Mind Picking : Happy Halloween IX

 

There has been so much going on this year domestically, and considering the COVID protocols that are still in place and preventing us from getting out and seeking new experiences, I was pretty sure that this would be the year that I would have nothing interesting to write about for Halloween (honestly, I can't believe that this is the ninth year that I've been doing this). But I did have a curious experience nonetheless, and I'd like to share it.

As I had the devastating duty to report earlier this year, first my mother-in-law and then my father-in-law passed away as summer began. Although they were in their eighties, and each of them had various health issues, it was still surprising and incredibly saddening to suddenly have them gone from our lives. And because they were living with my sister- and brother-in-law, and because Rudy and Dan then decided to invite his parents to move into their inlaw suite, furniture needed to be cleared out and my younger daughter was honoured to take her grandparents' Mid-Century Modern bedroom furniture for her new apartment. 

The day that Mallory moved, Rudy and I were able to load up the furniture on the U-Haul by ourselves, and when I got the truck to Mal's new place, she enlisted her friends in helping me to get her belongings off the truck. As we went to move one of the dressers, one of Mallory's friends balked at the weight and suggested we take the drawers out - and that's when we found, jammed behind those drawers, some curious items: A letter from my mother-in-law's lawyer, from the 1980's, giving a final settlement of her mother's estate; a Legion Magazine, commemorating the anniversary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge; and three pairs of discount, Queensize, taupe pantyhose. And hand on my heart, no assortment of random items could have felt like a clearer sign that my mother-in-law was trying to get through to me.

I have watched plenty of shows like Long Island Medium and sessions always begin with the medium saying something like, "I'm being shown the number nineteen" or "the colour blue" or  "a gold key", and the person in attendance is generally flabbergasted, saying, "There's no way you could have randomly guessed that; no other image could have been a clearer sign that you're in contact with my loved one." And then Theresa (or whatever medium) will say, "This is Spirit's way of validating that your loved one is here and safe and watching over you from the other side." And who wouldn't want to get that message?

As for the specific items that we found: My mother-in-law's uncle was injured at Vimy Ridge, and while that obviously explains why she would have saved the Legion Magazine that commemorated the battle, Bev also liked to read books about Vimy Ridge and talk about it in a way that made it particularly her own thing; Dave had been spending a lot of time this summer settling his parents' estates, and the lawyer's letter truly felt like an acknowledgement of the work that he had done; and the pantyhose...the pantyhose is what made it feel like a message to me.

I loved my mother-in-law: she was a big-hearted, generous, give-the-shirt-off-her-back type, and these qualities that made her so loveable were also the qualities that drove me a little bonkers. If Bev thought she had anything that I might be able to make use of, she would insist I take it, even if I really didn't want it. Our relationship was decades of her saying, "Here, read this Danielle Steel book...take these socks that are too thick for me...have these brown bananas" and me saying, "No thank you." And then her insisting, "You might like it, there's nothing wrong with them, I'm sure you'll get more use out of these." Drove me bonkers, lol. So, with Kennedy's wedding happening in September, I am 100% certain that if Bev had still been alive and had somehow found three pairs of discount, Queensize, taupe pantyhose at the back of her drawer (the sale sticker, from Woolco - so, at least twenty-five years old - put these at 3 for $1.98), she would have insisted that I take them for me and the girls to wear at the event. Even if Kennedy and Mallory have never worn pantyhose in their lives, and even if I tried to say that they really weren't my size or my colour, Bev would have tried to make me take them with me; her offer, as always, made in the spirit of a genuine delight in having something to give to me, and my stubborn refusal, as always, mystifying to her. 

And here's my takeaway: I don't think that these items were supernatural gifts from the other side, but they certainly felt like a message. If these had been images given to me through a medium like Theresa Caputo, the magazine would have served as the initial image to prove that we were in contact, specifically, with Bev; the lawyer's letter was a validation of gratitude for the work that Dave and his sister have been doing to settle the estate; and the pantyhose were the recognition and continuation of an inside joke between me and my mother-in-law (maybe even proof that she finally understands what it was that made me bonkers and giving me a final razzing; no one loved to laugh like Bev did and I want to believe she's still laughing out there). Dave, in particular, was fascinated by these finds: he thought it was no coincidence that they were uncovered in my presence since I'm the only one who watches these kind of shows and would, therefore, be the easiest member of the family to get a message to; Rudy says she cleaned out that dresser twice - when her parents first moved homes and as she got it ready for Mallory - and never found anything jammed behind the drawers; but if she had, I'm sure she would have just tossed them out as the junk they essentially were. 

I, on a deeply personal level, did find meaning in these items, and if they were left in my path to validate that those who pass remain safe and ever present in our lives, that's a message that I think is worth sharing. Perhaps not Halloween-level spooky, but certainly suggestive of something surviving death; and isn't that a lovely message for today and every day? 

On a related note: That same day that Mallory moved in, she and her roommates were apparently sitting around, flipping through some birthday fortune-telling book, and the first date that they randomly opened to was her Grandpa's birthday. And Dave is provoked by the fact that every time he goes to do some work on the Sauble Beach property, he finds dimes. The first time he found a single dime, and having heard that dimes are particularly known to be messages from the beyond, he thought, "That's weird." The next time, he had three dimes fall to the ground when he was taking down a cupboard in the laundry room, and he said to himself, "This is getting more interesting." And the next time he went up, he bumped a shelf in the garage and a dime fell to the ground, and he apparently said out loud, "Okay, I get it. I know you're here." Dave says he has collected fifteen dimes in all at Sauble since his father passed, and he has come to believe that these are signs from his Dad; and that makes him feel good. Make of that what you will.

Happy Halloween!


Strange stories from previous years:

Halloween I

Halloween II

Halloween III

Halloween IV

Halloween V

Halloween VI

Halloween VII

Halloween VIII

Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas

 

The Parvati Valley has earned its own nicknames: the Valley of Shadows, the Valley of Death. It is a place where every moment exists on a knife edge, where a wrong turn tips a vehicle over an unbarriered cliff edge, a wrong step pitches a traveler into a churning maelstrom of a river, a wrong turn sends a hiker to ranges unknown. Since the early 1990s, dozens of international backpackers have vanished without a trace while traveling in and around the Parvati Valley, an average of one every year, earning this tiny, remote sliver of the subcontinent a dark reputation as India’s Bermuda Triangle. The circumstances of each disappearance are different — the tourist’s country of origin; villages visited or paths walked; last known location — yet eerily similar. All feature a spirited backpacker seeking an off-the-beaten-track adventure, a collection of anecdotes from fellow travelers relating the backpacker’s final days, a family’s anguished search, and thousands of unanswered questions.

