Tunesday : Danny's Song

Danny's Song

(Loggins and Messina) Performed by Anne Murray

People smile and tell me I'm the lucky one
And we've just begun
I think I'm gonna have a son
He will be like him and me, as free as a dove
Conceived in love
The sun is gonna shine above

And even though we ain't got money
I'm so in love with you honey
Everything will bring a chain of love
And in the morning when I rise
Bring a tear of joy to my eyes
And tell me everything's gonna be all right

Love a guy who holds the world in a paper cup
Drink it up
Love him and he'll bring you luck
And if you find he helps your mind, better take him home
Yeah, and don't you live alone
Try to earn what lovers own

And even though we ain't got money
I'm so in love with you honey
Everything will bring a chain of love
And in the morning when I rise
Bring a tear of joy to my eyes
And tell me everything's gonna be all right

And even though we ain't got money
I'm so in love with you honey
Everything will bring a chain of love
And in the morning when I rise
Bring a tear of joy to my eyes
And tell me everything's gonna be all right

Not long after Dave and I moved back to Ontario with Kennedy, I was sitting in my parents' family room with my younger brother, Kyler, when out of nowhere he said, "Every time I look at you and Dave I think of Danny's Song. You know?" And then he started singing, "And even though we ain't got money, I'm so in love with you honey..." I was taken aback for several reasons: Kyler is not given to flights of romantic fancy; I wasn't crazy about having it pointed out to me that we had no money; and I thought it was presumptuous for him to assume he knew to what degree I was in love with my honey. I smiled after a beat, though, because it was a sweet and unprovoked statement, and while we didn't have money, Dave and I were not unhappy. In fact, at this early date, the future looked bright and sunny.

I have written before about how Dave was laid off while I was pregnant and that the job he had when Kennedy was born was not ideal, leading us to decide to sell our house, and how we gave our big dog away, and packed up our house to leave. I don't think I wrote before, however, that our parents were totally pushing for the move - both Dave's parents and mine said that we could live with them until we were on our feet; Ma said that my dad had several leads for Dave to get a decent job. I honestly didn't think that we'd be living with them for nearly a year, and if I had known that beforehand, I don't think I would have made the move.

As I wrote before, Dave and I had packed a shipping container with all our belongings at the beginning of December of 1995 and sent it off to London by transport truck. Meanwhile, Dave's father had cleared out his lower basement, and by the time our container arrived, we were there (along with my brothers) to unload and fill that room. We had sold, thrown out, and given away a lot of our belongings before the move, so when I found that most of our wood furniture had come through scraped and scratched, and cardboard boxes rattled with broken glass, this felt like a great loss to me.

Once we were in Ontario, my father didn't seem to have nearly as many job leads as my mother had thought, and while Dave did go on one interview, it didn't lead to a job (which made my Dad - who had employed that other man's shiftless son for years - quite angry and perhaps hesitant to set up anything else). We were staying together in London at first, but when Dave's friend Denton offered him a few weeks of work clearing out his farmhouse's dirt basement and pouring in a concrete floor, and Dave was gone all day and into the evenings, I decided to go stay with my own parents instead. I was pretty annoyed with Dave during this time - I wanted him to be out looking for a real job, but he was spending all his time with his old party buddy; Dave probably needed just this to make himself feel better, but I had a newborn, we were technically homeless, and I started feeling real despair at all I had lost.

In the end we had felt lucky to have sold our house at all in the depressed Edmonton housing market at the time (the boom would come just a couple of years later), so we didn't have much money in the bank, and the EI that Dave collected was mostly used up on diapers and other necessities for Kennedy. The EI itself wasn't going to last for very long, and when Dave read about an EI-sponsored program to take a few courses at the Ivey School of Business, he jumped at the opportunity - it would expand his hireability, and the pogey cheques would keep coming in so long as he was in the program. Dave was soon in school all day, doing homework all night, and he lived in London while Kennedy and I stayed in Burlington with my parents. I hated and resented this arrangement; I felt embarrassed and helpless. It went on for months.

Finally, after he "graduated" the next summer (both of our mothers remember this as Dave getting a Business Degree on top of his BFA; I don't correct them), my father gave Dave another lead - this time with a branch within the giant company Dad worked for himself - and Dave was hired as a lowest level sales guy with Maple Leaf Poultry. We couldn't have been happier, but with an office in the high-priced Toronto-adjacent housing market of Mississauga, we were distressed about how we were ever going to be able to afford even an apartment there.

After living between our parents' houses for nearly a year, and with both of my brothers (and one brother's new wife) also living at my own parents' short term at the time, my Dad was sick of having all his adult children underfoot, and he gave us a cheque for a down payment on a house - we were to find a real estate agent and get the hell out. Eleven months after we moved to Ontario, Dave and I weren't going to be homeless anymore, and for the first time in months, Danny's Song began to fit again.

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter's Journey Into the Lives of Others

I have no expectation that telling someone's story will fix anything because if I did, I would have an agenda and the truth would run the risk of being lost. I didn't return to Asad's side as a journalist; I did so as a human being. It was simply the right thing to do, a choice made in good faith. I appreciate that in my profession it's easy to become tangled in a cause and cross the line into advocacy. I understand why we have codes of conduct both in journalism and in society. But life is complicated. We do what we can and what we must.

