The Trouble with Goats and Sheep

You know that the Lord is our shepherd, Grace. We are just sheep. Only sheep. If we wander off the path, we need God to find us and bring us home.

In the beginning of The Trouble With Goats and Sheep, we meet ten year-old Grace – a wryly precocious blend of Scout Finch and Junie B. Jones – as she processes the big news on her cul-de-sac: Mrs. Creasy of Number Eight, The Avenue has disappeared (not taking even her shoes with her), and with the summer break looming, Grace and her best friend Tilly decide to spend their holidays investigating the case. As much as I did enjoy the quirky voice of this opening, I wondered if I had accidentally picked up a YA mystery, but as the point-of-view shifts to the various adults in the neighbourhood, and as they all fear that Mrs. Creasy might have discovered the dark secrets they've been hiding for nearly a decade, the novel definitely leaps out of kid-lit territory. In the end, there was much about this book that made for an enjoyable reading experience, but along the way, there was much that annoyed me, too. 

Early on, when Grace asks the local vicar what causes people to disappear, he gives the above answer about the need to find God in order to be found. When Grace and Tilly attend a funeral later that week – at which the vicar gives a sermon on Judgment Day; when all people will be separated into the sheep who will be saved and the goats who will be damned – the girls leave with a confused image of God the shepherd, but they do know one thing: if they can find God on their street, Mrs. Creasy will come home. Posing as Brownies earning merit badges, the pair drop in on each of their neighbours, ask them about God, and observe private behaviours that convince them that separating people into goats and sheep is harder than they had imagined. This might make it sound like a very religious book but it really isn't: author Joanna Cannon is simply using the goats and sheep metaphor as a framework; a metaphor which, by the end, she flogs into the ground. 

This street is claustrophobic: suffering through the apparently famous British heat wave of 1976, every one of the neighbours is keeping an eye on the others, peeping through windows, and rushing out to confront one another on the sidewalk. When Thin Brian thinks he spots someone skulking about in the dark, his Mam says, “Well, if you're going to do it, do it properly. Switch the big light off and pull the curtains back.” Expert level snooping. Yet, as much as these folks are watching each other, it's the house at the top of The Avenue – where that weirdo, perhaps pervert, Walter lives – that consumes everyone's most avid attention: things have happened there that Grace and Tilly needn't learn the details of, but they do know not to go near Number Eleven. Despite giving the reader the impression that Walter might be the victim of a smear campaign, when the girls do make a trip to Walter's house – when he insists that they come inside for some lemonade – I didn't trust him either.

In Joanna Cannon's blog, we learn that she is a clinical psychiatrist who wrote this book in honour of the misfits that she meets every day in her practise:

I decided to write Goats and Sheep, because I believe there is a little unbelonging in all of us – it’s just that some people are better at hiding it than others. In the story, everyone on The Avenue has something to conceal, a reason for not fitting in. It’s only in the thick, suffocated heat of the summer, that the ability to hide these differences becomes impossible, and along with the fractured lawns and the melting tarmac, the lives of all the neighbours begin to deconstruct. Through the eyes of Grace, our ten year-old narrator, we discover that if we scratch the surface of most sheep, we might very well find ourselves with a goat. And the biggest problem of all, is trying to work out the difference.

And the storyline is just that deliberate: each neighbour has a reason for their flawed behaviour – oh, that's why you're a drunk, and that's why you're a middle-aged man still living with your Mam – and it would seem that Mrs. Creasy was a saintly soul who had gone out amongst her neighbours, learned their secrets, and tried to help them. And these neighbours – the apparent good sheep – are so afraid that she had learned their biggest, darkest, collective secret (which is really pretty awful), that when she went missing, they all hope that she's been murdered and thrown into a canal somewhere instead of gone off to weigh her moral obligations. There's nothing at all subtle about this goats and sheep business; these aren't normal people at all.

There is a lot of very quirky humour in this book, and the conversations between Grace and Tilly often made me smile, even as I recognised and cringed at the unequal power balance of the relationship – but all little girls probably had that one friend they liked to push around a little bit; it felt completely truthful. I was charmed by the period nods I recognised from a 1970s childhood, but being non-Brit, I was clueless about radio presenters, the hundred different brands of cookies mentioned; don't know what Babycham or a Whimsy bushbaby is (but, obviously, Cannon doesn't need to write only references I would get). Grace is always making deep observations, like “Sometimes, with grown-ups, the gaps between your question and their answer is too big, and it always seems like the best place to put all your worrying into.” Some of that is okay, but by the end, I grew weary of the wisdom-of-children shtick. And there was something very deliberate in the pacing of the plot; something soap opera-ish about the mini-disaster of Tilly's brush with death that gets resolved before the true climax. 

In the end, I think that this was an excellent effort at writing a novel for a clinical psychiatrist working in NHS parking lots, but weighed against seasoned novelists, it's a rather amateurish effort. I do admit that there were many, many lovely lines – there was much that I enjoyed, for sure – and if you don't mind an overworked metaphorical framework and a book peopled by ultimately unlikeable charicatures, you just might enjoy some of this, too.

Principles To Live By

“Principles to Live By” was faded over the door of 87 Shelf Street. The residents of that house had kept foster children for seventeen years. Today, fog had come in across the bay to make all the houses gloomy. It swept toward the city that noon hour. Car lights shone bleakly, and all the trees reminded one of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Poe.

By far, my favourite perk at my new job is the access to advance reading copies; even if it's only by a couple of weeks, I love being able to read new books before the general public. When I saw that there was a new David Adams Richards – I do not disagree with the statement that he is “perhaps the greatest Canadian writer alive” – I pounced and greedily snatched up Principles to Live By for myself; what a coup! So imagine the pickle in which I now find myself: I've finished a new work by a writer I admire, and having not really liked it all that much, I come to see what others have said and I can find neither a goodreads review nor yet one from a newspaper. I am entirely at the forefront with a negative evaluation and I don't want to be here. I'll stress that I was working from an ARC – so I won't be heavy on quotes – and even that bit I opened with might not be in its final form.

The book begins with a brief scene from 1999 (a happenstance at the above-mentioned foster home) and then shifts to 2011 and an anonymous letter to the police that obliquely refers to those events. The letter is addressed to John Delano – a one time superstar of the RCMP, now marginalised, friendless, and limping towards retirement – and as we nearly immediately learn that Delano's own young son went missing years before, the reader understands why he has a particular interest in child welfare cases. Yet, right from his first reading of the letter, I got the sense that Delano's powers of perception are just too good to be true: based on the thinnest of clues, the cop is able to piece together exactly what the letter writer is trying hard not to come straight out with (putting together a story in his mind that exactly matches what the reader has already witnessed in the first chapter), and as his investigation continues, not only does Delano recover twelve-year-old evidence everywhere he looks, none of these scraps of paper, old clothes, or half-burnt photos that he recovers from closets, sheds, and fire-grates turn out to be not relevant. I appreciate that after thirty-some years on the force Delano would have seen it all and become an astute predictor of human behaviour, but I simply didn't believe in these leaps of logic that always propelled him in exactly the right direction.

