside her, studying a map and calling out directions. Edward her eight year old is tormenting his four year old sister Camille in the back seat.

“Hush, hush, you two. We’re almost there.” 

They round a bend, and catch their first glimpse of the medieval village of Montague that will be their home for a year. Annie pulls over to the side of the road. Four blond heads and four sets of green eyes tilt upwards. Perched high on a hill, the village looks like a castle in Malory’s King Arthur. Annie has never seen anything so old and beautiful.  She drives the steep ascent to the town proper but when she peers through the narrow entrance and sees even narrower twisting roads beyond it, she parks outside beside the thick stone wall. From this perspective, the summer gardens, farmlands, and vineyards that surround the town look like undulating waves on a green ocean. She turns around and around until she is giddy.  The town becomes a Cezanne.  The landscape a Monet.  Laughing, she observes her children also spinning with excitement. Grasping Camille’s hand, she leads the way through the arched entrance, along cobble-stoned streets toward the church: “Look upwards, find the steeple, walk toward it,” was the landlord’s instructions. “The house with the green shutters is yours.”

As each week passes, she and the children grow more native. Every morning they devour bowls of steamy milked coffee or hot chocolate, accompanied with a warm crusty baguette or croissant fresh from the patisserie’s oven, a few seconds around the corner from their house. They no longer run to the window morning and night to watch the six mooing defecating cows clomp by, followed by a poker-faced farmer staff in hand.  Similarly, they no longer give notice to the green tractor with trailer, the town’s garbage truck, rumbling down the cobblestoned street twice a week, pausing in front of each house to toss green-bagged garbage into the trailer. 

For the first few weeks, they visited neighbouring villages but the sightseeing was short-lived as the days were hot and the children bored easily. Annie found the happiest solution for all was to go to a nearby lake with two lifeguards, paddle-boats, a waterslide, sandy beach and snack bar that sold french fries, cold drinks and ice-cream confections and kept her children entertained while she sat and read.

 One steamy hot morning, towards the end of summer, Annie opens the door to a tall good-looking stranger. He leans forward and kisses her on both cheeks, gently brushing her lips with his as he changes sides. She is taken aback and before she recovers, he repeats this gesture and then explains this is the greeting in the north of France, in the south two kisses suffice. 

“Oui?” Annie stammers. “Peux-je vous assister?” 

He excuses himself and explains that he is a friend of her landlord who asked him to help her with her French.

He returns the next day and the next - the second time with two young boys, his sons, she presumes - greeting her with the same four kisses that continue to startle her with their intimacy. Their conversations are a mix of French, English, and hand gesture. Although Annie's French has improved, she still finds the rearrangement of verbs and adjectives, when spoken, difficult to decipher. She does understand when he asks if she and the children would like to join his family for a swim at a nude beach. She thanks him but says that her sons would never agree. She doesn’t voice that the idea of appearing naked in front of her boys let alone strangers would embarrass her. 

He does not return for a week and just when Annie thinks she has seen the last of him, he reappears at her door, a bicycle at his side. He leans forward, gives his four kisses and stands grinning, red-faced, sweat dripping from his forehead, wet spots showing under his arms. She invites him into the cool interior, offers him a chair in the dining area, and goes to the kitchen to fetch him a glass of water. Returning, she sits facing him.

While the Frenchman talks, she gives her usual smile and nods, trying hard to decipher what he is telling her.  After a while, she wearies of the effort and simply observes him. He looks more like a schoolboy with his unruly chestnut-coloured hair, poly shorts and t-shirt than an academic who teaches mathematics at a northern university. He has cycled, he tells her, from his summer home below the village. His body, soaked in sweat, smells pungent like boys in high school after gym class. She finds herself breathing him in. He leans closer. His brown eyes are so close to her face that she feels herself being drawn into them and then catches her reflection, eyes glazed like a love-sick teenager. She pulls back quickly in an effort to reclaim herself. 

“Comprends?”

She has no idea what he’s been saying and asks him to repeat himself. As his family is leaving the next day for their home outside Paris, he explains, he hopes Annie and her children will join them tonight for dinner: this will be her last chance to study French with him. Although she accepts the invitation, she feels uneasy: she is awkward enough in a social setting when all speak a common language. The Frenchman quickly draws a map with arrows to his hamlet and scrawls “19:00 heures” on top, to make sure she understands place and time.

