June 25, 2008
Summer is less than a week old and already the pages of the Sears Fall/Winter catalogue are bent and crinkled as society tugs at us to plan what we are going to wear five and six months from now.
And here I am behind the times again, having just found my jean cut-offs and the three tank tops I didn’t give to Goodwill last October.
What’s the sense in rushing things anyway? As it is, I can barely keep up with mowing the grass every three days to stay ahead of the dandelions.
When I’m not thinking about yard work, working, or cleaning the house, I have my face buried in the endless pages of the Undergraduate Guide and “How-To” tutorial that precedes Daughter #3’s impending stab at university in the big city.
Deadlines for post-secondary fee payments loom like bats in the belfry, swooping down and into my wallet only to find food coupons and Canadian Tire money. And if that’s not enough to think about, I find myself measuring the week by the amount of days I have left to write this column in time for the following week’s paper.
When I refuelled this mission to write “The View from Here,” I made a pact with myself that I would have a new column lassoed and tied each Friday morning. The late author Lloyd Alexander once penned, “We learn more by looking for the answer to a question and not finding it than we do from learning the answer itself.”
All I know for sure is that for six of the last seven days, I’ve been looking for the answer to this question: “What am I going to write about this week?”
I have a million beginnings running around in my head, 16 pages of snippet notes, and a little brown notebook I carry with me everywhere that is full of chicken-scratch and half-cooked ideas. One of my biggest hobbies is collecting philosophical quotes. I suspect it has something to do with my insatiable longing for another person’s viewpoint.
My husband would beg to differ and he’d be right.
When he’s around and it comes to brass tacks, my viewpoint is the only one that counts (I love you, honey). Column-wise, I had a good thing going for three weeks and then the ’flu bug came a-knocking and relieved me of all grammar and language abilities except for the word “Ralph,” which I repeated several times in the wee hours of a mid-week June morning.
I guess I should have listened to Mrs. S. when I closed in for a friendly hug at the store and she said “Don’t get too close, I’ve been sick and this is the first time I’ve been out and about in three days.”
It was four for me.
Time melted into a big heap and with it, all my energy. My bed never saw so much of me. The dogs—bless their canine souls—slept at the foot of the bed patiently waiting for my “get up and go” to get up and play fetch. When I finally did come up for air and went outside to take in the sun, the grass was around my kneecaps and the dandelions had gone to seed.
“Dot” and “Cash” bounced around in mid-air clearly overjoyed by the rebirth of the one who has treats. Then, as dogs do, Cash took a break from the frenzy, lifted his leg, and peed on an evergreen seedling I planted last summer for my dog, “Griffon,” and whose ashes also are buried beneath it.
I took one good, long look and realized that Cash had been making regular stops at the little tree, and had rendered it a stark and dingy former skeleton of itself (no pun intended).
Dogs pee on trees, that’s the truth of it, but I think Cash has hierarchy issues. He certainly has poetic timing. About two hours ago, he got up from his spot at my feet near my desk chair and put his big, fat mutton head on the keyboard resting on my knees and, with one flick of his snout, deleted all the work I’d just written for this week’s column.
But that’s another story.
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
Patience is a virtue, right?
June 11, 2008
“I have about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.”
My brother, a.k.a. Mr. Smooth, uttered the statement last weekend after spending three-quarters of his two-day visit here from Thunder Bay trying to figure out why his old truck wouldn’t start.
“Wow,” I said to myself. “That’s impressive.”
The Sunday afternoon was teetering on 5 p.m.—one hour past the time he’d decided to head back to the big city. If it had been me turning the ignition key over and over again, and staring at the engine until my head looked like a question mark, I’d have stomped up and down, lit a match with the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes, and smoked the half-ton long before my patience had time to run out.
And I’d still have had enough tantrum energy left to clean my entire house in about 15 minutes.
As much as I’d like to boast that I, too, was born with the patience of Job, sadly, I think I was behind the door when the storks handed out that virtue. However, in my neck of the woods of late, matters of normal human tolerance are clouded by merry menopause.
In any given nanosecond, the hormone roller-coaster and its forces of evil cause me to start on fire in the middle of a cold shower or morph into Cruella De Ville and send every living thing in the farmyard scurrying for cover.
A woman’s day-to-day agenda is a big test as it is, without being drafted kicking and screaming by the war department into the Change of Life.