Early on, I was also confused by all the extraneous characters, and especially because they are always referred to by their loose or longterm connections to Delano and each other through time and space (who was that again? when?). I was confused that there was a character named Melon Thibodeau and one named Officer Melonson (the first time Melonson was mentioned, I misremembered and thought it was Melon grown up), and isn't it unnecessarily awkward to write scenes like, “Melon said to Melonson...”? That's obviously a conscious choice, but why? Is it a clever way to show that in real life you might meet people with such similar names and it would be authorial cowardice to always shy away from such clunky scenes that might have a basis in truth? By the end, all of these characters are necessary because they are somehow all related to one another (some even, surprisingly, by blood) and the “finger of fate” became wearisome: if Delano hadn't gone to Rwanda and had a driver who told him about his sister who Delano saves thereby ticking off Melissa, then Melissa wouldn't have been out to get Delano and working behind the scenes on Bennie's case so that Bennie was released in time to go for a drive in the woods while Delano is in San Francisco picking up the ecoterrorist son of the man who suggested an Edmonton family go to Rwanda: and just who was that Canadian kid in Rwanda again? But again, Richards is too clever a writer to be making these connections casually, but yet, their purpose is beyond the likes of me.

As for the politics of this book, Richards gives voice to a lot of my own beliefs – ivory tower academia, the hypocrisy of the UN, the futility and falseness of the Occupy Movement, the throwback hippydom at the CBC, the bureaucratic powerplays that undermine the ministries that civil servants are meant to serve, even the beyond-the-borders promotion of Margaret Atwood at the expense of fine Canadian regional writers – but they're so in-your-face as to startle even someone like me with sympathetic views (and I am looking forward to seeing how this book will be received at the CBC, Toronto Star, and other liberal media). Most oddly, Richards namedrops some of his own books in Principles to Live By (not too flatteringly), and again, he's too deliberate to have done this for no good reason.

So here's what I think: As Delano stands strong against those who would accuse him of sexism and racism, as he ignores those who would mock his faith, he's one of the few characters who actually adheres to his own principles to live by, refusing to chase the politically convenient in order to get himself ahead. This book is a contrast between those – bureaucrats, politicians, and academics on the one hand and police officers, foster parents, and activists on the other – who do everything out of self-interest while declaring altruism, and those others – not only the good cops, social workers, firefighters and soldiers, but also the humble bakers, welders, and taxi drivers – who do their work for the work's own sake. As a writer, Richards himself could fall into either camp, but by mocking self-serving institutions like academia and the Order of Canada (each of which Richards is a member of), and even by taking his own earlier work less than seriously (as Melonson says, I've never even heard of that book, or that writer, for that matter), it feels like an eye-wink; a dare to choose where to pigeonhole him. 

So, I didn't like Delano's superhuman detective skills, didn't like the way everyone and everything is related (Saint John isn't that small; I lived there as a child in the seventies myself and don't appear in the storyline, har har), I didn't find the politics to be nuanced enough (but perhaps that's an all-too-Canadian complaint), and the characters are too black and white; wholly good or wholly self-serving. I understand that this is the first book in a trilogy (Richards' last trilogy?), and I'm not turned off enough to give a pass on the rest of the series; I will always greedily snatch up a David Adams Richards ARC if I see one; I will continue to buy my favourites of his books for my own collection. And I will be a coward and give Principles to Live By a very wishy-washy three stars.

Tunesday : Karma Chameleon

Karma Chameleon

(O'Dowd, G/ Moss, J/ Craig, M/ Hay, R/ Pickett, P) Performed by Culture Club

There's a loving in your eyes all the way

If I listen to your lies would you say

I'm a man without conviction

I'm a man who doesn't know

How to sell a contradiction?

You come and go, you come and go

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Didn't you hear your wicked words ever'y day

And you used to be so sweet

I heard you say

That my love was an addiction

When we cling, our love is strong

When you go, you're gone forever

You string along, you string along

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Ev'ry day is like survival

You're my lover, not my rival

Ev'ry day is like survival

You're my lover, not my rival

I'm a man without conviction

I'm a man who doesn't know

How to sell a contradiction

You come and go, you come and go

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

I remember mentioning to some boyfriend in high school that I wished I was as pretty as Boy George. I remember the scoffing (without remembering quite which boy it was who scoffed) and I recall there being a tinge of homophobia to his reaction -- and what's curiouser is that, in my innocence, I never really thought of Boy George as gay; had never heard of drag queens or cross-dressers (beyond British comedy, I suppose), and I totally accepted Boy George's look as just a show business thing. When I said I wished I was that pretty, what I really meant was, "I wish I knew how to do my makeup like that", because like all teenage girls, I just didn't know what my look should be or how to achieve it. 

From my earliest memories, people had always made a fuss over my hair: its unique colour (Mum remembers some woman saying to her when I was little, "Her hair is such a beautiful red -- not like yours of course -- but really beautiful"; Mum always emphasised the backhanded insult to her in that statement) and its natural curl (Mum says that when I was little, she only needed to wrap strands around her fingers to form ringlets). And yet, growing up, I never knew what to do with my hair either; straightening out the curls was my number one goal. Being a teenager in the 80s truly meant that anything goes, but living in such a conservative community, that didn't mean that I could go full Boy George. So for years, fitting in and looking like everyone else took a lot of my energy.

For pretty much all of my Lethbridge high school years, I would shower every morning, return to my room, crank up my cassette player and belt out my favourite songs (and for months, that was my Culture Club tape; I stopped when I heard my mother singing Karma Chameleon in the kitchen) as I blow dried and curled my hair. I know that sounds like an oxymoron, but in order to straighten my hair every day, I needed to curl my bangs forward and the rest of my crown in a series of rolls to the back so that I could then brush it all back into a feathered shag. When my girls look at pictures of me from high school they insist this is a "Lady Mullet", but it was much more Markie Post in Night Court than Charlise Theron in Monster: I was conservative but cute. As for my makeup, I never learned anything beyond three shades of eyeshadow (medium on the lid, ultralight under the brow, dark in the crease; still my go-to dress-up look) with plenty of black eyeliner and mascara. My lips are so thin that lipstick seems to highlight that fact, and as a result, I've always avoided it; I never even went through the bubblegum lipgloss phase. Again, I looked like everyone else.

