Mind Picking : Happy Halloween

I hope the following picture is legible: That was taken one year ago today – another rainy Halloween – but while today is just an ordinary wet and miserable day, last year we were feeling the tail end of Superstorm Sandy. (And if the messy scrawl of that hand-painted sign is hard to read, some classy homeowner declared, "Screw U Sandy We Have Candy!!!" Mmmm hmmm. Classy. For the children.)

In honour of Halloween, I thought I'd jot down some true ghost stories. I'll say "true" even though none of these happened to me, so I can't swear to them, but I do trust the sources. I'll list them in chronological order.

At the turn of the twentieth century, long before electricity or paved roads or automobiles came to rural Prince Edward Island, my great-grandfather (known as Country Father in my family) was driving his horse-drawn cart home, well past dark. As he approached a long laneway that intersected his path, his horse stopped abruptly, began nickering with fright, and no matter how he prompted (giddyup? a touch of the whip?), the horse would not budge. Thinking there must be a something on the road scaring his horse, Country Father climbed down and approached the front of the animal and saw…nothing. Not a critter, not a weird shape, nothing he could see that would frighten the horse. He grabbed the bridle and tried to lead the horse forward, but with wide eyes rolling with fear, the animal refused, trying to back away instead. After quite some time and effort, Country Father gave up, turned the cart around and took a longer route home. The next day, he heard that at about the time he had been having his misadventure, someone had died in the home at the end of the long laneway that his horse had refused to cross. To the end of his days, Country Father believed that his horse was stopped as the great Carriage of Heaven made its slow procession away from the home, bearing a worthy soul to its final reward.

This is a story about my inlaws.

Bev's father died suddenly when she was in her early twenties and one of the hardest things for my mother-in-law to accept was that her father wouldn't be around to walk her down the aisle when the time came for her to get married. When that time did come several years later, the ceremony took place in Saint Peter's Cathedral; a huge and ornate Catholic church that only underscored how few guests were in attendance. Despite the meager crowd, afterwards many of the guests told Bev that during the vows, her father had been seen watching the event from the choir loft. But wait, there's more...After the wedding reception – and this was back in the days when a bride would have had a going away outfit and the happy couple would be seen off while the day was relatively young – Bev wanted to stop on their way to a Niagara Falls honeymoon to place her bouquet on her father's grave. The day had been wild and rainy and the heavens poured as they approached the country graveyard. Tying a scarf around her head, Bev opened the car door...and the rain abruptly stopped. She and Jim, my father-in-law, took their time placing the flowers and paying their respects, and as soon as they were safely back inside the car, the storm started up anew. They don't speak of the rain as a ghostly event per se, but you can make of it as you wish.

And speaking of my inlaws: My sister-in-law, Rudy, told me that the first night that she and her partner, Dan, spent in the new home they bought together, they were laying in bed, discussing plans for the house, when they suddenly heard the back patio door open and close, the tick-tick-tick of feet walking through the hallway below them, and then the distinctive sound of the front door opening and closing. Dan jumped out of bed and went down to investigate – but both doors were locked and dead-bolted, from the inside, and nothing seemed amiss. Rudy then joined Dan on the lower floor and noted that none of the boxes had fallen over; nothing was out of place that could explain the strange sounds that they had both heard. At some later point, Rudy learned that the previous owners had had a dog die at that house; that they had buried its body in the back yard. And Rudy knows that that first night that she and Dan spent in their new home, the spirit of that dead doggy passed through the house, from the back yard to the front, to go join its family in their new home. 

The following was told to me by an ex-boyfriend and the events happened to his sister. I don't remember her name, so I'll call her Mary.

Being young and having moved pretty far from her family, Mary felt trapped in her relationship with an abusive live-in boyfriend. He constantly yelled and put her down, and she started feeling really awful about herself – a situation that changed for the better after they moved into a basement apartment in an old and lovely home. Several times in the new digs, when they would have a fight and the boyfriend stormed off, Mary would be standing in her kitchen, sobbing, and feel a warm embrace enveloping her. She would turn around, hoping to see the boyfriend…but there was no one there. The hug was so soothing and so maternal that Mary would be comforted instead of scared; she felt that, finally, someone had her back. This went on for some months until the night that the boyfriend slapped Mary during an argument; the first time he had hit her; the only time he would ever hit her. They went to bed, and in the morning, the boyfriend said that he'd be moving out. When Mary asked why, he said: In the middle of the night, he woke up suddenly as though he had been shaken. He realised he was paralysed, he couldn't move no matter how he struggled, and he couldn't even turn his head or close his eyes – and this last was the most disturbing because above him, hovering near the ceiling, was an evil witchy hag, all swirling black smoke and glowing red eyes. Holding his stare, the figure began to lower itself onto him, slowly squeezing the air out of his lungs as it made its descent, and when they were eye to eye and nose to nose, the thing told him he was to leave Mary and never have anything to do with her again. He somehow, suddenly, fell into a deep sleep after that, and when he woke up, he told the story and left – for good. Mary realised she was happy to see him go and believed that the witchy presence was the same maternal figure who had given her comfort – and she remained in that house until my ex-boyfriend moved to the same city – the city I lived in – and took an apartment with her.

My last story happened to my immediate family, although I didn't live in that house with them.

