Author: somethinggrand

writing and walking

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Yard Art Love – a sort of Advent Story (Maisonneuve Magazine 2005)

Christmas in Verdun

There I was, butt-up, head-down, outside at midnight in my dressing gown. Smack-dab in the middle of lining up my plastic snails, someone at Hydro threw the city’s breaker. The darkness was just so – you know – total, with no big fat moon sitting like a pumpkin just over the neighbor’s clothes-line, that I lost the snails for a moment. It kind of makes you think you could be anywhere. Or anyone. It’s like when we were St-Henri girls pulling down the shade pretending to be camping dans les bois even though we could still hear the humming of the fridge downstairs and the adults talking, voices rising and falling with the rye and coke, the shuffling of cards, the arguments, the calling through the screen door for fresh packs of du Mauriers.
It wasn’t easy making it all the way back to the porch in that kind of blackness. Every footstep’s a decision. I closed my eyes – for concentration – and figured my place in relation to the big cement angel fountain in the centre of the yard. Saint-Gabriel help me see my hand in front of my face, I said, and then I just went. Stepped right around the flock of pink flamingoes, each with their one foot up, waiting. Inched my feet around the frog, knowing the little rascal was there, even without the sound of water shooting out of his mouth. Pictured the glass fairy globes on their poles so clearly I could touch them, passing. Waited till I could hear the lazy clack-clack-clack of the windvane duck, so I wouldn’t bump it off its tethered flight.
I heard geese that night. I swear I did. It was a remarkable Passover. Their calling out in the high darkness to each other made me look up. Oh my God yes. If it’s true what they say, that in this world there are ghosts wanting bodies, then they could have had mine. Perhaps they did.
The night drifted, with the streetlights out. I don’t know, I really don’t – what happened, exactly. Stars trespassed the city, came up my street, crossed my eyes. I fell right over the yard butts (a family of four in descending girth, thick white legs like sausages from their slacks), still looking up. Don’t know how long I sat there. Like eating candy at the drive-in. A good long while, I guess.
What we long for, we live in fear of finding, open and waiting, wanting nothing more than to fall into our laps like fruit off the trees, forever luscious. I’m not saying it was the stars, exactly. But two things happened that night: my troll disappeared, the one sent to me by my mother’s cousin’s sister (somewhere in Norway, I’ve forgotten where). That nasty short fellow with his long nose never did fit with the leprechaun. Better he’s gone now.
And best: I sit on the porch, growing fatter and closer to term with my precious little baby each passing week. A real-estate agent came by today, a nice man in a fancy car, sweating in his spring suit as he hung over the fence trying not to look at either my big belly or the manger scene (I decided to leave it up at Christmas). He said “Ms. Elizabeth, I could sell your house for a lot of money.” I told him about the ultrasound the doctor ordered, about the bulb in the streetlight over my yard that keeps burning out now, the city crews that come back every few weeks to repair it. I showed him how my ankles have swollen with the edema. I asked him about my collection – what would happen to it if I sold? But he didn’t really answer. Eventually he left, my leprechaun making rude faces after him.

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Vulnerability

They say we’re our own worst critics. I suppose in one sense that’s true. But it’s also a strange and not very comfortable feeling to stand in the semi-darkness at the back of a crowd of people while they’re watching a documentary you’ve been putting your heart into for months, waiting for what they think.

Monday last, on November 19, I had the Concordia University premiere of “Something Grand”. Tons of people showed up; estimates were just shy of 200. We filled the place. Those of us who’d organized the evening – thanks Adan! – kept pinching ourselves as more and more came through the doors. To our amazement the floor chairs were soon full and we were putting viewers into the balconies. Many of the faces were familiar, but not all. Certainly I’d pulled in all the friends and family I could. But there were many, many more as well – students, professors, Camino walkers who’d heard about the film on the radio, others who knew of it through contacts or posters. Three of the pilgrims I’d interviewed in Spain came to Montreal for the premiere. M, from Georgian Bay ON, came with her husband. And the delightful (and fabulous) S and J put on their premiere outfits and diamonds and looked like they could have been walking down a Hollywood runway. They’d come all the way from Florida just to be there with us and acted every inch the “celebrities”.

