Me, Myself and I

So, lots of languages have both polite and familiar words for you. Because you’re special, cold, or unfamiliar, and I’m just being polite, playing it safe, I don’t presume. But at work, myself has gone viral as the polite way of saying me. As in, “Give the form to myself when it’s complete.” Because myself puts everyone on notice that it’s special? More special than those who fumble their way through the form? It’s impossible to explain to the myselvers that me would suffice. They get this special, cold, and unfamiliar look on theirselves faces. Like something’s wrong with me.

Image: last.fm

What, child, is this?

At some point near the end of her marriage, my mother again started going to church, our Christmases became a little less secular, and it fell upon me—at a mere nine years old—to assemble our family’s first nativity scene. The crèche I built out of Lego, of course; Joseph was the Olympic judo figurine I’d got from a box of Cheerios; and Mary was swiped from my sister’s set of Russian nesting dolls. The greatest abomination, however, was saved for the baby Jesus, where I pulled the hair off a tiny troll and wrapped him in swaddling clothes.

Photo based on a dim memory and the necklaces sold by Hannah Nuttall.

Our Atheist-Agnostic German-Canadian Christmas

Our parents were in a mixed marriage: our father an atheist and our mother agnostic. Fortunately, both believed in stories and neither could forgo German Christmas cookie traditions. These joint enthusiasms meant that Christmas got the go-ahead. We’d be shooed out of the house while Mama put the finishing touches on the tree (real), lighting candles (real), and hanging strands of German angelhair (limp and silvery). Our presents were being delivered by German Engeln, entities of secular fantasy unrelated to Canadians’ Jesus. Meanwhile, we’d hunker in the Volkwagen with Papa, turning on the emergency blinkers to scare away the Grinch.

How Great Thou Art

French Canadians will tell you that while you can put up your Christmas nativity scene any time during Advent you never include the L’Enfant Jesu until Christmas Eve. My mémé had a plaster Baby Jesus that was chubby and white with blonde hair and a diaper. The thing was the size of a large toddler and so old that it probably was suckled by the Roman she-wolf. But after midnight mass and until Epiphany this Colossus dominated my grandmother’s fibreboard mantle, dwarfing the tiny manger and imposing its Godzilla-like reign of terror among the cowering wise men and frightened donkeys.

Photo by Riccardo De Luca

AYRE-240

Nola and I are walking to school, and I’m trying to get her to read the words spelled out on the license plates of the cars parked along the way.
     Understand, most of the plates here in Toronto begin with an A or a B and are prone to a strange insufficiency of vowels; and so, although there aren’t likely many words to be found, the perfect parent is forever alert to a Learning Opportunity.
     “A–Y–R–E,” asks Nola. “What’s that?”
     “It’s what you put in your TYRES!”
     . . .
     I swear, I’m wasting my best material on a six-year-old.

Believe it or not, you can read more stories about license plates here and here. I picked the photos for this story from the extensive collection of Jerry Wood.

 

The Illuminating Power of Football

We played two-hand touch on the street. Someone on defence counted Mississippis while the quarterback narrated his own exploits for imaginary viewers at home. We were always the Roughriders, the quarterback was always Ron Lancaster. “Lancaster, dropping back to pass... Here comes the rush! Lancaster scrambles, rolls out, here’s the throw... Complete! What a catch! George Reed at the curb, caught immediately and smacked into a Buick – but he’s okay, folks, he’s getting up! It’s just a bruise!” The receiver was always George Reed, who was black, and no one in Saskatchewan was black, but he was one of us.

Image:   CFL

The Slow Storm

“Slowflakes,” said Jakie, soft but clear, pointing out the window from his high chair. His mother smiled, but he was right. Slow flurried overnight and all next morning. The news came on late and said the roads were full of slow, cars trickling along at four miles an hour. Schools were closed because children would never reach them on time. Instead, Jakie’s sisters built a slowman in the front yard, pondering each handful, tenderly gnawing clumps of slow off their mittens. Their mother asked them why the slowman had no eyes. “They’re shut cuz he’s sleepy,” they said, and yawned.

Image: SireneTzukiDark.