When they were transferred back to Ontario – from a depressed housing market into a crazily expensive one – my parents were happy to find a house they could afford on a beautiful tree-lined street in a prominent neighbourhood. The house was owned by a doctor whose wife had passed away the previous winter and he was willing to accept my parents' lowball offer to get the sale over with quickly – the doctor was still grief-stricken and felt some guilt at selling his late wife's beloved home, and even more so, her cherished garden. After they moved in, strange happenings began nearly immediately: The dog would wake from a deep sleep to start barking at empty corners; doors would bang in empty rooms; a picture jumped off the wall while they were sitting watching TV one night; visitors would often say things like, "Who's upstairs? I saw someone standing up in the window" (when, naturally, my mother was home alone and hanging out on the main floor); they could smell cigarette smoke when entering an unoccupied room (the wife had died of smoking-related cancer); very oddly, a greasy roasting pan that had been soaking was dumped onto my brother's bed while no one was home; and the best story of all: The first February after they moved in, my mother looked out the window, and, despite the snow and frost and chilling wind, the rose gardens were in fresh and glorious bloom. (They don't know exactly when the doctor's wife died, only that it was the previous winter, so for the sake of the story, we all presume this blooming happened on the first anniversary of her death.) They only lived in that home for a couple of years before my Dad's job moved them to a different city, and although they say they weren't particularly scared by these events, I have to believe that my mother, father and little brother – who will each matter-of-factly state these events to be true – didn't make them up.

The strangest part of the last story, to me, is the fact that many years later, my younger brother and his family moved into a beautiful home right across the street from the so-called haunted one. It is a lovely tree-lined street in a prominent neighbourhood…and Kyler has never gone over to ask his neighbours if the ghost yet smokes her cigarettes and slams the doors and makes the roses bloom in winter's dead.

Happy Halloween!

Minister Without Portfolio

Let's not be Americans, Tender said. Let's be outlaws. Except for Henry -- he's our minister without portfolio.

What the hell is that.

You're not committed to anything but you got a hand in everywhere.

Henry accepted this.

From the first page of Minister Without Portfolio, I had to wonder if Michael Winter is in a writer's group with fellow Newfies Lisa Moore and Jessica Grant (and I have no reason yet to believe he isn't) since they seem to share some literary quirks -- lack of quotation marks, question marks, and in Winter's case, apostrophes in words like arent and couldnt. For example: How would he do this. Who was she to him. What did he need and what did she need. Do we need people. Parents, offspring, census reports. Marry her. That's a lovely stream of consciousness, and since I don't punctuate my own thoughts, and since Moore and Grant each wrote one of the favourite books I've read so far this year, the comparison is a favourable one. 

As the book begins, Henry Hayward, the young-and-selfish/hard-working-hard-partying protagonist, loses his girlfriend and his home in one conversation:

She told him there wasn't another person. Henry watched her stand up from her kitchen table and push things around on a counter. She peeled up the foam placemats that made that satisfying sound. She was busying herself and of course he was in her house, he was the one who would have to physically leave. For three hours they talked it over and she told him how it was and he fled through the spectrum of emotions and they were both cleansed but she returned to what was not an ultimatum. I'm leaving you now can you please leave.

But I love you, he said.

Ah, peeling up foam placemats from a laminate countertop does make the most satisfying of sounds; I knew that Winter was talking my language. And then these images, beautiful and thought-provoking:

The alert daylight made him stagger to the house of his best friend, feeling small and without a shell. He felt himself evaporating and it scared him. He let the sun warm his shoulders and kidneys and fill him up, the sun pushed him to John and Silvia's.

He spoke of Henry as if he were an old shed built with found wood. Which he was. Which we all are.

Henry is convinced to snap out of his funk by going to Kandahar on a civilian contract, where he and his best friend John will be able to spend time with another old friend, Tender Morris, who is an army reservist who volunteered to join the Afghanistan campaign. I really enjoyed the description of the Canadian presence in Afghanistan -- the shoestring budgets and serious soldiers being supported by the profiteers from back home (from the little "fixers" to SNC-Lavalin) and creating photo-ops for the Defense Minister -- this section felt true and honest. And I was intrigued by this pontification by the drunken Tender Morris:

Let's turn our voices into marches, Tender said. Let us pass by the injured and those that throw stones (he motioned to the Americans) and alter a law through a circuitous route. Come on guys.

Henry and John had no idea what Tender was talking about. Obviously, he had time to read, like a fisheries observer…

Hurt those you mean to help, Tender said. We'll take your ride and be a member of the steering committee for the marketplace of ideas that fights against the very same structure put in place by your bilderberg group!

That's not my usual image of the screech-fuelled Newfie and the scene serves to underscore the tragedy that soon follows: Just as I got to know and admire Tender Morris, he is killed by a suicide bomber; an event for which Henry feels responsible.

