On the day that nothing happened

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Each time I think my life is a direct download of nothingness made famous by the ‘Seinfeld’ TV show, the forces of nature step in and stir up my neck of the woods just enough to give me a solid word count for my newspaper column.

The rainy morning has preempted my plans for gardening and set me to keyboard plunking. My collaborative colleague—iTunes—contributes songs from Neko Case, Maino, Shiny Toy Guns, Bruce Cockburn, Joni Mitchell, Kings of Leon and whomever else happens to be in line to inspire me as I write about the day nothing happened.

In an emergency on a nothing day, I could just open my fridge and write a story about what I see inside—wilted old lettuce, a partly-devoured tub of sour cream with a green, crusty topping and a due date back on February 10^th, and an unopened bottle of Marguerita mix from New Year’s Eve. The grim scenario would not qualify for an episode of ‘MTV Cribs’, but then neither would this ordinary, little, old farmhouse and that’s just fine with me.

On this nothing day it is not even noon yet and I’m not sure what rates first in the excitement category; the trailer-full of black dirt delivered by Cohort #1 on Friday evening, or the black bear who was headed to my back door on Sunday morning.

Truth be told--gardeners and landscapers preserve me--I really was as elated to get the dirt, as I am to find a roll of duct tape in my Christmas stocking.

It’s mine and you can’t have any. Oh, the endless possibilities.

I dream bigger dreams for myself than I think God does for me sometimes, and that includes the host of one-woman dirt projects I think I can master.

And as Cohort #1 and his reluctant kin now realize—‘Mrs. Incredible’ can make short work of a trailer-load of dirt long before they decide to get up at noon on a Saturday and come over and help me.

(Wink, chuckle, thanks anyway).

Mr. Bear, who in hindsight appeared rather dejected and lost on his trek through my yard on Sunday morning, was not nearly as excited to see me as I was to see him.

I was edging ever closer to get a picture of him with my camera, and jumping up and down like a two-year old who’d just spotted Santa in Safeway.

The bear stopped, turned, and flat-stared me as I stood there in my housecoat, gum rubbers, and braided Pippi Longstocking coif before shaking his head in disbelief at the country hick paparazzi and sauntering off. 

I shrugged off the snubbing and headed in to quiet the dogs that’d got whiff of the intruder on the outside breeze that blows through the receptacles in this old house.

It was only 9:30 a.m. and too early to allow the canine capers to clock in under their SAEWS collar (Security Assistance Early Warning System) due to the current ‘Quantum of Silence’ proclamation made by cohorts and pundits that restricts all outside noise until noon on Sunday, and includes moaning lawnmowers and barking dogs.

Despite this, I rewarded Dot and Cash for their awareness and handed out treats, most recently found to be old gingerbread man cookies left over from Christmas that I discovered in a container on top of my fridge.

The cookies were so hard that on the way to the dog’s mouths they bounce off the floor, hit and chipped the newly-painted wall in my kitchen, ricocheted off a chair and still not break, leaving the duo occupied with protracted chewings.

Now, here’s the kicker in this entire melee over the day that nothing happened.

If you are not already aware, my husband is in Afghanistan and at the moment he is in the central part of the country in an isolated area of the mountains helping to build facilities at a military forward operating base.

His environment is dusty, dirty, and very, very hot not to mention there’s a war going on.

I thank God for the military troops who do their job so well to protect him and the countless others.

Keep safe all of you. 

So when I think my day is a nothing, I will remember my trepidation and uncertainty that crept in during the online chat with my husband this morning at the same moment when there was gunfire in the background of the world he’s in.

He assures me the barriers that protect the base are taller than he is. Yet I worry for my electrician.

I cannot imagine the worry of a soldier’s wife.

However, Pete was more concerned about the big, hairy live spider that was in his tent—one he called the “daddy” of the camel spider encased in acrylic that he had sent home to me to give to the J.W. Walker students.

Peter had left his luggage open and full of clothes on the floor of his tent (which sounds remarkably like his side of the bed when he’s here at home) and said he was too freaked out to get anything out of it.

Beware the man with aerosol foot deodorant.

“I’m gonna spray inside the suitcase with ‘Tough-Actin Tinactin’ and see what happens,” he wrote.

God help the spider. 

Thoughts on the person I want to be

Monday, May 19, 2009

 

“Four little words just to get me along . . .” 

That’s the first line of a song called ‘That’s Not My Name’ sung by British craze duo ‘The Ting Tings.’ ‘That’s Not My Name’ is a fun, upbeat tune that drives me to grab my pseudo-microphone hairbrush and karaoke my way back and forth across my kitchen floor, pretending to be a pop star.

“They call me Stacey, Mary, Jo, Lisa. They call me Her, they call me Jane, always the same. That’s not my name. That’s not my name. That’s not my name,” I croon.