To the People: Another Apology

I apologize for finding his apologies tedious, disingenuous, and meaningless.
I apologize for his lies, excuses and false denials.
I apologize for his do-what-I-say-not-what-I-do “leadership”.
I apologize for his claim he had nothing more to hide.
I apologize for his hypocrisy.
I apologize for him clinging to office like a limpet mine.
I apologize for thinking he’s only sorry he got caught.
I apologize for all these apologies, but as the man himself has said, “the past is the past and we must move forward... I know I have let you down and I can’t do anything else but apologize.”


Image:  CBC

A Failed Photograph of the Night Sky

It began at 3 a.m. as another failed experiment. She wrote her shopping list on the back in hard lead pencil, sighed, and shoved it into the pocket of her tweed skirt. That day, she handled more invoices for the Milliken account, stubbed her toe on the filing cabinet, and – it must be confessed – nodded off into an inchoate dream, in which tidy rows of figures became gentle, supple shadows. That evening, when she took out the list, she saw a few lines had appeared on it from nowhere, suggestive of a figure. Over the years, she watched her emerge.

Image: Edgar Degas, Danseuse ajustant sa bretelle.

but can you touch

                                                      a praying mantis?
       can you smell rain or snakes or cancer?
       can you see russia from alaska?
       could you hear music as it’s playing on the moon?
       could you see mars last night or tuesday
            or taste spinach in a smoothie?
       should you feel guilty killing zombies?
       would you feel
                                       getting shot
                                                                in the head?
       oh: you. should you now be inclined to censure,
       you who touch your chest on bench press,
       you who hear from your ex-boyfriend everyday
                                      (that’s a lot)
       i suggest that you drink heavily
       i suggest that you tread lightly
       i suggest you let a praying mantis pray.

Image: Mantis.

Dans l’estomac de la Loire

The river swallowed
her, turned
her into a bolus, slid
her into a slow stomach in
 the middle of pre-primeval Nantes.

    And waited.

      Time churned, silts settled,
       her tender toes now tap twenty
        thousand leagues beneath
        the Jules Verne Museum beneath
        a dancing salon named
         Sea of
          Dreams.
            Her serpent twines
              expectant near her cunt – ou,
                       disons-nous, near the école élémentaire
                                    named after Gustave Roch, scholar
                                        of surfaces topological until he
                                          died untimely in the coils
                                           of tuberculosis . . .
                                           Her nipple
                                          perks the Palais
                                          des Sports de  Beaulieu,
                                            where Real Madrid played
                                                PAOK Thessaloniki
                                                    in a beautiful ’92
                                                       Eurocup
                                                        game.

Image: le jardin, by Max Ernst. For other stories it inspired,
see Magpie Tales.

Sparks

Passing through the smokers out behind the Dufferin Mall, I caught the scent of that old round table lighter in my grandmother’s apartment, or maybe the Zippo my dad let me play with because he never did get around to refilling the thing . . . a whiff of the fuel, the smell of flint against steel, and the chime of metal on metal when you snapped it shut. Except that this one belonged to a younger man, who had taken a pass on those disposable plastic jobs for something more substantial, flipping it open just out of the corner of my eye.

Image from Found Walls.

Backache, Scotch and Chickpeas (Breakfast with the Linguists)

My breakfast of Backache, Scotch and Chickpeas is, according to Richard Lanham, a paratactic list like Veni, vidi, vici, i.e., a list that makes the reader do the work of figuring out how its elements connect. Deborah Tannen would point out how the three elements run parallel in containing k sounds and in being two-syllable nouns, “and” being the linguistic equivalent of Hamburger Helper. Roy Peter Clark tells us that once a list runs to more than three elements, it starts feeling endless, whereas trinities – like Carrie-Anne Moss’s adorably fucked-up little sweaters in The Matrix – do the trick. Slainte!