When Henry returns to Newfoundland (after a disastrous return to work in Fort McMurray), he decides to repair a falling down house in a community of a couple hundred people -- roughly the responsibility figuratively assigned to him as a "minister without portfolio" -- and the home renovation serves as a metaphor for the reconstruction and rehabilitation of Henry's own life: No longer adrift and selfish, Henry is determined to create a home and salvage a legacy. At this point, where Henry has pushed through his pain, the book started to lose me a bit; it turned into a string of vignettes instead of the introspective study I thought it had started as. The passage about Henry falling into an incinerator was interesting, but I had actually read that story in the newspaper when it happened to the author in real life -- I'm sure that all authors use events from their own lives in their fiction, but recognising this story made me wonder about each scene that followed: Did Winter have a brush fire burn out of control? Has he tried to row a dory across a cove in the fog? These musings took me out of the narrative. And the pronouncements from this point felt less profound:

Being driven to a place is much different than driving there yourself. The world involved in its own copulation.

We are living in a time where it is easier to know more about a stranger's family by researching online than it is to know one's own. History is the constant upheaval of peregrination.

And even though this image would probably have delighted me if it was in Come, Thou Tortoise, it seemed out of place in this book, as though the character had been indulging in the psychotropic ayahuasca that her ex-husband had smuggled into Canada:

His mother kept grudges , but limited them, so she got over much grief by drying out the grievances on a clothesline then stacking them in a little drawer behind her ear.

In the end, I think the disconnect is entirely my own : I was expecting another Come, Thou Tortoise or February and Minister Without Portfolio was something entirely different. This might be the difference between fiction written by men and women; a difference that doesn't reflect on quality. My brother recently showed me this video, telling me it's hilarious:

It's Not About the Nail

After I watched it, I said, "You can tell that was written and produced by a man. I know that men and women approach problems differently, but nothing makes me crazier than when I tell Dave a story, and instead of just listening to me, he tells me what I've got to do." That is rarely what I'm looking for: I can solve problems, honestly. In the three books I'm thinking about here, each of which deals with loss and grief, the two written by women explore the emotions and inner reactions of female protagonists -- and those books had a profound effect on me. In Minister Without Portfolio, we are shown Henry's reaction through the responsibilities he's willing to take on, the roots he puts down, and the literal rebuilding of a house -- and I couldn't connect to this on a deep level, though I do appreciate the artistry of the work.

Books about Newfoundland are a genre unto themselves and I have great affection for the place and its people. Michael Winter obviously shares this affection and writes strikingly when it's of his home:

Like a lot of Newfoundlanders, though, he pictured an acre of land in his head that was his land. The picture has no location, it's a floating acre with a perforated edge like a postage stamp that hovers slightly above the land, though there is, of course, a view of the Atlantic.

And even the characters are overwhelmed by the beauty of their surroundings:

Just because an experience is an old one -- being affected by nature -- doesn't mean it shouldn't affect the heart…Let yourself be humbled by the experiences people have been having for thousands of years. And speak of it.

In Minister Without Portfolio Michael Winter fulfills this duty of speaking, crafting an entertaining and intriguing story -- not only set in the starkly beautiful province of Newfoundland, but so Canadian that beavers make intermittent appearances. It only misses the mark where it doesn't conform to my expectations, but that is hardly a complaint.

My friend, Delight, married a Newfoundlander and I don't know if she would like this book or not. They met in Edmonton, while he was working the oil fields in Fort McMurray (not the mining operation Henry is involved in, but it does have similarities in that it shows the why and how of Newfies heading out to Alberta) and he now works in an oil field in Yemen, spending weeks away at a time (again like Fort Mac, but also like when the boys headed out to Kandahar). She has a university degree in Environmental Science, but because she lived in a small and remote outpost (smaller and remoter than the tiny Renews described in this book), not only could she not work in her field, but she was forced to not live in a very environmentally friendly manner -- there was no recycling, it was a 7 hour drive to the nearest big town to see an Optometrist, trips by plane were an absolute necessity to escape the cabin fever in winter, etc. Growing weary of being left in this village for weeks at a time (for ten years, no less), she convinced her husband to move to a larger community in Nova Scotia about a year ago.

As much as she would relate to details in Minister Without Portfolio, I fear Delight would cringe at the image of the big incinerator at the dump, the garbage spread out on a field for fill, the waste and the diregard displayed by everyone -- this is exactly what she fought to escape. Interesting (to me, anyway) is the dispute Henry finds himself involved in over the title and land connected with the house he renovates: Nearly the exact same thing happened to Delight when she fixed up an old home to operate as a cafe and B &B. I do believe she's still bitter that after several years of operation, when she was ready to sell and move away, nearly all her profits were gobbled up by paying off the old man who had never had use for the property until he saw it might get him a few bucks.

I don't think I'll send her this book for Christmas...

Dear Life : Stories

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle--
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

What a conundrum -- how to rate Dear Life? I am a long time fan of Alice Munro -- though I'll admit I didn't pick up this latest (to be her last?) book until she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature -- and while I don't think this is her strongest collection, she's still a better writer than just about everybody else out there. So, do I rate her against herself or against the everybody else? 

There's a special alchemy to the way Munro crafts a short story -- filling it with detailed reminiscences, with the occasional "I think it was that way" or "I may be remembering this wrong but…", every word having the ring of truth, and just when the reader thinks "Aha, I know exactly who this character is", some detail is revealed that changes everything. That this can be the case so often without it ever feeling tricky is a testament to Munro's craft, her ability to capture truth: Don't we all present a public face -- even to the people who know us best -- one that would be (dangerously?) illuminated if we were to reveal those private, seminal moments that shaped and haunt us?