I absolutely loved Harley Rustad’s last narrative nonfiction tale — Big Lonely Doug:The Story of One of Canada’s Last Great Trees — so I was excited to read his latest: Lost in the Valley of Death: A Story of Obsession and Danger in the Himalayas. And while Rustad brings the same eye for detail, background, and narrative tension to this story of Justin Alexander Shetler — a thirty-five-year old American backpacker with an incredible life story, a large social media presence, and who mysteriously disappeared in the Indian Himalayas — I’m left feeling, somehow, that the story of the tree was ultimately more interesting and relatable. This is still an intriguing story, well told, that asks interesting questions about what a meaningful life looks like. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Over time, Shetler’s stories began to acquire their own near-mythological quality. There was the time he carried the injured toddler in Nepal, running for hours — some who have heard the story say days — to take her to the nearest clinic; there was the time he went into the wilderness in Idaho, or, as some recall in Montana, with nothing more than a knife and emerged weeks later wearing buckskin clothing; there was the time he was beaten up, or possibly even stabbed, in Bangkok while trying to save a young woman from harassment. Shortly after quitting his job, he found himself at a Los Angeles restaurant talking with Jonathon Goldsmith, the actor who was appearing on television commercials as “The Most Interesting Man in the World” for a long-running advertising campaign of Dos Equis beer, who remarked, “I think you might actually be the most interesting man in the world.” Shetler illegally climbed the most famous bridges in the United States, he became a Buddhist monk in Thailand, and he crossed snow-covered Himalayas in flip-flops. It was all part of a story that Shetler wanted to build, a story that, as he saw it, was just beginning.

This passage doesn’t even reference Shetler’s unconventional childhood (that saw him attending a wilderness survival academy instead of high school), his time fronting the alt rock band Punchface, or the three years he worked with a tech startup and travelled the globe on a luxury budget. Approaching his mid-thirties, Shetler decided to leave his high-paying job, give away the majority of his worldly goods, and embark on a quest for deeper meaning (which he believed could only be attained ascetically as the heroes had in the books he grew up reading). Shetler spent the next couple of years vagabonding across the United States, South America, and Asia — boosting his social media following with beautiful pictures and enviable adventures — and by the time he found India calling to him irresistibly, Shetler was on the horns of a dilemma: Should he continue to focus on growing his ego-boosting online presence or was it time to give himself over to a sadhu, an Indian holy man, who could teach him to entirely free himself from his ego by learning to let go of the world. When Shetler decided to accompany one such sadhu on a dangerous trek to a holy lake, his last post to social media was:

These Babas are said to have magical powers from decades of ancient yoga practice. But. I really don’t know what to expect. I’ve never done yoga, and his style is extreme — based on the grotesque swellings on his joints. But I want to see the world through his eyes, which are essentially 5000 years old, an ancient spiritual path. I’m going to put my heart into it and see what happens. My back is in bad shape, (broken when I was 19) and even with daily soaks in hot springs, this cave/mountain life has recently put me in a state of constant discomfort. I’m sadly inflexible, and I can’t even sit still for a few minutes without pain. Maybe Baba Life will be good for me. I should return mid September or so.

If I’m not back by then, don’t look for me. ;)

And as it turned out, that was Shetler’s last ever social media post. So, how seriously were his friends and family to take that final thought, “If I’m not back by then, don’t look for me”? How to interpret the wink? Was he joking or saying goodbye?

Rustad went to India (several times) in search of those answers, and this book is filled with his conversations with the people who knew Shetler, as well as long passages from Shetler’s own writings. Rustad quotes freely from famed literature set in India and fills in the history of the area: many foreigners have contracted “India Syndrome” in this magic-filled valley at the foot of the Himalayas and disappeared into mountain caves to live undetected; sometimes for decades. This is also one of the remote settings of India’s illegal cannabis cultivation (the hash produced here is apparently world-renowned) and the hills are filled with black marketeers, thieves, and fake holy men. As we get to learn more and more about Shetler and his quixotic nature, there is certainly narrative tension in wanting to know what Rustad learns of the backpacker's fate. Despite all of the crazy antics in Shetler’s life, I really did find the story of Big Lonely Doug to be somehow richer, but it’s not really Rustad’s fault that I wasn’t completely wowed — Rustad set out on his own journey without knowing what he would ultimately find and he presents the results in a narrative that is consistently interesting and well-written.

The Nineties: A Book

 

The feeling of the era, and what that feeling supposedly signified, isolates the nineties from both its distant past and its immediate future. It was a period of ambivalence, defined by an overwhelming assumption that life, and particularly American life, was underwhelming. That was the thinking at the time. It is not the thinking now. Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

I have always liked Chuck Klosterman — reading one of his books feels like talking to my younger brother Kyler, who has a similarly episodic memory for pop cultural moments and an ironic tone that masks wise insights — and Klosterman’s latest, The Nineties:A Book, seems particularly written for me (and others who lived through that decade as adults). Klosterman himself notes that every generation thinks that they’re living through times of intense change, and that’s because it’s always true, but the changes that occurred in the period between the falling of the Berlin Wall and the falling of the Twin Towers, as the world moved from analog to digital, were particularly revolutionary (and maybe I only agree with that thesis because I was an adult during those years). We went from people who were tied to our house phones if we were expecting a call, answering every call in case it was important — people who published our addresses and phone numbers in books that were freely distributed — to becoming a people who took our phones along in our pockets, often ignoring calls even from people we know, and made it illegal to “dox” — to publicly publish someone’s address and phone number online. We went from watching fairly formulaic television — because it was the only thing on, and if you missed an episode, maybe you’d catch it in reruns — to “prestige television” like The Sopranos (which we could tape, then DVR, then stream and binge), but more viewers watched an average episode of Seinfeld than the finale of The Sopranos. The nineties were a time of nihilism and postmodernism and a desire not to be seen as trying too hard; the days of Nirvana and Friends and The Matrix; low speed chases and clear colas and domestic terrorism and both Lance Armstrong and Bill Clinton staring into a television camera and insisting that they did not do that thing that they totally did. Klosterman says that people born after 1985 look back and say, “How could you have put up with all of that?”, and he replies, as do I, you really had to be there. Because I was there, every little bit of this resonated with me, but I could see how some might see it as pointless navel-gazing about a decade that was about nothing. As for me, I am happy that this book exists and that I got an early chance to read it. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

