These are a few of my favourite things

Lost and found

I had the post-holidays blues today. This condition typically leaves me feeling lethargic, pessimistic and, frankly, a little irritable. Regardless, I decided to shake off these harbingers of inactivity and jump start 2012 by turning my attention to an essay that I have been studiously (ha!) avoiding throughout the yuletide. I need to submit an outline in the next couple of weeks, and so I decided that I would feel infinitely better about myself if I could just gather together the relevant papers, shuffle them about, perhaps type a quote or two into google docs and watch my attitude miraculously shift from self-reproach to self-satisfaction in a matter of moments.

I quickly locate my textbook right where it should be inside my bookbag. A-ha. But…where are the other papers? Dazedly, I look about my room for the all-important “handouts”—photocopied introductions by learned types that are highly valuable (to me), difficult to come by (their loss involves empty hours by the photocopier) and pages which I have carefully kept with the textbook for these past weeks (er, on the stairs). I love the numerous and delightfully indecipherable marginal notes, emphatic underlinings and abundant exclamation marks throughout, all courtesy of my wise and brilliant instructor who has carefully copied these tomes from his own collection and passed them along.

I must pause to say that isn’t really like me to lose things, but of course it does happen sometimes, and it was the holiday season after all, complete with bags and boxes and much coming and going. Furthermore, I am—admittedly—a ruthless tidier and since I couldn’t find the papers anywhere,  I began to consider—with rising terror—that I must have recycled them (somehow) along with the holiday gift wrap and general mess. The dawning of this thought brought a landslide of self-recrimination and with it, a generalized feeling of woe (see opening paragraph).

Having exhausted all avenues of search, and feeling a little hopeless, I did something rather peculiar. I lay down on the bedroom floor on my back. I’m not exactly sure why, but it seemed the right thing to do. As I did so, I rolled my head to the right, and looked absently at the radiator that runs along the front of the room under the window. The window seat atop is a popular resting place for our lunatic cat, as it offers a marvellous vantage point from which to survey the squirrels as they perform acrobatics in the tree. I looked again at the radiator, and thought I caught sight of something white, wedged between the wall and rad. I scrambled to my feet and groped behind the radiator for a second or two. My persistance was rewarded: I pulled out page after page of the missing Ferenczi handouts which my cat had presumably knocked there in one of his playful bouts of gravity-testing. (He can be trusted to knock virtually any item from the top of a dresser, table or chair, watching closely as he does so, and seeming only to be interested in proving to himself that it will, in fact, fall to the floor.) I was thrilled: no need to track down equally-weary classmates for the missing material, and I was free to banish all remorseful thoughts on my carelessness. Indeed, joy!

As I happily organized my notes (I had abandoned any thought of doing any real work on the essay today) I decided I had unintentionally enacted a rather important life lesson.

When you have a problem, try another perspective.

Even if it means lying on the floor.

Feeling a little crafty

Merry merry!

Forever Family

As an adoptive parent, you expect it.  You know it will come, but still you hope that—maybe, just maybe— it won't. You arm yourself with a well-thought-out-Good-Housekeeping-Seal-of-Approval-style response which you imagine delivering calmly and confidently. You speculate a little, you wonder about the circumstances that will prompt it. Maybe it will be delivered in anger: perhaps tearfully. Maybe it will come during a quiet, shared moment while you're baking cookies or raking leaves. But come it will.   "You're not my REAL mother." Ah, yes.   She says it calmly; it is almost a question, reflective and curious. The words hang between us for an instant, and I register a mild thump as they land. I blink. I move closer and look deeply into those puzzled eyes whose dark elegance betrays our differences. We have talked about adoption since she was an infant—this is something else. This isn't defiance. Or anger. This is longing. We talk about what it means to be a real mother. We talk about China. I say the things I believe, and know in my heart to be true: I am not your biological mother, but I am your real mother. We are a family, forever.     She talks about her Chinese mother. Does she wear a red dress? Together we imagine what she might look like: her face, her smile, her dark hair. Where she might live. There is a need, a desperation, to know. I understand this longing. I, too, dream of this woman—I see her slender silhouette in my imagination, her face a shadow. I dream of holding her hand, of telling her we think of her often, and that we will never forget her.  That my daughter is as real a daughter to me as any biological child goes without saying. But ours is a family narrative woven not of biology, but of an invisible red thread that connected us and brought us together.   There will be many more of these conversations in the years ahead. But for now, she is satisfied. She drifts off quietly to sleep, lost in dreams—I imagine—of a woman with long dark hair and a red dress.

