A Cinnamon Nest

This New Pocket I've Got

2009-07-20T09:57:00.007-06:00

When I go out walking, inevitably, I will pick up something I find on the ground - usually a rock or a stick - and hold it in my hand while I walk, and if it is a real find, I will tuck it in my pocket and keep it for later. India is the same way, and I need to get better at checking her pants before I throw things in the wash because there have been messes and loud crashings and bangings in the dryer and one day something will get stuck and I'll be in trouble.

I've been out wandering. Picking things up and shoving them into a pocket. I've been thinking about writer as servant, as independent, as dependent, as private figure, as public figure, as artist, as professional, as watcher, as collector, as distiller. There is a lot of Romantic gobbledygook surrounding the persona of being a writer, and because I own the sort of heart that is susceptible to Romantic gobbledygook, I have had to sludge my way through the bullshit to get to the truth. Of course, I'm not through it all yet, but I'm trying. Forgive my lapses.

All of that is to say that if there are any of you left reading, if you are curious, or bored, or just looking for a link to follow, you can find me here, for now.

Driving With the Window Down

2009-06-20T12:25:00.003-06:00

If a song were a meal I would gorge myself on this, so that it would leak out my pores, and my hair and skin and neck would smell of it.

A Vending Machine of Happiness

2009-06-09T12:39:00.001-06:00

Ojibwe for Beginners

2009-06-03T12:59:00.004-06:00

"Noongom zhebaa,"

This morning I woke to the softness of your voice in my ears
and I lay in that pool of sunlight while you tripped like water over stones and the birds calling out my window.

"Minogiizhigad."

Last night there were the leaves, finally, unfurled and wet in their newness, shushing together in the dark, in the wind, and I stopped, paused with my hand on the door
and held on the threshold by that warm blooming.

"Dibikad,"

The heat a drug,
and I grew round like the moon, hips soft, curved movings.

"Aandi ezhaayan?"
"Asleep."

"Aandi wenjibaayan?"
"Into the day."

Such a slow spring.
And now, eyes closed, such a slow awakening.

Two Months and Counting

2009-05-28T13:30:00.006-06:00

So, I know for the most part Canadians and Americans have more similarities than differences, but still, there are all these little things I'm learning as I'm getting ready for this move that keep surprising me. For instance:

Summer holidays. School is already done for lots of American elementary kids? Weird. We don't finish here until the very end of July. July and August are our holiday months.

Hot lunches? American schools seem to all have hot lunches available with french fries as a staple side item. (Are the other kids going to make fun of my baby for having to eat healthy food?)

And, of course, the weather. No snow till Christmas and summers that hit 40C?- which also explains the equally weird air conditioners in every house. That's some crazy.

College football. People actually come out to watch these games in droves. They cheer, they drink, they care who wins. Imagine!

Sororities. They're real. They're not just in the movies. People actually pay a lot of money to join them and they've got these HUGE fancy pants houses all over the place full of overly-tanned girls with pedicures, and on Friday nights they get all dressed up and walk their bodies around.

Undergrads. It seems like if you are an undergrad in the States you're supposed to spend most of your time in university drunk and not making it to class? No one seems to think undergrads think much here. Oh, and, they don't call it university. They call it college.
College
College
College.

Got it.

2009-05-22T19:52:00.002-06:00

Must I Still be Learning?

2009-05-18T22:18:00.004-06:00

(click on the video twice to play)

My parents took India camping for the long weekend since I had to work, and she just came home a few hours ago. She was grimy and exhausted and she squeezed me tight around my neck because she had missed me, and, because she was so exhausted, she kept breaking down into fits of weeping and wailing.
"Momma?" (Cry, cry, cry) "Do you love me? I just don't feel like you love me." (Cry, cry, cry) And so I would snuggle her and kiss her and fill her up with love and finish making her dinner /reading her a story/brushing her teeth/getting her to bed.
And repeat.
And repeat.

She is her momma's daughter. Last week was a rough week, and by Thursday I was a weepy roller coaster mess in the parts of my brain that I usually keep to myself. I always get embarrassed when I get like that, but I suppose it's inevitable: bad things will happen. I will get hurt, and then I will get sad. But for this long weekend, I got to talk to my sweet friend in England for a couple of hours and see her lovely pregnant belly. I rocked it out on the karaoke with some friends from church, and I sat on a rock in the sun by the river with my shoes off and burnt my nose.

I told India tonight that it's alright if she feels sad, and that if she needs to hear me say again and again that I love her, that I will - that I will be glad to tell her how special and lovely and beautiful she is to me. So she stopped crying. We snuggled until she fell asleep, and I came up here to say I think I'll hang around here awhile longer.

The Lost Stories

2009-05-16T16:06:00.006-06:00

Whilst I put on the coffee and work out the "maybe" of that last post in the murky, sore and somewhat bewildered bits of my brain, there are some things I want to say. This is one of them.

India and I read the story of John the Baptist's beheading the other day, and when we were done she said, "Momma, why are all the women in the bible bad?" Now, like I've said before, my baby loves herself some bible. We read it like mad, and we've read through five children's bibles front to back and some more than once, so the kid's getting the whole story. She knows about Ruth and Esther and Naomi and Mary and the other Mary and whatever other secondary ladies might show up to drive tent pegs into sleeping heads or rescue spies on the run, or sleep with their father, (alright, maybe we didn't read that story) and still she asks me why all the women are bad.

This Easter, as I read through the story of Holy Week, the crucifixion and the resurrection my heart sat most with Mary Magdalene - Mary of the seven demons cast out; Mary of one at the foot of the cross. There is that sweet, sweet moment at the empty tomb when this woman, whose heart has been saved by this kind God-also-man, begs for the body of Jesus, and she is weeping as she stands there it says. Either she is weeping so hard that she can not see Jesus before her, or she is blinded by other means, but when Jesus says her name she at once knows that it's him and grabs hold until he says that he needs to leave her.

After, Mary runs to tell the disciples about seeing Jesus, "but these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them." And so, the story goes on, and the disciples see Jesus themselves, and believe in the resurrection, and belittle poor Thomas who did not without seeing, but as for Mary - Mary of the cross, and Mary of the resurrection, we hear no more. But I would like to know some things, the kind of things that women talk about while drying dishes or chopping vegetables or folding laundry, mainly, how she survived the losing after his appearing, what it was like to be loved so purely, what her name sounded like in his mouth.

I have, at times, doubted a faith that has kept one half of its believers silent for thousands of years, and I mourn the loss of those stories that would speak to a woman's heart in the way that only those stories could, but what I thought of mostly this Easter was of the eternal patience of a God who allowed, and still allows humanity to find and shape its self. "Whatever you bind on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven," speaks to me not so much of our power to affect heaven, but of the shocking reality that God has allowed us to wield any power at all. We bind, we loose, and so we shape our faith and the future of our faith with justice or injustice, sexism or equality, in God's image or in our own, and in so doing we shape forever our ability to see and know and taste the fullness of God.

What else am I going to do.

2009-05-14T14:57:00.006-06:00

Sometimes, a lot of times these past few months, I come here and I write the things I need to say, and then, when I've got it all down just the way I want it to be, I go and hit that little old delete all button.

It's been pretty slim pickin's here. I'm not sure this blog can survive that kind of censorship.
I don't know. Maybe we're done.

2009-05-08T10:42:00.004-06:00

It takes a lot to make me laugh out loud at something I'm reading. I'm not proud of the fact, but it's the gospel truth. I'm a hard laugh. So, this morning when I should be in bed after working all night, but am instead reading blogs, I found myself laughing and laughing out loud at the black boot and the "silhouette," and I thought, damn, tell your friends.

Skinning a Cat

2009-05-03T01:37:00.006-06:00

I sit in church in my pew in the balcony, and watch as the sunlight bounces like a ball off the passing cars at 299 792 458 meters per second, shoots through the winter trees, through the church window and shines their leafless silhouette across the wall like a black and white filmstrip of naked branches, arms raised, flick, flick, flick, a refrain. A liturgy of trees.

The Glory,
and I am undone.
Breaking. Peeled back.
Lips parted, throat tight, eyes full, mouth empty.

God appears, is merciful, covers his face and only pastes pictures on the wall, and still I do not know if I will survive the show - me and my threadbare skin sack of bones and organs and blood.

I fear violence, disease, my face through a windshield at eighty an hour, a knife in some dark helplessness,
while my body, just stitched to my soul, so loosely looped, fumbles most at the threads
on any given morning in sunlight.

This is Good.

2009-04-29T09:41:00.001-06:00

That one part, that one right there, made me break out into a big old grin on the way home from work this morning.

...

2009-04-21T10:54:00.004-06:00

I'm getting some really exciting feedback on the sex post idea. Wahoo!!!
So, I'm in no hurry. Let's keep thinking about this for awhile and I'll remind you to send in your thoughts/stories/poems/lyric essays/art/whatever your beautiful brain thinks of, and I'll put it all together into something fantabulous when it feels done. Ya?

I have an idea. It involves you.

2009-04-17T13:19:00.012-06:00

Let's talk about sex. Rather, let's write about it.
The thing is this. I think about sex a lot. I don't mean that I think about the act of having sex, though I'm still youngish and there is that too, I mean that I think about sex in the context of how does my sexuality define me, how do I live out my sexuality and, mostly, what happens when my sexuality and faith make out.

Now, sex is tricky to talk about because, obviously, it's intimate, it's full of vulnerability, guarded secrets, desires, naked people. It is sacred and holy and thick in mystery. And for Christians, it also has a history of being chock full of guilt and worry and flaws and stress and failure and loneliness and repression and hurt. And, of course... SIN.

Weird things happen when women hang out together and talk about sex. Really weird things happen when those women are women who are trying to work out where their faith fits into their sexuality. There's lots of laughing and confessing and, "Really!? Every time?!" and, "Oh, I'm so glad to hear that." But there's also a lot of nervousness and quiet and things that can't be said in certain circles. I remember once, a girl I hardly knew confessed to me in a rush of fear that she was the only "impure" person in the small Christian college we went to, even while I knew that couples were sneaking off to sweat and moan together in the library stacks after supper. Now, there have also been the odd times when I've been able to have these same sorts of talks with men, but, uh, mostly they've been with men I've seen naked, or the desire to get naked together creeps in, or the inherent awkwardness of men and women talking about sex while trying not to giggle like twelve year olds and imagine the other person naked comes in and colours it all impossible. But, I don't want a one sided conversation about sex. What good would that do? We need all sorts of voices on this one. Writing helps.