(People born after WWII and before 1985) were forced to wrestle with an experience that reconstituted reality without changing anything about the physical world. These interlocked generations — Boomers and Xers — will be the only people who experienced this shift as it happened, with total recall of both the previous world and the world that came next. “If we’re the last people in history to know life before the Internet,” wrote Michael Harris in his book The End of Absence, “we are also the only ones who will ever speak, as it were, both languages. We are the only fluent translators of Before and After.”

My reaction to just about everything in this book was a highly personal one, and while on goodreads I decided to not make this a navel-gazing public review about my own personal experience of the 90s, I don't have spoiler tags here, so that's what this will be. (*forewarned I don't expect this review to be interesting to anyone but future me*)

If I could change anything about this book, it would be to somehow shift the decade to cover 1985-1995 to better match my own experiences (and as Klosterman is five years younger than I am, perhaps the decade aligns perfectly for him as is.) I can accept that the following captures something true about me as a Generation Xer:

The generational disinterest in contradicting any allegation of apathy proves that the allegations are correct. Accusations of an overreliance on “irony” are met with ironic rebuttals. It’s like a court case where the plaintiff and the defendant are both trying to win by making identical arguments. The portrait is accepted as accurate because no one is particularly invested in arguing otherwise, and that will remain true for as long as the generation is remembered.

And the following is an eerily accurate assessment of how (and why) I left my university studies:

Allan Bloom published an unexpected bestseller titled The Closing of the American Mind, claiming that the modern university system had prioritized relativism over critical thinking, inadvertently leading to nihilism — but Bloom was attacked for being elitist, out of touch, clandestinely conservative, and not really a philosopher.

The nihilism I felt was very real, and this was shared even by my friends who ended up finishing university. As a group, we would go for coffee and write crowdsourced poetry and songs; all of them ironic and fatalistic. On a whim, we got together once to record some of our songs. Kevin had a synthesiser that he didn’t know how to play (when I later saw Ross on Friends sit down to a similar keyboard to “find his sound”, I totally lost it), but we would select a synth beat and Kevin would just kind of make up chords and moods to go along with them. We called ourselves Men in Comas and our feature song was called “Men in Comas (Get an Erection)” (because that was a hilarious thing that we heard could happen?), and the cover of our cassette tape was a reproduction of Marilyn Monroe on the autopsy table, which Kevin had discovered in some book at the library and had photocopied over and over in black and white until he got the “fuzziness” of the gender just right; this was our photoshop. We had a song called “Save Me a Cyanide Pill” (about committing suicide in the case of a nuclear war — which we assumed was coming — instead of living as a mutant in a hellscape), “The Orphanage Song” (about being too ugly to get adopted), and “The Train Bridge” (our country crossover, with half the lyrics in French, begging the high, rocking bridge to not fall down on us). I wish I could remember more of the songs (or that I still had my copy of the tape!), but that was the mood in the late 80s. We did not know if we would live out the century, and it made it feel like nothing mattered. I remember thinking when the first Gulf War started in 1991, “This is it.” (And not uncoincidentally because I had been reading Nostrodamus and some details lined up about Armageddon happening in the Middle East, and that when Russia and China intervene, it would all be over. [Something like that.] And it did frighten me.)

My husband Dave, on the other hand, only two years older than I am (born in 1965, so technically actually a Baby Boomer, even if I insist that he is not the same generation as my parents who were actually born right after WWII), identifies more with the 70s and unironically loves everything about that decade:

The seventies were beloved, but not as a historical period; the seventies were beloved as a collection of stuff, some of which was cherished precisely because it now seemed dumb.

Dave loves all that dumb stuff — the movies, the music, the television; the license plate on his ‘74 Dodge is 70S GUY — and I don’t know if that’s why the nihilism of my young adulthood seems to have skipped him; I couldn’t even get him worked up about the Gulf War at the time. (Hello world, hear the song that we're singin'. Come on, get happy!) Something about our different reactions to the times we were living through has lingered until today and the way that we embrace new technologies: He loves Spotify (but only to find familiar songs; he does not want an algorithm to guess what he’d like) and I prefer the human-touched randomness of FM radio; he won’t go anywhere without Google Maps (“Take this right, it’s two minutes faster”) but I would rather stick to my regular route and see what the two minute hold up is about; he will Google any little unknown/unremembered detail and I don’t mind not knowing every little thing (I will say that YouTube comes in handy when reading a book like this; I enjoyed rewatching videos like "Smells Like Teen Spirirt" and "Creep"; watching "Cop Killer" and "Fly Me Courageous" for the first time); and ever since the first time I saw a sitcom without a laugh track (maybe The Office?), I was sent along a postmodernist path that sees me now cringing at anything that is trying too hard to craft an “entertaining” experience for me — I feel totally done with Hollywood movies, popular fiction, live concerts with huge production values, and pretty much all scripted television. (By contrast, Dave can still laugh at Gilligan’s Island, thinks The Rolling Stones and Bob Seger put on amazing live shows as geriatrics, and can tear up at the most manipulated Hollywood death scene; his is a sincere heart.) I loved Friends when it first came out — I made Dave watch it with me because it was the first TV show I ever saw about people around our age — but by the time 1995 came around (the year that I would end my 90s decade on), we were married, had a mortgage, a dog, and a baby on the way. I remember I was pregnant and sitting at home when live footage of the Oklahoma City bombing interrupted whatever I was watching, and maybe it was the hormones, but that was pretty much the end of irony for me. All those dead kids in a government building daycare, my first child in my belly, and I finally felt like a full adult who had to believe that everything did matter. The OJ trial was going on at the same time, and while I might have previously been sucked into watching it as a shared cultural spectacle, I now found the idea totally distasteful; I no longer watched. I even stopped watching Friends long before it was over; I had grown up and the friends had not.