Luke, the musician we’d hired to play spanish guitar, was excellent. The speeches were….well, they were speeches…but some managed to point quite well to what pilgrimage really is, and the importance of studying this exceptional social and spiritual revival. When the lights finally dimmed, there was a buzz of excitement in the room. Or maybe that was the butterflies in my stomach.

We spend so much of our lives learning to avoid being vulnerable. In elevators and on the street we keep our eyes to ourselves. If we allow ourselves to cry at funerals or films it’s discreetly; we hide our tears. The word “sensitive” isn’t a compliment. But then we try our hand at something “creative” or “artistic”. And surprise, surprise: we then discover that in order to make something good, or true or beautiful we HAVE to open ourselves up to others. We have to FEEL with them. And we have to make ourselves vulnerable too – and show our dreams, ambitions and flaws. Which is to say: we have to risk.

The premiere was a smashing success. Now I want more people to see the documentary. Its strength is clearly not its technical aspects (despite some miracles of editing by M, Z and P). It’s in the relationship I had with the people I interviewed. The author Jonathan Lear, in his book Radical Hope, says that we human beings are “born into the world longingly”. One of the things we long for is real, genuine contact. Both the documentary and the premiere offered a glimpse of that. And that is worth all the vulnerable risk in the world.

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Uncle Carl’s Requiem Aeternam

Today is All Souls’ Day. It’s a sort-of All Saints, which was actually yesterday, Nov 1. That still might mean little, but in essence says that today is a day for remembering loved ones, and (if one is so-minded) praying for their memory.
I’m not an Anglican. But Anglicans do All Saints so well that days like these make me just slightly envious. The hymn “For All the Saints” is perfect, and perfectly Anglican: all pomp and circumstance, with a feel both global and sentimental, pious and restful and stirring in a sad, masculine, military sort of way, all at the same time. One can just about hear the British Empire and God’s mirrored and more perfect realm echoed in the words”…the golden evening brightens in the west…. while yet there breaks a still more glorious day”.
It perhaps takes something as solid as the Anglican church to really mark the permanence we hope that our loved ones enjoy. There is a weight of history, for instance, to the high wooden vaulted ceilings and the Gothic walls of a place like Cambridge’s Kings College. Or even, more locally, the jewel that is St James the Apostle Anglican, Montreal, where I visited with my students on Hallowe’en (All Saints’ Eve). There are so many memories in such places, and such rare beauty.
But this year the person I most remembered was the one person who would have felt most out of place in such a (as he would have called it) “high falootin'” environment. My uncle Carl was a simple man, if anyone can truly be called that. He never had a great education, and left school to take over the farm at the age of 12. His grammar was terrible and his habits, frankly, not the best. But his heart was kind. And he managed to travel the world enough to inspire me, decades later, to follow his tracks. My childhood years are sprinkled with postcards he sent from places like Japan, Morocco, Gibraltar and Germany. The first time I ever rode a camel (in my case, in Palestine), I thought of Uncle Carl, grinning out from beneath a straw hat in a photo he had sent in the 1960s. All I was missing – thankfully – was the big cigar and loud tropical American shirt.
When we honour “our” dead, something mysterious happens. We are changed. Perhaps it’s an act of memory, perhaps of alchemy, but they come alive again, if ever so slightly, by our remembering. And more importantly perhaps, we recognize in what parts of ourselves, our habits, our dreams, even our physicality, they live on.
So here’s to whomever it is that you remember. Requiem Aeternam, Uncle Carl. “What? What’s that? I don’t understand that kind of stuff,” I can see him pushing his cap back, scratching his head, laughing that big laugh that means he doesn’t really understand, and frankly, doesn’t really care.
“That’s fine, Uncle Carl. God doesn’t need us to understand to bless us all the same. Requiem Aeternam.”