Heavy Horses

Until last night my exposure to Prog-Rock was limited to enforced snippets of Rick Wakeman and weedy, gravitas-rich Pink Floyd liner notes. Then Sherry and I went to the Jethro Tull concert. She was fabulous; attuned to every trill and tempo change like a true Ian Anderson aficionado. Thirty minutes in I realized why I preferred a post-Gabriel Genesis, an epiphany exacerbated by the demographics of the average Tull fan. This is where Comic-Book Guys go to die and given the arduous ascent to Massey Hall’s upper balcony, I was amazed that these whiskered mastodons had the energy to air-flute.


Image: Popular Mechanics (1952)

Taken from the Spine

bloodletting & miraculous cures
behind the scenes at the museum
alone of all her sex
paris was a woman
loitering with intent
to kill a mockingbird –
the door into summer.

salt fish girl
salt fish girl,
interpreter of maladies,
when fox is a thousand
always
never let me go.

fugitive pieces
tender buttons leaving earth
eight cousins, tender is the night
the children of men voyage in the
dark green shadows, white whale, ammonite
a mouthful of air taken at the flood
tales from the thousand and one nights
the book of small fugitive pieces
charms for the easy life.

Wait! Now, go back to the beginning and touch each line in turn. And, if you like this sort of poetic puzzle, make sure to check out For 20 weightings.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Fortune Spy

In 1806, Jane Taylor didn’t have Google Translate to help her write “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Finnish, Armenian, and Hindi translations would have let her daub it with wistfulness: Twinkle, twinkle, little star, I wonder how you are doing.
     Adding Gujarati, Maltese, and more, she’d have had MI-5’s first coded message: Sparkle, twinkle, little star, somebody doesn’t know the enemy’s paying. You are a Solitaire in the heaven across the world.
     Or, the world’s first fortune cookies: Star hotels are a little festive for this. Put your trust in enemy ships being constructed. In a specialized world, enjoy fresh air.

Images: Margaret Tarrant, Daily Mail, Unravel a Gift.  

Sorry, Margaret Atwood

So, Margaret Atwood has joined other Canadian feminists in calling for the anthem to be edited back to its original. I like Margaret (and feminism), but I have to disagree with her. The line in question reads “true patriot love in all thy sons command.” They want it to read “in all of us command.” But being commanded to feel true patriot love is a bit much. Feelings can’t be commanded, and I’m not big on the whole patriot love concept either. Sorry, Margaret, but I’d rather just stick with an anthem that sticks that one to the sons.

Image: Canada's Walk of Fame.

Being in love with a bear

It’s awkward being in love with a bear 

First off, what can you say to the parents? 

You can say, “He’s dedicated to work 

’Cause, Dad, bearhood is no song and dance 

No beer, no skittles, no coffee breaks

Eating offal from seals takes real stamina.” 

You can say, “Daddy, at least he’s white and 

Remember what you said about Angelo 

Yes you did too say that and I was so 

Ashamed I wouldn’t visit you for months and –”

Yes, such arguments divert the parents 

But truth told, being in love has got to be 

Awkward, standing hair on end. 

Image: Catrin Welz-Stein.

HEY! (The already-outdated kimchi taco chant)

HEY! is the new hi rooibos the new chai

gluten is the new egg yolk fake’s the newest fur

kimchi the new taco and gambling new tobacco

for hipsters the new yuppies labradoodles their new puppies

sigh for rhinos the new dodos clap for katniss the new frodo

winning hunger like a new board game but HEY!

HEY! it’s the new hi syria’s in the news why
war is lame the new retarded like wispy bangs the new cross-
     parted
HEY! they’re the next hi and netflix the new sky’s
got ben the latest batman wearing cheetah: the new black. HEY!

Image: Steamy Kitchen.

The Falls

At the age of four, Sarabeth Harcourt let her best toy, a squeaky dog named Benji, slip over the railing to Niagara Falls. The experience transformed her. She became so listless, her mother sometimes turned the lights off in a room, not realizing Sarabeth was there. At 16, Sarabeth continued to sit in the dark, indifferent even to a toothache. Her mother took her to the dentist nonetheless. There, Sarabeth saw a pale, freckly boy emerge from the dentist’s room. “The nitrous will wear off soon, Benji,” the dentist reassured him. “Okay,” the boy squeaked. Sarabeth fell tumultuously in love.

Image: OLX.