So, here's this idea. I'm sitting on the couch this morning trying to study/pray/read and I keep thinking about sex and all our real thoughts and questions and ideas and secrets about it and how, if we could just get together and talk about sex without freaking out and damning all the "impure" people to hell, then maybe some good things would happen. Maybe we could be honest instead of self-righteous.

If you're up for it, and I know you may not be, write me something about sex. Tell me how you feel about it, or what you grew up thinking about it and how that's changed, or how it blesses you, or curses you, teaches you about love, or takes you from it. Tell me that you think God hates it, adores it, couldn't really care less about it. Tell me a story, your story, anyone's story. I'm not asking to be your confessor, I just want to hear what you've learned, or seen, or thought. That's all. It doesn't have to include, "And God forgave me and now everything is good." It doesn't have to conclude with towing the Christian line. It really doesn't.

Sign your name or don't, use a fake name or the name you wish you had. What do I care? Send me your address with it if you want, and in awhile, let's say some months down the road, I'll gather up the stories and sew them up into a little book and send them to you. It'll be good.

This is my address.

526 Alder Ave
Sherwood Park, Alberta
T8A 1T2
CANADA

I'll be here until the beginning of August, after which point you can reach me in Iowa and I'll post that address, too, once I know it.

Or you can email it to me. I'm easy. Heh. (acs3@ualberta.ca)
Maybe we'll get two, maybe will get tons. Whatever.

So come on. Get it on. Screw fear. Spread the word. Tell the truth.

This is me saying thank you, and, I love you.

The best one I've ever written

2009-04-16T20:57:00.004-06:00

It's Spring

2009-04-16T13:28:00.004-06:00

And this is sexy.

Uh. Really, really sexy.

Maybe make sure there's someone close by that you can bite when you listen to it.

Or, whatever you do.

You know. Just sayin'.

Phewf.

It's Easter. Dance. Dance. Dance.

2009-04-13T10:39:00.003-06:00

There are some things I need to think through about Easter here. Something is tick, tick, ticking into place, but not there yet.

In the meantime...

He has risen indeed.

So let's dance. I'm only guessing here, but I think Jesus knows how to shake his hips with the best of us.

Today

2009-04-10T08:53:00.003-06:00

Wear black.
Wring your hands.
Know yourself.
Weep.

If not now, then when?

And he will destroy on this mountain
the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
the sheet that is spread over all nations;
he will swallow up death for ever.

Isaiah 5:7-8

2009-04-08T20:48:00.002-06:00

Also,

2009-04-08T15:17:00.002-06:00

I'm in a pickle.

Finding a house to live in for three years from 2470 km away, or 1534 miles away, is tricky business. So, you know, if any of you want to swing by a place and check it out for me I would repay your love with cake. And pies. I make a mean pie.

That Rose. That Name. That Sweetness.

2009-04-08T10:28:00.010-06:00

Don't tell my mom, but I don't like my name. I never have. It feels ugly in my mouth and I remember once in school being assigned the homework of learning what our names meant and that I didn't need to bother.

"And what does your name mean, Angela?"
"Uh. Angelic".

Surprise.

And I blushed and gagged a little.

Even as a kid, a good kid, I didn't like the idea of being angelic. I've never liked those saccharin stories of angels saving drowning children, or of that business where they whisper sweet words to sick grandmothers and all. That whole guardian angel culture with its plastic figurines and terrible poetry creeps me out. I don't like soft, glowing lights. I don't like easy answers. I don't like angels.

I was telling all of this to the ladies I hang out with on Thursday morning, and of how I also take issue with my last name, as it was my married name and I chose to keep it so that India and I would have the same last name, and they decided they would rename me.
Fantastic, I thought. And a good way to be named - after who you are instead of some random name your parents liked when they knew nothing about you. One good woman even said she would ask God to give me a new name; she would get back to me on it.

Today, India and I read about Peter getting it together after Jesus forgave him his betrayal, about the Holy Spirit coming down like fire, and of his healing of the beggar at the gate called Beautiful. She laughed at the part where he raises a woman, Dorcas, from the dead. I had to read that story twice. It's a funny name.

I thought of how Peter was first called Simon, and of how his new name, the Rock, must have covered him like a curse after that awful night and the cock crowing in the morning, of how he must have had no idea how true his name really was and would become.

A few weeks ago the good woman told me that she had asked God for my new name and that he had said no. That I was named as I should be. So I sighed, because I know God when I hear him, and I began rethinking angels.

To be angelic, I've read, is to cry, Holy, holy, holy," is to say, "Do not fear," to those who are afraid, is to shine like the moon as its face reflects the sun, is to wield a sword, is to speak truth, love fiercely, attend the weary in the garden with the sweat that falls like blood.

There is no trite and easy sweetness here. Mostly, there is burning.

I'll make my peace with them then. Those angels. And because it never turns out well for those who laugh at God, I won't. I'll set my face for angelic, and trust in the truth of things to come over the vision of things that are.

I can be an ass. I know it full well.

2009-04-08T09:33:00.008-06:00

How to be friends with your editor:

1. Acknowledge your proclivity for assholism.
2. Swallow pride.
3. Swallow pride again.
4. Let it go.
5. Repeat, "Editor's are my friend. Editors' are my friend. Editors are my friend."
6. Admit that it is a possibility you may not know everything and that the word you really wanted to use twice in the same sentence for a specific reason is not as obviously effective (affective?) as you think it is.
7. Remember to say thank you without sounding like your throat is bleeding.

So,

2009-04-06T22:41:00.009-06:00

India just woke up. She's sick with a cold and an ear infection. I'm expecting another long night and maybe I'll just take her into bed with me, but when I went in to give her some medicine she was complaining of a sore arm and waving her hand around.

India: I just had a crazy ping pong dream. I was hitting and hitting, and my hand got so tired.

Me: [laughing at this weirdness] Well, at least it was a good dream.

India: No, I was facing the devil.

Me: Huh. The devil?

India: My hand got so tired I had to switch. [Waving both of her little hands in the air and smacking at imaginary ping pong balls]

Me: How did you know it was the devil?

India: He had a scary laugh.

Me: So, who won?

India: [Lifting hands and flabbergasted] I don't know. [pause] I think the scary laugh was winning.

I used to feel sorry for the devil when I was a kid. I always thought he just needed a good hug from God and another chance to get it together, but seriously, ping pong? Is nothing sacred? There's no going back from that.

2009-03-27T21:48:00.001-06:00

This is what I sound like in Iowa.

The Grass

2009-03-23T13:15:00.008-06:00

Say to my soul,
"I am your salvation."
Psalm 35:3b

There was a night not long ago when what I wanted was lost, and my heart dropped from my chest like a jumper from a high rise. I went into the bathroom, closed the door, knelt on the bath mat and cried quietly so that I wouldn't be heard. And then, I did what mothers have done for years, which was to powder around my eyes, open the door and take my daughter to her swimming lessons. God, I know, plays by her own set of rules.

That night I slept in broken blocks of time with the failure pressing so hard against my head that I thought my skull would crack, that I would split right there in the bed and they would find me in the morning with my liquid brains pooled on the pillow beside me.

Fear, as always, slipped in the cracks. It blew its rancid breath into my mouth and I sucked it down deep. Swallowed every word it fed me, so that I lay there, body bloated with failure and shame, tucked in tight under that thick hopelessness. And there was this: A vision of myself lying curled in a field of dead and yellow grass. And of even that sharp straw accusing me. Even the grass mocking. And the sky was heavy with hate.

Until: All at once? In a puff of smoke? Suddenly?
God was there.

A holy ghost hovering, and me as empty as the space between things.

I do not pretend to understand how love becomes enough. But it does. Did. Some things will only live outside language.

She held close the empty space the way oil loves the face of the water, clings and curves to its movings.
And there was nothing to become, to be done, to attain. Only the loving.

And my eyes following the words, "You shall see, and your heart shall rejoice; your bones shall flourish like the grass."

Enough.

2009-03-20T14:16:00.003-06:00

I just finished re-writing something that I started a long time ago.
It's down below if you want.
It's long.
You should print it out if you're gonna read it. Grab a coffee. A comfortable chair. My voice in your head reading it to you. I like hanging out with you better like that.

Stray

2009-03-20T14:06:00.003-06:00

And all must love the human form,
In heathen, Turk, or Jew.
Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell,
There God is dwelling too.

From: The Divine Image
William Blake

I am a glorified janitor, really. I mop the floors when everyone else has gone to bed. I disinfect the bathrooms, restock the toilet paper, do the dishes, straighten the shoes and empty the trash. I stay awake and work alone, and the keys jingle in my back pocket. In the morning when the cleaning is done, I stand on the deck of the house and drink my coffee, watching as the steam pulls off my mug and the sun pulls out of the dark. There are frogs singing in the slough in the backyard when the snow melts, and deer crackling through the trees that edge the property. I sip and bless those sleeping boys, and they sleep on unaware.

I work at a group home for behaviour rehabilitation. There are five boys who live in this house between thirteen to sixteen years old, ranging from short-ish to very tall, from very round to growing muscles. They are sweet and dangerous and they would just as soon hug me as hit me. They live here because they are hard to live with. They are hard to live with because their lives have been hard to survive. They have been bumped from home to home, growing wounds along with scars along with violent tendencies along with anger and tempers and distrust, and ended up here with the hope that we, the staff, could teach them how to make it through school, keep a job, and imagine some sort of future worth working toward. And we all struggle with hope.

Most of the time I work the weekend overnights. I get to the house and the boys are hyped up on chips and pop and Friday night. I ask about their week and they grunt, or show me their new stereos and clothes and remote control cars and, if I play my cards right, about the girls they like. Then I work to get them into their rooms close to on time. I tuck them in to their beds with wheels, alongside walls without pictures and over porn shoved under mattresses. Sometimes I get a, “good night” and sometimes I get a, “fuck you.” Wait for it.