 As the dinner hour approaches, she pours a bath for the children, lays out clean clothes and leaves them to ready themselves while she quickly showers and spends too long ironing a skirt and blouse, not knowing that before the night is over, she will be exchanging her white linen for a colourful ensemble from his wife’s wardrobe.

She finds the hamlet easily and after parking the car, walks carefully on the stone-splattered dirt driveway - the children following - towards an ancient stone cottage with peeling blue shutters. A tall woman leans or rather poses against the doorframe, rolling a black olive between scarlet lips. A thin white halter barely covers her nipples, and a tiny cream-coloured bikini, trimmed down the middle with imitation leopard skin, scarcely covers the rest of her sun-gold flesh. The statuesque figure moves towards Annie, eying her, as if measuring her worth as an opponent. When she is a breath away, she pauses, leans down, and rouges Annie's pale cheeks with her red mouth. Without a word, she turns back toward the door and calls for her husband. Several minutes later, he ambles out the door, his sons behind him. In one hand, he holds a bottle of bubbly wine, and motions for her to sit under an arbour of grape vines at a crude wooden table in their front garden. His eldest boy asks his papa for permission to take her children next door to play in a neighbour’s yard. He gives his consent and, as the children disappear, he catches her worried look and reassures her that the older couple adore enfants and will guard them well. 

While admonishing her for arriving on time - a French guest always arrives half an hour late - he un-twirls the wire on top of the bottle. A split second later, the cork explodes, hitting her chest, followed by a gushing stream of foam. She is so taken aback, she can’t move. Similarly the Frenchman, staring at her chest, appears frozen until her front has absorbed most of the liquid in the bottle. Shaking his head, he apologizes, reaches for her hand and pulls her towards the house, through the messy kitchen where his wife is stirring some red concoction on the stove, and up a dark staircase to a bedroom. 

Annie doesn’t know if it is her imagination but she smells sex. She tries not to stare at the tangled sheets and rumpled bed cover that are duplicated in a mirror on the far wall. She glues herself to the door frame - wet clothes adding to her discomfort - while the Frenchman goes directly to the wardrobe beside the mirror, flings open the door, and begins rifling through his wife’s clothes. He stops at a multi-coloured skirt with elastic waist and red blouse with plunging neckline. Holding them up, he eyes Annie and then hands them to her saying that they will fit.  When she looks doubtful, he tells her that any French man can look at a woman and know her measurements. He stands quietly waiting as if expecting her to strip in front of him. Feeling awkward, she too stands silent waiting for him to leave. After several minutes, he moves around the bed, takes her elbow and leads her down the hall to the bathroom.

 Not sure whether she looks like a gypsy or whore, she tugs the back of the blouse to show less cleavage, hangs her clothes to dry and descends the stairs, past the wife who ignores her, and back to the picnic table where her host is barbecuing meat over short logs, on an ancient stone oven. He looks up, nods as if in approval at her new look, pours the rest of the bubbly into her glass and, forgetting her poor grasp of his language, goes off on a diatribe about someone or something. 

When the children return, followed by his Amazonian wife carrying a tray of baked potatoes and a bowl of ratatouille, the youngsters rush to the far end of the table. The French boys, Annie sees, immediately take the napkins from beside their plates and place them on their laps, while her three ignore theirs. The wife, with a nod toward them, mutters that this shows the lack of manners of North American children. 

Speaking of manners, she turns her back on Annie and engages her husband in a lengthy conversation. For a time, Annie sits quietly, guzzling her wine but, in a moment of exasperation, she mentions the plaque in the central square of Montague with the inscription noting that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre visited on a rainy day. This excited her as Beauvoir had changed the way she looks at the world. The couple stare at her and burst out laughing. She looks from one to the other, wondering what is so funny. The wife explains that Annie is brave attempting to discuss a French intellectual with two French intellectuals. She can imagine her mother saying “those two think a lot of themselves”.

She drinks well that evening: she always does when she feels socially inept or when a host refills her glass without asking. Usually Matt gives her the nod when she’s had one too many; but he is on another continent and she must govern herself. Wisely,  she switches to water as the evening winds down, knowing she must be sober enough to change into her own clothes and, more importantly, to drive her children safely up the hill home.