I suppose I should be thankful for some things, though. At least for the moment, it would appear I’m not on the list for symptomatic weight gain. In fact, I’ve lost 15 pounds since January—a direct benefit of no alcohol, no breads, no sugar, and plenty of exercise scrubbing tubs.
On the other hand, there’s a downside.
My apple-bottom and piano legs have shrunk, but losing bulk from “the sisters” and from the skin above my eyelids has caused those parts of me to droop farther south. While an 18-hour bra can improve what’s abreast, where’s the hope for the slinking skin above my eyes, short of a scalpel wielded by a plastic surgeon?
Come to think of it, I could do what my dear Ottawa-based cousin, Carol, humorously suggested. Gals with eyelids like us can self-rejuvenate our smoldering youth by maintaining a constant look of surprise on our faces.
I set a mirror on the kitchen table this morning and tried that pose at breakfast over coffee. I looked 15 years younger for about seven minutes, then my eye sockets dried out and my contact lenses bonded to my pupils.
Peter walked in from his morning rounds, took one look at my wide-eyed “deer in the headlights” expression, and checked his pants zipper and his hair to make sure everything was buttoned up and beautiful.
As if he hadn’t seen that look on my face before. It’s the same one I use to showcase disbelief when the space junkie that I am is overrun by the unorganized territory that accompanies a man about the house after his three-week stint away at work in the far north.
And it’s the same face I confronted Pete with just the other day when he insisted that his new diet program, which he began just two days before his work medical, included of a jar of Nutella and a dozen corn muffins.
It’s also the same bug-eyed look Mr. Smooth did not see when he jumped into the front seat of my new truck and ripped open a big bag of corn chips and a runny jar of jalapeno cheese dip.
He has no idea how close I came to sending him back to 1972 in a sewing basket.
Lucky for him, I was starving—and had about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.
“I have about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.”
My brother, a.k.a. Mr. Smooth, uttered the statement last weekend after spending three-quarters of his two-day visit here from Thunder Bay trying to figure out why his old truck wouldn’t start.
“Wow,” I said to myself. “That’s impressive.”
The Sunday afternoon was teetering on 5 p.m.—one hour past the time he’d decided to head back to the big city. If it had been me turning the ignition key over and over again, and staring at the engine until my head looked like a question mark, I’d have stomped up and down, lit a match with the lightning bolts shooting out of my eyes, and smoked the half-ton long before my patience had time to run out.
And I’d still have had enough tantrum energy left to clean my entire house in about 15 minutes.
As much as I’d like to boast that I, too, was born with the patience of Job, sadly, I think I was behind the door when the storks handed out that virtue. However, in my neck of the woods of late, matters of normal human tolerance are clouded by merry menopause.
In any given nanosecond, the hormone roller-coaster and its forces of evil cause me to start on fire in the middle of a cold shower or morph into Cruella De Ville and send every living thing in the farmyard scurrying for cover.
A woman’s day-to-day agenda is a big test as it is, without being drafted kicking and screaming by the war department into the Change of Life.
I suppose I should be thankful for some things, though. At least for the moment, it would appear I’m not on the list for symptomatic weight gain. In fact, I’ve lost 15 pounds since January—a direct benefit of no alcohol, no breads, no sugar, and plenty of exercise scrubbing tubs.
On the other hand, there’s a downside.
My apple-bottom and piano legs have shrunk, but losing bulk from “the sisters” and from the skin above my eyelids has caused those parts of me to droop farther south. While an 18-hour bra can improve what’s abreast, where’s the hope for the slinking skin above my eyes, short of a scalpel wielded by a plastic surgeon?
Come to think of it, I could do what my dear Ottawa-based cousin, Carol, humorously suggested. Gals with eyelids like us can self-rejuvenate our smoldering youth by maintaining a constant look of surprise on our faces.
I set a mirror on the kitchen table this morning and tried that pose at breakfast over coffee. I looked 15 years younger for about seven minutes, then my eye sockets dried out and my contact lenses bonded to my pupils.
Peter walked in from his morning rounds, took one look at my wide-eyed “deer in the headlights” expression, and checked his pants zipper and his hair to make sure everything was buttoned up and beautiful.
As if he hadn’t seen that look on my face before. It’s the same one I use to showcase disbelief when the space junkie that I am is overrun by the unorganized territory that accompanies a man about the house after his three-week stint away at work in the far north.