I chose to lead with the above quote advisedly because it captures what I believe to be the primary caveat about All We Leave Behind: I won't contradict that author Carol Off is “one of Canada's most respected journalists” (as states the book's blurb), but this is not a work of journalism – it's a highly personal and opinionated narrative of a time that Off's actions did cross into advocacy. As she relates the story of how her own quest for a scoop led an Afghan man to put himself (and his family) in danger, I am absolutely convinced that Off did the right and moral thing when she then spent years trying to expedite their refugee claim and bring them to Canada – as a personal effort to redress unwitting errors. Everything about this story is informative and highly pertinent to our times, but it's not a cold-eyed work of journalism (and to be fair, it never claims to be), and every time Off uses the term “holy war” to describe both Ronald Reagan's and George W. Bush's entrees into Afghanistan, every time she accuses the Harper government of xenophobia and fear-mongering, I was reminded that she has spent her career working for the left-biased CBC; was probably relieved to drop any pretense of impartiality in her reportage here. And that's not to say that this isn't an important and interesting book to read – I just think it's key to keep in mind that this is a story that puts Off at its center, not merely a dispassionate reporting of the facts.

Off begins with an informative history lesson. As the Berlin Wall fell and Moscow retreated from Afghanistan, the country was left in a power vacuum; and in horrific condition:

For the previous ten years, billions of US dollars and USSR rubles had poured into Afghanistan to fund destruction but little else. By the end of the 1980s, half of all refugees in the world were Afghans, mostly exiled to Iran or Pakistan. A million and a half civilians had died because of war, while countless others were maimed and wounded; the International Red Cross estimated it would take 4,300 years to remove all the landmines that the contending armies had buried in the countryside. Afghanistan ranked third from the bottom in development of all countries of the world. Its children were severely malnourished. The place was swamped with Kalashnikovs, Stinger missiles, rocket launchers, armoured vehicles, bullets, bombs and angry disillusioned men.

Off describes the ensuing years of conflict between the Taliban and the far-flung warlords who resisted ceding power, and after the US-led Operation Enduring Freedom, Western journalists began flooding into the country (she has no kind words for celebrity newscasters like Dan Rather and Tom Brokaw whose presence distracted American viewers from the real news), and in pursuit of her own story on the rising power of the warlords as the Taliban fled the country, Off met and interviewed Asad Aryubwal. Asad had been forced into one such warlord's militia in the north of the country during the years since the USSR left (Asad had been given the rank of General, but insists he had been an unwilling conscript and had no combat role), and he was eager to be part of a news story that might warn the West that they would be foolish to partner with his former boss, Rashid Dostum. Asad led Off and her documentary crew to the site where Dostum's men had massacred Taliban POWs in the weeks following the Coalition's invasion, at great personal risk, and when the interview was over, Off went on to receive an award for her piece and Asad went back to living his life.

Usually, Off gets her story and doesn't look back – understanding that subjects who seek her out for interviews are aware of the risks they are taking and have their own motivation for speaking with a foreign journalist – but she kept in touch with Asad's family; exchanging email greetings and giving heartfelt advice. Off, however, had no idea that Asad was experiencing mounting threats until, for the third time in his life, Asad packed up his family and fled to Pakistan. With Rashid Dostum now the Vice President of Afghanistan, and with no support from his own clan back home, Asad knew he could never return to Kabul; and as the Pakistan around him grew ever wearier of supporting an ever-growing mass of fleeing Afghans, Asad knew that he and his family couldn't remain where they were indefinitely. With Off's support, they applied to the UNHCR as refugees, and as she arranged sponsors for them here in Canada, the Aryubwal family faced down unending years of looming danger and maddening bureaucracy.

The first half of All We Leave Behind is about everything leading up to Off's initial interview with Asad, and the second half is about dealing with the UN agency responsible for refugees; in this way, it feels like two different books. I appreciate the frustration and impotence that Off must have experienced as the refugee application process stretched out indefinitely for people that she had come to love and feel responsible for, but with persistent errors and corruption within the UNHCR's office in Peshawar, and the refugee crisis growing in Syria (and other areas where people were desperate to get to any safe country), I can almost understand why a seven person family with members working and going to school and stably renting an apartment weren't the highest on the list of those needing safe passage; even with a sponsor. 

The CBC – where Off worked in television journalism before switching to a more domestic-based role on the radio – may be funded by us Canadian taxpayers to the tune of a billion dollars a year, but that doesn't make it a branch of the government; Off's actions on their behalf were not a proxy for my own. So, the outrage that a person feels in reading about the Canadian government's inaction on Asad's case would likely be proportionate to the degree in which a person agrees with the following statement:

Asad had risked his life when he spoke to the Canadian public broadcaster in an effort to warn our government that Canadians were unwittingly getting involved with the wrong people. I couldn't conceive of a better argument – Canada had an obligation to help.

I don't think that I do agree with that statement, but again, I 100% empathise and agree with Off's decision to have made it her personal obligation to see Asad and his family make it to safety. As her personal story of this journey, All We Leave Behind is a fine and informative read.

2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalists:


Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear

Life on the Ground Floor:Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine by James Maskalyk 

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others by Carol Off

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

*Won by Life on the Ground Floor. All of these books are worthy finalists, and I learned a lot, but my favourite would be Tomboy Survival Guide as the best written/most eye-opening.

Tomboy Survival Guide

You don't have to look a certain way to be a tomboy. Don't let anyone tell you that, ever, and please don't find that here in my words. Tomboy thrums in your heart. It's in your head. It's what is holding your spine in place. It can't be hidden by a haircut. It's not about nail polish or not. It's running right now in your veins. If it is in you, you already know. Tomboy blood is so much bigger than the outside of you.