All my friends lived in blue jeans and conservative tops, and really, that's all you could buy in Lethbridge. I do remember a couple of shopping trips to Calgary and picking up things that pushed that envelope a bit: I remember some jeans I bought that had cargo pockets down the legs and what looked like splashes of white paint all over them; I also picked up a pair of skin tight jeans that were plain denim on the back (with no rear pockets) and a denim leopard print on the front -- these jeans caused raised eyebrows even from my friends. I remember Kasia and I buying some similar pants in grade eleven -- hers had fuchsia and navy alternating pinstripes and mine were turquoise and navy -- and although they were too big for us when we bought them, we brought them back to her house and took in the side seams to make them painted-on tight (and we both made them so narrow that we couldn't get our feet through the ends of them and had to rip that bit out). Kasia called these our "Marilyn Monroe" pants (I still don't get the reference) and I remember wearing mine once with this belt my mother had: the belt was made of black braided leather and could go around a waist three times, but I had looped it around once loosely and let it drape down a second loop (I felt like a gunslinger when I left the house), but when I got to school and had a couple of guys (rough guys that I wouldn't normally talk to) compliment me on the "whips and chains" look, I demurred from ever trying that again. 

Meanwhile, Cyndi Lauper and Madonna were making fashion statements with big hair and accessories, and when these kinds of things started being sold in Lethbridge, I pretty much left my pack and bought anything that caught my eye: lace gloves; dangly earrings; strings of fake pearls to wear as bracelets; anything neon; anything military. I used to love wearing a long man's dress shirt and pin the tips of the collar together with a reproduction war medal on a ribbon. I'd wear long shirts or long cardigans over stirrup pants with several long strands of beads and I was ridiculously happy the time I found a pair of tights that looked just like men's longjohns. I don't remember now if I was reacting to the distance that was growing between me and my best friends or if my nonconformist clothing contributed to that distance, but the stranger my clothes got, the more I was simply on my own. I remember once I was in the school  library and Mirella -- who had been mad at me and hadn't talked to me in weeks -- came over just to point and laugh at the clothes I was wearing and that broke the ice between us and made us friends again; I remember her pointing at my yellow neon tie, black T-shirt, turquoise pants, yellow neon socks, and bright pink terrycloth tennis shoes (I probably wouldn't remember that particular combo if I couldn't right now totally recall Mirella pointing at each item individually and cackling). Meanwhile, my hair and makeup never changed throughout high school; I never had the nerve to make that Boy George leap.

When I went to university, however, and met new friends, I had a new tribe to conform to; and that conformity involved a lot of hair spray. This is when I started buying all my clothes from the Sally Ann: my favourite outfits were bejewelled polyester dresses with matching jackets from the sixties and my houndstooth trench coat (I chose not to go black trench like everyone else; my Dad hated this oversized old man's coat). This is also when I gave up my curling iron and got an asymmetrical fauxhawk, using hair spray to make the top stand up. I eventually buzzed down the other side, too, and dyed one side of the stubble a bright pink: it took me until my second year of university to find a way to express what I felt inside -- I hadn't exactly been a chameleon for all of these years, but it wasn't until I was genuinely expressing myself that I saw how I had been repressing myself; blending in and laying low. 

But then...I met a boy that I lost my mind over, and although at first he said that it was my unique look that had attracted him, his jealousy and possessiveness -- Whose attention are you trying to get with all that? -- put me right back into a little box; I gave up the hair and the clothes, and eventually, the boy. And by then, my moment had passed.

It was when I moved up to Edmonton that I discovered what I should have known my whole life: if I just put a bit of mousse or gel in my hair when I get out of the shower and rough it up a bit, my hair will form curls all on their own that need no further help from me. Over the years, I've tried many times to find a more polished look, and I've had many haircuts that have made me cry, but in the end, it always grows out into the same general shape that is simply good enough for me. Okay, I know all this sounds like I'm obsessed with my own hair, but honestly, I don't think about it until some stranger mentions it. All through my life, there have always been those guys who would call out, "Hey Red" from passing cars and those women with fine, straight hair who tell me they're jealous (and when they invariably add, "But I bet when you were growing up you wished you had hair like mine", I always lie and say yes; I may have been trying to straighten it, but I did recognise that my hair only took to the curling iron because of its texture; fine and straight wouldn't have held my signature shag). 

I remember volunteering in a beer tent in Edmonton for the Fringe Festival one year and a slightly soused older woman came in, took one look at me, and said aggressively, "I suppose you're going to tell me that's natural curl?" I was taken aback, but agreed that it was, and she said, "Mmm hmm. And the colour, too? Oh yes, it's to dye for." I could only laugh and let it go, but I've always remembered that woman's belligerence at just the sight of my hair. I remember one night at the bar I worked at, it was after last call and the lights came up, and a semi-regular customer looked at me and said, "Oh my God. How long has your hair been red?" I assured him it always had been and he sat looking at me in amazement, saying that in the dim lights he had always assumed it was brunette. I couldn't fathom why it made a difference, but I began to wonder if all of my regulars knew my hair was red or if I was somehow "passing for normal" (and then one night some time after this, an older, drunken guy I had never seen before said, "Hey, tell me, do the carpets match the drapes?" I had never heard that expression before, but I twigged its meaning right away and walked off in a huff, but certainly confused about how one drunk could see my hair colour but another couldn't). 

Twenty years of being a stay-at-home mother has made it easy for me to neglect my look; to just grow out my hair and wear comfy clothes. Now that I'm back at work, however, I wonder if I should put in more effort. I got my hair cut a couple of weeks ago (first time since Christmas 2014), and even this new stylist asked me if my curl is natural; if the colour is, too. She then asked if I have ever considered getting some blonde highlights put in, and while I know that the red hair with blonde streaks was kind of a trendy look ten or fifteen years ago, I was too indifferent to trends at the time to get them then and worry about trying too hard to look younger than I am right now. The stylist explained that the blonde highlights would probably blend out my, "well...greying areas", and that made me smile: I've had the stray white hair since I was a teenager, and the more of them I get, the more happy I am; I have long looked forward to going full witchy once the red is all gone and I can tease out the white curls. In the end, the stylist just gave me a trim -- same general shape I've had for yonks -- and while I can honestly say that I'm comfortable in my own skin today, moreso than at any other time in my life, I'm still thinking about those highlights; maybe it's never too late to awaken the chameleon within and display a little flash.

Karma, karma, karma, karma, karma, chameleon

You come and go, you come and go

Loving would be easy if your colours were like my dreams

Red, gold, and green, red, gold, and green

Carry Me: A Novel

Perhaps if I had been able to put things in plain language, it might have made plain that things between us were so damnably unequal, that I loved her as I would never love anyone else and that she loved me as a young woman might love a devoted brother, a trusted bodyguard, or a horse that never stumbles, never shies, but takes all fences willingly, and carries her safely across.