I won't review these stories individually, but just pick a few on which to comment. Train is one story that perfectly illustrates what I mean by Munro's slow revelation of character. As I was reading it -- the story of a soldier returning from WWII who decides to jump off the train that's carrying him home, ready to start a new life wherever he lands -- my thought process was: "Okay…all right…huh…oh…oh, okay…ohhhhhhh". That's the process with so many of her stories: Not O Henry gotcha endings, but an incremental revelation. Such magic.

Another great gift of Munro is her scene setting, as the beginning to Leaving Maverley illustrates:

In the old days when there was a movie theatre in every town there was one in this town, too, in Maverley, and it was called the Capital, as such theatres often were. Morgan Holly was the owner and the projectionist. He didn't like dealing with the public -- he preferred to sit in his upstairs cubbyhole managing the story on the screen -- so naturally he was annoyed when the girl who took the tickets told him that she was going to have to quit, because she was having a baby. He might have expected this -- she had been married for half a year, and in those days you were supposed to get out of the public eye before you began to show -- but he so disliked change and the idea of people having private lives that he was taken by surprise.

If I took a notion to writing short stories, I wouldn't know how to do this -- the girl who takes the tickets doesn't come up in the story again and even the owner/projectionist is soon out of the picture. And yet, by starting with the two of them, we have an idea of time and place that might not have been obvious or subtle enough if the story started with the main characters -- such a witchy kind of alchemy, totally beyond my understanding. Leaving Maverley also contained one of my favourite descriptions -- that of a woman lingering on her deathbed -- that I'll include: She had changed from a very thin woman not to a child but to an ungainly and ill-assorted collection of bones, with a birdlike crest, ready to die every minute with the erratic shaping of her breath.

To Reach Japan had the feel of a Margaret Laurence story (another of my most cherished Canadian authors). Greta could have been Stacey MacAindra (from The Fire-Dwellers), losing control after one too many Pimm's No.1 with pink grapefruit juice, regretting wearing the smart dress that's just a bit too tight in the hips, wondering if she should be offended when a strange man decides against kissing her. The following could also have been said by Stacey (or Morag or Rachel):

It would become hard to explain, later on in her life, just what was okay in that time and what was not. You might say, well, feminism was not. But then you would have to explain that feminism was not even a word people used. Then you would get all tied up saying that having any serious idea, let alone ambition, or maybe even reading a real book, could be seen as suspect, having something to do with your child's pneumonia, and a political remark at an office party might have cost your husband his promotion. It would not have mattered which political party either. It was a woman's shooting off her mouth that did it.
People would laugh and say, Oh surely you are joking, and you would have to say, Well, but not that much.

I have the benefit of living in a sort of post-feminist world -- one where the notions of women's lib marches and bra burning seem vaguely embarrassing and unnecessary -- but I'm only just barely too young for these movements, and applaud stories that remind us of what our Western world was like in such recent memory. Related to this, in Haven, Uncle Jasper returns home one evening and finds the new neighbours and a chamber group, including his estranged sister, enjoying an impromptu concert in his home. He proceeds to the kitchen and after some banging and scraping noises, returns with a plate of pork and beans which he eats, standing, his winter coat still on, with contempt and vulgar manners until the group awkwardly leaves. As if in apology the next morning, Aunt Dawn says to the young protagonist, "A man's home is his castle." I can so see my own father having done that, and my mother trying to explain after the fact, so maybe that reveals why both Laurence and Munro seem to speak to me.

The final four stories in Dear Life are described by Munro as "autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact". They do feel different from the rest of the collection: Perhaps because each story proceeds linearly instead of containing those late story reminiscences that serve to throw typical Munro characters into new light. There are seminal childhood moments revealed in these stories, but they don't demonstrate how they affect the protagonist in later life -- unless, of course, you take them to be straightforward autobiographical experiences and Alice Munro's entire canon is proof of how they affected her. She seems to have a particular fixation on: sidewalks (and what it says about your status if your home has them out front); sausage curls; Sunday School recitations; and her mother's driving, its "nervous solemnity". One of my favourite quotes about her mother:

With her everything was clear and ringing and served to call attention. Now that was happening and I heard her laugh, delightedly, as if to make up for nobody's talking to her.

With that, I can imagine how the young girl cringed to have her mother behaving so awkwardly, never quite right in public, but I also felt such compassion for the mother who couldn't find her place. Dear Life is full of these moments of truth, of situations I could relate to even if they aren't my own experiences.

So how to rate this book? Alice Munro, now in her eighties and recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, has many collections of short stories that I would give five stars to, and so I will need to hold her to the very highest of standards. The four stars I'm giving to Dear Life only reflects how this stands up against her previous works, a formidable bar by which to judge anyone.

Writing this letter is like putting a note in a bottle--
And hoping
It will reach Japan.

I like that small poem from To Reach Japan, for itself, but also because it reminded me of A Tale for the Time Being: In that novel, a young girl in Japan puts her note in a bottle -- or, rather, diary in a Hello Kitty lunchbox -- and flings it into the sea (presumably), hoping to connect to a time being; whoever might find and read her message; to make a connection with the future. In Dear Life, Alice Munro has created a work to which I connected -- across time and space -- and which leaves a legacy to be discovered by the future. I think her notes will make it to Japan.