I guess I'm late to the Ivan Coyote party. Tomboy Survival Guide is their (Coyote uses the pronouns “they” and “their” to refer to themself) eleventh book, and as Coyote seems to be about my own age, they would appear to have been at the vanguard of writing about the trans person experience. I can only imagine how scary and lonely it must have been in their early career to be openly pushing for understanding and acceptance for something that most of us had no exposure to, and I do hope that Coyote's everyday experiences have been improved by the growing presence of trans persons in the news and in the entertainment industry. I think that most people read in order to learn about the lives of others (and by extension, learn about ourselves) and this book of essays about Coyote's life taught me plenty; it would be of interest to any person who cares about people; it couldn't help but spread empathy and understanding; read it.

Coyote was born in the Yukon, into what appears to have been a large and supportive family; and while some early family drama is hinted at (and may well have been described in their earlier books), they would seem to now be in a place of love and acceptance. The essays in this collection range from the first time – at five years old – that Coyote remembers feeling pride at being mistaken for a little boy, through their awkward adolescence as they tried to figure out just what they were, to early dating and workplace experiences, to their present as a respected writer, performer, and public speaker. As we are about the same age, I identified with all of the cultural references, and as a fellow Canadian, I enjoyed the recognisable geographical bits (loved the mental picture of playing softball under a midnight sun). Mostly, I appreciated the learning I gained about the non-binary experience: Coyote may have been born with female parts, but they never felt like a girl, exactly, but not like a boy either; “lesbian” would seem to be the wrong word, too, and “trans person” will need to do if I need a term:

My day-to-day struggles are not so much between me and my body. I am not trapped in the wrong body; I am trapped in a world that makes very little space for bodies like mine. I live in a world where public washrooms are a battle ground, where politicians can stand up and be applauded for putting forth an amendment barring me from choosing which gendered bathroom I belong in. I live in a world where my trans sisters are routinely murdered without consequence or justice. I live in a world where trans youth get kicked out onto the street by their parents who think their God is standing behind them as they close their front doors on their own children. Going to the beach is an act of bravery for me. None of this is a battle between me and my own flesh. For me to be free, it is the world that has to change, not trans people.

This is not an angry or political book; Coyote's tone is easy, engaging, and often humourous. However, as Coyote is a public speaker, some of these essays felt a little performative – as though written to be spoken aloud to a crowd rather than read; but that's a small complaint. The text includes charming diagrams (from how to tie useful knots to the assembly of an iron), short observations from the real world, and a few responses to the people who have written to Coyote for advice:

I promise you that you are not alone. I'm here. I'm here and I see you. I feel you. I was you, and I am you. It's not you, it's them. It really is. And those boxes, those binaries, those bathroom signs, those rigid roles, they hurt them too, they do, they carve away at their souls and secret desires and self-esteem and believable dreams and possible wardrobes and acceptable careers just like they do ours, just it's harder for them to tell it's happening on account of no one is hassling them in the bathrooms every other day about it. They somehow just fit better in those boxes, so they can't see what fitting has cost them, not like we can.

This book is a conversation, not a lecture, and I enjoyed every bit of it; learned much. (I will, however, need to think hard about whether or not baby-showers-as-gender-reveal-parties are nothing more than an attempt to hang a burdensome label on the unborn; I honestly don't see us moving into some post-gender world.) This deserves to be read widely and I wish Ivan Coyote all the best.

Ivan Coyote's TED lecture is : here.

2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalists:


Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear

Life on the Ground Floor:Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine by James Maskalyk 

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others by Carol Off

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

*Won by Life on the Ground Floor. All of these books are worthy finalists, and I learned a lot, but my favourite would be Tomboy Survival Guide as the best written/most eye-opening.

Smile

I knew what I'd just done. I'd invented something that would live for years. My own monster, and I was giving it to my friends, the only people I cared about and the only people who really, really frightened me, because of how things shifted, how the wrong word, the wrong shirt, the wrong band, an irresistible smile, could destroy you. You had to have something useful, your size or a temper, or a sister. The Brothers were zombies. Because I said they were.

It has been a lot of years since I read Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha and I'll never forget that it left me wrung out; moved to tears over Paddy's sad childhood. Over the years I've read other books by Roddy Doyle, but Smile is the first to recapture some of what I loved in that first read. Doyle really gets people and has a talent for capturing the little moments that make up a life. And as brief and scattered as this narrative is, we end knowing exactly who Victor Forde is; what childhood dramas moulded his whole life; and when he ended in tears, so did I.

This tale is a slow reveal, jumping from the present to the past and back again, so I don't want to say too much about the plot. As it opens, Victor Forde – fifty-four years old and recently asked to leave his home by the beautiful and successful woman he never actually got around to marrying – has returned to the Dublin neighbourhood where he grew up, and deciding that he needs to force himself to go out and rejoin the world, he chooses a nearby pub to be his local. Nearly immediately Victor is cornered by a man who claims to have gone to school with him, and while this Fitzpatrick knows all the embarrassing details of their childhood days that Victor would like to forget, Victor can't remember the other man at all. Through flashback scenes we learn about Victor's years in a Christian Brothers school, the early success as a journalist that led him to drop out of university, his meeting and falling in love with a woman who would go on to start a massively successful catering and television career, and his own efforts to turn his journalism into a book on Ireland. Victor eventually falls in with a chummy group of blokes at the pub who envy him his successful life and famous wife, but Fitzpatrick is never far from the scene; threatening to undermine everything with his intimate knowledge.

I carried the pints across to the window. How's it going? Good man; thanks very much. The words felt great and a bit forbidden. I hadn't earned the right to slip into the rhythm of the middle-aged Dub. My father had liked a pint, my mother told me.  He'd liked the company of other men. Maybe that was me. A late arrival.