Carry Me: A Novel might correctly be called a love story, but this isn't “just” a romance. And as it spans the two World Wars, it might correctly be called historical fiction, but this isn't “just” a gratuitous retread of what I could catch any evening on the History Channel. As I closed the covers of this book, tears streaming down my cheeks – not because of a melodramatic ending but because I had been profoundly touched – I could only conclude that this was a story of humanity, and as is true of all great literature, I felt connected to that humanity; this was the story of us all; the story of me.

But in the beginning, this is the story of Karin Weinbrenner. As the narrator Hermann "Billy" Lange opens with: Her story is not mine, but sometimes her story feels like the armature my life has wound itself around. I am telling it, so this story is also about me. After briefly sketching out his early relationship to Karin – they were born a year apart on the Isle of Wight, where Billy's father acted as the captain of the racing yacht belonging to Karin's father (a German-Jewish aristocrat, the Baron von Weinbrenner) – the next chapter skips to 1938, with Karin summoning Billy to Berlin. And this is the structure of the entire book: Going back to the beginning and quickly sketching along the years in which Karin was the spoiled but largely ignored daughter in the big house and Billy was the beloved son in servants' quarters, intertwined with 1938 and Billy's efforts to get Karin out of an increasingly antisemitic Germany. What's incredible is the tension that author Peter Behrens is able to achieve with this format: despite the present day Billy (who makes reference to the Iron Curtain, so he's writing post-WWII, pre-fall of the Berlin Wall) often telling the reader what is going to happen before it does in the flashback sections, hardships and dangers are palpable and real. Also intriguing are the frequent inclusions of letters and diary extracts that are currently being held in the Archives at the University of McGill: not only are these interesting (and often plot spoilers before events happen) in their own right, but they beg the question, “Who in this narrative is eventually going to do something worthy of being archived at McGill?” The writing that pulls off this tricky tension is masterful without seeming so; such a deft skill.

Although Billy understands that his full story might not have universal appeal (I don't want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you), the peculiar genealogy of these characters is what argues for their universality. The Baron von Weinbrenner, while a nonpractising Jew, is German to his bones; a loyal subject of the Kaiser and a decorated war hero. He married an aristocratic Irishwoman (Northern Ireland, her family holds a seat in the House of Lords), and since Karin was born on the Isle of Wight, she has a British passport. Billy's father, Buck, was born a thousand miles off the coast of San Francisco to a German sea captain who had married an Irishwoman (Buck's birth was registered in the US as a German citizen), and Buck himself married an Irishwoman who had been hired on at the baronial estate, Walden, outside Frankfurt. When Buck and Eilín married, von Weinbrenner offered them the position of caretakers of the summer home on the Isle of Wight, their only real duties coming into play for the month of August when the Weinbrenners would be in residence and Buck would be expected to race the baron's yacht. This makes for an idyllic childhood for Billy until the outbreak of WWI, when Buck is arrested as a potential German spy and sent to a loathsome detention center in London for the duration of the war. Eventually, Billy and his mother move to the Irish town of Sligo – where both Eilín's father and Buck's mother live – and while Billy (despite his Irish mother and British passport) is tormented as “Herm the Germ”, his grandfather gets tangled up in the prevailing winds of Irish nationalism. This question of nationality and nationalism – can a person be reduced to what it says on their passport, or is that trumped by their actions or their beliefs or their nominal religion or residence – is returned to over and over again, and if this question wasn't at the heart of tens of millions of deaths throughout the twentieth century, it might seem farcical to keep returning to it. When armistice arrives and Buck is finally freed, when Billy's family finds themselves to be homeless and penniless deportees, they accept the baron's offer to make their home at Walden.

Burning aviators, clots of fire. The reeking night jar in our bedroom in Muswell Hill. Children skipping round me in the school yard, shouting taunts. My ship Lilith. London's winter cold and dark. The smell of ground sliced open in Regent's Park, my father's pale prisoner's face, his white hands on a table in the visiting hall. There it is. That was my war.

The interwar years (once Billy, recently ostracised as too German, can overcome being considered too British) are happy ones, with increasing prosperity and pride for the German people. Karin and Billy's paths only cross about once a year – which seems ironic considering how close the reader knows they will be in the future – but they always share in-jokes about their mutual love of the adventure writer Karl May and his tales of the high plains of western Texas and New Mexico, known as “El Llano Estacado”; the desert heat and light contrasting nicely with their forest setting, cold and dark. When the streets of Frankfurt start filling with brownshirts and Billy's coworkers begin showing up in SS uniforms – even after Billy and Karin are dismayed by a rally where they heard Die Donaustaaten Kuriosität storm and splutter – the baron refused to believe that he was personally in danger, and the reader understands where it all will end.

This all happened before I or anyone else had watched half a century's worth of films about secret police and Nazis and the brutality of ordinary “decent” men in uniforms, so I didn't recognize the situation, I didn't know the story line. I couldn't put it together fast enough to tell myself what was happening. What had started as an ordinary day kept getting darker and crazier. I was reeling.

I appreciate the time-frame that Behrens chose for his book: by having the “future” sections in 1938, he's capturing the last possible moment that the people of Germany could convince themselves that everything was normal. He is able to demonstrate how essentially “good” people could be inflamed by nationalism and prejudice to do terrible things (or, by trying to protect themselves, to turn a blind eye to terrible things). Several scenes are haunting my memory (perhaps, primarily, every time that Billy literally carried Karin) and I found the writing to be simply exquisite. But most of all, I simply believed this story – there's truth here and it touched me, and I couldn't ask for more from a book.

This is the ending that made me cry: beware spoilers!

I'll leave you here, beside a highway in Texas, just come up on el llano. It's not where our story ends, but it's where I'll leave you, your right hand shading your eyes as you watch those antelope flicker across a yellow field – alert, sensitive, tuned to one another, moving in unison, like a dart of flocking birds. 

Why, you've done it Billy Lange. You've brought her to the open country. 

That's what I was thinking. 

It's rare to recognize happiness for what it is, but I did then. It was like that morning on Eschenheimer Anlage, your pied-à-terre – French doors flung open, rain just past, and the fragrance of trees floating from the palm garden across the road. I held it in my hands, I knew it for what it was.

Is it too early to be talking awards season? The Giller? The G-G?

The Noise of Time

Art belongs to everybody and nobody. Art belongs to all time and no time. Art belongs to those who create it and those who savour it. Art no more belongs to the People and the Party than it once belonged to the aristocracy and the patron. Art is the whisper of history, heard above the noise of time. Art does not exist for art’s sake: it exists for people’s sake.

The Noise of Time is a fictionalised biography of acclaimed Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich. Although in the Author's Note Julian Barnes cites the several dense biographies that informed his research, what he has written is a very slim volume – not quite cracking 200 pages in my edition despite much white space – and notwithstanding its brevity and potentially interesting subject matter, I found the whole thing to be a little dull. 

