Last View from Window

About four years ago I stood in that empty apartment, having fallen for the view, alone with the parquet floor, Jim S's laptop and a phone, oh and my Tarot cards I rememeber. Kneeling on the floor, I called people. I went to the store for toilet paper and then Cathy and Aideen arrived at the top of the hill

Now I watched the city flicker into being, the Emerald Not Emerald City, and I waved the view bye bye, to return to the world of the carpet and what may come.

That part of my life is done. Now usher the Dandy Period?

Moving

My new apartment smells of someone else's bacon, frying.

You cant miss it. You open the door and there it is, as if someone was in my apartment, as I enter with Baccardi coco rum and passion fruit Alize, but it's clearly not me but somebody else who has been frying bacon so that my entire kitchen accuses me of the deed.

That's moving, alright. You are always inheriting someone else's walls and smells.And in my case, carpet as well.

The apartment came with a balcony and another room, and a larger bathroom and it is a handsome apartment if the electrical by the telephone jack worked and we could link up the phone.

It also came with history and I do not know if it is the history or myself that keeps tapping me on the shoulder to say here, this is what happened here, but you will never know just exactly what wont you?

Iris lived here, Iris O Brien, for 37 years, longer than her Northern Irish compatriot and superintendent, Pat who has been here for 30 years. Beverly, the woman down the hall, has been here for 20 years. People stay, they stay here, and even when they leave, they leave something behind and they don't go very far. Last year, Pat moved from the first to the basement so that her daughter could take her old apartment.



Iris left behind an immaculate set of walls, as if never touched, rose-posy dappled wallpaper and a matching unassumingly solid salmon-pink carpet, the carpet that is the envy of Beverly and a thorn of sand chafing against my sense of satisfaction. I am not a carpet person. I loathe carpets. I want my floors good and wooden, yet I compromised. Extensively, again. For the sake of the extra room.

And now I sit among the hue of a faux Victorian parlor and with the smell of bacon banished by the candles I lit as I giggle over Las Vegas. The combo of carpet and wallpaper is as perky-prim as a white picket fence--not my preferred perimeter. The knowledge of this apartment having been a shelter more enduring than marriage prevents me from claiming it. (Well, as if I ever could claim any space for myself apart from Lake Eva in Traverse County.) I feel an unusual compulsion to clean up after me, every crumb of the way. And I dont feel this is my place and maybe that is what I wanted, not to feel at home again so I can be forced to find that home within me that is always fading into dawn. I am brushing against Iris's history.

Iris raised her kids here too, until her lungs started giving out and she stopped being able to climb the three flights of stairs here. Now she lives downstairs, a slender wisp of a woman who rises at five every morning to take the bus to work at the Food Depot where she works. She goes to bed neatly each day at 8 PM.

Iris lived here forever, but left having left the place pristine, blasted of any dirt, windows bright against the rosey-dappled wallpaper. But then there is the carpet.

Carpet does not let furniture stake out its full footing. Carpet, shag or not, pushes back. And I dont care that this carpet is in reasonable condition, professionally laid, enviable, practically flat. Carpet and pink wallpaper and now the socket closest to the jack, off: this apartment is pushing ever so slightly back, too.

I will get used to it, but then there is the realization that maybe I dont want to and dont need to and shouldnt, that this is yet another transient hotel I have to occupy with a flabby imagination. What will she, she who sometimes has something to say within me, come up with then?

Spring

It arrives while I ponder the shape of the summer now that the strike is over. As well as the shape of my sentences, mere prose.

I have been perusing flickr to find many an interesting frame and fanclub hovering around youths with cameras.

So many frames to fill and so much time to fill them with.

Monday Monday

I
am not quite in possession of
myself.

I have two thoughts now.

Soon
I will be returned to my students
and they to me.

Good photographs vanish the pole in the picture. And there is always a pole, a telephone pole in the picture, a wire, a car flashing by, a gawker bulking the frame, did you notice? Great photos pretend the pole does not exist but of course it does. It just has to be ducked, dodged, blocked or shoved aside, but like weeds soon another pops up in its place. Purity of background is the fiction arresting photography professes,oops, fakes.