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Premiere of “Something Grand”

final poster Oct 2012

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Guy Delisle’s “Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City”

“Have you read the Guy Delisle graphic novel Jerusalem?” wrote my friend C, who sometimes pops into my inbox with interesting ideas and comments on life. “Since you were recently there,” she went on, “you might find it relevant, or maybe even entertaining and heart wrenching. There is even an important character at the Lutheran church.”
This was my first ever recommendation to a graphic novel. Had it been about vampires or medieval Spain I might have balked. But Jerusalem is….well, it’s Jerusalem. As you’ll know if you’ve been there, there’s no spot on earth quite like it. I was interested in seeing what a cartoonist would do with the place, that hasn’t already been done by Jews, Arabs, Crusaders, religious zealots, Zionists, Muslims, Christians and the million other types of people who seem to have a deadly interest in these few acres of the not-so-holy Holy Land. Besides, where else does a best-seller feature a Lutheran pastor, even in a small cameo appearance?
I got the novel at the library, and started reading. And C was absolutely right: I did find the novel relevant. And entertaining. AND more than a little heart-wrenching. And because, with the Waterloo Lutheran Seminary group I visited the Lutheran chapel and hospital at Augusta Victoria in East Jerusalem, right above the Mount of Olives, I wanted to see it again, through an outsider’s eyes. It turns out that, unlike the omnipresent dividing Wall (which features again and again in the book), Augusta Victoria became a place of rest and reflection for the author (Delisle became friends with the Lutheran pastor, who is a comics fan, and had his studio there).
I’m not a follower of comics and despite his success, I didn’t know Delisle’s work. He’s a Quebecois who has lived many years in France. This book (originally published in French, English translation by Helge Dascher, published in 2012 by Quill & Quire of Montreal) is the result of his family’s one-year stay in Jerusalem. During that year Delisle took care of the kids and sketched while his wife worked for Medecins sans Frontières in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Get this novel and read it. It’s worth it. Firstly, Delisle is honest but hilariously understated in his portrayals of life in the so-called Holy Land. There’s no shouted polemic. Instead Delisle’s slightly dopey, typically nice Quebec/Canadian alter-ego meanders through, and chronicles, the absurdities that seemingly pop up everyday in and around Jerusalem: an Israeli soldier with a massive machine gun slung in front of him and an equally large guitar slung over his bag, Palestinian women shopping in the settlement grocery store the expatriate workers from overseas, in solidarity with Palestine, have been so studiously trying to avoid, Christian priests coming to blows over which part of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is theirs, Palestinian children afraid to go to school in the West Bank because of the settlers and Israeli taxi drivers afraid to go into East Jerusalem because of the Palestinians. One of Delisle’s funniest lines is “thanks God for making me an atheist”.
The most touching, and yet still understated, part of the book is at its end, as the family prepare to leave after their year-long stint. But I won’t spoil the ending for you. Read it yourself. Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City is the kind of book that, like a seemingly harmless “nice guy”, sometimes surprises you. Delisle’s everyman is a sharp-eyed observer, and this novel has a punchline, even if you have to look for it.

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The Cowichan Sweater

The Cowichan Sweater

Over a quarter-century ago, before they came back into fashion, my father was throwing out some of his clothes. One of the items was a Siwash sweater he’d worn in the late 1950s and early 1960s. If you’re unfamiliar with the term Siwash, they are also called “Cowichan” sweaters, after a style developed by the indigenous peoples of south-east Vancouver island (see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowichan_knitting).

Truth be told, back then I wasn’t sure what I thought about the sweater. I’d only ever seen “old people” wear them – and most of those old folks were curlers at that. But the sweater was hand-made, and hand-made for my father with images of his 1950s construction vehicles on it, which to me made all the difference. So I saved the piece, and had it resized for my smaller frame by a kind elderly neighbour. Then I put it in a box for almost thirty years, only taking it out occasionally.

This last week I put the sweater on. My father has been wheelchair-bound for a long time. He’s lost weight – a lot of weight, and the sweater that I had made smaller would now be much too big for him in turn. I wear it, not in Saskatchewan where it came from, but in Montreal, where, for at least the moment, and for certain groups of students such sweaters are all the rage (not being the pinnacle of style, I may have missed ‘the moment’ even as I report it!).