I loved everything about Doyle's writing – in the details and in the big picture – and with so few scenes, he was able to precisely draw Victor's homelife, his school days, his falling in love, his career of provoking the establishment, and his descent into middle-aged mediocrity wherein all the old interpersonal pitfalls apply; I believed every word of it. Long passages made me smile knowingly and I'd quote off of every page if they weren't so dang long. The following is from Victor's first meeting with Rachel's posh Catholic parents; people who aren't too keen on the young man who writes articles on abortion and contraceptives:

Sunday in our house was one smell, one taste, one quite happy memory. This, though, was wild and unrepeatable. There were things in this gravy. An onion – a whole onion – slid over the lip of the potty when I poured some of it onto my plate. I'd never had to pour my own gravy before. The onion – I didn't know what it was at first – fell onto the plate. I was sitting alone; there were empty chairs on either side of me. I looked across at Rachel. She grinned at me and chewed. She gave me a little wave with the hand that held her fork. But the gravy – it was black. It was alive. The onion was the blood-covered head of one of the unborn babies I'd been writing and talking about. I stuck some of the gravy to the side of a carrot – glazed – and managed to get it to my mouth without lowering my head too far. And, Jesus – the taste. This was the Southside. This was what it was all about. There was wine in there, and history. This stuff went back to the Norsemen. It went straight to the blood. I wanted to beat my chest.

Ultimately, it would take quoting the entire book to demonstrate what Doyle actually pulls off here, and I won't do that, but will reiterate: I enjoyed this immensely; even through tears.

Uncertain Weights and Measures

Progress, such as it is, depends upon our increasing ability to measure. Time has been measured using the sun's rays, the swing of pendulums, barometric compensation, and now we have the quartz clock. But can we truly say that these sundry devices have actually measured the same thing? We want to speak to others, and we want what we say to mean something, but even words betray us. We are caught by the impossibility of communicating the colour blue.

Uncertain Weights and Measures makes for a good example of why historical fiction isn't really my jam: Author Jocelyn Parr takes a historical factoid that caught her attention – the Moscow Brain Institute (Institut Mozga), which was founded in 1928 in an effort to study and preserve the genius brains behind the glorious Revolution, and which fell out of favour as its showcase brain (that of V. I. Lenin) became overshadowed by the growing Cult of Stalin – and by imagining how the lives of the workers at the Institute changed as the times around them evolved, Parr attempts to capture and lay bare the historic moment. This book does achieve these ends, but it felt a little dull to me, a little shallow; I think I'd prefer a nonfiction account of the times and do my own imagining as to how the proletariat were affected. And yet, I know many intelligent readers who want exactly this – a history lesson told through the experience of the people involved. Not my jam, but deserves to find its audience.

We were building something totally new. Of course it was difficult. All great endeavors are difficult. Art, love, science – they all dream big and fight hard before they achieve the grace of being settled. We didn't want to be held back, but it was human nature to want to return to the familiar.

Tatiana is a particularly gifted young scientist and a true believer in the Revolution. When her mentor, Dr. Bechterev, brings her along to help set up the Institut Mozga, Tatiana is honoured to be the one to arrange the display of Lenin's brain; is gratified to learn that the German scientist, Dr. Vogt, has located the unique structures within Lenin's brain that were the wellspring of his genius. Although in the beginning Tatiana had been attracted to the challenging viewpoints of her artist husband, Sasha, the more she is trained to disregard anything that can't be weighed or measured, the greater the gulf that's growing between them; matters aren't helped by Sasha's state-assigned job as a propaganda colourist: this isn't art but Tatiana doesn't see the problem if this is what the state wants. As the years go by and acquaintances disappear or die under mysterious circumstances, it becomes unclear if anyone can be trusted.

This was when the new feeling started, though at the time I wouldn't have described it as such. It wasn't fear exactly, but fear's beginning: a stranger seen once too often.

As a history of the Institut Mozga, Uncertain Weights and Measures contains all the details of an interesting story that I hadn't heard of before. But as the story of young people coming of age on the cusp between the idealism of Lenin and the totalitarianism of Stalin, it doesn't really capture the growing paranoia, fear, or disillusionment – Tatiana is an idealist who remains committed to the cause and Sasha is secretive with his wife, and therefore, with the reader. This is more a book of facts than of emotions, and where Tatiana periodically thinks like a feeling human, I didn't recognise her:

For months afterwards, I had a recurring dream that my heart was not muscle and blood and flesh but a cave-like bone, inside which I could stand upright and barely touch the roof, and there I could yell out I and it would echo back as if I were in a magnificent outdoor amphitheatre. Or, as if I were inside an operating theatre. From all sides I was surrounded. The sharp points of infinitely long needles stabbed me. Some were so sharp that their points were invisible, and these stung the deepest parts of me. Then, I would wake up thinking of Sasha, of how he had, inside him, an ocean.

So, I didn't really relate to much in this book – but will again add the caveat that another reader likely will. I am not disappointed that this book's Governor General's Literary Award nomination led me to pick it up – I am always happy to try something outside my routine.

The 2017 Governor General's Literary Awards Finalists:

• All the Beloved Ghosts by Alison MacLeod
• Lost in September by Kathleen Winter
• The Water Beetles by Michael Kaan
• Uncertain Weights and Measures by Jocelyn Parr
• We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night by Joel Thomas Hynes

Won by We'll All Be Burnt in Our Beds Some Night - which seems an odd choice to me. I liked it, but would have personally given the award to The Water Beetles.