So, maybe as someone who was no longer going to allow myself to be sucked into the overfabricated entertainment machine, I’m not the right person to consider everything Klosterman had to say about movies from this era — that films like Reality Bites, Natural Born Killers, and American Beauty seemed perfect in their day but are now seen as problematic and trashy — and while I would agree that the home VCR and video rental stores absolutely transformed movie watching as a less restricted experience, they didn’t make me an auteur who internalised craft and form and who then proceeded to expertly critique what I was watching. I don’t even know if the following is true:

The mania surrounding DiCaprio in the wake of Titanic was astronomical, bordering on unsettling. His unprecedented ascendance was the product of two divergent phenomena: He was the last actor to achieve superstardom as a vestige of the monolithic Hollywood system and the first actor to become a megastar within the emerging paradigm of postmodern celebrity. He will always be the only person to have both of those experiences at the same time.

And while Klosterman writes a lot about sports in this book (so he must be a big sports nerd where I am not?), I absolutely don’t believe this to be true:

The late nineties will forever be defined as baseball’s Steroid Era, to the exclusion of all other events that transpired within that same window of time.

Okay, I really did like The Matrix — maybe because it didn’t actually feel like a big Hollywood movie despite mind-blowing special effects — and I agree with Klosterman that this is the defining film of the times:

The Matrix seemed like it was about computers. It was actually about TV. There are a handful of news events from the nineties that are now used as historical data points. The Clarence Thomas hearings of 1991. The chase of O. J. Simpson in the Ford Bronco in 1994. The shootings at Columbine High School in 1999. These events destroyed lives and altered the future, and they happened the way that they happened. Yet the collective experiences of all those events were real-time televised constructions, confidently broadcast with almost no understanding of what was actually happening or what was being seen. The false meaning of those data points was the product of three factors, instantaneously combined into a matrix of our own making: the images presented on the screen, the speculative interpretations of what those images meant, and the internal projection of the viewer. What is real? How do you define real? The Matrix resonated not because it was fantastical fiction, but because it was not.

These (and, I suppose, the Bush v Gore election and its endless vote recounts in late 2000) were the last culture-rattling events to be exclusively televised, with the horrific events of 9/11 being the first to receive immediate online dissection that now typifies the way that we are presented with the news. And, if anything, the world feels even less real and knowable today.

The past is a mental junkyard, filled with memories no one remembers. If someone glances at the Billboard singles chart from any random week of the nineties, they will always find a handful of songs that were extremely popular before being wholly erased from the historical record . That process makes sense: The Billboard song chart contains one hundred “hot” songs that change every week, so a music fan who dislikes Top 40 radio might not hear a noteworthy single even once. Movie theaters shuffle the decks every weekend. Sales for a high-profile novel might stall at ten thousand copies before the book goes out of print five years after it was published. Most popular entertainment is designed to be niche and disposable.

For this reason, if no other, I’m glad that The Nineties: A Book exists; it might have been a placeholder decade about nothing, but by its end, the world had changed forever and I am pleased that Klosterman has preserved and analysed the highlights. Worked for me.

When We Lost Our Heads

 

The new silhouette was mature and stately. It was more beautiful than the previous one. Sadie wanted the silhouette to turn her head and explain herself. She leaned forward and pulled the bag to her. It was as though she were holding Marie’s head in her hands, but Marie refused to look her in the eye.

When you read a book entitled When We Lost Our Heads — featuring a decadently wealthy main character named Marie Antoine, heiress to a sugar fortune and whose likeness is featured on every bag sold (“Everyone knew Marie from her profile on the sugar bags. It represented sweetness. It represented being able to eat cake instead of bread.”) — you might think you know where this book is going. But this is from the mind of Heather O’Neill. Virtuoso of the clever metaphor, doyen of dazzling wordplay whose humour sweetens the political punch, O’Neill never fails to surprise, delight, and provoke. With other characters named Mary Robespierre, Jeanne-Pauline Marat, and Georgina Danton, revolution is certainly on the horizon, but the enemy is not simply, or solely, L'Ancien Régime. Focussing on an extraordinary friendship set against the backdrop of Industrial Age Montreal, this is class warfare, sex warfare, gender warfare; referencing Dickens by way of Christina Rossetti and the two Marys, Wollstonecraft and Shelley, with the Marquis de Sade thrown in as well. This is literary, gritty, socially astute, and I loved every page of it; I will boldly declare it’s my favourite O’Neill novel so far. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

Every mother engages in an act of parenting they know isn’t a great idea. They allow something to slide. And this is the thing that causes the child to develop a personality and also all their worst inclinations and predispositions and habits. The mother’s neglect seals the child’s doom. Thus, we can safely blame all crimes on mothers.

The initiating tone is amusingly wry, right up until it becomes deadly serious. In the beginning we meet young, motherless Marie Antoine — envy of all the girls on Montreal’s Golden Mile for her superior wealth, beauty, and charm — and she might have drifted through life forever in her bubble of self-satisfaction if, when she was twelve, she hadn’t come across another young girl whose mysterious aura of artistic self-composure hadn’t pierced Marie like a lightning strike. The profound and inexplicable attraction is mutual for this Sadie Arnett — the unloved daughter of social climbers, Sadie will be forced into Marie’s orbit before she has a chance to dissect her own desires — and the friends are so well-matched, like “two dolls that were being marketed to girls, one fair, one dark”, that their friendship seems both destined and doomed from the start. In the style of a Victorian novel, there will be tragedy, separations, coincidence and dramatic revelations, and as the narrative descends the hill from the mansion that sugar bought on the Golden Mile to a character-rich brothel in the lower reaches of Montreal’s Squalid Mile, we are given a soapbox-side view from which to watch the fomenting of La Révolution.

Every decent friendship comes with a drop of hatred. But that hatred is like honey in the tea. It makes it addictive.