The dogs, which are my ever-adoring and only audience, shudder and shuffle off to hide under my bed.

I’ve heard myself referred to as ‘she’ on more than one occasion in passing conversations. If my grandson, Adam, is talking to someone else about me and refers to me as ‘she,’ instead of ‘Granny,’ I am quick to remind him, “That’s not my name.”

It’s a throwback to something I was taught in childhood by my mother, who’d also grown up learning to acknowledge people in conversation by their names and not by ‘he’ or ‘she.’ 

It makes perfect sense.

Pay attention to conversations and see how many times it happens to you and to the people you are talking about. You’d be surprised how many of us lose our identities in ‘he’ and ‘she.’ 

I also can think of a handful of other times in my life when “That’s not my name” was central to a conversation—including when I tried to use it in a last ditch effort to avoid punishment from my school principal, the late great Ernie Buchan, when I was in fourth grade in Sixth Street School. 

Mr. Buchan figured out that it was me who had made several alterations to the daily attendance sheet in my fourth grade classroom. 

While waiting for the school bus after school, I had started rubbing out the ‘P-for-Present’ beside every other student’s name but my own, and penciled all of them in as ‘A-for-Absent.’ This went on for a few days, at least. How smart was that?

At the moment when I realized I was ‘toast,’ and as Mr. Buchan addressed me as ‘Beth,’ I wanted to stand on the teacher’s desk and profess, “That’s not my name.” 

Thankfully the reprimand amounted to nothing more than a stern warning and reminder about right and wrong, and yet for a few years after that, I was convinced that the reason I was short in stature was the result of being mortified by the whole affair. 

And then there was life in Grade Seven in Robert Moore School when school pictures were taken. I’d worn a purple t-shirt, had flecks of budding acne on my face, and a wispy scruffy haircut.

We all had our allotted bunch of photos to trade out to our friends. 

Remember how a measure of your “coolness” was how many copies of ‘you’ you had left over? I always had leftovers. Oh well, that’s another story. 

Anyway, the father of one of my friends to whom I’d given a photo of myself took one look at my school picture and determined I was a boy.

“Bert?” That’s not my name. 

After that I started to stuff my training bra, bleach my upper lip hair, and pluck my eyebrows. In public school I also carried the nickname ‘Cuds’—awarded to me I suppose because I lived beside a farm. I couldn’t have had a regular nickname like ‘Shorty’ or ‘Bitsy’ that reflected the fact that I was shorter than everyone else in my class. Nope.

Instead I got nicknamed after the contents in one of four digestive compartments of the ruminant animal better known as the cow. 

And although I am still stunned by the fact that the cow’s rumen can hold 50 gallons of partly digested food or “cud,” I echo -- “That is not my name.”

Another misnomer incident wherein I again thought about denying my true identity was in 1980 when I was working as a course counselor for a driving school in Thunder Bay.

I was in the office listening to a psychic on the radio profess his abilities and who was encouraging listeners to call in, give their name, and wait to hear a future prediction. 

I called in (on company time) and was lucky—or so I thought-- to get in line for a one-on-one with ‘Mr. Clairvoyant.’ “What’s your name?” he asked. (Now remember folks this is live radio.) “Beth,” I said, anxiously awaiting his prediction that would see me running out and buying my lucky million-dollar lottery ticket.

“Well, first of all, I’d tie a big rock around your name Beth and throw it into Lake Superior. It will always bring you bad luck,” he said rather matter-of-fact.

“Oops, silly me,” I wanted to shout out to the doofus forecaster. “What was I thinking? That’s not my name, it belongs to a friend of mine.”

Instead I mumbled, “Okay then. Thanks,” and hung up. 

And while there were stories from my youth that indicated my parents had considered calling me Helen--with all due respect to the Helens of the world--thankfully that’s not my name either. 

On the other hand, a beautiful little soul named Sam once mistook me for ‘Oprah.’ That was my 15 minutes of fame.

And in 1985, a very, very good friend of mine, the late Norrie Godin who was ill and in hospital shortly before he passed away, mistook me for his first love ‘Victoria.’ 

That’s not my name either, but it was one of the warmest mistaken identities I’ve ever had the pleasure of being.

We all work hard in life to build ourselves and being recognized for who we are--or are not—is part of the journey. 

The new website ‘Wolfram Alpha’ predicts that 1 in 8000 women are named Beth and that there are approximately 144,142 women named Beth who are alive today. With a world population of some 6.53 billion people, it does make sense that one wouldn’t hear or see the name very often.

I guess I’ll just have to shout it out a bit more often. 

And while I don’t mind being mistaken for a talk show host once in a while, about a month ago the tipping point came when I suddenly aged about 25 years and was renamed Marie. While I, too, remain on this side of 60, might I remind you—that’s not my name.