Tunesday : Head Over Feet

Head Over Feet

(Morissette, A / Ballard, G) Performed by Alanis Morissette

I had no choice but to hear you
You stated your case time and again
I thought about it

You treat me like I'm a princess
I'm not used to liking that
You ask how my day was

You've already won me over in spite of me
And don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet
Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are
I couldn't help it
It's all your fault

Your love is thick and it swallowed me whole
You're so much braver than I gave you credit for
That's not lip service

You've already won me over in spite of me
And don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet
Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are
I couldn't help it
It's all your fault

You are the bearer of unconditional things
You held your breath and the door for me
Thanks for your patience

You're the best listener that I've ever met
You're my best friend
Best friend with benefits
What took me so long

I've never felt this healthy before
I've never wanted something rational
I am aware now
I am aware now

You've already won me over in spite of me
And don't be alarmed if I fall head over feet
Don't be surprised if I love you for all that you are
I couldn't help it
It's all your fault

This week I want to write about my brother Ken's wedding, and while I don't remember what their song was for their first dance (something obscure, I'm sure), I do recall that Ken and Lolo were big fans of Alanis Morissette; long before most people caught on. I remember Ken saying how he admired her transformation from teeny-bopper pop star - which I don't remember at all - into a legitimate artist, and I have to admit that it took me a long time to see the genius; but I eventually did. The specific song I've chosen is simply the most romantic from Jagged Little Pill; the album that came out the year Ken and Lolo got married.

Their wedding was September 23, 1995 - five weeks after Kennedy, the first baby in the family, was born. Since we were so poor, my parents paid for the plane tickets for us to fly back to Ontario for the wedding, and Ma had contacted the airline directly to reserve for us the bulkhead seats - the front row of the plane, which had a bassinet attachment on the wall in front of us (I had never noticed this before, and don't recall ever seeing anyone else using it). Naturally we were concerned that Kennedy would cry straight through the flight and annoy everyone around us, but I breastfed her during takeoff, putting her to sleep, and she pretty much slept through the whole thing (I don't recall if I ever actually put her into the bassinet, but I loved that it was there for us; better than first class.)

One thing I do recall precisely: After the fuss and excitement of Dave's parents coming out to meet Kennedy, I was wary about presenting her to my father for the first time. I warned Dave that I didn't want his feelings to get hurt - as I had already steeled my own - if my Dad didn't make a big deal over her. Dave thought I was crazy - this was my Dad's first grandchild, and of course he was going to make a big deal - but as I said to him at the time, "As his child, if there's one thing I know, it's that my father doesn't like children." And of course I was wrong - by the time we got to my parents' house, Kennedy was fussy, I was frazzled, and Dad took the baby from me and walked her around; alternating between shushing her and wailing back in her face with a huge grin on his face. Over the next week, every time Dad beamed at Kennedy or snoozed with her on the couch, I was almost jealous; I could have used some of that growing up. Ma said later that my Dad has always loved babies and I had no idea.

Ken and Lolo's wedding was to take place in her family's hometown outside Ottawa, and when they went up early to start getting things ready, Dave and I popped over to London to visit with his family (I think they had a family baby shower for us?) and it was awesome that my brother gave us the use of their car; acted like it would be a "huge favour" if we drove it up to Ottawa for them. We were so broke that this felt like a luxury vacation - driving around in a new Pontiac Sunfire, goggling at the beautiful roadside Ontario fall colours (such a stark contrast to the drab brown of the harvested fields we left back home in Alberta), and having my parents pay for a hotel room in Cumberland; if we were seriously debating at that point whether or not we should move back to Ontario, the loving presence and support of our families tipped the scales in favour of hell yes.

Now, before this wedding week, I had only met Lolo once. Ma had flown me out to Ontario for some reason, and Lolo and Ken were already living together in my parents' basement while she was finishing University. Ma got us tickets to go into Toronto to see Sunset Boulevard (starring Rex Smith!), and we had a pleasant, if slightly awkwardly quiet, evening (I remember Lolo was surprised that I wanted her to drive - coming from cowpoke Alberta, the highway into Toronto certainly intimidated me). Ken and Lolo met through my Aunt Judi, who was best friends with Lolo's mother, Barb, and they clicked immediately; moved in together quickly; got engaged at Niagara Falls on New Year's Eve while the Tragically Hip sang in the background. Judi and Barb were very active in their home parish - singing in the choir, polishing the church pews, cooking and cleaning and buying trinkets for their beloved priest (Father loves his angels) - but when Ken and Lolo went to this priest to arrange a wedding at his church, he turned them down; said that because they were living in sin together, he couldn't, wouldn't, join them in marriage. That was such a slap in the face to the pious and devoted Barb and Judi, but instead of being angry with him, they felt chastened; embarrassed. When Ken and Lolo pressed the point - this was the same church where Lolo had been Baptised, received First Communion, was Confirmed; it was her home parish - the priest decided to allow a willing priest from another parish to come perform the ceremony. Not a perfect solution, but acceptable. And while Barb and Judi felt it as an embarrassing incident for years to come, this was the thorny circumstance that led Ken and Lolo to leave the church; to not Baptise their own children. So, that's how a church becomes irrelevant; allowing individual priests to interpret the rules according to their own whims.