Later when they are safely tucked in their beds, she pours herself a glass of armagnac and sits outside on the low steps, under a brilliant starry sky, thinking about the curious couple. 

Not so alone

 I cannot sleep and so I read my emails. Ever since meeting a young woman, another writer, this past week, I've been thinking about my writing and how everything else in my life has taken precedence. And it pains me. I feel the pandemic has quieted me, made me more fearful of doing anything, or perhaps made all my rumblings seem minor, unimportant. 

I have lost most of my fire and so to try and regain it, I painted a wall in my office red. 

Amid my emails this morning was this note and poem by a young American poet:

“Deep inside the jaws of the pandemic, I’d found myself chewed up and swallowed by unending loneliness. The morning I wrote this poem, I’d completely given myself over to looking outside the window of my longing; I was writing love poems. What I saw was a streetlight. A man-made object that dared to mimic the elegance of the moon. This symbol of light was just enough for me to know that all the love my heart longed for was not as out of reach as I’d been made to feel. That if the streetlight could derive its meaning from the moon, then the longing I pressed out of my pen was also bringing me closer and closer to something more real and more exciting than I could ever imagine. How horrifying! And how energizing to be completely alone yet comforted by creating a poem, a record of where I was and a contract for where I was going.”

—Jalynn Harris

the life of a writer is desire  
              i hammer into the page  
                          i make up my mind: the streetlight  

is not the moon, but anything can be 
              made beautiful under the ease  
                          of my hammer  

i wish you could see that i write in blue ink 
              the color of oceans & early mornings  
                          & everything is clear like  

tears rushing towards the chin  
              of my desire. i pen what i’m meant 
                          to pen. how deep in love i am  

& how silly of me to spend all morning dreaming  
              about love & not expect my  
                          desire to set me free  

the knives of my fingers tap 
              out the notion that if i turn the key  
                          it will unlock. 

admittedly, i am foolish  
              about love—a simple yes excites me— 
                        ‘cause i know that all that i require will be met 

like water meets the tongue. it’s scary 
            desire, a small fan at my window in the summer,  
                        a booklight lighting the pages of my life

I am going to try harder to get back to my writing and my old self who is not so fearful.  Is this possible? I remind myself of Georgia O'Keeffe who said, “I’ve been absolutely terrified every moment of my life — and I’ve never let it keep me from doing a single thing I wanted to do.”

The big question is what do I want to do now?

My Eyes - post rewritten August 13th

 Although I hate excuses, I have a valid one for not writing. Three weeks ago, I had the lens taken out of one eye and replaced with a Johnson and Johnson. There was a slight complication and my cornea was bruised. Three weeks later I had the second eye operation. Again, there was a complication with the cornea. 

At the end of June, I returned to the clinic and had my eyes tested. A lot of people can go without glasses after having cataract surgery. Not me. Luckily, I like wearing glasses and, at this appointment, was given a new prescription - a lot weaker that my previous one - and told I only need them for reading and driving. 

I will make one small note about my novel. I have removed Chapter 1 and 2 from this site because I have made so many changes.  I've also changed the main character's names because "Eve" sounds like me and she is not me and add to that I named the husband Adam (unintentionally) and it sounds a little too biblical. I will reinstate the first two chapters soon with the changes though I expect more will come and I've rewritten three more chapters... which I may or may not publish here. 

To be honest, I am a little bit of a mess at the moment in regards to my writing and a little in regards to my life. 

 

Would you read this?

 I cannot believe how fast time is passing and how I am always busy although I am stuck in this little village with few friends, no social engagements, no cultural events, no dining out, no travel, and no leaving the house from 6 pm to 6 am seven days a week. But simple living demands a lot from each individual. Cleaning, laundry, grocery shopping, cooking, clearing up, showering, brushing teeth, deciding what to wear, dressing, paying bills, doing one's income tax... and on it goes. For the last week, I have also been putting together presentations on the fall/winter collections of European designers for the store - difficult without seeing and touching - working from line sheets and photographs, and supervising repairs on a friend's house as he is locked down in England. 

And then there's my novel that causes me the most grief and I am such a painfully slow writer that I fear that I will die before I finish. Is this how I want to spend my last days, I ask myself? Every day when I wake, I worry that this may be my last day on earth. Do what makes you happy, I whisper to myself. 