This book contains a swirl of memories – initially, Shostakovich is musing about peat and carnation flower oil and sweat dripping from a widow's peak; all images that are central to some long ago happenings that he will recall in time – yet it primarily focuses on three main events (“Conversations with Power”) from the composer's professional life. So far as they go, these three events arequite interesting. In 1936, we see Shostakovich standing outside the lift to his apartment, suitcase at his side, as he awaits the inevitable: a visit from the secret police, expected to haul him away for a middle-of-the-night interrogation and a bullet to the head. The reason? After his opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk had met worldwide acclaim and was lauded in domestic newspapers, Stalin and his entourage decided to see it and walked out in disgust. The next day, the opera was denounced in Pravda (in an editorial that contained so many spelling errors that it could have only been written by Stalin himself; as the only uncorrectable person):

Even the stone deaf couldn't fail to hear what “Muddle Instead of Music” was saying, and guess its likely consequences. There were three phrases which aimed not just at his theoretical misguidedness but at his very person. “The composer apparently never considered the problem of what the Soviet audience looks for and expects in music.” That was enough to take away his membership of the Union of Composers. “The danger of this trend to Soviet music is clear.” That was enough to take away his ability to compose and perform. And finally: “It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very badly.” That was enough to take away his life.

Although he dodges the bullet, Shostakovich's opera was banned in the USSR, and even though he had always thought that the opera format was where his true calling led, the composer never dared to finish another in his entire career. This is where we first get to see the central challenge of Shostakovich's life under a dictatorship: should an artist keep himself and his family safe by playing by the rules, or should he write what's in his heart and damn the consequences? At this point he dismisses the notion of composing secret works (music is not like Chinese eggs: it does not improve by being kept underground for years and years) and chooses a gentle form of subversion: writing ironic passages into his music, hoping that they will be caught by the world at large.

For his second “Conversation with Power”, Shostakovich receives a phone call from Stalin in 1948. In an offer he can't refuse, Shostakovich is asked to lead a delegation to the United States to attend a scripted Peace Congress. While there, the composer reads his speeches in a monotone (hoping that those present will conclude that they aren't his own words) and ends up being snubbed by his hero Stravinsky and publicly humiliated by a journalist named Nabokov (cousin of the author and covert agent of the CIA). His precarious position is misunderstood by both those Russian expats who would judge him from the safety of their Americanised lives and those western artists who travelled to the USSR and declared it to be the People's Paradise that Stalin presented to them.

There were those who understood a little better, who supported you, and yet at the same time were disappointed in you. Who did not grasp the one simple fact about the Soviet Union: that it was impossible to tell the truth here and live. Who imagined they knew how Power operated and wanted you to fight it as they believed they would do in your position. In other words, they wanted your blood.

In his third “Conversation with Power”, Shostakovich is by now an established man – the year is 1960 and Stalin has died and been replaced by the more moderate Nikita “the Corncob” Khrushchev – and he is hounded at public events by Party official Pyotr Pospelov who wants to appoint him Chairman of the Russian Federation Union of Composers. By playing by the official rules for so long, Shostakovich has received many awards and gained a comfortable lifestyle, all while convincing himself that he lived outside the political sphere; his own hands were clean. Yet now, Pospelov refuses to take no for an answer, and in order to accept the appointment, Shostakovich is forced to join the Communist Party: the ultimate compromise both ethically and artistically. Shostakovich concludes that he has lived too long.

The Noise of Time is told in the third person, and this may explain why the dangers that Shostakovich periodically finds himself in never really come across as urgent to the reader; it's just all very theoretical without his emotional reaction, and therefore, I didn't feel a emotional reaction either. In the beginning, when Shostakovich is recalling his parents and his first love, I thought that I was meant to learn how these early influences affected his work, but no, in the end, they're just random memories. We read that Shostakovich married (three times) and had children that he loved, but they're merely signposts along the way: even when his first wife dies, it's recalled as a fact instead of being presented as a major event that the composer has a reaction to. We don't even get to see the composing process. I don't think I've ever read a more emotionless book.

As for the format, I found it a little odd. The book is broken into three sections (for the three “Conversations with Power”), and within each there are no chapters but frequent breaks: some passages lasting for several paragraphs, some just a line or two (and I couldn't figure out the rhyme or reason of this; many of the shortest passages are followed by another short passage that directly continues what came before). And while the writing is straight-forward and without ornament, there are many repeated phrases: like a shrimp swimming in shrimp-cocktail sauce...knows as much about music as pigs know about oranges...his hands were small and “non-pianistic”...even the phrase “the noise of time” is used six or seven times. What I couldn't figure out is if these repetitions were meant to signify an obsessively compulsive mind or if they were the equivalent of musical themes that repeat themselves in classical compositions. (And could the odd passage breaks also have a musical equivalent?) Because this book is so short, Barnes had to pick and choose what events he would include, and every repetition and every break of white space struck me as a waste (which surely is an admission that something important went right over my head).

As with any biographical type book, I'm pleased to have learned something new about a famous person and his place in time, but like I said before, I found The Noise of Time to be fairly dull. It might very well end up winning awards, but to evaluate my own experience, I'd give it a low three stars.

Shostakovich playing briefly from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk:

Ruby

Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high. The people of Liberty Township wove her into cautionary tales of the wages of sin and travel. They called her buck-crazy. Howling, half-naked mad. The fact that she had come back from New York City made this somewhat understandable to the town. She wore gray like rain clouds and wandered the red roads in bare feet. Calluses thick as boot leather. Hair caked with mud. Blackened nails as if she had scratched the slate of night. Her acres of legs carrying her, arms swaying like a loose screen. Her eyes the ink of sky, just before the storm.

When Ruby first opens with this description, I thought I had really found something. The writing was not only lyrical but slightly off-kilter (“acres of legs” seemed fresh and slightly challenging), and as the mystery of Ruby's presence in this East Texas unincorporated coloured settlement is slowly teased out – as conjuring and haints and exorcism are introduced – I finished the first section of this book curious for answers. But when these answers eventually involve a relentless and gratuitous catalogue of child abuse, religious hypocrisy, and rabid misogyny, I mentally checked out: there is no doubt in my mind that life for African Americans in the Deep South 1950s could be nasty and brutish, but this narrative does nothing to illuminate the actual; the situations are so over-the-top that author Cynthia Bond does a disservice to the memory of those who in reality were lynched and raped and beaten down. I picked this book up because it made the shortlist for the 2016 Bailey's Prize, but it's the Oprah's Book Club 2.0 sticker that should have warned me off: like so many of Oprah's picks, Ruby is the story of a southern woman who attempts to overcome a childhood of poverty and abuse. And even if that's what you're looking for, this would definitely not be my recommendation for a feel-good read. It's feel-bad. Spoilers ahead (for real: I was able to hide most of my spoilers behind tags on Goodreads but I don't have that feature here; be forewarned).