The days leading up to their wedding involved many family gatherings, with our grandparents (I don't think my Dad's Dad was well enough to travel), aunts and uncles and cousins all arriving and meeting Kennedy for the first time - what a fantastic opportunity this was for us to show her off. There was one party a couple of days before the wedding at Judi and Dennis' house, and after days of heavy rains, their septic system was swamped and they were forced to put a sign on their bathroom door that said: If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down. Now, not to get too intimate, but as I had had a baby just weeks earlier, I was still shedding blood and decided to avoid using their bathroom at all (If it's red, live in dread?). Unfortunately, I didn't reckon on the looseness of my muscles down there, and despite not feeling like I desperately had to go pee, while I was out on the deck talking with Lolo at one point, something let go and pee just ran down my leg - it was the most bizarre and helpless loss of control I've ever experienced, and although I felt the blood drain from my face and the hair prickle on my scalp, I kept nodding as Lolo talked, and since I was wearing a dress and we were outside in the dark, the pee just ran down and away into the standing rain puddles and left no traces. Weird but ultimately not actually embarrassing and I was eventually able to slip into a bathroom and wash down my legs - without needing to flush. TMI? (I eventually told this story to Lolo - as a word of warning after she had her first baby.)

Ken and Lolo's wedding was an unfussy but lovely affair. They each had two attendants (a sibling and a friend; no room for me in the wedding party), and the ceremony itself was short but sweet. They then went back to Lolo's parents' house for unprofessional pictures - they did turn out lovely, but again, I wasn't a part of it - and then the reception was at a hall in the village (maybe at a Legion Hall?) The food was a buffet cooked by friends and family, and Lolo had baked her own wedding cake; Judi and Barb made the flower arrangements. And this had nothing to do with money - Lolo is simply an unfussy person who has never been impressed by gross displays; they saved their money for a European honeymoon and a down payment on a house.

My Dad cried during his speech welcoming Lolo into the family (which touched me, but also rankled me because I didn't remember him crying at my wedding), my other brother, Kyler, got drunk and spilled beer on Kennedy (Christine had to eventually drag the increasingly obnoxious Kyler away from the wedding; she has been his conscience for a whole lot of years; she had to babysit him at my wedding, too), and it just felt right to be around so much extended family with my baby in my arms. This experience totally sealed our decision to sell our house in Edmonton and make a home in Ontario.

*I couldn't find a wedding picture of Ken and Lolo around here, so those are the pics of them meeting Kennedy, the night I peed my pants*

Future Home of the Living God

Everything that I am seeing – the pines, the maples, the roadside malls, insurance companies and tattoo joints, the ditch weeds and the people in the houses – is all physically balanced on this cusp between the now of things, and the big incomprehensible change to come. And yet nothing seems terribly unusual. A bit quiet, perhaps, and some sermons advertised on church billboards are more alarming than usual. Endtime at Last! Are You Ready to Rapture? In one enormous, empty field a sign is planted that reads Future Home of the Living God. It's just a bare field, fallow and weedy, stretching to the pale horizon.

As I understand it, Louise Erdrich began writing Future Home of the Living God in 2002 as a response to what she perceived to be President Bush's clampdown on women's rights. She let it lay dormant during the Obama years, but with last year's election of Trump, Erdrich returned to the manuscript with a vengeance. I include this information only because it didn't surprise me to learn it – although I have always found Erdrich to be a gifted and thoughtful author, this book felt rushed, and ultimately, a bit pointless and unoriginal; a poli-fictional response on behalf of a half-bewildered nation. I am particularly disappointed because as a Native American author, Erdrich had the opportunity to explore a unique viewpoint on dystopia – wouldn't the collapse of Western Civilisation pave a return to a pre-Colombian paradise where traditional knowledge is king? – but Erdrich doesn't follow through on this promising idea. More than anything, this book reads like a twenty-first century update on the early days of The Handmaid's Taleuniverse, and I don't know if that's very profound; I do know that it didn't feel well executed.

“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we'll keep adapting.”
“But the world is going to pieces.”
“It is always going to pieces.”
“But this is different.”
“It is always different. We'll adapt.”

In the near-future, evolution seems to be suddenly running in reverse with various species producing throwbacks – sabre-toothed cats, giant dragonflies, and predomesticated plants are popping up everywhere – and although there are rumours, no one knows for sure what is happening with human babies: Are they viable in this new world? Are they born alive but Neanderthalish? The narrator is a twenty-six year old woman – an Ojibwe raised by white liberals – and as she confesses to the diary she is keeping (the format of this book), she is several months pregnant and excited to meet whatever she is carrying. Cedar is able to move freely at first (as she is not visibly pregnant and society hasn't quite collapsed yet) and she decides to meet her birth mother for the first time; ostensibly to ask about the family medical history, but obviously seeking deeper connections. By the time Cedar returns to Minneapolis, the banks have collapsed, communications are down, the government has ordered pregnant women to report to detention centres, and according to her boyfriend, Phil, she'll need to go into hiding. With the mention of the Patriot Act and the deployment of secret military drones and surveillance devices, this book had the potential to extrapolate a totalitarian future from today's blithe acceptance of the loss of small liberties (as in 1984, et al) but because Cedar is hidden from what's going on in the world, and we are only reading what she records, the reader doesn't really know what's happening out there either.

As a teenaged rebellion against her progressive and atheist adoptive parents, Cedar had joined the Catholic Church and supported herself as an adult by writing a subscription-funded newsletter for her parish, Zeal. Because Cedar takes pride in the scholarship behind her writing, and since she has nothing better to do when she first goes into hiding than draft her next issue, she assembles the writings on the Incarnation and makes cursory links between the Immaculate Conception and what is happening with human reproduction in the present. This thread could have made the whole quite profound – if the Church accepts Evolution because it proves the God-driven perfectibility of humanity, what does a disruption in the evolutionary process say about the existence (or concern) of God? – but, like with the thread about Native issues, it dangles without going anywhere; is ultimately abandoned.

The sky has bloomed, it is verdant with stars. Deep, brilliant, soft. I am comforted because nothing we have done to this earth affects them. I think of the neurons in your brain connecting, branching, forming the capacity I hope you will have for wonder. They are connecting, like galaxies. Perhaps we function as neurons ourselves, interconnecting thoughts in the giant mud of God.