 

To Live and Jaywalk in L.A.

I spent some time south of the border last month. In the O.C. and in L.A., as my blog title suggests. It was one of of those lazy, just-us-girls kinds of trips, involving shopping, facials (my FIRST!), manicures and sauvignon blanc. There is a part of me that loves California. I am far too removed from TV and popular culture to enjoy the Hollywood aspect (have you see Us magazine lately? I don’t recognize anyone under 40 except Selena Gomez), yet there is something deliciously decadent and excessive about California that appeals to the hedonist in me. But it’s all a bit much, really, and some aspects are so, er, not Canadian that I was delighted to return home to composting, integrated communities and walking. But the weather, the ocean—that incredible coast line—and, possibly my favourite California treat: the breakfast burrito. These I embraced happily. Sunshine. Fescue. Hibiscus.

But I digress. This is the story I want to tell.

I spent an afternoon in L.A. while my girlfriend met some suppliers in the fashion district. My instructions were to check out Santee Alley while I waited for her, L.A.’s fashion market known for its “festival atmosphere and amazing bargains.” I’m always up for a bit of a shop, so off I went. Without much difficulty I located The Alley, and began my explorations. Shoes (platform, plastic), skirts (impossibly mini), and sunglasses (cheap, big, ridiculous) abound. Santee Alley is indeed an alley, a pedestrian shopping district. It stretches across several blocks and is intersected by narrow city streets. It is noisy: stores open onto the street, music blasts (pop nonsense), owners shout at one another and pedestrians move along, some quickly, most slowly. It’s hot. I look at a pair of shoes but my heart’s not in it. I am being lulled into a stupor. I stop curbside, look left and right. I see no oncoming vehicles, and proceed across the street to the other side where the market continues.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

Wait. What was that?

Again. This time louder.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

I look up as a rather imposing-looking uniformed and helmeted police officer is gesturing to me.

“Me?” I say, stupidly, pointing at myself.

“Yes, ma’am. You. Can you come here please, ma’am?”

Don’t panic, I tell myself. This is the United States of America. Nothing bad can happen here. There are hundreds of people around. This officer cannot arrest me in plain site and send me to a work farm. That only happens in TV movies from the seventies, not in real life.

“Is there a problem?” I ask crisply.

“You see that stop light over there?” he asks, pointing. “You crossed on a red light. You are supposed to wait until it’s green and indicates that you can cross, like all those other people over there.”  My gaze follows his index finger and I see the stop light and about two dozen people dutifully waiting as the light turns green. Well, duh, I think.

“I’m not from here” I say (is this the best I can come up with?). “There are painted lines on the road, “ I stammer. “It looks like a pedestrian walkway” (True, but weak).

“That may be, ma’am,” says the officer, “but you’ll have to come with me.”

What?

He gestures to me to follow him and he heads towards his motorcycle. I follow, feeling a little queasy. He picks up a recording device (no, I’m not making this up), presses it to his mouth like Martin Milner in Adam-12 and proceeds to speak into it. I can only make out some of what he’s saying. “Officer blah blah blah, pedestrian violation blah blah blah, caucasian woman, blah blah blah”.

He then asks for identification. I sigh dramatically and dig into my purse for my wallet. I pass him my driver’s license, heart pounding. Is he going to take it away?  He starts filling out the form. I notice that he’s left-handed.

“What’s your height, ma’am?” he asks.

“It’s there. On my driver’s license.” I say rather sharply.

“Ah, I see it here. But you look taller than than,” He is trying to be friendly, I think.