Ruby opens in 1973 with the title character bearing little resemblance to the chic city woman who disembarked a bus eleven years earlier; once beautiful and regal, Ruby now wanders the roads and digs in the forest dirt and lays down willingly for any man who grabs her. Ephram Jennings – her childhood admirer – has been watching Ruby's descent for all these years and finally decides to offer his heart – and his sister's famous white cake – to the crazy woman of the woods. We learn that Ephram's father was a respected Reverend who lost his church when Ephram's mother showed up naked for Easter service. When their mother was hauled off to a mental institution and their father was eventually lynched on his itinerant preaching route, Ephram was raised by his older sister Celia; a pillar of the church whom Ephram calls Mama. There are many mysteries hinted at that take a long time to answer: How did Ruby get that plum job as a paid companion to a white woman in the city as a child? (It was actually a brothel that the Reverend Jennings sold six-year-old Ruby to.) Why did the Reverend have questionable behaviours? (He was the ringleader of a secret society that had bonfires in the woods where they raped little girls “to gain their power”. Oh, and he killed both his parents as a child, sleeping with both his mother and a sister along the way.) What made Ephram's mother go crazy? (She witnessed her husband presiding over one of these rituals, and when she cried out at the sight of little girls being raped, she was gang-raped too.) Why could Celia not offer Christian charity to Ruby? (She also witnessed a bonfire ritual and assumed that the child Ruby had bedevilled her father.) What was Ruby doing in New York City? (Supposedly searching for her birth mother, Ruby primarily prostituted herself while reserving her heart for lesbian relationships.) Why does Ruby now scream in the night forest and dig graves in the dirt? (She is birthing/mothering all the dead children who haunt her, like the ghost of her friend Tanny; another child sold into prostitution whose murder Ruby witnessed.)

These answers, when they come, are never revealed organically: over and over, a character (usually Ephram) will think of someone who isn't present in the scene and the next paragraph will start a flashback featuring that person. It got so predictable that eventually, if I read that Ephram was thinking of, say, his mother, I'd wonder, “Well, what else am I to learn about her?” (Oh, she was used as a guinea pig for horrifying experimental cures in the mental institution because she was in the Coloured Wing. Gotcha.) This device felt amateurish as did many of the repetitions: the “listening” piney woods, the crows that are watching everything (but that's okay because the main one is Ruby's dead cousin Maggie), the constant rain storms, the mysterious and powerful Dyboù that dips in and out of the story (but that's okay because it's actually the evil spirit of the dead Reverend trying to take control of Ruby once and for all). Also amateurish was the immediate description of each new character's skin tone, and while I appreciate that African American skin in all its glorious shades might make for an important trait (and not least of all for the way that characters' lightness or darkness might affect they way others treat them), it was the immediacy and abruptness that kept jarring me: name a new character, then straightaway identify where they fall on the creamed corn to walnut to plum spectrum. 

And through it all we have Ephram: perhaps slow-witted, he seems content to be a grocery bagger in town; content to allow Celia to take his tips and wages to buy her church clothes and wigs. Ephram appears to be the only man in Liberty who doesn't have a hatred of women at his core; the only person who goes to church for humble worship instead of using it as a platform to jockey for power and prestige. And yet, despite his decency and life-long affection, it takes Ephram eleven years to reach out to Ruby. Once he does, no amount of crazy or resistance will shoo him off. Ephram is just too good to be true, with motivations I couldn't understand.

In the first section, when the young Ruby, Maggie, and Ephram enter the witch's hut in the woods, I thought that I was going to love the supernatural elements; the folksy superstitions; the haints that Ruby attracts. But it didn't take long for it to feel like just too much – again, this layer of the story came off as clunky and amateurish. And, again, the unrelenting abuses (and especially of children) totally turned me off: piling abuse upon abuse is a cheat; a short-cut to emotional gravity that the narrative doesn't earn (which is such a shame because in the first section, when the bad guys were Klan members and corrupt sheriffs, I was totally on board; when the truth of history is full of incredible evil, why would an author feel the need to add elements that I refuse to believe?)

I understand that Ruby is the first volume of a planned trilogy, but I'm not left with unanswered questions or a burning need for more. I didn't like the writing – neither the big story arc or the fine details – and I do not recommend.

Ain’t nobody ever gone answer you cries. You can fill a well with tears, and all you gonna get is drowned. You sit there long enough and the crazy man find you. You weep too long, your heart ache so, the flesh slip off your bones and your soul got to find a new home. You wait on answers ’til the scaredy-cat curl up in your belly and use your liver for a pin cushion. And that’s just how you die. Ascared and waiting. And death find your ghost wailing for help. In this life, if someone promise you aid, they a lie. If someone offer they hand, check five time ten to see where they hide the bill. You ain’t nobody but alone. And God come to those with the fight to find It. Ain’t nothing easy. Not for the likes of you.

I don't usually follow the Bailey's Prize, but since I had read some of these titles already, I thought, why not? So much regret. Perhaps I'll find a gem yet. Later edit: Yes, there were gems to be found. I am delighted that The Glorious Heresies won the Bailey's Prize: the best of an uneven but respectable shortlist; here in my ranking order.

The 2016 Bailey's Prize shortlist:

Lisa McInerney: The Glorious Heresies
Anne Enright: The Green Road
Elizabeth McKenzie: The Portable Veblen
Cynthia Bond: Ruby
Hannah Rothschild: The Improbability of Love
Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life

Tunesday : People Are Strange

People Are Strange

(Densmore, J/ Morrison, J/ Krieger, R/ Manzarek, R) Performed by The Doors

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down

When you're strange faces come out of the rain
When you're strange no one remembers your name
When you're strange, when you're strange
When you're strange

People are strange when you're a stranger
Faces look ugly when you're alone
Women seem wicked when you're unwanted
Streets are uneven when you're down

When you're strange faces come out of the rain
When you're strange no one remembers your name
When you're strange, when you're strange
When you're strange, alright, yeah

I'm going to step away from the usual format this week to talk about the weekend I just had: several months ago, my friend's daughter, Cara, started to plan a surprise 50th birthday party for her Mom. As soon as I told Dave that there was going to be a party for Delight out in Edmonton, he was excited to go, but immediately, he realised that it was planned for the same weekend that he left for Japan on another business trip. He said I should take the girls, and while Kennedy was ecstatic about the opportunity to see the city where she was born (for the first time since leaving as an infant), Mallory correctly guessed that the party would be at a bar, and as she is less than a month shy of the drinking age out there, it wouldn't be much fun for her to wait in the hotel room during the actual party no matter what other fun things we might do. Fair enough; just me and Kennedy then.