Susan wants to live long enough to see my book published. She likes me to read bits and pieces to her but when I do, I find myself thinking it is crap and who would want to read such fiction. And yet, underneath the self doubt is a confidence that I can write well and, in large part, this is due to you, my readers who applaud my efforts.

I read somewhere that we lead small lives if we keep to ourselves so I've decided to begin publishing my novel here just in case I don't make it to the end or if I die too soon. So here is the prologue but you must understand that it may change as I get further into my story.

Three Hundred Days of Indulgence

Prologue

   The Frenchman knelt and lowered his head to my feet, kissing one foot and then the other. Je baise ton pied difforme de sorcière. Ta signature diabolique, he said, stressing every syllable, pausing every few words so I might understand his language. He rose, wrapped his arms around my waist and spun me round, singing, “I am yours. I am yours.”

   The man was crazy. My hammer-toed feet were diabolical. I had hated them all my life until this mad Frenchman knelt and declared that they belonged to a witch. He was the sorcerer, the magician. With a turn of phrase, a slight of hand, he transformed the way I looked at myself. Early in our relationship, I had sent him a picture of myself from Venice. I thought myself drab in a long floral skirt and bulky black pullover but knew he would like the mask on my face. He noticed only my eyes, staring out through holes on either side of the hooked beak. My look was one of rebelliousness he had written. My life was a defiance of normality, of morality. Non, décidément, tu ne ressembles pas aux autres femmes.

    I should have laughed when he wrote that I was unlike other women but instead I felt as if I had been handed a rose. Never mind that he had announced more than once that he loved women, all women. His wife had put it less delicately: “He’ll fuck anything that wears a skirt.” But that was later, when frightened by the intensity of our affair, she blamed me for seducing her husband. I was not the seducer. 

    I was a dutiful daughter until I discovered Simone de Beauvoir. Her love and lust for Sartre and others, astonished and excited me though I found it difficult to reconcile the bookish-looking woman in photographs with the seductress who lived her life in cafes and bars drinking and arguing; and who managed somehow, with so much alcohol and sex, to write a weighty body of literature. She refused marriage because she felt the institution steals a woman’s autonomy. After reading this book, I swore I would never marry.

   Then I fell in love and moved in with my boyfriend. Before the year was out, I’d agreed to marry him. If only I had suggested to the boyfriend who listened carefully and applauded my ideas, what I later suggested to the husband. After five years as man and wife, I proposed that we live separately like Beauvoir and Sartre. He rolled his eyes and told me not to be absurd.

   Several months later, I packed my bags and moved across town. It’s easy to write in one sentence that I left him but the leaving was painful, full of self-doubt and recriminations. I turned into the kind of person I hate – a spineless liar who snuck around and found an apartment, before telling her husband she was leaving. Fifteen months later, my husband left a love letter on my doorstep. I returned to him. Fifteen years later, I packed my bags again but instead of crossing town, I crossed an ocean. I was giving myself a year, I told him, to study an old passion of mine - the French language. I had no idea, when I said “passion” that I would fall into bed with a Frenchman and learn more about myself than the language. I had no idea that I was granting myself three hundred days of indulgence. 

Let it be

I wrote this post around the first of January and then my computer died and I did not continue... I have an idea for other posts but I'm looking for my courage. I'm sure I'll find it soon because, at this time in my life, I don't have time to waste. 

 "When I find myself in times of trouble, Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom, let it be
And in my hour of darkness she is standing right in front of me
Speaking words of wisdom, let it be

Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be"

Paul McCartney wrote this song, inspired by his mother, Mary who died when he was 14. Many people thought "Mother Mary" was a biblical reference but Paul says no it's "about leaving problems behind and moving on in life".

My two words for this new year 2021 are courage and kindness. 

Courage as Henry Van Dyke describes it in "Life":

"So let the way wind up the hill or down, 

O'er rough or smooth, the journey will be joy: 

Still seeking what I sought when but a [girl], 

New friendship, high adventure, and a crown, 

My heart will keep the courage of the quest, 

And hope the road's last turn will be the best."

Kindness - the kind of kindness that I want to own, is more difficult to describe. Sylvia Plath suggests it's superficial in her poem "Kindness". A week or so after writing it, she committed suicide.

Dame Kindness, she is so nice!