Now back to those students who are not mine at all.

Soon, soon.

Feeling the Pinch

Reentry is hard. Hard. Hard. And to top it off, I am now bruising from the pinch of the Harsh Epiphany that Suckerpinched me the other day.

The light at the end of the tunnel is the impulse ranunculus I bought the other day at dusk. Her name is Marilyn and she sports the most redalicious red in the world. I wish the room had nothing in it but a dark mahogany table and Marilyn. That would be enough and it has to be.

Going running.

Word is...

Strike is over.

Time to steel oneself against the Dread of Reentry.

Let's recap what came of this strike for me:

Yoga in AM.
More oxygen.
This blog.
Some sense of myself!
Gossip!
New book to read!
Characters on the sidelines.
What else what else?

I will have to think about that. Some more.

Click!

We Need Some Color Here!

You gotta admit, on a Kold day, and even beyond, a Coke Truck catches the eye. Never mind the pop corrosives it carts: I do love a clean, snappy Coke Truck!

Out in the Kold

When it is as Kold as it was yesterday when I was at an evening shift, it should be spelled Kold.

Kold, I am useless. My mind is glaciar-thick and thoughts crawl across it like the Donner party on its last knees.

It was THAT kold and once again I patted myself on the back for not even being vaguely tempted to sign up for the evening 5-7 night shifts. People huddle in front of the smoking barrel while the more useful ones hand out pamphlets to the entering cars. Not me, no no. I energetically huddle and quiver and stare at sparks and pay vague attention to the conversations around.

That Kinda Kold makes you appreciate the vigor of those who hop about, cheerfully. Arthur, the picket character, breaks into song he wishes people would take up and I would on an ordinary temperature but not even a Queen song can snap me out of my dedicated spark-gazing. Maria, usually a subdued presence on the job, has turned totally jolly and even gets excited over a particularly poetic wording in an official report. "Look! Look!" she slaps me on the shoulder, flaps a pamphlet at me. The writing is oddly rousing: "'We risk romancing mediocrity," it says. "From that embrace, only decline will follow.'We could show it to our students when we get back. It's a real report and yet it's so poetic!"

Indeed. A good turn of metaphor is a leap of flame on a Kold dank night.

Afterwards I get home and remote it through useless programs, sipping hot choc. I have no brain left. It will have to grow back at night.

What You Dont Know

And there is plenty of it.

Another snippet from the walkabout:

I dont think he knows what a bad administrator he is.

That's just it. Who knows anything? At all? About the judgements of others?

Cliche thought of mine: Hell is an eternity of learning, through unexpurgated texts, what others REALLY thought of you when you were doing a good or rather good job.

Mood for the Day

Excellent picture of a thousand words:

Early Morning

No sun. No picketing because rally later in day. No email almost at all. Grimly, glumly, I work myself into the day. Epifany: I skimp on myself, skimp, skimp. I skimp on myself really.

And a nasty sense of disliking of people I know I have liked and should.

Someone turn on the sun somewhere out there, please.

Madeline

I like Madeline.

Madeline loves dogs, Canada and the control she exercises over information.

Madeline pauses to laugh out with delight at what seems to be the most delightful sight of three Portuguese water dogs wrestling each other till the leads get twisted around each other. It's what dog lovers must do, I reckon, giggle with approval at dogs the same way baby owners cluck and coo over the waddling of a diapered child across the carpet. It must be just one of those things impenetrable to boffins.

Madelines PhD is in Canadian studies and she loved loved writing it. It took her three months to write a complex outline, and one month to write her dissertation in one draft. It went without any trauma whatsoever, and when it was done, Madeline had answered the question of how she had become so Canadian. Madeline was exploring the formation of Canadian identity through her own experience of Canadian children's literature. It was accepted without revisions, as was, by U of T, and considered "brilliant" publically. Just the same, she was told by admin here that she would never get a full time job because it was not in English.