Once, when I first start working at the home and because I don’t know what else to do, I tuck a suspicious-eyed twelve-year old into bed and tell him the story like my mom used to do with the blankets when I was a kid.
Me: It was a warm, sunny day. The birds were singing, the sun was hot. It was beautiful. But then, one white cloud puffed by gently and paused, covering the sun. [Pulling the top sheet over his face.]
Him: [Silence.]
Me: Soon, there was another cloud, and then another. They collected and filled the sky, blocking the sun until no blue remained. [Pulling the blanket up and over his face.]
Him: [Silence.]
Me: [Loudly and frantically] But then the clouds kept coming, pouring into the sky like water into a glass until the birds flew quietly for cover and the sky was as black as night. [Puling the quilts over his face.]
Him: [Silence]
Me: [Shake bed, bounce mattress, roar and swish like a storm.] And the wind wailed, breaking branches, bending trunks, ripping tress from the ground. And the rain fell hard and fast drenching the entire land, filling rivers, drowning all green things growing.
Him: [Silence]
Me: It blew and stormed and raged until it tired itself out, until, eventually, the rain slowed to a drizzle, a drip and then stopped completely. The harsh wind died down into a gentle breeze, and slowly, bit by bit, blew the storm clouds away until pieces of blue showed through, and then finally, one last puff and the sun burnt through the last white cloud and shone bright and hot on the wet world below. [Folding back all the blankets from his face.]
Him: [Silence]

He looks up at me uncertain. Maybe a little bit thrilled. But I can’t tell exactly, his face is so hard to read. I want to laugh. It was laughable, this tucking in of a strange teenager with this gentle parental intimacy that I was paid to perform. I want him to love it.

Later, when I read his case history in the office, I cry quietly under the harsh hum of the fluorescent lighting, hoping the sound won’t carry down the heating vents into his room and his dreaming.

Every night I close their doors when I am done tucking them in and they are all in bed. I walk up the stairs and shout out that I am turning on the alarms. No one can leave their rooms without my knowing it.

“As snug as a bug in a rug,” as my mom would say.

***

When I was a kid, my dad used to bring home all kinds of strays to us. It started with a cat shoved inside his winter coat one cold afternoon. She had a violent temper from a broken tail and so we kept her in the garage until it had healed and then brought her inside and named her Muffin. She showed us her gratitude by leaving dead mice in our shoes, a bloody rabbit on our stairs and by sleeping on our necks at night. My dad said she was as ugly as sin, but really, she was just a calico. We all loved her.

After Muffin there was a dog, a mouse, and more cats, but most of the strays my dad brought home were men: alcoholics, drug addicts and thieves: broken faces, broken souls, broken lives. If love is taking pity on people, or in being able to see yourself reflected in them, if love is the desire to help, then my dad loved these men. They were friends of friends, men from support groups he attended and brothers of men he worked with. He heard their stories, held their hands in his rough mechanic ones, cried with them, prayed with them and hugged them like he hugged his children. And then he brought them home to us.

My teen years were filled with strangers sleeping in the spare room we called the office but which was really just a space to store junk until we needed to clear it for the men. The smell of their despairing unwashed bodies slipped under the door, down the hallway and into the rest of the house. At suppertime they sat beside me at the end of the table. I ate and breathed through my mouth, trying to be discreet about not inhaling their moist mushroom smell. I passed them the potatoes without touching their fingers. Avoided smiling. Smiling encouraged talking, and when they talked they told such strange stories of loss and shame and salvation and pride that I never knew what to say even while knowing that they only wanted to be heard – that need for repetition, for telling the truth until the anchor holds, until it becomes true.

They also knew God. Once we sat all together on the brown flowered couch, on the almost matching brown carpet and watched: this video on rock music and the devil – because they knew God, but they were familiar with hell. There was the beating moth flutter of thrill in my chest, that quick hot sweat on my neck, and then there was the glory of Sin Uncovered! Sin Made Shameful! Sin Destroyed! like the glory of the gore of the guts of a car crash. Like the thrill of gossip. There was in this video, as in their lives, as in their stories that simple slicing and dividing of good from evil, Christian from secular, sheep from goats, heaven from hell, and I was sucked up like pop through a straw. The devil wanted me. It was cosmic. Until the movie ended and I went to bed. The sweat cooled, the flutter tired. A few days later I took my chances and shook the devil off my back and sent him back to hell. I kept my music.

***

I was almost hit this morning. I stood a foot away from one of the boys at the group home and he lowered his six-foot tall self into my face and yelled, “Shut-up!” two inches from my eyes. We stood there. Then I escorted him to his room, and he slammed the bedroom door as hard as he could.

I taught him how to bake a pie this past summer. It was a hot night with the sun not yet set. I stood in the backyard with a pair of scissors in my hand, intending to cut some fresh flowers for the house when I saw a patch of wild Saskatoon trees hanging thick and heavy with purple berries. The four other boys had gone to a movie for the evening, and this one tall kid was left home for bad behaviour. So I asked if he wanted to help pick, and he surprised me by saying yes.

We sprayed each other’s arms and backs with mosquito spray and the first few berries tasted like the chemicals on our hands and made my lips numb, and then we filled a large plastic bucket full. It was easy. He held the branches for me and I brushed the berries off of them and into the box with my purple fingers. We talked, mostly about his family, about how he wished he could go camping with his mom again, about the father he had never met, and about how proud he was of his baby sister.

I am my father’s daughter. I wanted to bring that berry picking, homesick kid home, take him camping and give him a family that knew how to love him without the hurting. So I listened, and then we went inside and I taught him how to make a pie. We made one each, and when I showed him how to roll out the top crust onto wax paper and then flip it on top of the berries he laughed at the trick and then spent half an hour pinching the crusts shut just so, pricking it with the tines of the fork and sprinkling sugar to make it crunch. We baked them, and his looked so pretty and he did such a good job that I took a picture. "Smile," I said, but of course, he wanted to look tough. In oven mitts.

I am not supposed to sleep at work. I am supposed to clean, bake, file, cook, count knives, make notes, prepare the next night’s dinner. But I don’t like the smell of pork roast cooking at three in the morning, and I am not so good at the staying awake part of my job description. I am a mediocre maid.

But there is another kid, a very large, thirteen-year old boy with green hair and a round soft stomach that lives here, too. This boy has, on occasion, wrapped his massive arms around me, kissed me on the cheek and said that he loves me. I wipe my face off when he isn’t looking and tell him the truth, which is that I love him, too. Sometimes, he comes up out of his room early in the morning and I sit with my coffee on the couch and we talk about whatever he wants to talk about, which is usually video games, but is sometimes God and love and, “Angela, what is the purpose of life besides being happy and increasing other people’s happiness?” I tell him what I think, and I am continually amazed at how articulate he is, and how generous his beliefs are. He has taken the hits, massive hits, bigger than adult-sized hits, adapted to pain and is still willing to swim around in joy when he can find it. He makes my heart hurt, and I am very glad to know him.

Tonight, he has walked up into the living room and flopped himself onto the couch across from me. He should have been asleep hours earlier. He knows this full well and that he is pushing the rules with all this plopping down willy-nilly as if it were the middle of the day instead of the middle of the night.

There should be a patron saint of the overnight shift. I would hang his image from my neck, buy his icon and carry it with me in my bag, make bookmarks of his pleading face to keep me true to the cause. His eyes in all of these would be round and dry, his greasy hair standing on end, there would be a raised mug of coffee in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other. All three of his obligatory miracles would include not falling asleep under devastatingly comfortable and tiring situations. His virtue would be patience. A miracle in itself.

So the green haired boy is not sleeping, not in his room where he should be, wide awake and requiring love. But I am dead tired. So tired I almost miss it. I almost hurry him downstairs and back to his room, not because he is breaking the rules like I say, but because I don’t really care why he can’t sleep, and I want him out of my face so that I can. Except that he is terrified. He is not pretending in order to stay up longer. I can see that now. He is afraid. And his fear wakes me up.

I let him sleep on the other couch across from me. I tell him I will sit and watch, that I will stay with him until he feels safe again, because really, there is no reason for him to not be afraid. There have been monsters and they have all been real.

So I sit across from him and read my book as his breathing slows and his body relaxes. I fill the role of, Woman On Couch; Another Human Being; A Touchstone to Reality. And I play gate keeper to his demons for a night, not even a night, a moment, and it is the best thing I have ever done for him. I am faceless, could be faceless, he will not remember this sitting together or even me, one amongst the many paid parents who have passed through his life, but it doesn’t matter right now. I get to do this, give him this one thing I have, and I am all gratitude.

We stay like this, me reading, him half watchful, until the shift into the calm and he sits up slowly, heavily, and looks at me.

“I think I can go back to my bed now. Thank you.” And he does.

***

Sometimes, Love is the ugliest one in the room. It’s face is set like stone, it walks blindly, mostly backwards with hands full of the mundane and is clothed in indistinguishable days; it has a cankered tongue from all the biting and mumbles ridiculous things like, “Blessed are the poor.”

I was a kid living with men who were living with addictions. What I knew about love and what I knew about addictions could be written and rolled on a cigarette paper: it was a disease; love could save them from the illness. Yes. Of course. It was a questionable thing for my dad to do – tossing these men into our home. Yes. But that’s not the point now. What I’m trying to say is that I knew nothing of love.

I was a kid then. Really. How much can you expect? To love another person, they say, is to see the face of God, but seeing God’s face is also just as likely to kill you. Love has a lot to do with dying, with the sacred suicide of selfishness, and it’s hard going. Sometimes even the experts throw in the towel, throw up their hands, walk away, return, walk away again.

Passion is a cheap commodity and the easiest response to injustice. Any passion will do in the moment, and it doesn’t really matter what form if finds because it takes very little energy or thought to see a starving child or a battered woman and then feel that hot flush of anger rise and radiate. The problem being that the straw burns bright and the straw burns fast and leaves a cold ash in its going.

It became a strange, institutionalized version of a home; I got dressed before coming down to breakfast, waited my turn for the T.V., labelled my leftovers and wandered around the house not knowing where to sit. Displaced. My love, propped up by pity, grew thin and cold, confused, until I began to resent them. They were moody, dirty, awkward and demanding. This was not love, I thought, not what I had expected - my curt responses, my irritation, their ingratitude, this sharing a table, a T.V., a bathroom. Good God, the bathroom!

I felt guilty as all hell, swam in it, guilty to the ends of my toes and tip of my head that I wanted these down and lost, forgotten and abused, lonely and needy men out of my life. Wanted my home back. My supper table. My stranger-less house. Guilty that I did not, could not, would not feel love for them as I thought I should. And the guilt was a balm for the failure as much as it was a wounding from it.

I have wondered since, still wonder, why love in the everyday puts on such disguises, why it fools us all with its lack of fanfare and sturdy shoe sensibilities, why it looks so much more like punching the time clock than anything close to beautiful. I was a kid, but I got to see love move, love flounder, love try, reach for transformation.