But this was more an act of memory and legacy. When I put on the Cowichan this last week, I felt connected across the decades to the man my father was. Don’t ask me exactly how this works. But to feel the wool across my shoulders makes me realize how he and I are connected. We are very different men, in very different times and places. But as he passes 80, and suffers so badly from crippling Parkinson’s, I wear the sweater and wonder: “what was he thinking when he wore this?” “How did he look at the world?” “Did he have any idea what lay ahead?” He would have been a younger man than I am now. But the wearing connects me to him, and to that wild, open country from which both he and I come.

We can talk all we want about memory being a mental process, but in families as in religion there’s something important about the totem, the symbol, the revered object. There’s something special in taking an object into our hands and letting the memories enter us through our skin.

This last week my daughter, who has been eying one of my own sweaters, came out of her room one morning before school. “I’ve got nothing to wear,” said the young woman who has drawer after drawer of clothing spilling over. “Could I wear that sweater of yours?” She had a sparkle in her eye.

It’s all about connection. I just might ask my grown sons if they have anything I can borrow.

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Parents’ First Day of School

Parents’ First Day of School

I snapped this photo just down the street from my house, on my way to my first day of university classes this fall. It’s one half of a traditional but heart-wrenching scene: parents waving good bye to their young ones as they go to kindergarten for the first time. It’s that day when we hand our children over to an institution that we know will sometimes be brilliant, often benignly negligent, and occasionally incompetent in the care of our little ones. But even more importantly, this moment marks a new stage of development for the children themselves. From here on they will begin to understand themselves as more autonomous, beginning a process that, parents hope, will lead to responsible and mature adulthood.

I remember the first day I took my daughter, G to kindergarten at a very large downtown Montreal school. She looked so brave with the little piece of paper I had written her name on safety-pinned to her shirt, and her lunch-box in her hand. She had no idea what to expect. Neither did I.

At the end of that day I anxiously arrived at the day-care only to find myself living out a parent’s worst fear: they didn’t know who my daughter was, and had no idea where she might be. This in a school of a thousand students, all of them at that moment moving up and down staircases, running around me, and moving in and out of the school yard in huge crowds that could easily hide a lost child, on a very very busy downtown Montreal street, in the middle of the urban jungle. They didn’t seem all that worried, but I was frantic. As I stood there on the sidewalk, traffic whizzing by, trucks and sirens and delivery vehicles and people of all descriptions crowding by, I was remembering the little child with the note pinned to her shirt who trusted me so completely.

A heart-stopping half-hour later, I found G, sitting calmly in one of the vice-president’s offices, eating her granola bar. The systems that were supposed to be in place to identify and move her had clearly gone wrong, but the safety measures in place to protect any child – even an anonymous one – were still in place.

It was hard, after that first day, to take her back for a second try the next morning. Now she’s a teenager, but I still remember that first day, and how hard it was. There are many types of “first days” of course. Sometimes it’s a child leaving to move to another country, or to take a job, or to become a parent themselves. Part of our task as parents – at any age – is to nurture our children, and then let go. But it’s only human nature – we can’t help waving as we do, and standing on tiptoes, just to see if maybe they’ll wave back.

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NEW trailer for my upcoming documentary!

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The Clergy House of Rest

The Clergy House of Rest

My second day at the parsonage attached to the summer parish of Cacouna QC, my friend Eric, who had come down to spend a couple of days with me in Bas St-Laurent, found a small plaque on the mantel of the fireplace. It’s a short text, written in old and uneven typewriter script, and deserves quoting in full. The capitals (interesting in and of themselves) are there in the original:

The Committee desire to draw attention to an established Rule which forbids except on special occasions, and with the approval of the Master of the House – the admission of Ladies and Children to the hospitality of the House.

The Committee believe that it will be recognised that the observance of such a Rule is absolutely necessary to secure the Guests of the House that freedom and liberty of action to which they are entitled.