As a result, Madeline is proud guardian of all things Canadian and she informs me proudly how well Canadian diamonds are received on the market, and how they are branded with a maple leaf to differentiate them from blood diamonds. She watches CBC every evening, has the paper read before she gets to pick me up at 8 :15 in the morning, and cannot be surprised by information she does not know about. She throws out words I have no relation to and I nod as if I had: Walkerton. Something happened there, but what was it? I am clueless. Sadly.

Because Madeline was a reference librarian as well as broker, she knows lots of everything: the history of stirrups and the inconsistencies in "Gladiator," how pavement stones have been used throughout history in riots; the rise and fall of stocks and bonds and the perils of RRSP overcontribution. Madeline is not an encyclopedia but she is an almanac and all news to her is old news. If one tells Madeline something new, it becomes immediately absorbed into her mind so that she is certain she knew it already.

Madeline does have a phenomenal memory for distant names long gone and so her mind will retain its sharpness for a long time. She feasts on data like minor grammatical quibbles that befuddle less attentive minds. "One thing Terry and I would do that few couples do," she chuckles, "is discuss fine points of grammar." I do know how fine the points of grammar can get as distracting as cookie crumbs in bed and I admire Terry and Madelines persistence in justifying the plural copula in What relative clause constructions. "Resume," she points out the sign in the window of the strike HQ. Resume in that spelling has an accent over "e" and she insists that it should have one over the other "e" as well. She who controls the spelling controls the sentence.

Madeline also delivers control in sentences sculpted by a fabulous experience of storytelling. In the past, librarians would, as part of their training, specialize in telling fables of yore on Saturdays, Celtic tales, Greek tales, Nordic tales,tales to woo young minds with. She too had to spend time polishing the stories and she grew up listening to them.

Madeline delivers a good story, though Pam who accompanies us often enough, has even more enviable theatrical training. Madeline knows how to protract a narrative towards a point, no matter how minor the point. This is an amazing skill I do not possess. Madeline controls the story by walking you just so through, easily, steadily through its each junction, down to the focused detail, the contact numbers in the rolodex on her desk.

I think: how Canadian. How steady and unruffled her delivery and diction, how directed and unfazed. This is not Vegas presentation, but well cut and well dried, information as tightly snipped as newsbriefs she cuts from the newspapers with her paper-slasher, the precision tool of librarians.

But Madeline does get excited about dogs and I hope that she gets her dog from the pound because she would really love it. A dog like that will make her laugh and who knows how else her life will become unpredictable in ways that she can live with.

Shopping at Lent

Once upon a time, there was a boffin seeking an impish friend to keep her frou frou mind company.

Every time she would meet someone new, the boffin would hopefully (though she does not, herself, like the word or idea of "hope") tell the story of the shopping bag.

What shopping bag story is it, you ask?

Well, imagine that you walked into a church rectory as proper as an Architectural Design spread of a Hamptons beachfront property. The sun rests lightly on each saintly artefact; each saintly artefact seems to hover in a space cleansed by prayer and the Irish cleaning lady. It is terrain unspecked by dust and extraneous props. The kind of place that you draw yourself up to your full height to remember to genuflect.

Do you see the sole object on the fussed over unmussed sofa?

It is a Bryant Lane shopping bag, odd souvenir of a discreet foray into a Mall of Mammon.

Whats in the Bag?

The boffin would tell people of how impatient she was to look in the bag, that crisp, demure shopping bag.

She leaned over and looked in the bag.

And after telling them what she saw in it, she would wait.

And she would wait.

And she would know, by the widening of their eyes and stiffening of their lips, what she could make of them as possible friends of her frou frou mind.

Let me see--do you want to know what is in the bag?

Ok, look in the bag.

Surprise!

The Fall from KnowHow

James, Madeline states, has lost his sense of audience.

In this field, in any field, in this market-world, these are damning words. To be missing a sense of audience is a learner's flaw. To lose it is either arrogant choice or disastrous circumstance. To refuse the audience is to slam shut the visor to shield one's convictions, truths. But the move also cuts off peripheral vision, the lay of the horizon that is waiting for our answer. Without a sense of audience we are just knights astagger around ourselves, made clumsier by our own protective dogmas.