They didn’t make it. All the men that stayed with us eventually crashed and burned. They left our house, our lives - one of them with thousands of my parents dollars - and continued their descent. Except that that is not the entire truth. They crashed and rose. Crashed and rose. Crashed and rose. Like some sort of phoenix forever dying and being reborn. Like the rest of us but magnified, brighter flames, a hotter burning.

***

I can mark the moment when I turned, at least turned if not moved toward a deepening. The morning I watched the sun rise and prayed at the group home while the boys slept, and asked God to teach me how to love better. He said, “Wash the floors.” I laughed, “No, God, teach me how to love better,” and He said, “Do the dishes.” Hurt, I asked a third time, “God, teach me how to love,” and He said, “Feed my sheep.”

“Oh,” I said. “Oh.”

There are nights still when I am a sorry lover. When I don’t give a damn. When I skip washing the floors, sweep the crumbs under the rug, fall asleep and forget to listen. And those nights I resent the boys for the piss on the linoleum, the snot smeared on the tub and the shit on the floor that I have to scrape off with a knife. I forget, or ignore, or push aside the history of abuse that has brought these boys here, to these behaviours, and I swear a blue streak when even the knife won’t take it off. Sometimes, it’s the same old shit every week. Literally. Sometimes, these boys shrink to the size of a paycheque and not a very big one at that. And then my hot guilt rises again, I dig down for the easy passion and burn bright for a moment. But there is only cold ash in the end of these nights. That there is love, that it moves like an impossible shadow sewed to the smooth soles of my feet and that it cannot be lost despite my straying is miracle enough to bring me back to trying again.

Now, I am at my own home and the sun is beginning to set. The trees are bare against a yellow-grey sky and the brown grass is glowing electric. The day is dying. Later tonight I will get in my car and drive in the dark to the group home. The boys will be hyped up on pop and chips, and maybe the one that almost hit me this morning will like me again tonight, or maybe not, but if not tonight then next weekend for sure, because we are none of us easy to love here and we know it, stake our lives on second chances. Love is doing time. Love is a magical punch clock.

Tomorrow morning I will stand on the deck, drink my coffee and pray for deer. I will place my palms against the rail and pray goodness into the lives of these boys. And I will pinch myself to stay awake.

“Love is here.” I will remember.

“God is here.”

“Love is a boy asleep in this house.”

“Amen.”

And Love will say to me then, “Go inside, dear Stray, and eat up the good morning with your toast.”

Tapitty Tap, Tap, Tap

2009-03-12T20:16:00.006-06:00

Get your dancing shoes on over here and shake it with me.

This is me high fiving Jesus.

Sleepdriving

2009-03-07T13:39:00.002-07:00

Press play.

It's been a week

2009-03-02T11:12:00.002-07:00

and I still haven't stopped grinning like a fool.

University of Iowa called to "invite" me to do my MFA at their fine, fine school.

Holy.
Holy.
Smokes.

The Elect

2009-02-23T00:11:00.002-07:00

Photo credit: Colin Puchala

What I hadn’t understood before is that bit about the poor - in that room full of the scent of her perfume and the sound of her gratitude weeping on your wet feet - that you said they would always be with us.
It was your hand stretching out and blessing our foolish heads with promise.

We, who see the poor as a burden, who, if we feel anything about their lives at all, flit between guilt, or anger, or shame, but only enough that we might assure ourselves of our own goodness.
“Oh, the injustice!” [shake head, sip coffee, flip to horoscope.]
Then, those cheaply bought rivers of unearned emotion flood the banks of our hearts sufficiently, and we doggy paddle in the warm glory of them. (“What’s to be done/How can God be good/It makes me so sick.”)

But blessed are the poor.
Blessed are the weak.
And the foolish things shall shame the wise.

Because the presence of the poor here yet is paid proof of your mercy upon us, (though Heaven help them bear your generosity) and they are radiant in their inheritance.
You have spent a storehouse of kindness buying us back from our drowning poverty,
And still, you wait on our turning, on the slow, white blossoming of love unravelled.

Watch Out!

2009-02-22T14:11:00.006-07:00

I'm gonna mess you up with my moves.

The ones from grade seven dance class...
Thanks, Ms. Berry.

Just turn your head to the side for me, will you?

2009-02-19T13:15:00.009-07:00

Bolivia made my head hurt. It also made me laugh my ass off.
And, also, I am obligated by my vanity to tell you that neither are my shoes usually so ugly, nor my ankles so visible below my pants.
How embarrassing.

For the Artists I Love

2009-02-18T13:05:00.002-07:00

Think what you like about Elizabeth Gilbert. This is like being tucked into a warm bed on a cold and trying night.

The Undo-able Thing

2009-02-17T23:09:00.008-07:00

Photo credit: Colin Puchala

In Llallagua, I got out of bed in the mornings, washed, dressed, ate breakfast and stepped outside to the clang and holler of the busy market across the street from our hotel. To the right of me, as I inhaled the battling scents of morning in the city, of urine and freshly baked bread, rotting garbage and frying doughnuts, was a woman who slept curled on the sidewalk and the smells coming off her were almost visible in their thick and wafting potency. She slept there like the dead every night through the cold and noise, and our first evening in the city we looked to see that she was actually breathing, still as she was. One morning, I watched her wake and rise to sit, her eyes impassive, blinking, and then she gathered her things as though she had only napped on the couch and was now about to set off to run errands, or cook lunch, or write a letter that she had been postponing. But for the grace of God she went elsewhere.

And I have been thinking about dignity, about this woman sleeping on the streets like a dog, with the dogs, and of the beauty that lay sleeping and curled inside her. Inside one of the poorest countries in one of the poorest cities, one of the poorest women slept outside our door on the ground, full of worth and goodness, and nothing she had done, and nothing the world had done could diminish the truth that rose from her: that dignity had been fused to her soul. She could not be unmade from being made in the image of God.

Try as we might in our pride and judgement, there is no undoing of worth, no undoing of the mercy of God’s goodness grafted to the roots of a heart. Because when all else is gone, left forgotten and rotting in the gutter, dignity remains immovable, inseparable, ever fixed and alive, pulsing in the dirt and lashed like an anchor to the truth that set it down.

A Lovey Dovey Day

2009-02-15T21:35:00.001-07:00

I think last night I just might have had the best Valentine's Day dinner. Ever. It included macaroni, smokies, raspberries, blackberries, cupcakes with icing four inches deep and a movie that was even more sickly sweet than that. All of India's favourites.
I like that loving means knowing how to give happiness in concrete ways to the one you love, and that in the giving, bright orange cheese sauce tastes nothing like it came powdered from a box.

Shake it.
You threw your hair back and you sang along.

Reason 257 of Why I Love Them Folks

2009-02-15T16:38:00.003-07:00

It's possible were were laughing so hard that even funnier things happened.
Very possible.

Someone left a big tube of A535 at work

2009-02-14T02:42:00.007-07:00

and maybe I got a little a carried away.
I smell edible all over, or at least chewable - like a piece of spearmint gum.
And I'm smokin' hot.

Rad.

The Mule

2009-02-13T10:12:00.003-07:00

Yesterday, I put on your sorrows and my winter coat and drove them out to the frozen lake. I walked along the edge, rounded the bend and cut through knee high snow to a forest of sand coloured reeds.

Winter is a good place for grief: bitter, brittle, odourless, hard. So I knelt and took it out from under my coat where it pulsed warm against my heart, and placed it on the snow beside me.
Only silence, really, and the wind freezing my salted cheeks under that bright noon sun.

I would like, like a mule, to carry your grief there daily and leave that hot sadness to cool and break in the shattering cold, instead of only watching the path it burns in its passing.
But there is no cure for the losing and you feel that already.

I have only silences and sorry in the face of your sorrow.
And a frozen lake, and a winter's drive.
The putting on
The carrying
The lifting up
And the kneeling in the white.

I try to match the curtains when at all possible

2009-02-12T13:49:00.015-07:00

For Kimberly.
That's a ticket to Rent in my hand.

The Land

2009-02-11T15:37:00.008-07:00

Driving through Llallagua is what I imagine driving over lunar landscapes would be. That any life, let alone human life, exists here at all is a testament to the will of the survivors: the naked hills, thin air, incessant wind, razor blade grasses and the blowing dust, dust, dust, colour it all inhospitable. Uninhabitable. Though it is not.

One morning we drove to the worksite, silent, travel-weary and dull, and the radio sang quietly, “The earth is full of your glory.” We were passing the almost dried riverbed with its blowing collections of garbage stuck in the mud and its women and children who pick through the refuse in their endless pursuit for survival, and the irony of God’s glory crying out from these rocks only felt like an unkindness.

That God can be met in the extravagance of his creation when it is dripping wet with green and life, when the stars hurt your heart and the birds surge triumphant is believable, but what, I wondered, of God’s glory in the dead lands? What do these treeless hills cry out about?

Later, I saw that the beauty of this place was in the sky, in the way the clouds moved and shadowed the spaces, cupping and holding for a moment that was already dissolving, the life and lives of those travelling below, and I thought that maybe this land was witness to the uncontainable: that God is wild in mystery, vast, unyielding, folded in secret and sharp like a sword on the wind.

Photo Credit: Brian Wirzba

Full Moon

2009-02-10T23:04:00.002-07:00

Aw aw awwooooooooow

Washing

2009-02-10T15:45:00.005-07:00

One Sunday afternoon we helped wash babies in Cochabamba: round, stoic, black-haired beauties from North of Potosi. They had travelled the 350km from there to here slung on the backs of their mothers who had walked, hitched rides, bumped in the backs of trucks over hours of dusty winding roads. The mothers had come for a few months to beg a living, sleep on the streets, and then make the trek back home again. But the streets are short on baths, and so, on Sunday afternoons these women bring their children to a tall tent that is pitched in the city square for a few hours and run by a local man and some volunteers. They are given milk and bread outside, and when they are done they bring their babies to be cleaned.

I washed the littlest ones - took off their layers and layers of homemade clothes and poured warm water over their black hair and chubby arms and legs. Mostly, the babies only blinked up at me. They were silent even with the soap and shampoo and the washcloth that scrubbed at the layers of dirt and grime under their noses, behind their ears, and in their deep and secret bellybuttons. Some of the mothers handed their babies off to me and then waited outside, and some of them helped quietly in the washing, calm and matter-of-fact as we striped, washed, rinsed and dressed their babies in clean donated clothing. There was hardly more than a word that passed between us.