By order of the Committee

There’s no date, and no easy way to situate the notice, but it seems to be a bit of historical luggage left over from the 1920s or 30s. Whichever modern parishioner of the parsonage found this and dug it out must have had a sense of humour. She’s probably also the one who found a photograph that seems to go with it. The photo shows a group of middle-aged men, all in suits, sitting or standing on the veranda of a house very much like the present day parsonage of St James Cacouna. Some are wearing clerical collars. They are looking at the camera, and a few out toward the St-Lawrence (it’s hard to know whether to call it the St-Lawrence or “the sea” here since it’s a bit of both. It’s a river, but some 20 miles across, with six to eight foot tides and salt water). Some of the men are smiling, but most, as was the fashion of the day in front of cameras, look grim. Presumably, the looks on their faces indicate that they are enjoying “that freedom and liberty of action to which they are entitled”!

It would be easy to moralize over such a plaque. But times have changed, and little is accomplished by such straw-man opinions. Likely the men who were responsible for this directive wanted, more than a release from women and children, a release from themselves and their domestic lives (we still go on “retreats”, and these still involve getting away from responsibilities as far as one is able). The capitalization of the word “Rule” is interesting, however – is it possible, I wonder, that whoever framed this had in mind, consciously or unconsciously, the far more official and effective monastic “Rules” such as the Rule of St-Benedict? If so, perhaps there were some frustrated monastics amongst that surly lot on the steps.

But the phrase that most piques my interest is the last line: “that freedom and liberty of action to which they (that is, the clergy) are entitled.” Leaving aside for a second the word “entitled”, it begs the question: what exactly did they DO in the clergy house of rest? Smoke cigars? Surely, in the 1920s, the men did that at home. Tell dirty jokes? Golf? Fish? Walk around in their slippers all day and read the paper? None of these seem exclusively the province of a “house of rest.”

Maybe the “freedom and liberty of action” meant, for these men, temporarily laying aside the heavy weight of being clergy in a culture and time less libertarian than our own, where clergy had a much higher profile and were under much greater scrutiny. Let’s face it, most people barely know we exist these days, and find us more a curiosity than an object of judgment. But in the 1920s, in a stratified Anglo society, things were different. Maybe this Rule expresses the desire of these men to be free to express unorthodox opinions on certain church issues (to tell sacrilegious jokes rather than dirty ones), to be able to vent about people in their parishes, or to be able to pretend, for a time, that they were not “marked” by their ordination vows to be forever different from the rest of society.

It’s also possible that in these words we find the same somewhat unformed but strong urges for male unity and self-awareness that mark the “masculinity movement” of recent decades. And of course, it’s hard for us moderns not to look at that photograph, read these words, and wonder if there were not, again perhaps unconsciously, some homoerotic urges on the part of at least some of those men, the forbidden feelings for which “mens’ clubs” were once a cover.

That’s probably going too far. Maybe, the framers of this “Rule” didn’t really know themselves what they wanted, and “freedom” and “liberty” were words that expressed a yearning more than any actual plan of action. If so, I hope that they found what they yearned for, without having to resort too often to such petty, clumsy and dictatorial decrees as this “Committee” seemed prone to making.

It’s the end of my week in Cacouna. Eric left on Wednesday and when Cathy decided not to come up with her mother as planned, it occurred to me that as a man alone in the house, I was living by the Rule of the Clergy House of Rest! The Parish of St James has been tremendously welcoming to me, and the House (there, I’m picking up the capitalization habit) has been a God-send. Some days the fog rolled over and through the grand old place, making it eerily moody, and other days, when the sun was shining over the gulf, I’ve sat at my computer and watched, hoping to see the Beluga whales that sometimes pass by out in the sparkling waters. I can hear the foghorns of the freighters on the one side, and the lonely sound of the Gaspe train on the other. Up on highway 132, cars with campers pass by, and tourists stop to look at the signs describing the historic village of Cacouna. We haven’t stopped needing places of rest. But I’m glad that the parish of St James Cacouna is now so much more welcoming than was, once, the “Clergy House of Rest”.

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Angels and Monsters

Angels and Monsters

 

It’s kind of a joke, but only sort of: I’ll tell my students that if they are ever visited by an angel, they already know exactly what the angel will say, and what they should do. The script is all there in the Bible.

The angel will say two words, I tell them. Guaranteed. And those two words are always the same:

“Fear not.”