The blue and red jewels of her rings smoke

In the windows, the mirrors

Are filling with smiles.

What is so real as the cry of a child?

A rabbit's cry may be wilder

But it has no soul.

Sugar can cure everything, so Kindness says.

Sugar is a necessary fluid, 

It's crystals a little poultice.

O kindness, kindness

Sweetly picking up pieces!

My Japanese silks, desperate butterflies,

May be pinned any minute, anesthetized.

And here you come, with a cup of tea

Wreathed in steam.

The blood jet is poetry,

There is no stopping it.

You hand me two children, two roses.

Emily Dickinson's idea of being kind is too sweet for my tastes:

 

If I can stop one heart from breaking,

I shall not live in vain;

If I can ease one life the aching,

Or cool one pain,

Or help one fainting robin

Unto his nest again,

I shall not live in vain.

Naomi Shihab Nye comes closest to my meaning. In an interview, she describes how this poem came to be. She was on her honeymoon, on a bus, and she and her husband were robbed of everything including their passports and money. A man on the bus was killed. The newly-weds sat in a small town despairing of their loss, and the loss of a life, not knowing what to do when a stranger approached and asked what was wrong (in Spanish). He listened with kindness and, at the end, said he was sorry, very very sorry and then went on his way. His kindness soothed them. Shortly after, Nye's husband left to go to the next town to try and get their traveller's cheques reinstated. She sat there a little afraid when this poem drifted across the square to her. She took the small notebook and pencil from her pocket and took dictation.  

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore…

As I sit at my desk, the 4th of February, I wonder if I have embraced courage and kindness in January. Let me think on this a while.  

"And so this is Christmas"

"And so happy Christmas
For black and for white
For yellow and red ones
Let's stop all the fight

A very merry Christmas
And a happy New Year
Let's hope it's a good one
Without any fear"

Oh my head is stuffed with so much these days, it's hard to stay focused. I am up and I am down and I pace and try to do something useful every day but simply doing what one must to stay alive most often overwhelms me. I want all to be beautiful but it is impossible... but then again, I believe that I was able to give something perhaps not beautiful but heart-warming to each of my children and Rob for Christmas. I asked each one what they wanted from me and Gill's request was the most daunting. She wanted an essay on what it was like to be her mother. I poured over old journals, blogs, her letters and such and wrote and rewrote, edited and then edited again, adding and subtracting, and it turned out to be as much of a gift to me as it was for her. I asked her permission to post it here and she agreed. 

So, although I have not posted anything the past month, you'll understand that I have been writing - not my novel which is giving me a lot of grief but writing - and all feeds into the story of my life and how I read it.

"Bringing up Baby"  

 “What has it been like being my mama and watching me go from a baby to a woman?" Gill asks.

That's a big question, little one. I've been your mama for over 34 years and you sugar and spice with your great big heart through thick and thin have always been my dream daughter.

***  

When you are five months old, I write in your baby journal: “You have a wonderfully happy, tranquil disposition and are easy to care for…." At six months, I note that “you are coming along beautifully… a perfect cherub… [with] wonderful smiles.”  A week after your first birthday, you take your first step and a month later, you conquer walking: “You are still very easy going… I love having you my little one, my daughter! When you raise your little arms to be picked up - which you do often - I can’t resist you.” 

You are now almost two. You are sitting in the bath, your hair tied back in a braid: "I still can’t believe I have a daughter and she is so sweet," I write. You are now talking, forming simple sentences and love saying "no, mom". You are quieter, less physical than your brothers and mimic me more than they did. You love washing walls and countertops. Jokingly your father says you'll probably be an airhead. I say you're going to be a doctor or lawyer, whatever - you will always be special.

When you are almost four years, we move to France for the year and, unlike your brothers, you do not speak French or complain about missing your friends and home comforts. The only time I am aware that you are aware of language difference is when you ask, “how do I say ‘give me back my toy’ in French?”  By the end of the year, you speak French as well as the village children. One of my sweetest memories from this year is watching you with Susan. (How happy I am that she can teach you about the natural world - a subject I know little about.) In my mind’s eye, I see you plodding after her in fields of wild flowers and when she points out a particularly unique orchid, you exclaim, “how clever you are Susan to find such a beautiful flower.” Once, when the two of you are sitting on a grassy hill in the hot sun drawing, Susan removes her blouse, and you tell her: “my mother has nicer breasts, Susan.”