Without a feel for our audience, we don't communicate, we pontificate.

James is, of course, fatigued, and that is what accounts for his state.

Still. It is a limiting perception, to say the least. You're just not listening. You are fooling yourself to think you can express it as if you were the only one listening.

Which you are not!

Walkabout some more

Today we walked in grim, overcast weather. I grew quite tired. But we trudged. Briskly in the clammy, dull breeze.

Some episodes have ended. The transit crew has collected its CaTs and gone home. Only the newly welded rails remain. The black and white pillow is disappeared. The break has ended so children no longer spill into Academy Hall. But the Timbits continue to arrive at the A and B building fire barrel.

Today the determined faculty parade paraded all the way down to the politico's office to deliver a letter of protest.

"Do something," an ordinary woman who passed us by chided. "You look like the walking dead."

BLOW STRIKERS a pencil sign proclaimed from a convenience store.

Nobody would walk single file though law requires marchers do not obstruct pavement.

The 1 hour round walk was a quick stroll past all the storefronts of this sad, district that has been allegedly looking up and up for years now, since I got here. That's been the word. But if that is the word, it is not becoming world fast enought for me. Well, there is a new development around the area of the past Good Year plant--rows and rows of "nice" townhouses. But mostly the remaining stretches of buildings seem down, rows of two story buildings squatting against each other like rheumatoid peddlar stalls determined to outstubborn the plans for the new shopping mall. Some businesses are clearly over. The expensive car dealership is gone, but others have remained, servicing ghostly customers, I am sure. But many seem forever: just how does a store whose door never opens survive? What secret needs are they meeting?

Judging by the range of businesses blocking the view of the lake, all manner of unexpected needs.

If there is a business that is not represented by windows in various stages of grime, I do not know what it is. Internet cafe, Hair styling (PERMS), martial arts, very dollar stores even with a Biway holdover from the seventies, east european restaurants, pubs that that converted into private clubs that accept only (smoking) members (Philosophers Pub!), Asian grocers, Army and Navy surplus ("It's a museum," someone remarks, "they've got platform shoes there!"),furniture liquidation stores (Economical Moving), an alternative, Body/Mind health centre, clothes resale shops, a chefs cooking school, a floral store with a window display of alabaster, pleading angels and skirted bears, a floral design school (since 1988!),Pet Valu, digital picture processing, standard Shopmart, LCBO, Country Time, McDonalds, Take Thirty, a Curves spinoff, Thai eatery to come, modified head shop, cafe, local banks, alternative banks, travel office, funeral parlor, though no Church on this strip, none.

And to counter some pretty grimy window exhibits and one pigeon crapped restaurant door, lively murals celebrate life in the hood in past years, same stores, perhaps, but so much more colorful.

All to stroll past and ignore if you are me, disgruntled by the cluster-rows of them all, looking so much like plywood boxes crammed to the ceilings with merchandise worn, weary and five steps away from dumpsterhood.

But on the way back, John, silver-haired, determined picket ubercaptain, waves to people who indeed seem to patronize the hair salons or diners or who wheel their kids around in prams, and everybody waves back, cheerfully. Cars honk as we the striking crowd shuffles ahead, some of the population clearly supportive. A passer by ducks her head out of a drugstore: "I've been writing my MP all week!" "Thank you!" John responds. John says thank you a lot. He never forgets to thank everyone even faculty who turn up because of the Union check carrot.

Yet, as I slog through the last half mile, once again you remember that it's that time of year, that color of sky and ground that does no city justice. In light like this, litter drifts louder and dun is the hue of the day. No city, no city looks good like this, bedraggled by a receding winter, and this stretch of town, like many others, needs more help than even the sun can give it.

Luckily, like yesterday, Management has supplied the strikers with a hot cauldron of minestroni. One spoonful of it and it's like someone poured sun down your throat.

Walkabouts

It's another day of the campus walkabout.