And it’s the same face I confronted Pete with just the other day when he insisted that his new diet program, which he began just two days before his work medical, included of a jar of Nutella and a dozen corn muffins.
It’s also the same bug-eyed look Mr. Smooth did not see when he jumped into the front seat of my new truck and ripped open a big bag of corn chips and a runny jar of jalapeno cheese dip.
He has no idea how close I came to sending him back to 1972 in a sewing basket.
Lucky for him, I was starving—and had about an hour-and-a-half of patience left.
Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Stalk of the dandelion
June 4, 2008
In the news these days, there’s a lot of talk about kids spending too much time in front of television and computer screens, and not enough on physical activity.The truth is what it is.
In my youth, physical activity was as regular as rain. If my brother and I weren’t digging huge forts out of the mountains of snow piled along our driveway in the winter, we were bag-lunching it across the field or the creek every day of the summer with our cousins.If boredom set in, netting cabbage butterflies from the garden earned us five cents apiece, or we could pick dandelions—the arch-enemy of my dad’s well-manicured lawn.The insect pursuit would land us 10 or 15 cents before the winged creatures figured us out, or we lost interest.As a kid, the stalk of the dandelion lasted only as long as it took to pick a handful of the yellow dander and run it in to my mother who, like all mothers, would accept the bouquet of weeds with a smile.I was just shy of being a teenager when the audio visual entertainment industry became a household commodity called a TV in my parents’ home and computers existed nowhere that I knew about except on the starship “Enterprise.”My parents’ decision to wait to buy a television was kin to an old western gunfight at the O.K. Corral. They were one of the last hold-outs.In hindsight, given the statistics that some kids today are watching TV or playing video games up to 12 hours a week (and getting fatter by the minute), parents like mine had made the best decision of all.Until the early 1970s, if anybody in my family wanted to watch television, we had to go next door to my grandparents’ farm house, where we’d get to sit in on watching whatever the older folks had in mind. “The Wonderful World of Disney,” “Lawrence Welk,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Bonanza” ruled the coop.If I could be a kid again, I wouldn’t change a thing.I have a storybook of fantastic childhood memories built on country living, outdoor play with my cousins, and farm yard fun. Yet, I loved the novelty of television, too, just about as much as I did playing with kittens and baby chicks.And I’m still a big fan of all three.Once TV came to my house, the way things were didn’t change a whole lot. The only show I really was interested in was a spooky black-and-white series called “Creature Features,” and it started at midnight on Friday nights.Of course, the middle of the night was way past my bedtime and I only remember seeing the show once—after tiptoeing downstairs as everyone slept.I remember my dad had two weekly television series favourites—“The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” and “Hockey Night in Canada.”Back then, I wouldn’t have thought twice about knocking my little brother over and into a sewing basket on the way to the couch when my dad sat down to watch the Loony Tunes.They still rock.On the other hand, I dreaded Saturday night and sitting through the “the good ol’ hockey game.”If I could have managed to slapshot that hour of television into outer space where Captain Kirk voyaged, I’d have done so.And with all due respect to hockey fans, I’m still not among you—though I am very familiar with the terms “offensive zone,” “poke checks,” and “clearing” as they frequently apply to the disaster on Pete’s side of the bed.I also know the meaning of goalkeeper (though I must admit I rarely stay on my side of the centre red line).These half-cooked meandering thoughts of my youth, television, cartoons, and hockey were going round in my brain as I looked back at all the dandelion stalks popping back up in place in the cut grass of my entire yard after a four-hour elimination mission with the master tractor “Big John,” and the push mower, and the cordless weed eater.I wondered if a short-tempered attitude approach, like that of Yosemite Sam, would make a difference. But for every clump of dandelions I hammered back into the ground by jumping up and down, another 300 of them popped up three feet away.Maybe the neighborhood kids could pick them all.But I couldn’t think of anybody under the age of 15 who lives around here—and if there were any, they probably were watching TV or playing video games.Maybe I could pull the “good ol’ hockey game” out of my bag of hat tricks and slapshot dandelion heads into outer space with my baseball bat. Maybe I could just wish them away like I did the wart on my big toe when I was 10 (my dad had told me to do that back then and it worked).I convinced myself that the lawn still looked well-manicured despite the stalk of the dandelion, and then went inside to put on a pot of java for the lone ranger who’d often stop by for coffee at 3 p.m.We were sitting at the kitchen table talking about this and that when he looked out the front window at the green grass and said, “With all the dandelions out there, it looks like you need to cut the grass again.”