At its heart, this is the story of Marie and Sadie’s fraught friendship, but more precisely, this is the story of women; the restricted lives of women from all classes (but especially the working poor); the impotence of most and the inflamed actions of the bold and desperate. I appreciated that O’Neill flipped the genders of the architects of the French Revolution (Robespierre, Marat, Danton; even the Marquis de Sade), for if the history of women’s revolt had been “written in invisible ink”, this is a truly satisfying effort to “put the page up against the window and let a light shine through it”. I don’t want to reveal any more about the plot, but as always, I can’t help sampling some of O’Neill’s metaphorical exuberance.

There was much intriguing imagery this time around involving puppets:

• A group of bats flew past the window of the brothel, as though they were shadow puppets who had escaped a child’s wall.

• Madame was an older woman who wore a burgundy dress with an enormous skirt and a tight bonnet on her head. It was a mystery what might be found underneath her large skirt. One might imagine if she lifted it, there would be a small puppet theater underneath, where all the puppets were having delirious sex.

• They danced like they had no feet but were swinging around as though they were two swirling puppets in the hands of a careless puppeteer.

And as seems to be her routine imagery, there was much involving roses and cats and the moon:

• The mansion was surrounded by a thick bed of beautifully kept pink roses. They were like ballerinas taking a break and sitting down in their tutus.

• She found the violin, took it out of the case, and tried playing a note on it. It sounded like a black cat who was on the gallows confessing to all the bad luck it had caused.

• The moon was full. It looked like a breast engorged with milk because of all the babies crying in the night.

And, as always, paragraphs bursting with analogy and anthropomorphism (to my delight):

The clouds were puffy and large like the foam at the top of a glass of beer. Marie had never seen the sea before. She stretched her arms out toward it. There was a large brass band playing as she ran about collecting seashells. A musician held a French horn to his head that looked like the ear of an elephant pricking up to hear a sound. Marie stood in the sea. She ran after the waves in her bare feet. The sea changed its mind about retreating. It turned around and came after her. The sand on the beach tried to hold on to the impression of her footprints for as long as possible after she left. She screamed when the water hit her ankles. It was colder than the snow in Canada. It had the feel of bottles striking up against her ankles. She kept looking down to see if there were bottle messages from Sadie. But there was nothing there but the pain the ocean caused. Then seaweed grabbed at her ankles as though mermaids were casting their nets to catch her.

Yet, although I did delight in the language, I was always aware that this was a serious work of political and feminist fiction:

Humorous books were often the most subversive ones. People became free in literature first. It was through books that new ideas entered the general population.

I loved every bit of this; entertained and provoked, I couldn’t ask for more.

Light Perpetual

 

Come, other future. Come, mercy not manifest in time; come knowledge not obtainable in time. Come, other chances. Come, unsounded deep. Come, undivided light.

Come dust.

At the sentence level, Light Perpetual feels kind of remarkable — the language is lyrical, the scenes rich in specific detail, fates ebbing and flowing like the roar of a crowd at a football match — but overall, as a novel, it feels kind of pointless. I understand why Francis Spufford wrote this book (daily walking past a memorial plaque at the site of a London Woolworths that had been bombed during WWII — killing 168 people, including 15 children — Spufford decided to bring a fictional five of those children back to life and explore what those lives might have been had that bomb never landed), but beyond the satisfaction of playing God and resurrecting dead innocents, there’s really no literary payoff in this novel. Spufford imagines five ordinary, often unhappy, fates for these children — none of them goes on to cure cancer or prevent 9/11; the world seems utterly unaffected whether they live or not — and with just the one timeline given, with no contrast with how the world would have looked if they had died as children, the central concept feels like a big so what? (By contrast, Paul Auster’s 4 3 2 1 describes four different lives that might have played out for one character had small differences occurred in his surroundings; and while I might have found it a bit dull and self-indulgent, I understood the point of it.) This book is fine; I didn’t find it literarily strong enough to have been a real contender for this year’s Man Booker Prize, am not surprised it didn’t make the shortlist, and I could have skipped it without feeling poorer for it. Had some lovely sentences, though.

He gazes. A rose-coloured scratch is travelling on the blue, high and far. The last plane of daylight. The celestial clock is evolving and bringing on the night. Even happiness can’t stop it. Time is his friend now, but it goes by so fast.

There’s a truly surreal prologue in which the destruction of the Woolworths is described and then we are invited to imagine an alternate reality in which some hiccup, failure, some tiny alteration, sent that bomb off course. The novel then starts properly five years later, in 1949, with a class of schoolchildren having their Singing Class and we are first introduced to the five: Jo has a beautiful singing voice, and synaesthetically, sees music as colours; her twin, Val, is more interested in boys than singing; Vernon is a piggish bully who wishes he had a good singing voice because he is helplessly in thrall to music’s beauty; Alec is clever and smart-mouthed; and in a separate scene, we meet poor little Ben, undersized and scatterbrained, as he attends the footie with his Da. From here, the timeline jumps ahead fifteen years at a go (to 1964, 1979, 1994, and 2009), and in each period, the characters’ basic traits are pretty much what they had been as children. Spufford does add some incredibly detailed scenes that must have been the result of extensive research — the operation of a linotype machine at a major newspaper, the mechanics of writing a song and laying down multiple tracks, the routine of a double-decker bus conductor in London’s core — but they were more like impressive vignettes than scenes integral to the story. And Spufford introduces a bunch of issues — schizophrenia (which can apparently be cured by the love of a good woman, and an exorcism), labour strikes during the Thatcher era (but are we honestly meant to support the typesetters’ right to do their job forever at the dawn of the digital era?), neo-Naziism (but does anyone buy the explanation for Mike’s need to crack skulls or Val’s inability to leave him?), and bulimia (and honestly, this granddaughter seemed written into the plot just so Spufford could make her sick. Why?) — but these seemed more for colour than as points of entry into exploring the changing social scene over the decades. There are stories here, but not a satisfying novel.

People say the world gets smaller when you’re dying: but there it still is, as astonishingly much of it as ever. It’s you who shrinks. Or you who can grasp the world less, who can take hold of less and less of it, until you’re only peeping at one burning-bright corner of the whole immense fabric. And then not even that.