You are my sunshine.

We return to Canada and you begin French Immersion kindergarten. We walk to school each day because I read that children who walk to school rather than be driven are better grounded. Often, we sing and step to the rhyme “left, left, I had a good job and I left. I left my wife and 48 children just because I thought I was right, right” our left and right feet touching ground on the appropriate word. I believe you love school, make good friends, have play dates, are happy. A few years later you join an early morning walking group and the leader tells me that you are noncompetitive, are never shoving to be first, you take your own sweet time, you chat to whoever, you are a delight.

You teach me how to be a better mother. I am angry at you because you won’t do your school work. I yell and you cry. I say “Gilly you have to allow me to yell sometimes.” You say “you have to allow me to cry.” We shower together and you look up at me and say, "aren't vaginas beautiful?" You are already leaps and bounds ahead of me. 

Before you are ten, we become travel companions. I see you still, trudging behind me pulling your small green suitcase. In those days, we go cheap and don’t make reservations. We stop at small inns and examine the room and decide if it is good enough, clean enough. Once we are invited to Italy to stay with a family who has a daughter your age. We go but that year it snows, the house is cold and the mother has a hissy fit and books her family into a Hyatt in Rome. We decide that we will go to smaller, more affordable cities. I am befuddled and you suggest Pisa and Verona. We visit the two, wander, share meals and beds. From that time to this, I love travelling with you.

(Years later, you want to see the Mediterranean. I drive for several hours and park by the sea. We walk and talk, sinking into sand and soaking in the water, and forget to search for a hotel until it is too late. No vacancies. We drive out of this town to the next. No inn. Finally, when I can drive no longer, we spend the night in the car, in a hotel parking lot off the autoroute. I am miserable but you, daughter of my heart, tell me "it's an adventure” and make me laugh. Forever after this, when we find ourselves in trouble, you remind me that life is an adventure.)

You are a pre-teen and your brothers are well into their difficult teens and test me often. I worry that you are too sweet, too kind, too ready to please, and worse, too like me. (Throughout my early life and well into my teens, my friends’ mothers called me “Little Mary Sunshine”: I was so smiley, so polite, so “tamed”.) Around this time, we have our first real confrontation. You buy a very skinny stretchy black skirt for a choir recital. You try it on to show me and for the first time, I see that your body is changing. You are still very young, you barely have breasts but you are sexy. This sexiness worries me. I seek a friend for advice and she tells me that I am right to be worried. There are men who prey on little girls. I tell you to buy a larger size and you cry and ask if I think you a slut. (As some one glibly told me “with boys you only have one penis to worry about”.) 

At fifteen, you tell me that you want to go to school in another country, to be the new girl in class, to wear a uniform, and to be intellectually challenged. You have searched the internet but it will cost too much. You sigh: “most of all I wanted to see if I could make a dream a reality.” I think of Langston Hughes:  “Hold fast to dreams/  For if dreams die/ Life is a broken-winged bird/  That cannot fly.” This is too important to ignore, I think. Several months later, you are the new girl, wearing a school uniform and being challenged intellectually in Lisburn Northern Ireland. We celebrate your 16th birthday at an Italian restaurant. You walk home from school with a tall good-looking boyfriend. He disappears. It is a long grey wet winter and you are unhappy. You lose weight. You write me a note: "Sometimes a cold lonely apartment on Bachelor’s Walk seems like a lot compared to this non-stop chaos and drama. But even when I am not stressed, it’s almost like I need to create it… I respect you more that I knew I could respect. I respect very little in this twisted world.”

I am dumbfounded: I say “let’s go home”. You say, “no, I said that I was going to do this and I am.” We still watch movies and read poetry snuggled into each other in bed but you are pensive. 

We return to Canada and you re-find friends and complete high school. You have grown intellectually and physically in Northern Ireland. You are writing poetry and prose. You challenge teachers at school. A steady stream of your friends come to our house and eat our leftovers. You appear happier. You are beautiful. You graduate. You will soon leave home for school in Toronto. I can no longer watch over you and keep you safe. One morning I find a package of black licorice, tied with a ribbon, and a note from you in my bathroom drawer, thanking me for rescuing you when your spirits were down. You include a poem that you wrote in Northern Ireland:

"I return home to my mother

who still hasn't eaten her scone

from the bakery that's shut down.