We flew out on an early morning flight on Friday, picked up our rental car, and headed for West Edmonton Mall. We went to the underground aquarium and sea lion show, bought an all day pass for the amusement park (and, in my case, suffered whiplash from a few of the rides; youch), walked for hours to see all the same stores that you see in any mall (but also the attractions like the indoor water park and ice rink), and when my legs screamed to be done, we went to the restaurant area and ate at the Old Spaghetti Factory; the restaurant (though not this same location) where Dave, my Mum and I ate the night before Kennedy was born.

When we were finished eating, we drove around the city: I showed Kennedy the Legislature grounds (and since you can't park on the actual grounds at night anymore, we had to use a public lot and climb up an insanely long and steep set of stairs that many people were jogging up and down; we were lucky to walk it), then to some places where I used to work, the hospital she was born in, and the house Dave and I owned when she was born; it was hard to convince Kennedy that that was a cute house as it is now literally falling apart. I was exhausted, so we went to the hotel.

We wanted to do more touristing the next morning since the party wasn't until 2:30, so after messaging Cara to make sure that we couldn't possibly run into Delight anywhere (Cara assured me that the plan was for her Mom to be at home until her friend picked her up at 2), Kennedy and I went to the Muttart Conservatory, checked out the HUB and the theatres at the University of Alberta where her Dad used to perform, parked back at the hotel (easy walking distance to the party's location) and then walked along Whyte Ave; checking out all the funky shops and having lunch at Chiantis, the restaurant where Dave and I had our first date. It was then time to go wait at Blues on Whyte for Delight to be brought along, but when we got there, only Delight's younger daughter Hayley and her step-sister Mallory were there: we quickly saw that nothing had been set up for us and I was stunned to learn that Delight and her friend had been shopping along Whyte Ave at the same time that Kennedy and I had been. We moved tables together, more people started showing up, and Delight's former mother-in-law (Hayley's grandmother Jeanette) brought a bunch of food platters and it started looking more festive.

Here's the thing about me and Delight: even though we worked full-time alongside each other and saw each other outside of work often (25 years ago), I knew I was never her best friend and she always had crazy stories about all the crazy goings-on that her other friends got up to. As people started showing up and introducing themselves, it was usually the first time that I was able to put a face to the names that I had heard about all those years ago. Every time someone would say, "Oh you're Krista, I'm sure we met back in the day", I would be thinking: I don't think we ever actually did; Delight did a good job of keeping her worlds separated. I was glad to see that her brother Dean recognised me when he came in with his new girlfriend, and Delight's mother made a point of coming over and sitting beside me for a while to reminisce about the time she had to babysit the newborn Hayley while Delight and Cara came out to be in my wedding party. Hayley's grandmother and aunts talked pleasantly to me, like they knew me, but I had never spent any time with them; they were probably just looking for allies amongst the rough looking characters from Delight's teenaged years. Because there were some rough looking characters at this party.

Eventually, Cara showed up -- her excuse to leave the house had been that she was going to get her hair done, so her Mom insisted on driving Cara out to the west end where her mother-in-law's salon is, and as soon as Delight drove away, Cara had to run to a bus stop and get back to Whyte Ave, lol -- and she walked straight to me and hugged me and started crying and thanking me for coming so far. Throughout the evening, Cara had many stories about how important Dave and I had been to her life (she certainly remembered Dave's Planet of the Apes toys) and I eventually began to wonder if she was inflating and romanticising those years in her memory: as she was the only little kid that we knew, Cara was indeed treated like a pet whenever we saw her, but we really didn't see her that much (yet, when I said this to Dave, he remembers reading her bedtime stories and taking her for ice cream, so I may be simply deflating her presence in my memory). 

And then Delight came in and was certainly surprised, and she also made a beeline towards me and Kennedy, and while I understood that she needed to make the rounds and see everyone who came out, Delight always came back near me eventually. At one point a woman named Patti came over and sat beside me (and I figured that was to be sitting where Delight would eventually return to) and asked where I knew Delight from. I explained that we worked together a long time ago, and when she found out that we flew in from Ontario just for the birthday, she made a point of yelling that fact around the table. I asked where she knew Delight from, and Patti said that they met when she was 15 and Delight was 18 and that they had been close friends forever. In the closeness competition, Patti had me beat. She eventually got very day drunk, but she kept saying, "Yeah, I'm drunk, but I'm taking a cab after this next one, so who cares?" And yet, she never did leave.

When the party was winding down, Cara said she wanted to walk down the avenue to check out a free punk show for a short bit, and she took Kennedy and Hayley with her. I'm pretty sure Kennedy had never seen anything like that before, and while I know she's been to plenty of parties at university where people have been smoking pot, she was surprised that the other girls were passing a joint between them openly as they walked along the alley (Cara had made a point of telling me that Kennedy had said no thanks when she offered her a smoke, and then Hayley shot a nervous look at me as though I might get mad that someone had tried to corrupt my innocent daughter; I just smiled and shrugged). When the girls got back, Cara asked Delight if we should go to karaoke and Delight was...delighted; smiling and nodding eagerly. The eco-friendly group decided we would take the bus over (Patti declared that she would take a cab instead, but ended up stumbling towards the bus stop with us), and although two of Delight's oldest friends -- Tessa and her sister Lisa -- did travel on the bus with us, they decided to get off at Lisa's apartment to get properly stoned before the bar, and seemed really put out that Delight didn't want to go with them.

We got to the second bar, had a crappy dinner, and waited for the karaoke to begin. Patti continued to get soused, Tessa and Lisa walked in totally baked, and the rest of the group was me, Delight, and our girls. Cara started with a Tracy Chapman song, and as Delight had always told me, that girl can sing; can cause goosebumps when you hear her live. As soon as she was done, the DJ started telling Cara about an upcoming karaoke contest. That good. Kennedy was up next and she did Love Shack (her usual party trick) and the girls laughed and clapped through the whole thing: Kennedy might not be the better singer, but she is the better performer. We had to sit through other singers -- good, great, and terrible -- and then Cara did an Adele song (fantastic) and waited for Kennedy's turn again. Unfortunately, everyone was outside smoking dope (and someone went out to smoke dope every time you turned around) when Kennedy started her Tina Turner version of Proud Mary (so they all the missed the slow opening), but Delight was back by the time Kennedy was belting out the second half and doing the famous Tina Turner dance moves: this was a hilarious performance, but Kennedy totally nailed the vocals, too. Everyone in the bar was hooting and clapping when Kennedy was done and Cara said she was sad to have missed it. Cara finished with a Janice Joplin (Piece of My Heart, her showstopper) and she brought the house down; the DJ now begging Cara to join the upcoming contest. Kennedy's last song was Bust a Move, and her rapping and dance moves were so hilarious that Cara had tears in her eyes from laughing, declaring that she wished she could adopt Kennedy. 