The truth is what it is.
In the news these days, there’s a lot of talk about kids spending too much time in front of television and computer screens, and not enough on physical activity.The truth is what it is.
In my youth, physical activity was as regular as rain. If my brother and I weren’t digging huge forts out of the mountains of snow piled along our driveway in the winter, we were bag-lunching it across the field or the creek every day of the summer with our cousins.If boredom set in, netting cabbage butterflies from the garden earned us five cents apiece, or we could pick dandelions—the arch-enemy of my dad’s well-manicured lawn.The insect pursuit would land us 10 or 15 cents before the winged creatures figured us out, or we lost interest.As a kid, the stalk of the dandelion lasted only as long as it took to pick a handful of the yellow dander and run it in to my mother who, like all mothers, would accept the bouquet of weeds with a smile.I was just shy of being a teenager when the audio visual entertainment industry became a household commodity called a TV in my parents’ home and computers existed nowhere that I knew about except on the starship “Enterprise.”My parents’ decision to wait to buy a television was kin to an old western gunfight at the O.K. Corral. They were one of the last hold-outs.In hindsight, given the statistics that some kids today are watching TV or playing video games up to 12 hours a week (and getting fatter by the minute), parents like mine had made the best decision of all.Until the early 1970s, if anybody in my family wanted to watch television, we had to go next door to my grandparents’ farm house, where we’d get to sit in on watching whatever the older folks had in mind. “The Wonderful World of Disney,” “Lawrence Welk,” “Gunsmoke,” and “Bonanza” ruled the coop.If I could be a kid again, I wouldn’t change a thing.I have a storybook of fantastic childhood memories built on country living, outdoor play with my cousins, and farm yard fun. Yet, I loved the novelty of television, too, just about as much as I did playing with kittens and baby chicks.And I’m still a big fan of all three.Once TV came to my house, the way things were didn’t change a whole lot. The only show I really was interested in was a spooky black-and-white series called “Creature Features,” and it started at midnight on Friday nights.Of course, the middle of the night was way past my bedtime and I only remember seeing the show once—after tiptoeing downstairs as everyone slept.I remember my dad had two weekly television series favourites—“The Bugs Bunny/Road Runner Hour” and “Hockey Night in Canada.”Back then, I wouldn’t have thought twice about knocking my little brother over and into a sewing basket on the way to the couch when my dad sat down to watch the Loony Tunes.They still rock.On the other hand, I dreaded Saturday night and sitting through the “the good ol’ hockey game.”If I could have managed to slapshot that hour of television into outer space where Captain Kirk voyaged, I’d have done so.And with all due respect to hockey fans, I’m still not among you—though I am very familiar with the terms “offensive zone,” “poke checks,” and “clearing” as they frequently apply to the disaster on Pete’s side of the bed.I also know the meaning of goalkeeper (though I must admit I rarely stay on my side of the centre red line).These half-cooked meandering thoughts of my youth, television, cartoons, and hockey were going round in my brain as I looked back at all the dandelion stalks popping back up in place in the cut grass of my entire yard after a four-hour elimination mission with the master tractor “Big John,” and the push mower, and the cordless weed eater.I wondered if a short-tempered attitude approach, like that of Yosemite Sam, would make a difference. But for every clump of dandelions I hammered back into the ground by jumping up and down, another 300 of them popped up three feet away.Maybe the neighborhood kids could pick them all.But I couldn’t think of anybody under the age of 15 who lives around here—and if there were any, they probably were watching TV or playing video games.Maybe I could pull the “good ol’ hockey game” out of my bag of hat tricks and slapshot dandelion heads into outer space with my baseball bat. Maybe I could just wish them away like I did the wart on my big toe when I was 10 (my dad had told me to do that back then and it worked).I convinced myself that the lawn still looked well-manicured despite the stalk of the dandelion, and then went inside to put on a pot of java for the lone ranger who’d often stop by for coffee at 3 p.m.We were sitting at the kitchen table talking about this and that when he looked out the front window at the green grass and said, “With all the dandelions out there, it looks like you need to cut the grass again.”
The truth is what it is.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)