Later, some of the women undid their long black braids and washed their hair in the square, necks bent, water streaming. They worked out the knots with small plastic combs while their children watched, teased and tugged at the mystery of those hanging black curtains, of their tired mothers made beautiful on a Sunday afternoon. The sun was setting as they lifted their heads and re-braided their hair: tight, smooth, cleanly parted and shining, glory around them, resting on their shoulders.

Photo credit: Colin Puchala

Not a kitten stuck up a tree somewhere

2009-02-04T20:52:00.007-07:00

So, last night I couldn't sleep. Again. Drives me absolutely bonkers. But last night I couldn't sleep because all night long I was writing in my head something about the movie Slumdog Millionaire. I saw it with a friend last week and the damn thing isn't leaving me alone.

So here's the deal.
I'm the girl in the back of the class with her hand raised, looking uncomfortable while everyone else is cheering their hearts out. "Um, excuse me? Pardon me? Could I just say this?"

I liked the movie. Really. I did. I've told many people to go out and see it, and that's a rare thing for me, but, although I want to overlook this major, glaring fault in an otherwise very awesome movie, I can't.

Let me say it here. Let me be loud. Let me be clear.

I'm sick to death of love stories where the girl plays the helpless/ powerless to effect her own salvation/ waiting for that knight in shining armour to save her, kind of role.
Seriously, kids. How long are we going to tell this story for? How is it that once again a pretty face is an interesting enough face? That nothing more substantial needs to emerge for her story to be meaningful?

I know. You're all rolling your eyes and calling me the eight letter f-word. And I know. That wasn't what the movie was about. I know. It was chock full of so many very fantastic things that it's almost asshole-ish of me to point it out. I know. It was going for a magical realism sort of deal with the destiny thing and all, and maybe I should overlook it. But you know, actually, I'm not going to apologize for being frustrated with this anymore than I would apologize for being angry about a depiction of an aboriginal person as a peace pipe smoking/headdress wearing/rain-dance making "How" sort of person.

Enough.

Men have a good right to tell their own salvation stories. Those stories are valuable in and of themselves. Don't go tacking on some pretty girl needing rescuing to justify the telling. And, if you do want to include some pretty girl, let her tell her own damn story.

Now, go out and see it and tell me I'm wrong. Seriously. I would rather be wrong.

Because I love a good love song just as much as the next girl

2009-02-04T20:40:00.006-07:00

Bodylicious

2009-02-02T09:49:00.005-07:00

I had a realization on Saturday. It didn't come about in a great way, but it was a great thing nonetheless.

India was running around naked, like she does pretty much every morning taking forty-five minutes to get dressed when it should take her five, when out of the blue I heard her crying and saying awful things. She walked into my bedroom and said, "Momma, I hate my legs. Look at them. They're so fat and they jiggle when I walk."

My first response was to tell her how ridiculous that was. India is all skin and bones, and for awhile I worried about her being underweight, so the idea of her legs being "fat" was hilarious. But, I realized that the last thing I wanted to do was to feed into this idea that her body has to look a certain way, and that if it does, it's good, and if it doesn't that's bad. So I thought of Anne Lamott and her thighs and how she calls them her aunts and says sweet things to them, and I told India, "Baby, you have a beautiful body with legs that are strong and healthy and take you where you need to go. You tell those legs of yours, 'Legs, I like you. You are good legs. Thanks for being a part of my body.'"

She thought that was pretty funny and we talked to her body awhile and we giggled about it, and I asked her where in the world she had heard such silly talk about her legs being jiggly and fat. She couldn't remember, and really, who can say? The girls at her school, her friends, some woman in the locker room? I don't know, but what I do know, and what I realized is that she has never heard that kind of talk from me, because... I like my body. I do. I think it's great. I thoroughly enjoy it, and man alive, it feels good to know that.

One of the funny side affects of having a baby was that after, when I still had large breasts and a round tummy and round arms and round everything, I started loving my body and feeling good in it in a way that I never had when I was skinnier. I loved it because it felt like my friend. It had given me a daughter, it took me through labour, it was stronger and tougher than I ever would have guessed.

But then, of course, when my marriage fell apart I forgot I had a body, and then I hated my body, and then I took pleasure in being mean to it, and watching it shrink, and feeling it starve. Weird. And sad. And scary. I know. But the truth.

And then, things changed again. I survived the loss of my husband, I survived being alone, being sick, losing my home, being a mom, getting on with life, rethinking my body. And so, I find myself here, a few years later, and realize that I have not once said something ugly about my body or anyone else's body to my daughter, and that generally speaking I feel good about it despite its imperfections.

Hospitality as a fruit of the Spirit is providing a safe place for hearts to rest inside. My heart is a home to my body. It can be a place of hostility or hospitality: forgiving weaknesses, overlooking flaws, enjoying the beautiful, providing a safe place to rest inside. I live in a good house. I know it. And that is such a good thing.

All professional, all the time

2009-01-24T23:01:00.005-07:00

Um, so, I may have just demonstrated to one of the kids at the group home that I, too, am perfectly able and skilled at using the fuck word - in a professional and unemotional sense, of course. He seemed to think it was a talent only he possessed, and that I should be duly impressed with the way he was tacking it on to everything he said in that ever so creative way of his.

Little brat got to me. And I like that kid.

I told him after that I wished him a good night and a better week, but I was half waiting to have the T.V. thrown at me.

Sheesh. Someone pass me a bar of soap and a little absolution.

This is for you.

2009-01-24T17:43:00.003-07:00

Graveyard

Movements

2009-01-21T10:16:00.006-07:00

Morning
The moon hangs safety-pinned to the backdrop of the still dark dawn, like a painted white cardboard symbol of itself. Three token stars twinkle around the sickle. I am moving over the frozen ground toward the tent of the sun, the bridegroom appearing, the leaving of his chamber and his blush against my face.
Which would make me what, I laugh.
Not virgin awaiting.

Afternoon
The cedar waxwings swoop in swarms like invading armies, plundering the dead trees of their fruity wealth like pulled gold fillings. They are as merciless as beauty. The skeleton trees stripped and gleefully abandoned.
I move over the icy sidewalks like pregnant. Hips forward, feet wider, steps smaller. My thumbs tapping the tips of my fingers in anticipation.
The birds, the birds, the birds.

Night
I walk to the graveyard in the cold black, twist off a powdery cattail for my sleeping girl and hop a fence. The place itself unremarkable. Tidy. Closer to a golf course than a pocket of grief, with the Buddhists and Muslims and Christians rotting in their separate spaces even six feet under. I am carried on the frozen wind like a ghost to the dogs and their hot barking, "On a night like this?"
I shortcut home in the dark through a blue-white field, snow to my knees, and there, in a copse of trees, is a plastic St. Nicholas face down in his red velvet cloak. The Patron Saint of generosity. The dead on my right, suburbia on my left, I pick him up and settle him in the branch of a tree. He is smiling, one arm lifted. I move to leave, and then stop. Face him. I hold my palm over him in return. Pray a blessing on the plastic, on the saint, on the generosity. That this wild white might sanctify any who pass under the beauty of his hand.

Thank you...

2009-01-16T18:42:00.001-07:00

"I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can't handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don't deserve me at my best."
— Marilyn Monroe

2009-01-14T13:35:00.000-07:00

There's a certain slant of light,
On winter afternoons,
That oppresses, like the weight
Of cathedral tunes.

Heavenly hurt it gives us;
We can find no scar,
But internal difference
Where the meanings are.

None may teach it anything,
'Tis the seal, despair,-
An imperial affliction
Sent us of the air.

When it comes, the landscape listens,
Shadows hold their breath;
When it goes, 't is like the distance
On the look of death.

Emily Dickinson

The Host

2009-01-07T13:20:00.011-07:00

The thing about Jesus is that he sounds like the kindest voice I know. I drive to work - the hour it takes me to get there sludging through the tangled city and then shoot like a rocket onto highways of sometimes black ice, or blinding snow, or summer heat hovering like ghosts above the soft asphalt- and Jesus sits beside me in the passenger seat. We hold hands. Threaded. He smiles a lot. Says good things. I drink coffee. He may wish he still had a body.

Once, when I was a kid, I asked someone why Jesus floated off into the clouds and didn't stay on earth forever, and they, the somebody, told me that he had left so that he could be nearer to us than bodies allowed. Closer than skin touching skin, or hands holding hands, and inside our souls. But still, there have been nights or mornings or long afternoons when all I've wanted to know is the shape of his hands, the cut of his collar bone.

There is a friend who prays for me and I swear I could mark the moments when those prayers hit heaven, because some days I stop and turn, and Jesus is talking to me in that kind, slow voice, filling up the empty spaces between my cells, rushing through my lungs and pushing against the blue veins in my wrists. It is a mystery. My heart only knows to lub-dub varying rhythms of fullness and desire in response.
Some days, all I know to say to that bodiless closeness is, "I miss you. I miss you."

Argh!

2009-01-06T22:10:00.005-07:00

Phooey on all self-protecting bums.

Note to Self

2008-12-29T22:27:00.006-07:00

I just popped out of bed where I was reading, "The Cloister Walk" by Kathleen Norris. It's been one of those books that come along once every five years or so, like "Pilgrim at Tinker Creek", where I can feel my life changing as I read. Things are changing.
So, yes, I just popped out of bed and I am writing this down to remind myself to think some more about it: Sometimes, I approach church, or faith, or God with a payment plan. I make my payments in effort, or belief, or simply showing up with my church heart on, and if I don't get a return for my investment I re-evaluate the terms of the agreement. But how much of the meaning to be found and held close to my soul from church, or faith, or God, is simply inside the showing up, inside the sometimes bland/bad/boring experience of the experience? When I went to Bolivia I worked hard to overcome the idea that this work we were doing was not about proving a return on an investment in monetary terms, it was about relationships. But do I approach God with a "return on my investment" set of attitudes?

It's like this.

Once, I was telling a man about a couple in my church who had been married for years and years - raised a family together, worked hard, survived sorrow, became these memory keepers of each others lives, and then, the husband died and she was left alone and old with no one who knew what her face looked like when she was twenty-three.
I told this to this man and he said that it all seemed like such a waste. "All that work and you are only alone in the end."

I don't know. I don't know. When did life become as containable as a grade three math equation?

A Present for you.

2008-12-27T15:56:00.002-07:00

This song makes my feet sweet.
That's a very good thing.