Meanwhile, Patti had stumbled off for her cab before the night was quite finished, Tessa was the most obnoxiously loud person I had ever met -- yelling and cussing even while people were singing -- and her sister Lisa sat stock still and stupefyingly stoned. We pretty much shut down the place and had a goodbye on the sidewalk, making plans to see Delight again the next day. We called cabs (so much for my smart planning of staying at a hotel walking distance from the original party location), and we had a crazy ride, with the cab driver stopping suddenly in the middle of a block, and as we looked out the window to figure out why, we could see that we were facing the wrong way on a one way street. Gulp. Then when we were close to our hotel, the cabbie turned one block too early, and as we ended at a one way street, he said, "Is it left or right from here?" We both said "Right" and hurriedly blurted, "But that's a one way going the wrong direction". He sighed and turned left and left and left again, adding much time and distance to our fare, and while at first I was annoyed that he expected us to pay for his mistakes, his age and accent and general air of hesitancy forced me to pay and tip (for which he seemed pretty surprised).

The next day had always been a dicey part of our plans: I knew that Delight would have to visit with people who had come from out of town to be at her party (especially her mother and Hayley), but with our rental car and a full day ahead of us, I had planned to take Kennedy to see the mountains: it's hard to balance "I came just to see you" with "I want Kennedy to see this other stuff". Delight understood and said to come see them whenever we got back to town; they'd be keeping Cara's 3-year-old son Cole up to meet us as late as needs be. So, leaving before 7am, after a late night of partying (Kennedy and I really hadn't had that much to drink, but we were still tired), we headed for Banff, a 3 1/2 hour drive. Kennedy was gobsmacked by the Rockies -- you really can't appreciate how majestic they are until you see them up close -- and we walked around Banff, drove out to Lake Louise (I wanted Kennedy to see that unique colour of blue of the lake; never imagining that it would be frozen enough in April for people to be out walking on it; which was dumb of me but dumber of the people out there as the lake was open water at the shoreline). I asked Kennedy if we should drive the extra distance to make it into British Columbia so she could say she had technically been there, and that sounded good to her, so we drove until we passed the Welcome to BC sign, stopped at a gas station to buy a postcard, and turned around and headed back to Banff. As we had been driving around, Kennedy had been in contact with a friend of hers who had dropped out of the U of G and moved back home to Canmore, and he said we needed to see the Bow Falls, and so we did (kind of underwhelming, really, but he's the local with the insider knowledge). I was starting to worry about getting back to Edmonton at a decent time, but when Kennedy asked if we could stop in Canmore so she could have a five minute visit with her friend, I figured it would have been mean of me to say no to that. I dropped her at the tourist info centre that Ben works at for a selfie that immediately made all their mutual friends back at the university jealous (so, worth the stop) while I got gas, picked Kennedy back up, and headed for the highway. As per some subset of Murphy's Law -- the more of a hurry you're in, the worse the traffic will be -- the cars were bumper-to-bumper, speeding up a bit and coming to a sudden stop, until we passed Calgary and were heading north again; dinner was drive-thru A&W so we could eat on the fly.

It was nearly 8:30 when we got to Delight's house, and by then, little Cole was tired and a bit fussy, but still a very sweet, very cute kid. Kennedy and I sat and talked with Delight until 1 am, and most of what she had to say was a surprise to me. She said that she had known Patti for about three months, thirty years ago, and Delight hadn't even told her that she had moved back to Edmonton because seeing her was just not a priority. She said that she was tired of Tessa's meanness and was thinking about cutting her out of her life. Now that really was a shock because I knew that Delight and Tessa had been through everything together -- lived together as teenaged runaways; were pregnant at the same time and raised their kids as friends; when we lived in Edmonton at the same time, it seemed that Delight was always just coming from or going to Tessa's house -- but having been put off by Tessa's loudness and coarseness the night before, I could totally see how someone who was hilariously subversive as a teenager would be wearying to know at 50 if she hasn't changed in all that time. The final straw, apparently, was Tessa hurting Cara's feelings at karaoke: in the middle of some conversation about how amazing Adele is, Tessa turned to Cara and said, "Honey, you don't have what it takes to bring tears to my eyes". When being a "bar star" is all Cara aspires to, that is a crap thing to say. Delight says that just like she was my naughty friend -- the one who, by comparison, made me look like Mary Poppins -- Tessa had always been her "good by comparison" friend and it just doesn't work anymore. This week's song choice is for Delight's old friends (Tessa and Lisa and Patti and the rest of those rough looking characters): not only were they all massive fans of The Doors back in the day, but they're as strange to me as I'm sure I am to them; and I'm okay with that meaning that I'm hopelessly square. When we realised it was 1 and Delight had to work at 8 in the morning, we had to say goodbye, promising to get together one more time the next day if time allowed.

We got up painfully early again so as not to waste too much touristing time, and Kennedy and I drove to where Theatre Network used to be at the Roxy (the theatre Dave used to manage which is now, literally, a hole in the ground), drove past Kennedy's birth hospital again, bought coffees and drank them at Hawreluk Park, went back to the university to buy Dave a souvenir T-shirt from his alma mater, and were checking out an antique mall (Western Canada's largest!) when Delight called and asked if we wanted to meet for lunch. Yes please. I didn't realise she meant that we were meeting at a sandwich shop where Cara works, so we were pleased to be able to say another goodbye to her, and the lunch was a fitting farewell to Delight. Kennedy and I went back to walk along Whyte Ave one last time, I picked something up for Mallory, and then it was time to head for the airport and home again.

I have loved Delight since the first time I met her: despite having some really subversive behaviours and an acid tongue, Delight has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever known. She is bright, hard working, loyal, and unapologetic; she deserves all the happiness that life can throw at her. It was impressive looking around at the people at her party; plenty of people who made a big effort to come to Delight's special day; certainly more people and more love than I could attract in a room. I know that as "the only normal person Delight knows" (her words), I was probably the freak in the room, and I hope that I didn't look as pathetic as Patti; overestimating how close I am to Delight based on our relationship from half a lifetime back; flying across the country, and dragging my kid along too, to drop at Delight's feet. But that's just the effect she has on people: even my own mother couldn't stop herself from reposting pictures from Delight's birthday party on facebook as though she had been there herself; and she didn't even know Delight until a couple of years ago (and as I pointed out to Kennedy, after this weekend, she totally knows Delight better than my mother does; Mum would probably have been scandalised if she had been at the party and the karaoke after, yet she believes that Delight is her own good friend. It was not by accident that I never mentioned to Mum that Kennedy and I were going out to Edmonton: she can't keep a secret and I would have been horrified if she decided to join us.) 

People are strange when you're a stranger

The Legislature

One of three sets of stairs to get up the hill. Gasp.

Hockey. Because Edmonton.

Chianti's!

Is that Delight wiping tears? I do believe tis true.

As my mother posted, "Can you believe this girl is 50?"

Downtown Banff

Lake Louise

Lake Louise

Bow Falls