Look Me in the Eye

Asperger's is not a disease. It's a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.

I've read quite a bit of Augusten Burroughs -- for the most part when his various books first came out -- so although I have a pretty good mental picture of the neglect and chaos that surrounded his childhood, I really couldn't remember that he even had an older brother. I suppose that's understandable since Burroughs and John Elder Robison, author of Look Me in the Eye, were born eight years apart and they have both written that it was as though they were raised in totally different families: When Robison was little, his parents weren't yet at war, his mother not yet descended into madness and his father not an alcoholic. Even still, Robison's early years were not happy: He has Asperger's, undiagnosed until he was forty, and what was natural behaviour for him was labelled stupid, lazy and obstinate by his parents and teachers -- and just weird by his fellow kids.

The title refers to the fact that Robison has a problem holding others' gaze while being spoken to -- "I don't really understand why it's considered normal to stare at someone's eyeballs" -- and in many other ways as he grew up, he was unable to crack the code of interacting with other people. What I found fascinating, and quite sad, was how badly he wanted that interaction -- I have very little intimate experience with Asperger's and the Autism Spectrum, but from what I think I know, aren't Aspergians supposed to prefer to be alone, to shun the company of others? For the first-hand insight that this book gives into Asperger's, this is a valuable resource. (And I should remember that Autism is a spectrum, which means, perhaps, not all Aspergians share Robison's views or desires.)

What Robison did enjoy as a youth was a near savant-like ability to understand electronics. While he learned most of what he knew from books and interacting with clubs and labs at the University where his father taught, he developed an extra sense that allowed him to visualise the phenomena for which he didn't understand the mechanics. He turned this into a gift for repairing and modifying amplifiers, eventually doing work for Pink Floyd, and when he met Ace Frehley of Kiss, he was soon hired to modify his guitars with light and smoke effects. When he grew tired of the Rock and Roll lifestyle, Robison became one of the first electronic engineers for Milton-Bradley, and when he grew tired of the corporate life, he taught himself to repair foreign cars and opened a car lot/garage (which he still owns today, apparently a great success -- not bad for a high school dropout).

In Look Me in the Eye, Robison recounts pretty much his entire life from first memories to his two marriages and the birth of his son. The biographical information alone was interesting enough -- not everyone will tour with Kiss -- but it was the inside information on Asperger's that I found the most fascinating. Robison explains that he believes in a plasticity of the brain, citing certain times in his life that were critical for its development, and as horrifying as his childhood became, he always got just enough stimulation to prevent him from withdrawing totally into himself. I was most especially intrigued when he said that as a teenager, obsessed with electronics and studying how it all worked, it was as though he were standing in front of two doors: one that would lead him out into the world to use his knowledge and the other that would lead him to becoming a recluse. It was only thanks to his family, to the madness that drove Robison away from home, that he was forced to choose the first door; to find a way to interact with society at large. With another perspective on how their dysfunctional family life was a boon for his brother, Burroughs wrote in Running With Scissors:

Sometimes I wonder if his life would have been easier if my parents had taken him to a doctor instead of just assuming he was cold and emotionally blocked. But then I remind myself that my parents had very questionable taste when it came to choosing medical professionals. With this in mind, I like to think that my brother wasn't so much overlooked as he was inadvertently protected.

Imagine that -- just when Robison needed it, his crazy home life saved him from something worse. Getting back to the idea of plasticity, Robison says that in a critical period in adulthood, when he decided to leave the world of electronics and concentrate on relationships (particularly with his first wife and child), the changes this made in his brain has left him now unable to understand the technical writings he himself had done twenty-five years earlier. Imagine that.

For the most part, I did enjoy Look Me in the Eye. I was a little disturbed by Robison's recounting of the pranks that he pulled off over the years -- and it's one thing to upset the police and fire departments by hanging a mannequin from a power tower in the woods over a burning pentagram in the middle of the night as a teenager, but it's pretty cruel to tell your young son that Santa is an alcoholic fugitive who operates a freight crane in the off season, skimming toys for a profit to support his various bad habits. Also, I understand that this book was written by a person with Asperger's and the language he chooses is a useful insight into the workings of his brain, but some things grew tiresome -- his son was hatched…at the hatchery…among the other hatchlings…or the people close to him are described as having paws and claws and fur -- I think a sensitive editor could have helped with this.

The Epilogue was surprisingly touching, though. Robison writes with emotion about the final illness and loss of his father and how they were able to reconcile before his death. That loss prompted him to write Look Me in the Eye, and after sharing the transcript with his mother, they were able to improve their relationship as well. 

My overall impression is that this was interesting and informative, but maybe not a perfect book. I see that Robison has two other books (one that appears to be a how-to manual for Aspergians and one that goes further into his relationship with his hatchling) but I can't see me reading those; Look Me in the Eye covers those topics without enticing me to want to learn more. I am loathe to begin and end with Augusten Burroughs when reviewing a book by his brother, but one of the things I enjoyed the most was the light this book threw on what Burroughs has written about before. For example, Robison writes:

My father had been drinking for quite a while, but now he picked up the pace. The empty bottles began accumulating under the kitchen table. They lined the wall, and when we went to the dump, they filled the back of the car. They were not little bottles either; they were gallon jugs.