“I’m standing on the curb,” I point out, curtly.

Silence. He continues to fill out the paperwork.

“Er, what do you weigh, ma’am?” he asks.

“Are you allowed to ask that?” I am officially horrified.

“It’s right here on the form, ma’am.” He shows me the place on the form where he will record my weight. His pen wavers over the page expectantly. I tell him the number, being sure to round up. For some reason this is important to me.

He signs the form, and tears off a copy for me.

“You’ll be mailed a ticket, ma’am, which you must pay upon receipt.”

I am outraged. Indignant. A ticket? Really? Can he be serious?

“How much is the ticket?”

“I don’t know, ma’am.”

So far, I haven’t received a ticket. I wonder if I have an international criminal record.

How thrilling.

 

Digital display

Spring is over. The forsythia has come and gone. The lilacs have bloomed and faded quietly, their scent a memory. Daily I peruse my garden for new blooms. I delight as my cornflowers bob in the breeze and my old-fashioned climbing rose bends under the weight of its buds. My pots are planted and luscious.Even the grass is green. And I anticipate the mid-June entrance of the grande dame of the garden: the peony. Showy, but always worth the wait. 

The June garden is my favourite, and I spend a lot of time peering out the breakfast room window gazing at it. Through my happy filter, much is gently cropped out—the leaning arbour, the weeds, the chipped paint, the less than perfect edging. Or rather these things are recast as 'charming' in my eyes. Either way, when I look out at my garden over my steamy mug of morning coffee, what I see is great beauty and possibility.

Recently I tried to take a photo of the garden from this self-same window, from the exact spot where I stand admiring it. Click. I toggle excitedly to admire the digital display. 

What? 

Where is the rambling English country garden of my imaginings? 

I press delete.   

With some help, I did, however, manage to get some lovely photos earlier in the season. Cast your mind back to April and enjoy the helleborus and my early Spring pots. 

More to come, I promise. 

 

 

 

Cognitus interruptus

I’ve been neglecting my blog.

There, I said it.

But the snow is gone, the days are growing longer, and today, I feel that rush of optimism that comes with the promise of Spring. The time is right. Besides, neglecting my blog tends to lead to a sort of listless haunting of the house where I find myself wandering from room to room, picking things up and putting them down again. This is followed by a kind of low-grade irritability, and, then ultimately, BBQ Fritos.

I’ve thought often of my blog over the last couple of months. And there are lots of excuses not to write: family time, studies, socializing, work. But the real truth is that it takes a lot of energy to be “that person”, the one who writes my blog. The writer of my blog has a particular voice to which I must adhere. And writing—even this kind of writing—demands discipline and focus. 

I have always been a writer of sorts. (That is not to say that I am a real writer, the kind who is possessed of a kind of hunger to put pen to paper.) But I have never been particularly consistent. There were essays and letters home from abroad and, of course, a journal. My journal was a loyal friend, a stoic repository for stormy ramblings. But later it was painful to re-read those raw unedited entries and so I spent an entire summer afternoon in the 80s systematically burning even my earliest childhood diaries. I watched with a hint of nostalgia as the flames quietly engulfed my words, pages folding in on themselves, disintegrating into ash and curling up the chimney in twists of grey smoke.

With my blog, I suppose I have abandoned that kind of reality  in favour of something different and perhaps a little broader. And that takes work. But I’m up for it.

BBQ Fritos and all.

Ante-meridiem

We have a certain morning routine in our house, which is to say there is none. Some days all goes smoothly, we get up early, hair is brushed, lunch is made, knapsack is neatly organized and waiting by the back door and I am smug and full of self-congratulation. Other days, the morning starts off slowly like an old wooden roller coaster ascending a track, ponderous and creaking, followed by a rapid descent and a great burst of screaming, riotous speed.

Translation: things start slowly and then accelerate wildly.

