Please read this “Please Read Me First” post first, please!

I’ve been writing these stories since 2001 and have, at last count, polished off 817 of the things—81,700 words—or something like a whole novel’s worth of disjointed thought.
        And even if it has taken me more than a decade, I am now finally flirting with the idea of publishing some.
        And I’d really like your help.
        I need you to tell me, right off the top of your head, which you’ve liked best. Don’t go looking, just post a comment or send a note describing your favourites as best you remember.
        Those are the ones I will count.

Photo by Jeremy Sterk, Pier 12 Photography.

The New Presidential Library

Word today of the opening of the George W. Bush Presidential Library (or as Dubya calls it, “Lie-Berry”). It is a remarkable honour for a man who darkened few library doors in his youth. Had events unfolded differently, this might not have been an issue; after all, his focus was going to be domestic. Well. Unschooled in world affairs, he had to rely on his national security “dream team”. Perhaps if he’d read more books he’d have formed his own opinions; he might never have invaded Iraq, or based his post-war strategy on a flimsy pop-up book, Democracy Made Easy.

Bubble Man

“Sonofabitch.” Bill greeted the prospect of a working holiday with a dread usually reserved for colorectal screening and destination weddings. Sure he got through British Customs via the fast lane with his wife and kid, who both held EU passports but this was cold comfort for a fortnight away from cat and castle. He hated leaving; home was so pleasant. Except for the never-ending winter, he really couldn’t complain about much. Here he achieved a balance, shutting off CBC whenever the news became too depressing or after Matt Galloway had mewed out “community” one too many times for his liking.
Photo: Sari Garden by L. Leclair

Shallow Hits a New Low

Guilty as charged, I’m a little shallow. But I bet you also I’m not the only one. And is it really shallow, when you look at a photo of the apprehension of a guy who allegedly – though his aunt in Toronto doubts it – pressure cookered a marathon and wreaked havoc on a city and ran over his own exploded brother with the getaway car (awkward!), and is now intubated, sedated, and reviled by his uncle, is it really shallow in this instance to look at the guy and find the first thing comes to mind is, “Hey, he’s really ripped!”?  

Colliders

What a shame that the idiocy of two boys has monopolized the news this week. Twisted and unforgivable but nothing that folks in the West Bank or Pakistan or even Europe haven’t been dealt on a daily basis. They grieve and vent and then move on. But because this happened in America there’ll be ribbon campaigns and concerts and anyone who looks like my son will be under increased and fearful scrutiny. That is, unless they want to buy a gun at Walmart. Forget looking in space for it, the God Particle is alive and well and living in Congress.

Image from The Particle Zoo.

The Higgs Bosom

So Peter Higgs, the guy who comes up with the God particle doesn’t want us calling it that anymore because (a) he’s an atheist and (b) it was a joke. But calling the God particle the Higgs boson is not gonna be an improvement. Because it sounds like breasts, not just any breasts, but breasts of a misspelled, old-fashioned variety that go with the kind of strangely-ribbed pink underwear that some kid’s grandma, gripped by a spirit of fierce conservation, turns into the face of a sixth birthday present doll. If that’s what the universe is made of, oh Jesus.

Image: Ecouterre.

Saskatoons

     “Who wants pie?” Mom demanded after we’d cleared supper.
     “I do! I do!” my brothers and I piped.
     Genny laughed.
     “What?” I asked.
     “Nothing . . . It’s just, you all sounded like eager little kids.”
     “Well, it’s saskatoon pie,” Mom said, eyes narrowing.
     “You’ve never had saskatoon pie?” Dad asked.
     “Never . . .”
     Heads shook at her deprivations.
     “. . . I can't wait to taste this famous saskatoon berry.”
     Now we laughed.
     Genny looked at me, a little hurt. “What did I say?”
     “Well, it’s ‘saskatoon,’ not ‘saskatoon berry,’” I explained. “You wouldn’t say raspberry berry, or strawberry berry . . .”
     Really: sometimes Genny can be so provincial.

Image: The saskatoon (Amelanchier alnifoliahe) pride of the prairies (and prairie folk), courtesy Government of Manitoba

Ironic Chef

I inherited some surplus baking supplies from a pal whose daughter worked on one of those elimination cooking shows. Every time I crack open the jar marked “rice syrup” I wonder how it all went wrong. When did it become entertaining to watch people cook like they were bailing water from a paper lifeboat? What must all that anxiety taste like? Give me an hour of Julia, Martha, the cagily Sinovescent Yan, or even the avuncular but dodgy James Barber anytime over witnessing some idiot sweat into his Saskatoon berry reduction while another bigger idiot rips him a new one.

Image: Detail from Stephan Yan, Wok With Yan (1981)

You, Tube

The Smithsonian tells us we share 98.8% of our genome with chimpanzees, but that hardly reveals us to ourselves in any new light. Now, from Belgium, comes a study showing we have 96.3% in common with annelida oligochaeta, the common earthworm. So very many nuances of human nature are explained in this fell swoop. The lingering popularity of the name Ann. Our affection for undergrounds, whether inhabited by the French Resistance or by hobbits. And of course, the disarming comforts we feel around tubes. Think tube tops, toddlers lulled by toilet paper rolls, and jagged mornings smoothed with Euro caviar.

Image: K. Bischoping.

Moving in Soon?

We’d eventually take over a house the bank had repossessed, that someone had left in a hurry, taking the stove and the fridge on his way out and tossing what food he still had in the sink.

     The second time through, we still weren’t entirely sure, but that certainly didn’t stop me from taking along a few things to clean up a house I didn’t yet own, gathering up the worst of the garbage, soaking the kitchen with Lysol, and doing what little I could to get rid of the stink of the previous owner before the heat kicked in.