Einstein said that we can live our lives as though nothing is a miracle, or as though everything is, and that may have ultimately been Spufford’s intention with Light Perpetual: He writes five incredibly ordinary lives here, maybe daring me to say that these lives were not important enough to write about. Either all of our lives matter or none of them do; we are either all miracles or none of us are. We all amount to dust in the end and the world is poorer for it. There’s a nugget of something interesting there, but it didn’t carry the novel for me.

2021 Man Booker Prize Nominees

The Shortlist (In my order of preference):

A Passage North, Anuk Arudpragasam

The Promise, Damon Galgut * The Winner

No One is Talking About This, Patricia Lockwood

The Fortune Men, Nadifa Mohamed

Bewilderment, Richard Powers

Great Circle, Maggie Shipstead

 

And the rest:

Second Place, Rachel Cusk

China Room, Sunjeev Sahota

An Island, Karen Jennings

The Sweetness of Water, Nathan Harris

Klara and the Sun, Kazuo Ishiguro

A Town Called Solace, Mary Lawson

Light Perpetual, Francis Spufford

Mind Picker: Butterflies Are Free to Fly

 

So, here's the long story of my most recent adventures. After my father-in-law passed away at the end of July, as Dave and I were having lunch with Rudy and Dan after meeting with the funeral home, Rudy turned to me and said, "Dan told me the other day that he thought your neck looked swollen, and I see it now. Tell me you'll get a doctor to look at that." And considering all that we had recently gone through, I said I would; right away. 

My doctor was able to see me immediately, she agreed with Rudy that I seemed to have a goitre developing, and she sent me for blood work and an ultrasound. And based on those, I was called in for a meeting with a specialist. This Dr. Gill is young and confident and he explained to me that I had several nodules on my thyroid — apparently "very common in women my age" — but as a few of them were quite large (the largest being 7.5 cm), they would need to come off and he was setting up a CT Scan next. Dr. Gill is a really confident young doctor and I had no reason to doubt him when he said, "I don't want you to worry. I'll do the worrying for both of us." I did not worry.

I went for the CT Scan (a weird experience that wasn't exactly as I expected; I suppose I was mentally picturing a full body MRI instead of just a ring of tech that moves over one's head and neck), and shortly after that, a receptionist called me to say that Dr. Gill's senior colleague, Dr. Nateghifard, wanted to consult with me; that he was willing to come into the clinic the next morning before his office opened to be able to meet with me if that would be convenient. Well, yeah, that's convenient for me. Still wasn't exactly worried.

So Dr. Nateghifard showed me the CT Scan — pointing out that that biggest nodule was displacing my larynx and forcing it to enter my lungs at a sideways angle (which I never even noticed despite high intensity cardio at the gym? I didn't even clock the massive swelling on one side of my neck until it was pointed out.) — and he wanted to do a biopsy on that big one in the office that day and schedule surgery to remove at least that one side of my thyroid (explaining that if he didn't like what he saw on the left side of the thyroid once he was in there, he would send a sample to pathology and potentially remove that side as well; and if he didn't like the look of my lymph nodes, he'd be removing those too.) Now, if Dr. Gill was like a young Noah Wiley on ER, Dr. Nateghifard is definitely the George Clooney — exuding confidence and competence, a compassionate bedside manner, with salt and pepper hair that promises maturity and experience — and I gritted my teeth through the in-office biopsy; nodded along as the surgery was scheduled, along with a biopsy at the hospital on some of the other nodules.

Meanwhile, we had Kennedy's wedding — I was pleased that none of the medical stuff interfered with those plans, and that I was able to tell my mother and brothers in person what was coming up — and I gritted my teeth through the next biopsy. This one took place in the hospital's radiology department: First an ultrasound tech took a bunch of pictures of my neck and then a doctor came and chose a 1 cm nodule on the left side to biopsy. With a small ultrasound wand in one hand and a large-bore needle in the other, he dug around in my frozen throat three separate times, not so much hurting me as making me flinch as he brushed past nerves and whatnot (it was like when you're getting a filling, and even though your mouth is frozen, when the drill hits a nerve, you jump as though your brain expects it to hurt, even though it doesn't end up hurting; I'm sure I seemed a weinie as I winced and clenched in response to no actual pain.)

A few days after that, I had a pre-op COVID test, and as this was my first COVID test, I was a bit of a weinie about that too. It didn't help that Mallory called as I was pulling into the testing centre and said, "I've had so many friends tell me that their nasal swab was the most painful experience of their lives and I just say, 'Then you haven't known real pain'." Thanks, daughter. (The nurse who gave me the swab said that it's no more painful than jumping into a swimming pool and feeling that sting of chlorine up your nose, and he was exactly right.)

A few days after that, I was pulling into the parking lot at work for my last shift before surgery (I didn't like that I was scheduled to close the night before the operation but I guess it did do a good job of distracting me), and just as I was parking, Dr. Nateghifard's office called to say that the doctor was hoping to speak to me. I had plenty of time and he got on the phone and told me that he had results from both of my biopsies that he wanted to share with me. The large nodule came back as containing "FLUS" (follicular lesions of undetermined significance) and the cells from the smaller nodule on the left came back as "suspicious". Based on that, the doctor said that he would be removing my entire thyroid and he didn't want to ambush me with that info the next morning. He asked if I had questions or concerns and I said, "I made the mistake of googling what happens when the entire thyroid is removed and I guess that does scare me." He wanted to know what in particular was frightening, and I said, "You know — reduced life span, potential for pain and mishap, the difficulty in getting the hormone replacement right after the fact." As for the reduced life span — and I haven't told this to anyone — I read that it's a reduction of 14%. So, if I was going to live to a hundred, living to 86 would probably be a relief; but if I was going to live to 80, living to 68 sounds kind of sad (and especially since I haven't any grandkids yet; 68 is just not that far away for me and I've been so looking forward to that stage of life.) Dr. Nateghifard addressed each of those points and explained that the right side of my thyroid was so distorted by nodules that it needed to come out immediately, and since the nodule on the left was "suspicious", it would likely need to come off eventually and the risk of anaesthesia for some future, second operation was greater than the risk of living without a thyroid. He assured me that this is the advice he would give a family member, the advice he would want to be given, and if I were to ask ten top surgeons, they would agree "this was the move". I told him that I could only trust his expertise, resigned myself to whatever was to come, and went in for my last pre-op shift. Not worried, just resigned.