And then, I tell the students, their job is to fall flat on the floor in wonder, awe, and holy terror.

The students always laugh. Our generations not being terribly familiar with wonder, awe, and especially holy terror, I suppose they’re laughing at the idea that such an encounter could be so scripted. Or more likely – with the world-wisdom of undergraduates bent on the deconstruction of all myths except the presently-important ones of the market – they are snickering at the idea that such a spiritual and otherworldly encounter could happen at all.

And it is funny, in a way, that the Bible’s angels all seem to have taken the same class in public speaking.  They really do say more or less the same thing. In fact, the phrase “fear not” is firmly attached not just to angels in the New Testament, but also to most of the events where what is “normal” in our world is portrayed as breaking down.

The disciples see Jesus doing what no human being should be able to do: walking to the boat across the storm-tossed water. “Fear not,” he tells them, as the laws of nature are tossed out. The confused women enter the tomb on Easter morning to anoint the dead body of Jesus with oil and perfume and instead of the stink meet a young man who says to them “Fear not.”

Perhaps with all that warning against being afraid, a question that could be asked is “what is there to be afraid OF?” And on that subject, we have plenty to learn.

The Bible uses the phrase “fear not” when there is some kind of theophany….some kind of “appearance of the supernatural”. We have forgotten that the Bible is an alien book, from a foreign, strange and sometimes horrific world. It is full – absolutely full – of a kind of monstrous depiction more reminiscent of a Transformers movie than of an English country garden. There are sea creatures that can swallow a man whole, witches that call up dead prophets, armies of skeletons standing at the ready, hell-rain to destroy cities, plagues, pestilences, and a pillar of cloud and fire scalding the ozone in the wilderness. There are angels and seraphim, magical windstorms and signs in the stars.

The understanding of what constitutes holiness, in the ancient Biblical world, was what was “set apart”. And what was set apart was, almost by definition, considered dangerous. When God is a lifestyle option and Jesus a bobble-headed doll, the idea of a terrible presence is something we have moved off to movies about space invaders and genetic mutations. But for the ancients who wrote the Bible, holiness was not just sacred. It was also scary.

And those who think Christianity is all sweetness and light haven’t looked closely at the two defining moments of their faith: the incarnation and the resurrection.

What could be more bizarre and repugnant than the idea of a holy God taking on flesh? The very term – incarnation – shares its root with something like “chili con carne” (chili with “flesh” or meat), which tells us something about Jesus. He was real (all the Gospels agree on this). He was human, which means he had headaches and ear wax and gas problems. If you cut him he bled. And yet he was, according to Christian teaching, the infinite God, somehow collapsed into a puking, mewling, baby with blood pumping furiously through fragile veins.

Holy miracle, freakish myth or monstrosity: a lot depends on your perspective. Given the unnaturalness of the initial story, it’s no surprise that eventually, there were legends about talking animals (run screaming from the barn) and strange foreign astrologers. In our own day, we have seen a whole slate of movies around Christmas that celebrate the monstrous: The Grinch (a monster), Scrooge (who might as well be), It’s a Wonderful Life, Nightmare before Christmas, One Magic Christmas, and the surreal and very spooky “The Polar Express”, just to name a few.

It’s interesting that the same Tuscany that produced the sweet Botticelli cherubs of the Renaissance also is home to the Etruscan urn reliefs. Many of them carry terrible images of the deceased meeting angels who look suspiciously like the modern conception of angels…except that the Etruscans lived centuries before Christ. The ancients weren’t always happy to meet such angels, and so the reliefs often show them carrying goods on their donkey, or sometimes accompanied by a slave carrying gifts, designed to placate the otherworldy powers.

The Bible unflinchingly looks at the “other” and the unusual, and – here’s the point – names it, quite often, as holy. The Biblical God is no stranger to what is different….God welcomes it. In our world, where there are fewer and fewer babies born with genetic abnormalities, and where the rich and stressed can undertake surgery to “correct” the slightest blemish to nose or ear, breast or chin, where is our reverence for what is strange, and our understanding of the holy “other”?