And in Dry, Burroughs wrote: 

My apartment is my secret. It's filled with empty liquor bottles. Not five or six. More like three hundred. Three hundred one-liter bottles of scotch…And when I used to drink beer instead of scotch, the beer bottles would collect. I counted the beer bottles once: one thousand, four hundred and fifty-two.

So that habit didn't come out of thin air… 

Asperger's is not a disease. It's a way of being. There is no cure, nor is there a need for one.

Yes, I'm repeating that quote from the beginning because it reminded me of something and because I wonder what Robison would have to say to the Jenny McCarthy notion of curing Autism with vitamins and diet and whatever other holistic mumbo jumbo she thinks she has discovered.

My related story:

When Mallory was born, the chiropractor friend of my sister-in-law gave me some pamphlets, asking me to consider not vaccinating my baby. These pamphlets were American and mostly talked about how vaccines are not only unsafe (risk of Autism, etc.) but they're also a scam -- doctors promote them because they're in the pocket of Big Pharma. But this is Canada -- vaccines are covered under our health care and I don't see how the administrating doctors could be lining their pockets with kickbacks. And because I love my children, and think chiropractic medicine is mostly quackery, I thanked the friend and got my baby vaccinated.

Fast forward to this past month, and the chiropractor, now the mother of a lovely four year old daughter of her own, Emily, was getting ready to go to Fiji for a wedding (no one ever said chiropractors don't make good money...) and Emily came down with a terrible cough. Likely Whooping Cough. When I heard that, I figured Emily had never been immunised and that's not the worst thing I suppose -- with herd immunity most of these diseases are nearly wiped out and she's old enough now to fight things off. But here is the worst thing: Before they could get a clear diagnosis as to whether it really was Whooping Cough or not, they went to Fiji, bringing along a coughing kid -- not only on a 20-something hour plane ride with captive and unsuspecting fellow passengers but to a country where I'm assuming the general populace isn't immunised against Whooping Cough. The arrogance of that just blew me away -- I can't prevent you from putting your own child at risk, but leave the rest of ours alone!

Here's the other thing this book made me think about:

         All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.

                                                                                                                                  ― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Something about that quote makes me think of family unhappiness as a competition; like as though, since the Robison family was so incredibly dysfunctional, I should just suck up my own unhappy memories and be thankful that although we may have been terrified, we weren't exactly terrorized. How strange that whenever I hear about someone with an unhappier childhood I feel worse instead of better because they have "won" the competition. John Elder Robison describes being routinely whipped in his bed at night by his drunken, violent father and fantasising about rolling over and jamming a knife into him "right to the hilt. Right in the belly." And what stopped him? He was afraid he'd fail -- he might miss or it might not kill his father right away. Our father wasn't a drunk or violent without "cause", and I don't think even my brothers have ever dreamed of killing him, but we still lived every day in fear, walking on eggshells, afraid that something would set him off and something would get thrown or an arm would get grabbed and lead to a shaking or we'd have to hear him roaring. Knowing other people have it worse doesn't make me feel any better.

And then the Epilogue made me feel even sorrier for myself (I know, I need to get over myself). Robison visited his father in the hospital and asked, "Did we ever have any fun when I was a kid?" and his father reminded him of the times they went to the Philadelphia museum to look at the trains. The memories came rushing back and Robison was able to forgive his father for the bad years. Here's the thing: I can rack my brain for as long as I like, but I know we never had fun with my father. So few outings (and what there were were fraught with the anxiety of "Is he okay with this?"), no vacations other than over to visit our grandparents while we still lived on the East Coast (and those were never meant to be fun visits...), no movies (I do remember going to the drive-in twice as a family, but that was a fairly neutral experience -- does that count as fun?), no regular trips to restaurants (there was a disastrous Mother's Day at Swiss Chalet, and I do remember getting yelled at the only time we ever went to Wendy's because I took too much time looking at the menu -- Chili? Frosters? What would these be like?) ... we kids spent all our time just tiptoeing around, trying not to get yelled at. And I don't know if I have it in me to go to my father's bedside when the time comes and clutch his hand and tell him I love him and hope to hear those words back -- I don't think I have forgiveness in me because I don't think he believes there's anything to forgive. I guess we'll see.

Here's the good news: Also in the Epilogue, Robison offered to bring his father's beloved farm tractor around so he could see it one last time. As it was buried under snow, Robison and his son had an adventure digging it out and transporting it, full of companionship and laughs -- and that's where our families are now. I can totally imagine both of my brothers having an adventure like this with their kids, as I can imagine me having with my own girls, so if abuse (or even just neglect and disinterest) is passed down through the generations, it has stopped with us. 

I'll end on a more neutral note. Here's another interesting part of Look Me in the Eye that didn't have a place in the book review proper:

Robison is currently married to a woman who has two sisters and he says that as a logical-minded Aspergian, he has to wonder if he picked the right sister to be his mate and compares them as though they are three models of the same make. He then says that anyone who says he (or she) doesn't do this kind of comparing is lying. Huh. I have no sisters, so I don't need to wonder if my husband is evaluating me in this way, and Dave doesn't have any brothers -- in fact, I never had a boyfriend with a  brother I've met -- so I've never done this kind of comparison myself.