Images from Between Heaven and Hell by Jacek Yerka, 1989.

Bonne fête ma chouette

«Es-tu mal au ventre, maman?» Every year on her birthday, mom would ask her mother if her stomach hurt. Mémé, who produced a bakers dozen, never got the significance. But most of us remember birthing our babies. Twenty-two hours of labour took me from insisting I deliver in a salt-water bath, the air replete with the sounds of whales and patchouli-scented vegan candles to maniacally screaming “Get that fucker out!” By the time the catheter arrived, I saw yoga and sheep breathing for what they were: chimerical hippy hogwash. But I’d have done it again in a heartbeat.

Photo: Zebra Photography

Raiders of the Lost Schmutz

So they found King Richard under a car park. Now that’s a dig. Back in the Jurassic when I trained as an archaeologist we did a field school in a parking lot. Filled with salady earnestness, I thought we’d discover something: The lurid tracings of Matthew Elliot’s slave cabins or Tecumseh’s moldering head—Essex County treasures just waiting to be unearthed. Instead we amassed a greenhorn’s cache of Styrofoam cups, nails, and broken glass. Turns out our slacker prof hadn’t applied for a field license. We were lucky we weren’t arrested or press-ganged to work the Scrambler on Boblo. Photo by P. E. Reid

A Proliferation of Popes

Yesterday two Popes lunched. We smiled; it seemed so sunny. We should've been afraid. I don’t mean just Catholics worried that Benedict might cleave the Church with a chance utterance about preferring pickerel to cod. Rather, as the moral majority of Star Trek viewers should've known, a space-time discontinuity had formed. Francis is but the first of the Popes who’ll be popping in from alternate dimensions. Come Tuesday, Popes will fill our screens, like in the old “Which twin has the Toni?” ads. About a week later, the exponentially-growing mass of Popes will tweak Earth off its orbit. Goodnight moon.

Intercourse

On our trip back from the Jersey Shore, we passed through the town of Intercourse, a small town in Pennsylvania with a shop on one side of the road—selling assorted knick-knacks and quilts made by the local Amish—and a lonely motel on the other. I insisted we stop, hoping to find something to add to my collection of kitschy souvenirs, but we really should have stayed overnight, if only to have the town come up in conversation one day, and so allow us to dismiss it with the weary cynicism of the seasoned traveller: “Been there, done that.”

The Potato Salad Mystery, part three

Adela rootled in the cutlery drawer, but her forks and spoons all lay dispiritedly in the still-clogged sink.
     “I hate my life,” she thought, turning back to the potato salad that she supposed the cleaning lady had left behind. It wheedled forth aioli and memories. Of a picnic spread on a chequered cloth on the Riviera, and a man feeding her fingerling potatoes with sandy, long-fingered hands and…
     Adela stopped short. “I've never had a boyfriend,” she thought crossly. “Let alone a cleaning lady.” Somehow, being near that salad was giving her memories of another life, better than her own.

Part one *  Part two

The Potato Salad Mystery, part two

Enticingly unctuous, the tang of aioli wafted up her nose and she found herself salivating. It was seven pm after all, and any ounce of satiety gained from that penitential gluten-free bean bake she scarfed at noon had long since evaporated. And here sat fingerling potatoes dotted with chives and dusty paprika. The temptation to eat this Trojan Horse of a supper was strong. But wasn’t it just last Saturday that she watched The Apartment? Who was in her house and left this behind? Could the cleaning lady be entertaining gentlemen on Tuesday afternoons, fueled by lust and high-end carbs?

Part one  *  Part three

So Hip It Hurts

After months of relatively unsuccessful chiropractic treatment on my hip, Dr. Ho now thinks it might be my sacroiliac that’s causing the pain.
      “There’s something we can try…” he says with a grin that suggests he’s as reluctant to tell me as I’ll be to hear it. And he’s right, because what he wants to do is inject anaesthetic directly into the joint, and if the pain goes away, it will confirm the underlying problem.
     Understand, shoving this needle into the base of my spine is just part of the diagnosis.
     I don’t even want to think about the cure.

Image based on a drawing posted to The Dance Training Project.

The Potato Salad Mystery, part one

When Adela Littleshank came home that night, the last thing she expected to find was a container of potato salad sitting on her kitchen table.
     She checked the back door: still locked. She yanked her bedroom closets open, peered under the bed, and inched the shower curtain back, ready to shriek: no one. Yet, in the kitchen, this potato salad, provenance unknown.
     Not quite unknown, she corrected herself; the salad bore the label of a rather upscale deli.
     It’s an upscale hallucination, she thought, poking the container to see if it was real. It was, and in fact, enticingly cool.

Part two  *  Part three

J + R

It wasn’t the sort of thing I normally did, but there was this wall, you see, down a long alley off Queen . . . a dull expanse of pale brick under decades of dirt, until someone had discovered—who knows when—that the brick had gone soft.
     And so began a long crude chronicle of young romance, white letters scratched into the grime, the successes and failures of those long gone and those still hanging onto the memory of a piece of gravel and a few minutes of carving for the ages to see, perhaps wishing now it hadn’t been so easy.
Photo © 2010 by The World Beckons. All rights reserved.

The Heart of the Storm

Outside the plate glass window, the storm slings flinty chips of snow into the shocked cheeks of the New Yorkers. It rips at Whole Foods sacks of tinned kidney beans and kelp snack storm provender; it snaps up five umbrellas – two floral, one stripy – at the corner of Ludlow and East Houston in a single skip of what must be a cold, cold heart.
     But inside the storm: il laboratorio del gelato, where a dish of spheres awaits. The marble grey is black sesame, slowly showing a toasty warmth; the off-white is lychee, its sweet breath perfumed like a succubus.

Image: Lynn Huang on foodspotting.