Christmas Eve Service

2008-12-25T00:49:00.006-07:00

God's Astrology

We come to this place week after week, month after month, year after year, and we work together at the seemingly impossible task of untangling God and putting into words the unspeakable mystery of faith. We are searching for even a single strand of his holiness to hang onto and follow down the length of our lives like fingers following down the beads of a rosary. And sometimes we are laid flat by grief, and sometimes we are laid flat by joy, and sometimes we just lie there, watching the world turn and the time tick,and wonder at the meaning of it all. We are so small; God is so vast. But somehow in the midst of all this wandering and wondering God lets himself be found by us. And once, he let himself be found inside a skin sack and blood vessels, two hundred and six bones, a brain and a spine, heart and lungs, fingernails and a belly button.

I know.

I can hardly believe it myself.

But then, I also have a hard time believing that a whale can hold its breath for an hour, that salmon swim thousands of miles back to their natal stream to spawn, that the earth is deeper than it is high, that 300 million cells are dying in my body every minute, or that an oak tree gives off twenty eight thousand gallons of moisture a season.

The earth is full of your glory.

Tonight, as we come together and celebrate this holy shrinking of God into a child, I am wondering at the ways we are brought to see the face of his glory. As much as I can, I understand the callings of Mary and Joseph, the shepherds and Simeon, and Anna the prophetess, they make sense in their smallness and chosen-ness and salt of the earth faithfulness. But then there are the wise men, and there is the star.
Consider the star.
Consider this: that once there were men, astrologers, living in a distant land who studied the skies and ordered their lives by the arrangements of those lights. And they were called wise. And they were wise, because they understood from the stars what God’s own people failed to see: that creation itself was bearing witness to this event: that God was entering history on humanity’s terms. And from this new born light, and their charts and calculations, and language full of words like “birth star”, and “alignment”, “precession of the equinox”, and “celestial houses”, these men found God, and the finding bowed them down in worship. And God spoke to them in dreams. And they moved and lived their lives accordingly.

But what does this mean, that these men who were wise in the ways that are not God’s ways, found God?

That Jesus was born to a virgin, that only the poor and lowly shepherds heard the angel choir, and that star gazing wise men found him first smacks of anarchy. It all points to a no holds barred holy heyday. It is God letting his hair down. Heaven exultant. Rocks crying out, trees clapping hands. It is rules being broken, predictability shattered, salmon swimming upstream, whales holding their breath, and oak trees weeping. It is heaven come down, heaven come down, heaven come down, and glory filling our souls. Our stable. Our earth. The star leading the wise men is God all pure desire, all reaching out, all hands held up in the air palms out, saying only, “Come, just come, come unto me.”

We are celebrating tonight the miracle of God made vulnerable, but vulnerable not only in his tiny hands and new born body, but in his desire for us. He has opened himself to our wounding rejection. And he’s pulled out all the stops. The sky cracked open and sang its heart out, the prophecies wove together and birthed a truth, and the stars, the night sky, aligned itself to point the way to this exposed God for anyone that might be paying attention. This, like all of God, is a great mystery, and as any wise man or woman would tell you, the only thing to be done with mystery is to hold on tight to the clues, and follow where they lead.

Winter Solstice

2008-12-21T23:52:00.004-07:00

Take your sins tonight and rake them up into a heap. And your shame. And your fear. And set fire to the lot.
They will burn, and burn, and burn. And die.
They will die.
Ashes to ashes.

Today, we struck a match and set fire to that white wick of love.
The Advent.
The Waiting.
From here on in, dear heart, we grow into the light.

Baby doll

2008-12-21T17:28:00.002-07:00

Oh, and if you think it's cold where you are - we have a forecast of -39C (-38F) for tomorrow. Without the wind chill.
Cripes.

Hey, don't you go to my church?

2008-12-21T15:00:00.006-07:00

If you're here because Pastor Ryan mentioned this place in church on Sunday, you can find the piece I read here. You are also welcome to look around at my other stuff, but, um, you should know that if swearing, or sex talk, or some plain old silliness makes your panties knot up than you may want to move along now. But, if none of that bothers you, than come on in. The water's fine, fine, fine. I like people.

I Like Men

2008-12-19T13:53:00.007-07:00

If ever I wondered, I now know for sure that I do not lean in the lesbian manner. I've been meaning to tell you all about this for awhile, but, you know, life's been ridiculously busy and since my sexual orientation is pretty well established, I didn't really think it a burning matter. But still, I wanted to tell you: I'm not gay. I know I'm not gay because my book club, which is one of the most fantastic book clubs in the world and full of ladies I really, really like, read Middlesex by Jeffery Eugenides last month, and I'm pretty sure I can attribute my dream of having sex with a woman from that book, and let me tell you- it did nothing for me. Random sex with a random woman. Nope. Didn't like it. Now I know.

Actually, I tell you all this because the book, which is basically the story of a person caught in the middle of their sexuality - a hermaphrodite - has some of the most amazing writing I have ever read in the first half. Seriously, the artistry in the beginning section is breathtaking (the second part, not so much, but you want to forgive it because the first part is so amazing). But all of us ladies sitting around discussing gender and sexuality after reading it was also pretty incredible. What's that famous quote - the one directed at woman to live the way the men they want to marry live? Shoot. I can't remember. But the thing is this: One of the women at our group said she had been to a women's retreat once, and one of the exercises they were told to do was to imagine their entire day from the beeping of their alarm, to when they crawled into bed at night, but to imagine how it would look if they were men instead. I don't know if the fact that imagining myself as a man feels like incredible freedom means that women's equality has a long way to go, or just that I have a very bad imagination of what it's like to be a man, but I'll tell you this: when my life begins to shrink on me, and it feels as though it has become this clearly marked path of uninspired predictability and monochrome routine, I imagine what a man in my position would do, and all of a sudden I see a way out, and it's good.

It's true. I have a shaky history with men in my life. The exact words, "Boys are better than girls," were said to me pretty regularly growing up, and I still feel the almost unrestrainable urge to defend my worth at times, but really, overall, I love being a girl. I love kissing boys, and actually, it feels like some kind of perfection to know that maybe I do need men - to teach me some of the things the ladies have missed out on, like how to say, "Awwwww, fuck it," with gusto, shrug off the the nastiness, be brave in that different way than women are brave, hold power without fear of offending, shower less, be kind, ride a bike with no hands.
That would be nice.

India lost her first tooth. She wrote this:

2008-12-16T08:12:00.005-07:00

Gums are a purse for a tooth.
It pops out
Just like money when you need it,
And then, another one grows.

But that one does not
Pop out of the purse -
It is a patch on the purse.
Zero money.

India Sophia Stewart

A Helpful Suggestion or Two?

2008-12-15T15:02:00.008-07:00

Men, I'm here to tell you some things - things that I think we would all be grateful if you knew.

So, I'm shopping for lingerie with my older sister, Caroline, who, incidentally, is super hot and super fit, and as she's waiting in line to have this pink and black lacy thing with straps and belts and bows and garters size checked, this older man (somewhere in his seventies) comes up to her and says, "Um, excuse me, but my wife is about your size and I'm looking to get her some panties. What size are you?"

Okay, so, obviously there needs to be some clarification here.

Dear, dear men,

#1. Do not, under any circumstances, ask any woman SHOPPING in a lingerie store any question. Not even the time. This is not the place for small talk between the sexes.
#2. Never, ever, ever tell a woman in her mid thirties that she's the same size as your seventy year old wife, even if you are a lucky enough man for that to be true.
#3. Do not appear comfortable in a lingerie store, even if you are. It's kind of creepy.
#4. Do not hold up an item and then hold it out in front of a female shopper to size it up for your wife.
#5. Feel free to hold it up to yourself to size it up.
#6. Buy what you like. Really. Go wild. Just don't expect me not to break into fits of school girl giggles, or at least blush uncontrollably when you do.
#7. Do not forget that sex is funny. Nudity is funny. Orgasms are funny. No amount of satin or garters or black leather boots should conceal the fact that sex is a laugh riot.
#8. NEVER, NEVER underestimate the power of a good old fashioned, jaw dropping, eye bulging, "Holy smokes. You are so beautiful," when your wife wears what you got her. Really. Never.

Now, go get sexed up for the holidays in ease.

2008-12-12T16:22:00.008-07:00

I guess it's stupid to cry over not being able to have babies right now. I mean, it's not like there's a husband to have them with, or a home, or anything, and it's not like I'm healthy and physically able to - I was already told not to get pregnant on my medication or my baby will be missing some vital parts, and to go off that medication would mean I couldn't walk, so it's not like it's an option. So, how come now that my doctor told me I couldn't get pregnant right now I want to crawl into bed and have a good cry before supper anyways?

Oh! And....

2008-12-04T13:19:00.006-07:00

I keep forgetting to tell you about this. You should come. You'll make me rich.

I've been asked to read for a Non Fiction cabaret this Sunday at the Carrot Cafe (corner 94st& 118ave) from 3:00-5:00. The cover is $5.00, but there will be some good music and fancy pants writers, like Myrna Kostash, Curtis Gillespie and Ted Bishop, reading there, too. C'moooooooon. It'll be fun.

(sheesh. life is getting out of control around here. For the good news: I'm getting some fantastic writing done on an essay I've been working on since May. That's right. MAY! Ugh.)

I'll take a momma with a side dish of reality, please.

2008-12-04T12:47:00.005-07:00

And then sometimes, my voice makes this terrible screeching sound that I've never heard before, and I'm saying, "INDIA, GET OVER HERE SO I CAN DO YOUR HAIR!!!" and I can't believe that sound came from inside me, and I have visions of becoming THAT woman - the one in Safeway with the short shorts and big crunchy hair, cell phone clasped in jewelry laden fingers, hollering at her chocolate faced baby in the bulk candy section.
Ahhhh... motherhood. The great equalizer.

Which reminds me. You should look at this. You should write a letter. You should spread some love, ladies. Ho, ho, ho, you know.

That's a whole lot of "shoulds" for someone who hates that word. May I suggest...

Why I'm Awake at 2:30am

2008-12-03T02:52:00.002-07:00

Sometimes, I can't get over how much India likes me. We usually snuggle for a bit before she goes to sleep, but last night I went out and I promised her that I would snuggle with her when I came home. She was, of course, sleeping when I got home and so doesn't remember my kiss, and blanket pull, and tucking her in, so that when she woke up at 2:30 she hollered out, Momma! and when I came in she was a huge sleepy smile and a, "Can you snuggle with me now?"
So I did.
She put one of her little hands under my chin and one on my shoulder and just held me, grinning like mad as she drifted off to sleep happy as a clam because I was beside her.
She just likes me so much. It knocks my socks off.