Walking about the campus, 2 km a full round in the slapabout March wind, learns you about people you know and people you would not regularly know. It's a regular wandering academic grove, the brainy Birnham wood on the move. And I am part of it. Striking leads to bonding and bonding leads to friendship? I am not counting on it. I do not count on continuity, though it is simulated enough by the routine chore of picketing buffeted by wind, rain and generally March in all of its fickleness.

We tread carefully so as not to step on college property even as I learn the details of the perimeter, the cigarette butts stamped into the sod around the bus stop, the discarded bottles in the bare orchard, the black and white pillow rolled around the lawn by the wind, the graffitti on the plaque stone that never got the plaque because it arrived with a misspelling that someone noticed.

You learn a lot about topography as you walk. About.

People tell you tales that they might not regularly tell because there is time to tell them. Sometimes you walk past the TTC crew that is welding the rusted rails it means to set into somewhere and the pounding of the generators mutes the sound of voices declaring, explaining, sharing. But I do wonder will these people respect me in the morning? Melanie says, it's the kind of conversations you have when you are drunk. Similarly, I learn the names and I learn their stories. Stories of spiteful tiresome parents and brilliant children, breakups and screwups, minor and major, debts and desires, thinly veiled. Will they respect me in the morning? The conversation will continue, but that depends.

That depends on whether they will remember that they told me and what they told me in between sharp gusts of wind and sun.

And that's my epiphany. Most of the time people do not remember what they told you unless they are ashamed of it in the morning. Then they either forget that they told you or they do not talk to you. They cork it up again, force the wind right back into the bottle like a misbehaved genie, and toss the bottle away to land in the grass. They wont admit that it is theirs.

It remains to be seen how many of them will not be anxious to remember what they have told me and what they expect I might remember, and more importantly, know about them.

In a sense I am a post a secret blog.

The Pressure of Thought

Sara says she doesn't get to sleep because of all the ideas that keep her from sleeping.

Not me, I say, insecure in my intellectual indolence. I know my ideas, whatever they might be, put me right to sleep.

The Concert

Rock concerts are set to stun, stun with the voltage of their percussion, guitars, keyboards and kliegs. The master of the U2 sound and light show is one Willie Williams, to whom Bono dedicates this time, not surprisingly, the song Yahweh. Let there be light! More light! Ever so more, lights and lights! Willie has been conjuring lightforms for U2 since 1982 and tonight, once again, he is at the top of his game.

The houselights dim at 9:00 to trip the roar of the crowd seconds before the calculated crescendo of illuminations jolts everyone out of their seats. Silhouettes onstage detach from darkness and become band. U2 is in the house. As the first notes rocket off Larry’s drum and Edge’s guitar, the arena lights are ratcheted up, up away up,to expose the crowd to its own mass, shoulder crowding shoulder crowding arm, arms up in the air.

The ceiling is raining shredded light—custom-made, PVC, round mirrored confetti. Meanwhile, the electronic backdrop, 12,000 LED daisy-chained spheres uncoil strands of color that coalesce into a screen of throbbing spirals. From the getgo, and for two hours, Edge’s saw toothed riffs will be matched by the riffs on light—as light spins, swirls and circulates, electricity routed through byzantine currents to

e

le

vate

us

here.

The commanding props of this show are of course that electronic curtain and an Ellipsis stage, round and round, reaching into the audience and flashing colors like a Disney dress. At one moment it is channelling the most profound purple I have ever seen. I am sure Alice Walker’s God is in the house because he would not miss this color purple that I want to wade in, up to my neck. That stage is really a color rimmed and color-brimming frisbee of light simulating a spin into the audience with Bono as cowboy, policeman, captain delirious, whichever hat matches mood. The digitized backdrop, a portable Times Square, pulses with pixels that deliver psychedelic patterns, a strolling man, and the colors of African flags streaming from the riggings to the stage. The more conventional video display screen delivers a staccato of words MEDIA MONEY LOVE TV WORDS, pull words from the ZOOropa tour. Meanwhile, Bono belts it out. Meanwhile, the Ellipsis’ lights race each other in full spectrum dashes. Oooh ooo, we really are in a scene called Vertigo.