So I broadened the scope and thought about my brothers: Would their wives be wondering if they chose the right brother? I'm certain that if it ever crossed either of their minds, they would have to answer yes -- as long suffering as they are, I can't imagine either Christine or Laura would swap husbands. Then I thought about my brothers themselves: They each married a woman with a sister, and there's no way either would prefer his wife's sister. As a matter of fact, as I thought about everyone I know, I can't think of a single instance in which a married person might be better suited to their spouse's sibling -- how strange! Now, when my own girls get married, I just know I'm going to be looking at their husbands and wondering what they're wondering about...

A Good Man

News of the disaster at Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer's golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States. Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church.

This is the atmosphere in which A Good Man begins: Sitting Bull and his band of Sioux have humiliated the American military and disappeared. At Fort Walsh on the Canadian side of the western border, Wesley Case is waiting for his term with the Northwest Mounted Police to be up (a fact made possible by his estranged and wealthy lumber baron father having bought out his contract with the Mounties) when his commander and old friend, Major Walsh, enlists Case to become his envoy to his American counterpart, Major Ilges of Fort Benton, a hundred and fifty miles to the south in Montana. As Case had decided to become a rancher in the vicinity of Fort Benton, and since he can recognise the importance of smoothing the correspondence between Walsh and the American that he despises, he accepts the challenge. In this way, A Good Man ( and The Englishman's Boy and The Last Crossing before it) does for Canada and the U.S. what Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy did for Mexico and the U.S. -- setting a work of epic sweep on the fluid border between two different countries, two different cultures, at a time when that border doesn't seem written in stone and the Americans can't be trusted to not attempt to move the border as it suits them.

When Sitting Bull finally appears on the Canadian side of the "Medicine Line" seeking sanctuary, Major Walsh is sympathetic and shows great respect for the Sioux leader who proves himself to be more holy man than warrior. Walsh finds himself under pressure from the Americans to treat Sitting Bull as a dangerous terrorist who is probably hiding out just long enough to rally other tribes to his cause and plan a renewed attack against the States. Despite wanting to help the Sioux, Walsh is under orders from Ottawa to give them nothing, to let them starve (and hopefully go away before the Canadian government is forced to come to a decision about what to do with them). I found the entire thread about Sitting Bull and the other Natives to be compelling and, ultimately, sad -- if the American solution to hunt down the Indians and take their land and move the survivors to Reservations sounds brutal, the Canadian stance of ignoring the problem, refusing to put money into setting up Reservations, had much the same effect (and has led to where we are today, a hundred and fifty years after the treaty process began, and a staggering number of agreements yet to be reached).

Wesley Case, through diary entries and the eventual revelation of a written confession of sorts, describes his upbringing and young adulthood in what were then Canada's power centers, Ottawa and Toronto. This civilised and privileged life makes for a nice contrast to the wild frontier existence he encounters later. Especially fascinating is his recounting of the Battle of Ridgeway during the Fenian Raids -- the notion of a bunch of kids being led into battle by pompous brats whose Daddies bought their commissions in the Militia, going up against Civil War veterans who are fighting passionately for the cause of an Irish homeland, makes for tense and exciting reading (and also is an interesting contrast to the sympathetic view of the Fenians held by some of the characters in Jane Urquhart's Away). A misjudgement during the battle will haunt Case throughout the book and taint his budding romance with the very strong-minded, very married, Ada Tarr. 

Another instance of cross border shenanigans is described by the mysterious Michael Dunne; a character who thinks himself more clever than everyone around him but whose low station in life causes him to be used and discarded repeatedly by men of wealth and power. As a young man, Dunne was hired to help the "crimpers and substitute brokers" who came up from the States to Toronto -- those looking for volunteers (or at any rate those who could be tricked into volunteering) to take the place of rich Yankees in the Union army during the Civil War. From there, Dunne infiltrated the Fenians, working both sides for his own profit, and after he, too, falls in love with the alluring Mrs. Tarr, a sequence of events is initiated that would make a worthy plot for a Coen Brothers movie a la Fargo.

The writing in A Good Man is muscular and masculine, but not in a way that I found off-putting; it is intelligent and literary, but not given to fancy prose. There is also much humour, especially in the character of Joe McMullen -- I laughed out loud at his story of Fancy Charles and the lovely Lurleen. The fact that McMullen made for Fort Whoop-Up when he was injured -- a place I know well from my years of living in Lethbridge, Alberta -- placed the main events of this story firmly within the limits of my own experience, making it feel even more like the story of me and my people. I loved this book -- it made Canadian history come alive, and as anyone who has been half asleep during Canadian History in high school would tell you, that's no small feat.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

For about as long as I've known it's an option, I've had the organ donor box checked to "yes" on my driver's licence. I've also checked the box that states I would prefer to not donate my entire body to science: my mental picture of first year medical students giggling at or being repulsed by my ancient, withered, naked body (because I know that I'll be old when I die, right?) sits uncomfortably with my notions of dignity and decorum. As an examination of what might happen to our corpses after death, Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers does little to change my preconceptions.