If you're small and on a search

2008-11-27T17:00:00.001-07:00

I've got a feeder for you to perch on.

To the Bookstore!

2008-11-25T21:23:00.004-07:00

I meant to tell you this months ago:
Read, "The Maytrees" by Annie Dillard.
It hurt like hell, but I felt better for it. Like resetting a broken bone.
It's a good one.
I think it might be the saddest, most realistic, and most hopeful look at love I've read.

Sigh...

2008-11-24T16:44:00.003-07:00

I suppose it is inevitable in a house as small and full as ours that one day India would throw open my bedroom door at the same time my fourteen year old brother would be bounding down the stairs toward my room, so that just as I holler out, "India! Shut the door," it would make my brother look up to see me, standing there in my black push-up bra and lace panties that don't quite cover it all, and of course India would not know what to do and then leave without shutting the door.

Inevitable.
And awkward.

A Fearful Clay

2008-11-21T22:37:00.007-07:00

If you want to read the piece I wrote about Bolivia, drop me a line and I'll send it to you.

acs3@ualberta.ca

Photo credit:Brian Wirzba

What I Read Today

2008-11-21T16:57:00.005-07:00

If John Banville had his way, his entire collected works would disappear.
"I have this fantasy," says the much-lauded Irish novelist. "I'm walking past a bookshop and I click my fingers and all my books go blank. So I can start again and get it right."

2008-11-19T21:30:00.001-07:00

Snap.
Pop.
Crunch.

I think that may be the sound of my heart coming unhinged from it's moorings.

2008-11-16T21:40:00.003-07:00

In retrospect I realize that I probably shouldn't have posted that last post. You know - privacy and all. So it's down now. Thanks for the support though. It was a rough go.

What I'm Talkin' About

2008-11-10T22:08:00.000-07:00

TOQUE!

The Facts of Life Are All About You. Yooooooouuuu.

2008-11-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

I may be about to tread dangerously close to crossing that line of things you don't want to know about me, but, we're all girls here, right?
I dunno. Pretend.

So, the other night I was undressing for bed and India was in my bedroom talking to me. I took off my shirt and then my bra, and ladies, you know that glorious moment when the bra comes off and it feels so damn good and you give a stretch and a rub where that stupid wire has been squeezing you all day long? Well, I'm stretching and rubbing and reaching for my pyjamas, when India looks at me with her little face all scrunched up in desire and she says, "Momma, can I please touch them too?"
"No. You can't, India. They're private."
"Please, Momma. Please."
No!"
"I'm never going to get boobies. It's not fair."
"You'll get them, India. Every girl does when they're older."
"Oh. Good."

Good grief. That's what I say.
I suppose this conversation is an improvement from the complete lack of conversation about boobies that I had with my own mother - she didn't even notice I had grown a set so I went and got my own first bra from my older cousin's hand me downs - but sheesh, the girl is five. Next she's going to be reading, Are you there God? It's me, Margaret and doing her bust exercises.

Hold on to your hats. Or boobies. Life is going to get tricky in no time flat. (!)

2008-11-07T09:17:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I freak out.

Ha ha ha ha...

2008-11-06T18:10:00.001-07:00

India is wrestling with my 15 year old sister, Courtney. I just heard my mom say in a half-hearted voice to her, "No choking, Court."
India is having a hoot.

Sometimes, I love this crazy house.

A Man and His Heart

2008-11-05T15:45:00.000-07:00

And then today I'm sitting on the white couch with red flowers, reading the story of David and his son Absalom to India, trying not to let her see that I am crying because of how David fled his palace and hid in the hills rather than fight his own traitor son, because of how David went from commander to commander ordering them not to harm him, because of his anxious waiting for word of his son's safety, because of how they filled Absalom's heart with spears as he hung like a wind chime in a tree strung up by his beautiful hair, and because of David's weeping.

"O Absalom, my son, my son."

Where, I wonder, do we get the idea that God equals happiness, equals safety, equals an easy old age in the suburbs with neighbours that wave?

"O Absalom, Absalom."

And how is it that we think we should now be able to escape the wandering, the fleeing, the cave dwelling, the robe ripping, prophet pointing, madman mocking of a broken heart?

"My son, my son Absalom!"

Or that we would be protected from our lusts, from our roof top nights, from the trickle of the water falling,
following
the curve of a neck,
down spine,
over legs,
between toes.
That heavy night air concealing
nothing.

"My son Absalom! Absalom! If only I had died instead of you."

Or, mostly, maybe mostly, that we would be protected from regret.

I look away, out the window at the bare trees and metallic sky, and she sits quietly beside me.

- It's so sad, she says.

- Yes, I say. It is.

"Let us fall into the hands of the Lord, for his mercy is great."

I wonder if he knew that he was called, "A man after God's own heart"?
I wonder if he ever felt he caught it.

2008-11-01T23:36:00.000-06:00

The night we confessed until the sun came up, took off our secret clothes like two giddy teens - that lying shirt, those shameful pants - until we shivered in our honesty, all knobby kneed and pointy elbowed, giggling at our pale skinned truth (you and your slow, quiet laugh at my blushing and sweat. My stretch and groan. "The sky's getting light." Those pauses).
We must have held hands under the tree then, the one by the water, and that kindness was enough. That generosity.

And then the last confession removed the last laces of fearful silence with such a nervous breath,
such a naked, "I love you,"
held and returned.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to:
a) death
b) a walking away
c) that good night

d) all of the above

Let the good times flow

2008-10-28T11:10:00.000-06:00

Hey, I'm home. Safe and sorta sound. I brought some fantastic souvenirs back with me, but I think my favourite one is the thing I got that kept me up half the night running to the bathroom and reeling in pain. That one's awesome. I'm putting to the test the theory that our bodies are mostly made of water because my blood has got to be like concentrated orange juice by now.

Really, it was a great trip. More on that when I can eat without pain.

Now I'm dancin' for my life

2008-10-23T10:13:00.000-06:00

I´m driving through the wind burnt countryside of Bolivia, from La Paz to Cochabamba, from all dead yellow, to springtime green, and Donna Summers is singing about looking for some hot stuff tonight on the cd player because our driver loves this music and we listen to it for hour after winding road hour. I hear it, and all of a sudden I´m six again, in my wood panelled family room with the brown carpet and brown floral couches, holding on to one of the back pockets of my dad´s jeans. My older sister, Caroline, is holding on to the other pocket and the three of us dance around the coffee table (also brown) with Chris and Kim, my little brother and sister, trailing behind us. We are a crazy, dancing-fool train, going in circles around the table until our cheeks are red and our backs sweat and my dad´s pockets threaten to rip. Nothing is better than this. Nothing is better than all of us dancing.

A few years later, Caroline and I take the plants off the tall windowsills that flank the fireplace in the family room and carefully place them on the coffee table. The windows are taller than us, and the sills so wide that we can step up and stand on them, enclosed in them like a go-go dancer cage. We sing with Kim Wilde about being a kid in American, though neither she, nor us, are American. No one cares. We dance our pre-teen hearts out, make up cheer moves with Tony Basil because Mickey is so fine. He blows our minds. We don´t have a clue what any of it means, but it doesn´t really matter because it´s good music to dance to and that´s all we hear. When my dad sees us, he laughs: he´s raising his girls to not be afraid of anything.

***

This is a Bonnyville wedding, which means that my mom has sewn matching dresses in different colours for me and Caroline and that we have driven the hour and a half long drive from our door to the doors of the community hall that my second cousin has rented out for his wedding reception. There is no caterer here: this is a country wedding old-school style where all of the neighbours are invited and the women bring steaming hot casserole dishes of cabbage rolls, lasagne, chilli and something that looks like chicken but tastes like fish. Most of them are covered in breadcrumb toppings that you only get if you are at the start of the line. There are freshly baked buns, squares with coconut and pink frosting for dessert and a cash bar, though all my alcoholic relatives complain about this, and there is, of course, a dance floor. After we eat, the tables are pushed to the sides with a few chairs left for the old folks to sit on while they visit, though even they will take a few turns around the room when the steel guitar gets going.

My dad is a dust devil on the dance floor, twirling and tossing my mom about with a reckless abandon that leaves her looking like an ecstatic loose wheel about to be flung free. Her face is a picture of frightened joy. My dad makes up his own moves, dodges some near misses with the shuffling old people, burns up the dance floor. Everyone talks about what great dancers they are and I´m proud as all get go.

I´m eleven or twelve, shy around the boys but plenty old enough to like them. I´ve noticed a boy my age that I´ve never seen before, so it´s a safe bet we´re not related. He has curly brown hair, a white dress shirt and the bluest eyes. I want so badly for him to ask me to dance, but he doesn´t, so I twirl and swirl with my cousins, my dad, my sisters and brother, always aware of where he is in the room. His older brother dances with Caroline, but my blue-eyed boy only sits quietly on a chair with the old people. When our eyes finally meet, we both look away quickly. I keep dancing - dance so fast that my hair is flying around my face, dance until my cheeks are as red hot as my shoes, dance until the cake has been cut and the late lunch cleared away: I´ll dance, boy or not, and I´ll love it.

The evening is almost over and I´m certain now that the beautiful boy is never going to ask me to dance and it hasn´t occurred to me that I could ask him. I am standing against the wall, taking a breather with my cousin, when an old man I don´t know stumbles up and begins talking loudly to us. My cousin looks afraid. I´m still pretty innocent. I know about getting drunk, but have never been even close to it myself. My parents like to give us sips of their drinks when we go out for dinner, banking on the idea that if they don´t make a big deal of drinking, we won’t make a big deal of drinking, so far, this has worked out pretty well for them.

But this old man at my country cousin’s wedding is very drunk, and both my cousin and I are nervous and polite girls who try to make sense of his nonsense, but just before he passes out and my cousin tries to break his fall with her already substantial breasts, he throws up all over her and some of it splatters on to me. Her face: horrified. I imagine mine is much the same. There is a commotion and all the other, less drunk men come rushing in to pick him up and straighten him out. My aunt helps my cousin wash up as best as she can in the bathroom and I wash my left arm off in the sink beside them. I hear them talking about what the old man was really after from us,and I don’t understand completely, but it, and the puke, make me feel sick, so I leave the bathroom and sit down in the hall on one of the chairs that border the dance floor.