But the crowd too wants to sing, and in light, electronic light, now that the BiC lighters have since given way to cell phones. “Ahh those magical gadgets,” cooes Bono as Paul Martin’s number appears on the screen for all to call and convince to raise foreign aid for Africa. The LCD displays of the phones glow a steady baby turquoise. Just at our level, a water bottle vendor, weighed down with his red bag of bottles, is peddling light in his aquafina wares: when he hoists a plastic bottle in the air it is flushed translucent, beacon-blue.

Two blond babes in spaghetti strap tops who did not bring their cameras, make as if they did, raising their plastic beer cups aloft like Bic lighters, the last sips of beer swaying to the hips swaying to the music, ooooh oooh o.. And then in salute, Bono scans the entire crowd with a highpowered hand-held searchlight, pausing for a moment in each section of the rafters to the hooting and hollering of the crowd that blinks and stomps as if refusing to wake from U2’s dynamic dream. We’d rather him elevate us here on the wave of light and song. He will sing, sing a new song.

We will sing…sing a new song. OOOh oooh oooh ooooooh oooooh…..Oooh to fade. The lights retreat, fall silent.

The roadies appear.

Elevation

High
Higher than the sun
You shoot me from a gun
I need you to elevate me here
Strung out like a guitar
Maybe you can educate my mind
Explain all these controls
Can’t sing but I’ve got soul
The goal is elevation
Higher now
In the sky
You make me feel like I can fly
So high
E
le
va
tion

The Case of the Sitting Couple

Yesterday, at the fourth and final, sold-out, wall-of-sound-to wall-of-sound two-hour U2 concert in Toronto at the Air Canada Centre, a couple in the row behind us sat out the entire concert. With the exception of the final encore, they sat. They sat, on the edge of their seats but not quite, poised to leave, but not just yet, yet sworn to sitting the show out, as politely as they could. They sat.

Even though. Even though they were wedged between rows of people on their feet throughout, and Deen and I smack in front of them, so that they truly could not possibly see anything, neither the stage itself nor even the monochrome visuals of the band in full throttle, reported by the helpful video screens on high.

Even though we were not the only people screaming each song aloud and hooting as if to blast the roof off, but that an entire congregation of 20,000 had risen to their heels now that Bono had arrived to the reassuring thunder of “Oh! You! Look! So Beautiful! Tonight!” Still they did not budge, but sat. Sat. Even though they sat in on one of the most light-lavished of rock concerts of the past years with $50 million worth of prime-time technology tuned to the U2 tempo, this couple rose once--toward the end.

“I couldn’t believe those two behind us,” Deen commented after the concert was over and as soon as words could rise a little above the din in our ears. “They sat right through it. And I am sure they couldn’t have seen a thing, we were right in the way. At one point I wanted to suggest that they take our seats because we were the first row, but then I thought—“ “Why?” I interrupted. “Why would you want to swap with them? It’s a U2 concert, for God sakes. They were at a U2 concert! I mean, duh!”

They were at a U2 concert, for sure, but I am not sure they knew it. They were committed to their assigned seats and chosen positions. Once they even tugged at us to sit down and join them, “Wouldn’t you like to sit down for a moment?” That was the one moment everyone had in fact rested briefly because Bono had launched into a relative ballad, posing a moment’s lull. But they had lulled themselves into a chronic indifference to the thump of the tunes at all other times. It was in the way their hands folded neatly into their laps as everyone else’s arms reached for the rafters to clock the mounting beat. The way they stared stiffly ahead as if past us, waiting out a portrait sitting. Why not leave? Why not go?

But they stayed till the last notes of the crowd-intoned new song became echo. They had stayed this long, after all. Now all that was left to do was to rise, to gaze from afar at the crowd below as the last notes of light diminished into darkness. The houselights blazed on and it was time to file out.

And they did, filing out right behind us, as if they were everybody else.