So, to the detailed story of what this experience was like for me: I arrived at the hospital at 8:30, two hours early, as scheduled. There was very little to the registration before I was sent to Surgical Day Care, where I was given a gown, booties, and cap to change into; a bed to lie in for the next hour and a half+. My overnight bag (so, my phone) was sent "up to the floor", so while there wasn't much for me to look at, the radio was playing, and off to the right was a room where people were brought after colonoscopies — I couldn't see any of them, but over and over I heard people being told whether there had been any polyps, what they could expect after they went home, who was ready to be picked up, etc. — and to my left was a nurses' station, where for the entire time I laid there, a group of nurses complained about the fifteen minutes they were expected to work extra every day, how hard it was to get specific shifts covered (because nobody "wants to do eyes"? I had my eyes done there and didn't know it was unpleasant for nurses?), and while the care that I received in my bed was excellent and friendly, it didn't feel very professional to be listening to these complaints.

Eventually I met a nurse who would be in the OR with me — she had lovely microplaned eyebrows, tastefully minimalistic fake eyelashes, and her overall put together appearance gave me confidence that she would be similarly detail oriented during the surgery — she chatted me up, read over the charts, smiled and left. The anaesthesiologist came by — kind of a goofy, hippy-looking woman who couldn't have been friendlier — and she asked if I have ever had a reaction to anaesthetic before. I was relieved to be able to repeat what I had told the nurse in my pre-op appointment — that when I had had my gall bladder out, I vomited for hours afterwards — and this doctor smiled and said, "No problem. I'm going to give you a good deep sleep and something to make sure you don't puke afterwards, especially because you'll be..." and she made a slashing motion across her throat. I laughed because that was exactly what I was worried about. Last, Dr. Nateghifard came by and said that the OR was just being set up for me, wanted to know if I had any last concerns I wanted to talk about, and when I said no, he kind of sighed encouragingly (frowned knowingly?) and patted my calf before saying, "I'll see you in there, then."

Before I knew it, a porter was wheeling my bed down a hall, she parked it and asked if I could walk into the OR; sure I could. We walked in, her carrying my IV, and she asked if I could hoist myself up onto the operating table; it was about hip height; sure I could. I was stretching myself out and the anaesthesiologist asked me to center the back of my head on this thick doughnut-shaped gel (?) ring, the pretty nurse asked me to stretch out my right arm on this support so she could hook me up to some monitors. Dr. Gill, who would be assisting, leaned in and said, "We'll cancel the two unscheduled biopsies because we'll be able to see everything we need to see here today." I don't remember ever hearing that I was supposed to have two more biopsies, and I'm sure that I looked totally confused, this was all happening in a whirlwind, and then I felt a pain in my left arm, and when I looked down at it the anaesthesiologist said, "Yeah, that can burn a bit going in," and I said, "Oh, I thought I had pinched it on something," and the pretty nurse was gently turning my chin back towards her, she put a mask over my nose and mouth, and blackout.

I really don't know how long I was in the recovery room before being sent up to the ward, but the nurse there was lovely to me, constantly checking up on me; giving me ginger ale and offering me advil when I said that I felt a bit headachey (worked a charm; that was the only pain meds I'd need). I was brought to my bed, and not long afterwards, another woman (an older woman who had had a knee replacement) was brought to a bed kitty-corner from me, and the way that the bed curtains bunched in between us, we couldn't see one another at all. I did hear that the people who set her up asked if she was hungry — could they find her a sandwich since dinner was over? — and that made me realise that I was really hungry. And then they asked her if she needed anything from her overnight bag, and looking at mine on the windowledge beyond my reach, I realised that I should probably dig my phone out to let people know I was doing fine. It made me a little sad to hear someone else being offered things that I wasn't. I had no idea just how much had been removed from my throat; had no idea if I wasn't supposed to be eating yet; but I eventually asked someone who came to poke at me if it was possible to have a yogurt or something since I had missed dinner. She was lovely and came back immediately with an applesauce and a vanilla pudding, and I was so satisfied to scarf them both down; delighted that it wasn't really painful to swallow.

Fortified, I then got my phone and answered a bunch of texts — happy to see that people cared, but not really wanting to get dragged into multiple conversations — and I felt terrible that one of the texts was from my younger brother (Thanks for coming to the party, hope you had fun!) and that while I had told him about the nodules and the upcoming biopsy and possible surgery (which he didn't remember?), I hadn't actually said, "Just so you know, I'm going into the hospital on this day and precisely this is happening." I just don't know how to ask for that kind of attention. So I had to tell him after the fact and I'm sure he felt sidelined and I had a bunch of back and forth with him to let him know that all was good. I felt like a jerk though.

Finally done with texts, I put on an audiobook and headphones to drown out the sound of the hospital and just kind of drowsed. That eventually became annoying — brain scrambling, really, despite it being just Jim Gaffigan droning on about his favourite foods — but when I took off the headphones, the old woman was snoring (like a chainsaw with apnea) and the constant beeping from all over the floor was entirely too much noise for me to sleep through. The head of my bed was raised to 30° (I had read in my google search that this was the standard recovery position for thyroid removal surgery, so I didn't question it), and there was no position that I could put my pillows in that didn't strain my neck and back or send me slowly sliding down until my feet were scrunched against the footboard. I was exhausted and cold and annoyed at the noise, someone came just about hourly to take blood or my vitals or give me meds, and after I got up to pee the first time, I then needed to get up a few more times during the night (probably to get rid of all the extra fluid from my IV). I'd put the audiobook back on until I'd drowse and then claw the headphones back off when my sleeping brain felt scrambled, watching as the clock beside me went through all the hours of the night. The only position I could get any relief in was kind of curled tight onto my side, but with a drain stitched into one side of my neck and a plastic bulb to collect the drainage pinned to my gown, even this was hard to manage. I believe I slept maybe three half-hour stretches in this position before Dr. Nateghifard came to check on me at around 8 am, starting with, "Did you sleep well?" My "No" probably sounded pretty bitter. The doctor explained that I could eat and move around without restrictions and that the most important thing to watch was my calcium levels; if a blood test at 2:30 that afternoon tested normal, that's when I would be going home. And that perked me up enough that I gave up on sleep. The only thing on my mind — and stomach — at that point was breakfast.