There is a nice passage about the respectful memorial service that med students give to their assigned cadavers, but there is also much said about the jokey atmosphere that can be found in a Gross Anatomy lab (apparently encouraged by instructors in order to help the students develop the impassionate distancing that doctors need to have with patients) and the gallows humour that can be found in the many other labs and testing facilities where a donated body might end up (as crash test dummies in plane crash simulations or as subjects in decomposition studies). Now, I know that I won't be present in my body after death, and that even my family wouldn't know to what indignities my mortal coil might be subjected were I to change my mind about whole cadaver donation, but according to Mary Roach, even doctors can be reluctant to follow that path:

• The Plastic Surgeon Marilena, fresh from practising techniques on a decapitated head, said that she wouldn't be donating her body for medical use citing "a lack of respect".

• Sir Astley Cooper, the nineteenth century surgeon and anatomist who had a no-questions-asked policy of cadaver purchasing, was so concerned about having his own grave robbed for dissection that when he died he "not only went for the triple coffin option but had the whole absurd Chinese-box affair housed in a hulking stone sarcophagus".

The fate of one's own remains isn't really the thrust of Stiff (even if that's where it directed my own thoughts), but it does give an overview of some of the interesting uses to which a donated cadaver can be put (as well as the traditional burial/cremation options). Despite being given access to many different labs and medical schools and funeral homes and hospitals -- places I know I'll never see behind the scenes for myself -- I don't think that the journalist Roach really told me much I didn't know before, or if I didn't know the specific facts, I rarely thought, "Wow, that's fascinating!" The historical tidbits were kind of interesting (even if grave robbing is familiar from Frankenstein and bathing in the blood of virgins is old news), and this was my favourite new fact (taken from Wikipedia because this was an audiobook and I can't find the passage to quote):

Mellified man, or human mummy confection, was a legendary medicinal substance created by steeping a human cadaver in honey. Some elderly men in Arabia, nearing the end of their lives, would submit themselves to a process of mummification in honey to create a healing confection. This process differed from a simple body donation because of the aspect of self-sacrifice; the mellification process would ideally start before death. The donor would stop eating any food other than honey, going as far as to bathe in the substance. Shortly, his feces (and even his sweat, according to legend) would consist of honey. When this diet finally proved fatal, the donor's body would be placed in a stone coffin filled with honey. After a century or so, the contents would have turned into a sort of confection reputedly capable of healing broken limbs and other ailments. This confection would then be carefully sold in street markets as a hard to find item with a hefty price.

I don't know if human mummy confection is enough to say this was really a worthwhile read, though. Stiff is noted as "oddly compelling, often hilarious" (according to its own press) and if I didn't find it particularly compelling, I also didn't find the droll asides to be hilarious either. A typical joke: When referring to the ancient Egyptian practice of placing pearl onions into the empty eye sockets of the deceased, Roach states, "Speaking for myself, if I had to have a small round martini garnish inserted under my eyelids, I would go with olives." Why? What was the point of that joke? To break up the tension of talking about dead people? Because pimento-stuffed olives look more like eyeballs? That level of humour was just annoying to me.

Back to my own remains: I've always thought that being embalmed and buried in a brass-handled casket is unnatural and a waste of money and space. As the only other choice (barring whole body donation for medical use), I've always said I want to be cremated, do with the ashes as you will, unless a truly natural return-to-the-earth option becomes available. Roach describes a process for turning a human corpse into ready-to-use compost for planting memorial trees being developed in Sweden, and as I listened to its description, I wondered if it has become widely available yet since it has been ten years since Stiff was written and because it sounds pretty exciting. Again, thanks to Wikipedia:

For over 20 years, marine biologist Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak has been developing a new form of ecological burial. The process involves freeze-drying the remains, which are then reduced to a white powder. The remains are then placed in a biodegradeable casket, which is then interred in a shallow grave. A memorial tree or bush can be placed above the interment site. Within a year, the contents have decomposed and have been converted to loam, nourishing the newly planted memorial. The company claims that this is ecologically friendly.

The first Promatorium was due to be opened in the Spring of 2011 in Sweden, followed shortly by sites in the UK and South Korea. However, as of April 2012, the first Promatorium (or Promator as Promessa Organic calls it) is still said to be '6 to 12 months' away from construction.

The process has so far never been tested on human remains. Tests on dead pigs has been claimed to show that much more brute force would be needed than what has been told. Initial backers of Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak and Promessa Organic -- Swedish funeral home Fonus and gas provider AGA AB -- have left the project after Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak reportedly has failed to provide evidence of the process being operational. Church of Sweden has ended their cooperation and sold off their company shares in Promessa Organic. Susanne Wiigh-Mäsak is claiming that she is being worked against by the Swedish crematory organisation and the funeral directors of Sweden. Professor in cellular biology and medicine, Bengt R Johansson of Gothenburg University, goes as far as calling the process surrounding the promessa method a fraud.

In several cases, the dead remains of people wanting to go through the promessa process has been waiting for up to ten years, in some cases resulting in forced burials to comply with Swedish burial law. The method itself has come under criticism for not being real.

Too bad. Too bad also that the custom of leaving the bodies of loved ones out for the vultures to take care of (one of several interesting customs I know of that were not included in Stiff) practised by Parsees and Tibetan Buddhists is also frowned upon in Western societies. I see that Mary Roach followed this book up with Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, and although that would dovetail nicely with this book and with Heaven is for Real (the last book I listened to), I don't think that I enjoyed this or learned enough from it to give the author another read. Might be interesting for some, but wasn't really for me.