I loved that line “the giant mud of God”, but despite the book's title and Cedar's musings, there's nothing ultimately philosophical or deeply meaningful about this book: it is primarily about the loss of women's rights in a world where humanity (men and women both) want control over the bodies of those who are incubating the future; a fact that's admittedly true today and could well become a matter of concern in the future: just what loss of liberty would we all put up with if the future of the human race was at stake? The narrative does eventually become an adventure story – with close calls and escapes and a fretful journey through the abandoned mines beneath Minneapolis – but again, because this is Cedar's diary and she is always shielded from the bigger realities, I found it frustrating that we don't know what is actually going on.

Without act or will on my part, I am creating a collage of DNA and dreams, all those words made flesh, and I am doing it even in my sleep.

I understand that Erdrich was triggered to complete this manuscript by her concerns over Trump's election, but it really felt rushed in the end. What promised to be an interesting and meaningful exploration – the Native response to the colonisers' societal collapse, the death of God accompanying the extinction of humanity – was put aside for a low-level thriller, and it didn't end up telling me anything new about the world today or the people who inhabit it. Disappointed and rounding up to three stars.

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City

To understand the stories of the seven lost students who are the subjects of this book, the seven “fallen feathers”, you must understand Thunder Bay's past, how the seeds of division, of acrimony and distaste, of a lack of cultural awareness and understanding, were planted in those early days, and how they were watered and nourished with misunderstanding and ambivalence. And you must understand how the government of Canada has historically underfunded education and health services for Indigenous children, providing consistently lower levels of support than for non-Indigenous kids, and how it continues to do so to this day. The white face of prosperity built its own society as the red face powerlessly stood and watched.

Seven Fallen Feathers is the kind of book that makes me feel near paralysed by helplessness: In straightforward reportage, investigative journalist Tanya Talaga tells the stories of seven Indigenous teenagers who died while attending the Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School in Thunder Bay, Ontario between its opening, in 2000, and 2011 (when Talaga began her investigation). Established to educate students who are flown in from remote northern reserves, this Indigenous-administrated private school of about 150 grade 9-12 students not only provides classroom instruction, but offers 24 hour/day counselling and arranges the offsite boarding for these kids who are often in “the big city” for the first time. Although none of these tragic deaths occurred on school property, Talaga is able to paint a perilous picture for any Indigenous person who chooses to live in Thunder Bay; made exponentially more dangerous for loosely supervised youths who have no choice but to move to Thunder Bay to attend high school, and who might turn to drugs and alcohol out of boredom or a desire to fit in. And as perilous as this picture is, I have no idea how to fix it; hence the paralysis. I couldn't help but get my back up at some of Talaga's accusations of Canada's “apartheid” culture, and I didn't always follow along with her conclusions, but this book is an important work of witnessing and should be widely read.

Talaga starts at the beginning – with the history of Thunder Bay and its surrounding First Nations – and after covering the horrors of residential schools, and after their closure, the pressing need for decent post-secondary schooling for those students who outgrow whatever underfunded elementary education their home reserves offer, Talaga describes Dennis Franklin Cromarty High School – a school run by Natives themselves that provides “a First Nations' education system that enforces academic standards, reinforces cultural identity, and enables learners to contribute with confidence to the well-being of the global community” (from the school's website) – and who, Native or non-Native, wouldn't like the sound of that? Tragically, within weeks of DFC first opening, 15-year-old student Jethro Anderson was found dead in Thunder Bay's Kaministiquia River. In retracing what is known of Jethro Anderson's last day, Talaga writes that he had been drinking all evening, and although no one knows how he made his way from his bus stop to the river, Talaga insists that his death couldn't have been accidental – no Native youth, raised around lakes and rivers, would have entered the cold water willingly. Although there was never any evidence of foul play, and I couldn't quite understand Talaga's insistence that there must have been, there's no denying that the Thunder Bay PD did very little to find the missing teenager, and when he was recovered from the river, they were quick to close the case.

This same pattern is seen in most of the stories of the seven “fallen feathers”: Jordan Wabasse, Curran Strang, Kyle Morrisseau, and Reggie Bushie were all drinking heavily the nights they disappeared and were later found in the water. Robyn Harper was heavily intoxicated and aspirated on her vomit as she lay in the hallway of her boarding house. Paul Panacheese had not been drinking or using drugs, and although he didn't appear to have anything physically wrong with him, the young man simply dropped dead in the house he was sharing with his mother. In each case of drowning, Talaga insists that they must have encountered foul play, and in every case, it is the indifferent response of the police, the coroner, and the justice system that the author particularly underlines; just another dead Indian; case closed.

At the urging of a high profile Toronto lawyer, an inquest was eventually held into these seven deaths, and the jury came back with dozens of recommendations; including maybe not forcing teenagers to travel hundreds of kilometres away from their families in order to receive a basic education. Two more DFC students have drowned in Thunder Bay since the inquest closed.

I did have a hard time accepting Talaga's insistence that those who drowned would never have willingly gone into cold rivers, and although she does describe the binge-drinking that most of them engaged in on the nights they disappeared, Talaga never suggests that any of them may have stumbled off a riverbank or fallen off a bridge. On the other hand, she does include the stories of a couple of Natives who survived beatings by groups of white men (including one who was left for dead in a river), so without outright saying so, I imagine that Talaga is trying to make the point that systemic racism in Thunder Bay has led to groups of white men going around throwing Native teenagers into the water; all tacitly accepted by the systemic racism of the white police and coroner's office. If that's her suspicion, I wish she would have come right out and said it: after the horrifying story of Barbara Kentner's senseless death – succumbing to the internal trauma caused by a trailer hitch being thrown at her from the window of a moving pickup as she walked down the side of a Thunder Bay street – I would have believed it (and am gratified to have heard this week that the perpetrator, Brayden Bushby, has had the charges against him upgraded to second degree murder).