A typical day begins with my daughter playing with the cat or perhaps leisurely surveying a science project on the breakfast room window sill, toast languishing untouched on the plate. There is much confusion over mismatched socks and a lost hairbrush. There is generalized dawdling. (Surely the person who invented this word had children.) Such a lazy and perhaps even charming approach to the day is perfect perhaps for a sunny cottage morning but is, however, hopelessly unsuitable for a school day. With some ‘encouragement’ from me to move along, there is a gradual increase in momentum, culminating inevitably in a mad dash out the door at 8:50, apple in hand, tangled hair, no socks, coat undone.

At last we make it to the street and then, next, to the corner, where at age nine, my daughter is able with the help of the crossing guard to  navigate the street by herself and head up the short hill to the school. Most days I stand on the corner and watch her as she half runs, half walks up the sidewalk. Sometimes she will turn back to see if I’m there, but often she will simply continue, lost in her own thoughts of the day, growing smaller to my eyes as she gets farther from me and closer to the school steps. It occurs to me that this is in a way a metaphor for parenting and I feel wistful.

But what of this routine of no routine? Volumes is written on the value of routine for children— as infants, pre-schoolers,in the classroom and even as teens. Routine brings with it certainty, imbues a sense of stability, and by extension allows children to learn, explore and grow on a solid foundation. In short, routine allows life to be a little bit predictable.

Perhaps I’m being hard on myself, I ponder. Certainly our home offers stability and predictability—if perhaps a slightly unstructured approach to some things.

Like where to keep the hairbrush, for example.

 

Festival of Lights

Happy December! Thinking of silver and blue tonight.

 

Status update

So I’m halfway through the sixperiment and I’m managing. It hasn’t been quite as soul-destroying as I thought it might be, and there is a certain simplicity to it that I am embracing. That’s the upside. 

I will admit, however, (on the downside) to being sick to death of the long-sleeved black t-shirt. This isn’t the exact item, but you get the idea:

 

Weekends are the worst. I wore the dbt (dreaded black t) everyday last weekend. I’ve accessorized. I’ve layered. I’ve belted. But at the end of the day, it’s still a black long-sleeved t-shirt and once this little exercise is over with, I’ll be more than happy to see it out with the Thursday trash, thank you very much.

Day 15 and counting.

Advice to my 18 year-old self

It’s a cheap device, a little facile perhaps, but I decided to give it a whirl. I was reading Marie Clair on the weekend (the UK edition) and the headline of one of the articles was “What I would tell my 18 year-old self”. “Now that’s a blog topic,” I thought triumphantly. I didn’t read M-C, not wanting to bias myself—and I expect the writer of that article was someone spectacular and fascinating—but never mind. I decided the idea had legs.

I cannot quite picture myself at 18. But what follows are the thoughts that drift to the surface and break through into the light as I cast around in the cloudy waters of the past. I suppose in many ways I have a sense of my who I was then, and my advice is not so much an expression of regret as it is a statement of possibilities, of disdain at wasted time, of frustration at opportunities not quite embraced. And there’s a lightness here (I don’t want to take myself too seriously), and a touch of the wistful. 

1. Study more; party less. Opportunity—real opportunity—is fleeting.

2. Learn to play guitar.

3. Read Plato’s Republic, as much Shakespeare as you can, Homer’s Odyssey, Virginia Woolf, the Romantic poets and T.S. Eliot.

4. Commit to memory at least one complete poem.

5. Follow your heart.

6. Don’t wear that tartan taffeta dress to JPT’s 21st b-day party: it’s hideous. 

7. Keep all the mixed tapes that people make for you.

8.Don’t blow dry your hair or try to straighten it. (The curl will win eventually anyway.) 

9. Wear mini skirts while you can.

10. Stay in touch with people you knew when you were a kid.

11. Don’t skip your French lab. You’ll be sorry one day that you can’t speak another language.

12. Don’t hang around with people who make you feel bad. Period. 

13.Learn to drive standard.

14.Spend less; save more.

15.Take more photos.

16. Believe that you’re fine just the way you are.

17. Live abroad.

18. Remember that sensitivity is a strength, not a weakness.

19. Don’t worry. It all worked out in the end.

20. Take the road less travelled. And that will make all the difference.