Soon enough catering brought a breakfast tray to the old woman across from me, but when she saw me in my bed, the worker said, "Oh, I don't have anything here for you, dear." And I thought I would go for mock-dramatic humour, but the, "Oh no!!!!" that wheezed out of me just sounded so weak and pathetic. Catering apparently had nothing else to say to me and she left and I just felt so sad. It took me about five minutes, but I eventually called for the nurse, and when she walked in and saw me without a tray, she said, "You didn't get any breakfast!" And I croaked, "I know. What are my options?" I was honestly wondering if Uber Eats delivers to the hospital. She said she would take care of me — I was thinking maybe more applesauce and pudding — but within about fifteen minutes she had a tray for me. The Cheerios, banana, egg and spinach pie, and coffee were about the best thing I had ever tasted.

To rewind for a second: When I had my pre-op appointment, the nurse asked if I had any supplemental insurance for a semi-private room, if one was available, and I gave her my information. And the fact that I had one whole side of this quite large room to myself overnight certainly felt semi-private or better, but soon after breakfast, a PSW came in and said she would need to move my bedside table over to the other side of me because another bed was coming in, and before I knew it there was another old woman with a knee replacement right beside me (so close that with the curtain closed between us, every PSW and nurse who stood on my side of her bed was nearly upon me, draped in curtain). The chainsaw-snoring woman was released before lunch (as soon as she could prove that she could walk the length of the room with a walker; this is a fast turnaround business) and just after lunch (egg salad sandwich, turkey vegetable soup, tea and oatmeal raisin cookie; yum), an old man who had had a knee replacement was wheeled into the spot directly across from me, so the curtain was hastily pulled completely around me, the PSW shooting me a look as though I was potentially some kind of Peeping Tom. (Note: It had been explained to me beforehand that rooms could be co-ed; that's just how they do it now.) Now when I had to pee, I had to come out from my curtain right at the foot of this old guy's bed (where his curtain was not pulled across) and then walk past the new old woman (whose curtain was not pulled across) before getting to the bathroom. And I didn't like that; and while I don't think that I'm better than everyone else because I have the insurance to pay for more privacy, what's the point of having the insurance if you're still stuck on a ward? (I will also note that I heard some nurses saying that one woman was in isolation because she was unvaccinated, and I am taking that to mean that by choosing not to vax, she got my room. I know it doesn't really work that way, but I do relish having someone to blame when things don't work out perfectly for me.) I will also stress that I believe that I got excellent and compassionate care from so many people who are working with who-knows-what kind of constraints (every time I asked for something, I got it; if I was uncomfortable, I could have asked for more help), and despite the number of beds that ended up coming into that room over the course of the day, once I left, there were just the two old people, kitty-corner from one another and set up for as semi-private an overnight as I had enjoyed. (And they deserve that, no matter their insurance situation.)

I spent most of my remaining time just sitting on the bed and reading my book, someone came to take my blood at 1:30, and when the nurse told me that the calcium levels were perfect and I could go home, I was texting Dave and reaching for my clothes before she left the room. I was home by four in the afternoon, totally pain-free and feeling like myself, nothing worse than the drain still in my neck — and a hoarse voice that I was assured was just from the breathing tube inserted during surgery — to remind me of what I had been through. I saw Dr. Nateghifard the next day and he took the drain out (a little ouchy as he pulled out the stitch and the tubing) and changed my dressing. He said that they usually like to make a symmetrical incision for this procedure, but since my biggest nodule stretched nearly to my right ear, they chose not to go that far on the left for aesthetic reasons; I laughed and thanked him. I asked if they had had to take out the lymph nodes, too (someone may have told me that post-op, but I couldn't remember) and he said that everything looked good while he was in there, so he didn't remove them; he also explained that some lymph would probably have stuck to my thyroid gland as it was removed, so it will all be tested in pathology. He explained that the parathyroid is all still in place (so I haven't completely lost thyroid function and calcium regulation) and all of the major nerves and vessels were identified and left undisturbed; a textbook procedure. I go next week to get the stitches out, and probably, get the last of the biopsy results.

In all of this, no one has said the word "cancer" to me. There were "FLUS" and "suspicious" cells and a need to remove my entire thyroid gland, and I guess that's because it was cancer? Precancer? Something serious enough that something had to be done about it. It was roughly ten weeks between the time that Rudy told me my neck looked swollen and the operation to remove my thyroid, and that feels fast and efficient and, particularly during COVID-related pressures on the health care system, a credit to how things are done here in Canada (not to mention the unending conveyor of colonoscopies and joint replacements that I was privy to). I am grateful for the truly excellent care that I received, and reserve the right to still feel a little sad if I don't get a really long time to spoil eventual grandkids.

Edited to add (and change the title) a week later:

It had been my routine to have "Tunesdays" every Tuesday to focus on non-book stuff, but I haven't done that in quite a while, and the personal stories I've added this year (two funerals and a wedding) didn't feel appropriate to reduce to pop tunes. But over the past week, and based on the fact that every doctor described the thyroid to me as a "butterfly-shaped gland", I kept hearing Elton John in my head singing, "Butterflies are free to fly, fly awaaaaaaaay." But then I stopped to consciously consider that song and remembered it's called "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" and that stopped my musings cold: As I wrote above, it made me sad to think that my lifespan had been reduced by 14% (compared to someone who hadn't had their thyroid removed), but I hadn't actually stopped to think how my life expectancy was affected by me having my thyroid removed. I know that sounds stupid, but it never occurred to me to ask what my prognosis was if I had done nothing; I was thinking of this surgery as a necessary inconvenience (like having my gallbladder removed) but not necessarily an effort to save my life. Of course I should be thinking of this as a prolonging of this fleeting life and I'm grateful to Sir Elton John for reminding me of that.

And someone saved my life tonight

Sugar bear

(Sugar bear sugar bear...)

You almost had your hooks in me

Didn't you dear

You nearly had me roped and tied

Altar bound hypnotized sweet freedom

Whispered in my ear

You're a butterfly

And butterflies are free to fly

Fly away

High away

Bye bye

(Ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh-ooh)