I also don't understand the logistics of opening a proper high school on every reserve in Canada, but I do agree that this is a human rights issue, and despite my feelings of paralysis on the matter, I hope there are people out there with the power to make things happen. Education is the first step to all social change, and Seven Fallen Feathers is a vital lesson in what's going on today.

2017 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction Finalists:


Tomboy Survival Guide by Ivan Coyote

Birds Art Life by Kyo Maclear

Life on the Ground Floor:Letters from the Edge of Emergency Medicine by James Maskalyk 

All We Leave Behind: A Reporter’s Journey into the Lives of Others by Carol Off

Seven Fallen Feathers: Racism, Death, and Hard Truths in a Northern City by Tanya Talaga

*Won by Life on the Ground Floor. All of these books are worthy finalists, and I learned a lot, but my favourite would be Tomboy Survival Guide as the best written/most eye-opening.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Our house was a castle, turreted and open to the sky.

We Have Always Lived in the Castle is all mood and madness, with an unreliable, immature narrator – incanting secret spells, nailing charms to trees – whose endearing relationship with her sister is so charming that the reader is often distracted from the fact that one of them is an unrepentant monster; this slim book is a tragedy with a misdirecting veneer of playfulness; a galvanic disconnect that I felt on my skin; in my teeth. Meet Merricat:

My name is Mary Katherine Blackwood. I am eighteen years old, and I live with my sister Constance. I have often thought that with any luck at all, I could have been born a werewolf, because the two middle fingers on both my hands are the same length, but I have had to be content with what I had. I dislike washing myself, and dogs, and noise. I like my sister Constance, and Richard Plantagenet, and Amanita phalloides, the death-cup mushroom. Everyone else in our family is dead.

Right from the start, you can see that something's not right with Merricat. When she walks to the nearby town for library books and groceries, she's met with open hostility (The people of the village have always hated us), and these unfriendly townsfolk could pass for those from The Haunting of Hill House or Shirley Jackson's most famous short story The Lottery. (Much has been written about Jackson's hostile relationship with the villagers nearby to where she lived with her husband; I don't know about that, but it's certainly a recurring motif in her work.) And while at first this animosity seems class-based (the Blackwoods live in the big house, and although there used to be a useful shortcut through their property, it was fenced off at Merricat's mother's urging), the taunting rhyme that follows Merricat up the street hints of darker things:

Merricat, said Connie, would you like a cup of tea?
Oh no, said Merricat, you’ll poison me.
Merricat, said Connie, would you like to go to sleep?
Down in the boneyard ten feet deep!

We soon learn that six years previous, someone poisoned the Blackwood family with arsenic – killing the girls' parents, brother, and aunt; nearly killing their Uncle Julian and leaving him an invalid under their care – and while Constance had been charged with the crime, she was acquitted at trial. The aged and addled Uncle Julian is trying to capture every detail of the final day of his brother's life for his memoirs, and as he is constantly confirming his facts throughout this book, it makes for a very natural slow unspooling of those events. Meanwhile, Merricat speaks fancifully of flying a horse to the moon, traces protective words into her marmalade, and harbours murderous thoughts in her heart.

I would have liked to come into the grocery some morning and see them all, even the Elberts and the children, lying there crying with the pain of dying. I would help myself to groceries, I thought, stepping over their bodies, taking whatever I fancied from the shelves, and go home, with perhaps a kick for Mrs. Donell while she lay there. I was never sorry when I had thoughts like this; I only wished they would come true.

I won't attempt to diagnose what mental disorder(s) Merricat is displaying, but Constance is seemingly an agoraphobe (an affliction that Jackson herself famously suffered with in her last years), and the insularity of their life in the fenced-off manorhouse suits the sisters fine. Whether it's part of the mental illness or she actually believes in her own witchcraft, Merricat does what she can to protect her fragile older sister:

All our land was enriched with my treasures buried in it, thickly inhabited just below the surface with my marbles and my teeth and my colored stones, all perhaps turned to jewels by now, held together under the ground in a powerful taut web which never loosened, but held fast to guard us.

Alas, all the magical charms in the world can't prevent a gold-digging relative from trying to insinuate himself into the girls' lives, and when Cousin Charles shows up unannounced, the plot takes off.

I loved everything about We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and especially the delightful disconnect between what was being said and done on the surface and the truths that lie beneath. I suspect that Shirley Jackson, in this her final novel, was playing with her audience's expectations – I kept anticipating the supernatural: Is Merricat (with her spells and her talking cat) actually a witch? Are people interacting with her; could she be a ghost? With all of her rules about what she can and can't touch, which rooms she's allowed to enter, is Merricat some kind of vampire? Or is she simply a sick and damaged young woman? (Merricat seems to be the psychopathic female lead that Gillian Flynn keeps trying to capture.) Even the villagers turn out to be worse, and better, than expected; they're real people, not pitchfork-wielding savages. Joyce Carol Oates wrote that this book revolves around the psycho-sexual fetishisation of food, so I guess you could read it on that level, but to me, it's all mood and madness; the galvanising disconnect between that which is said and that which lies buried underneath. 

“I am so happy,” Constance said at last, gasping. “Merricat, I am so happy.”
“I told you that you would like it on the moon.”