She's praising a poet

reminding me to dream big,

to earn my own living,

not to underestimate myself.

She sees some power in me

that I don't acknowledge

no matter how hard I squint to see.”

***

By this time, I have been a mother for nearly 30 years. I began when I was 29 years old. I feel as if I turned around three times and voila, I’m in my late 50s. Raising children is the hardest work I’ve done. Have I been good enough I ask myself? I often feel like a child myself and see, in truth, we have been growing up together. I cannot imagine myself in the world without you or your brothers. This reminds me of Sharon Olds’ poem “The Planned Child” as all three of my babies were planned:

“… when a friend was pouring wine

and said that I seem to have been a child who had been wanted,

I took the wine against my lips

as if my mouth were moving along

that valved wall in my mother's body, she was

bearing down, and then breathing from the mask, and then

bearing down, pressing me out into

the world that was not enough for her without me in it,

not the moon, the sun, Orion

cartwheeling across the dark, not

the earth, the sea--none of it

was enough, for her, without me.” 

***

You attend university for one year and then spend one year in Paris as an au pair before returning to school. I visit you in Toronto (December 2006) and write in my blog: “Every time I see her walking toward me, beautifully groomed and dressed… I think Paris, my favourite city has changed her, left its mark. She is so much taller, thinner, more confidant than I was at her age… And though I worry about her restlessness, sleeplessness, I do not worry that she won't find her passion… We talk for hours. When we are sitting, she curls into me. When we are walking, she links arms with me.”

A year later, I write: “I want to plant a seed in her brain that may take years to sprout. Nothing she does or doesn't do will stop me from loving her… I don't expect perfection. I know she is human… She doesn't have to be better than she is. I don't want her to despair as I have. Yet, I know I am powerless in this realm. She will despair.”

Susan tells me not to worry about you, to let you be: "Gill's clever." (I thank the heavens for all my strong female friends.) I let you be. You write me: "I feel as if I am always searching for something I

can't find. Anything within reach will never do." One professor tells you that you must decide what you want as you excel at all aspects of the program. I cannot advise you. I do not want to risk suggesting something that will divert you from your true path (if there is such a thing). I worry. I commiserate. I support you as best as I can but know you must find your own way to be alive.

 

In your notes, letters, and tributes, you paint me, with words, to be some wonderful wise creature and I have tried to live up to the picture you have painted with your glowing reviews but in true, I struggle. I am indecisive. I don’t know what direction to take myself. Paula Meehan says  it so well in her poem “I am not your muse”. 

I’d like to leave you in love’s blindness,

cherish the comfort of your art, the way

it makes me whole and shining,

smooths the kinks of my habitual distress,

never mentions how I stumble into the day,

fucked up, penniless, on the verge of whining

at my lot…

***

After graduating, you work hard. You blog. You visit your grandparents. You fall in love with a man who owns a boa. You create an in-home dinner club. You sparkle and shine. You leave boa man and meet television producer. I feel powerless to stop what is supposed to be the most joyous ceremony in your life. (I see clearly that your husband-to-be is an unhappy man, a lost soul, a drunkard.) I question myself even now: Is there anything I could have done to stop it? 

You learn quickly that if you do not leave him, he will crush you. You return to me. You become a gypsy. You find work here, there and everywhere. You re-educate yourself. You experiment. You find love again. You move to a new country, learn to drive, follow dreams, create your own business, and over this past difficult pandemic year, you have developed a social conscience, re-educating yourself yet again.

Still you have dark moments when you doubt yourself and all is gloomy. I want to reassure you, to tell you not to go there, that you are too warm, kind, intelligent, beautiful to indulge in self pity. Or if you must, know that it will pass, that it’s good to be human. I love how you aren’t afraid to expose your human side in your writing, how you pour it all out as if saying, take me as I am. I do.

You remain my dream daughter. 

You are home for the holidays. You call out to me “there’s a monkey in your bed.” and you silly-Gilly are laughing under the duvet on my kingsize bed like the child you once were.

“More than gems in my comb box shaped by the God of the Sea,/ I prize you, my daughter”     -  Eighth-century Japanese poet Otomo no Sakanoue Iratsume