While I am sitting there, smelling like old man vomit and wondering if I’m going to cry, the boy I had been eyeing all night and finally forgotten about, comes up to me and asks me if I want to dance. I look up at his pretty blue eyes and say, no. He turns and walks away.

Later that night on the dark drive home, my mom asks me why I didn´t dance with the nice looking boy with the curly hair. I tell her that it was because of the old man puke. It takes me months, maybe years, maybe until my first real crush into love until I can admit that I didn´t say no because of the old man, but because I liked that blue-eyed boy, and that I wasn´t as afraid of saying no to him as I was afraid of letting him take me for a spin on the dance floor.

Hey, You

2008-10-23T05:16:00.000-06:00

MY MOM´S GOOD!
MY MOM´S GOOD!
MY MOM´S GOOD!

I´m still in Bolivia - leave for home tomorrow night. Keep us safe.

Don't Be a Stranger

2008-10-08T21:54:00.000-06:00

Bolivia

(Ya. I don't know what's going on with my shawl either.)

Later, Alligator.

The Magic Hour

2008-10-06T22:48:00.000-06:00

I broke my computer a few weeks ago and my dad lent me his old laptop to use while mine is in the shop. His old laptop is the one I used three years ago so it's been like going back in time, looking at all the pictures, reading my old stories - my firefox home page is the blog of a boy I dated then. I haven't seen that blog in ages. Weird.
It's all made me nostalgic for my burnt down apartment and got me running around showing everyone how stinkin' cute India was three years ago.
Anyway. I found this story I wrote back then. I don't really write fiction anymore, mostly because I'm terrible at it, but this one was kind of sweet. I'll leave it here for you to read. I don't know if I'll have time to post again before Bolivia.

No word about my momma yet.

Love.
Love.
Love you.

The Magic Hour

September 4th, 2005

It’s raining again.
You’d think I’d be used to the damn rain after living here for two years, but I’m not. I miss sunny Alberta.
It’s 6:30 am. I missed the 6:00 Sea Bus and I’m going to be late for work again. Fuck.
There’s a guy sitting to the left of me. He’s got on a real expensive looking suit and a leather briefcase beside him. He actually just took out a pocket watch and checked the time! (who has pocket watches now a days?) His hands don’t match his suit. The nails are chipped and it looks like the pad of his thumb and pointer fingers are stained with grease.
I heard an interview with Robert Munsch a while ago on CBC and I remember him talking about how he hears voices in his head all the time. This world famous children’s author who’s sold over 21 million books hears voices in his head. He said, “It makes me wonder sometimes about all the effort it takes for some people to just sit there, looking as normal as they do. You never know what’s going on inside them.”
That’s right, Rob, you don’t.
I try to imagine what I look like to the people who see me and don’t know me. If I was the fancified mechanic beside me this morning, explaining to the police what the girl who jumped off the side of the sea bus because she was going to be late for work again looked like, what would he say?
Well, officer. She was youngish.
I don’t know, around 26, 27?
Prettyish.
She had light brown hair and I think she was short. It’s hard to tell how tall she was exactly.
She was sitting down the whole time.
Well, yes, she stood up to jump into the ocean, but I didn’t notice how tall she was then.
No. That’s all I remember of her.
She didn’t look like the type to get up and jump into the ocean.

September 6th, 2005

I caught the 6:00 Sea Bus today. Feel a little more in control of life in general.
I just finished reading “Life After God” by Douglas Coupland and I think I’m in love. Man, that guy’s intense. It’s like he just reached into my head and pulled out my brains and threw them in a book. All that emptiness and searching and finding. That’s it you know? That’s it.
I went out walking my city last night again. It’s my city. I want to make it my city so I figure I’ll go out walking at night and it will become my city. Kind of like Lila Futuranski in “Girls, Visions and Everything”. What a stupid name though, “Futuranski”. I know it was Schulman’s first book, but come on, “Futuranski”? More like “Dumberanski”. Anyways, so I’m walking around Vancouver by myself, like Lila, taking it back from, from…well, maybe just taking it, and I’m thinking about Doug C. and I wonder if I showed up at his door and told him I wanted to fuck him, no strings attached, if he would go for it. It’s hard to tell you know, those artsy types can sometimes be a little morally high ground, and sometimes when they die you find out they did all this gross crap like make-out with their sisters and hire prostitutes and that sort of thing. But maybe he would, you never know. I know what I would do though. He would answer the door and I would get all embarrassed and decide to abort the mission and probably thrust my dog-eared copy of L.A.G into his hands, mumbling for his signature. He would give me that squinty-eyed look that men give. Like when they want to fuck you but aren’t sure if they’re picking up the right vibe from you. He’d shut the door, slowly, giving me a chance to call him back and land in his bed. But I wouldn’t. I’d go home. Cursing my cowardice.
Man. Why can’t I get it together?
I want to live like Doug C. writes – seemingly careless and yet pointedly. I feel unanchored. I feel like I’m floating around loose, like I’m supposed to be tied to something but I’m more like an astronaut in space, grasping at a cord that has somehow become unplugged.
Maybe it’s because I had such a crap childhood. Well, maybe it wasn’t crap exactly, more like, rotten bananas. Mushy and black. Not bad enough to screw me up enough so I could use it to fuel my creativity and become famous, just bad enough so that I have to take those damn little pills everyday that cost an arm and a leg and keep me working at Telus because they have such a good drug plan, even though the work is mindless, monkey crap. It’s so crazy that they’re on strike right now. Telus should just fire all of the strikers and hire monkeys to replace them. They could pay them in mushy, black bananas and save all their drug money.

September 10th, 2005

I was listening to the CBC today, who is also on strike, and heard a repeat of Richardson’s Roundup. Old Bill was talking about this streetwalker who came up to him in China town one night “in a bad way” and swore she would do anything for him if he would give her some money. “But I’m gay,” says Bill. “There’s nothing you can do for me.”
“But I have a very hairy chin, she said. “Just feel it. All the gay men love me. Feel it.” And Bill Richardson, of Richardson’s Roundup stood in China Town stroking the poor, worn out hooker’s chin. I hope there was some transfer of kindness in that touch. Or something.

September 18th, 2005

I saw a kid this weekend when I was working the tea booth at a music festival, trying to pick up a little extra cash (those pills are so damn expensive). All the kids at the festival are dressed up real nice. They’ve all got their name- brand asses stuffed into name-brand jeans, carried around by name-brand runners. All day I’m telling people “Sorry, no coffee. We only sell tea.” It says right on the sign. “STEEPS TEA” but everyone assumes we’ve got to sell coffee too. I’m working away. Not really paying attention to what’s going on at the end of the line up but I keep seeing this lurching flash of red in my peripheral and I finally look up long enough to see what it is. It’s a kid wearing a puffy old winter jacket, like the kind I used to wear as a kid ten years ago, and a baseball cap that looks like it should be on a crotchety farmer, not a fourteen-year-old boy at a music festival. Everything about him looked “country”. Not “country” as if it were a fashion choice or something, which would still be weird in the middle of Vancouver, but Alberta style, just got in from feeding the cows “country”. I watched him because the line up died down and he was still hanging around on the edges, trying to read our menu, but I could see he was having trouble and I guessed he couldn’t read. There was something wrong with him. When he walked, his arms curved away from his body as if he had an invisible basketball under each of them and his legs seemed permanently bent at the knee. After five minutes of standing back, he lurched up to me all nervous. Man, his face though. I’ve never seen such an open face in my life. It made my head hurt. His skin was creamy smooth and his cheeks were this bright pink like a baby’s. He raised his eyebrows when he talked, with his eyes wide open, like had just been surprised by something.
“How much for a coffee please?”
“You want a coffee?” I asked him. I wanted to buy some time with that openness. It was selfish of me.
“Yes, please.”
I told him we didn’t sell coffee, just tea. And that open, rosy face turned and walked away from me. I couldn’t stand it, and this is clearly why I have to take those stupid pills. I started crying. I wished I could have given him his coffee. I wished I could have made his life a little easier, a little nicer than it probably was. I felt sick that that poor kid had to face life every day with his arms and legs out of his control and that vulnerable face of his just waiting to be hurt. I would have liked to have given him a coffee.

September 20th, 2005

It’s 6:30pm. I spent the entire day in my pyjamas, thinking about that kid. Wondering why I didn’t just talk to him, tell him I liked how he looked, tell him I liked his rosy cheeks, give him a free fucking tea at the very least.
I listened to the CBC all day, trying to cheer myself up. Nothing. All repeat programs I’ve already heard.
September 21st, 2005
I went out walking the city again. It was “The Magic Hour”. I always think of those words, “The Magic Hour” when I look outside and all of the colours are thick and bright, and the houses and trees are like cut outs against the blackening sky. It was so cold. My fingers were getting stiff while I smoked because I forgot my mitts, but everything looked so pretty and artificial, and I felt like I was a character in a book, so that I didn’t want to break it and go back home.
I walked to the Sea Wall and there was ocean to my left, dripping vines and forest to my right, and downtown Vancouver in front of me. There was a square of sunlight on the ground and I moved in to it to warm up a little. I stood there, looking out at my city, thinking about the boy. Thinking about floating astronauts and loose ends and I looked down at my shoes. I could feel the gravel of the path beneath them and I imagined the layer of sand beneath the gravel, and my mind kept drawing me down through layers of rock and underground rivers, strips of undiscovered oil and bones, right through to the boiling centre of the earth, all red and troubled, past to cooler rocks and water and bones again, until I came up, through to the other side of the world and bounced into another soul, that was standing on the exact same spot that I was, on the other side of the world. I took my cord and I tied it to that foot, that unawares foot, that is alone and confused but somehow, moving in a mirror image of me.

Last Night

2008-10-02T12:37:00.000-06:00

Arts Rally

Thanks to Mark Morris for the picture.

After the rally, India begged me to let her go to Margaret Atwood's lecture on the future of Canada - for 90 min. She - India and Atwood - were amazing. I asked her what she liked most about the lecture: the pretty stage, and that Margaret Atwood was so funny.

Maybe that's why she kept farting on my lap.

Vanity, Vanity

2008-09-30T23:43:00.000-06:00

So, you know how I told you I'd put up a link to my Globe and Mail podcasted piece today? Well, um, I'm feeling kind of shy about it. All I will say is that I would have read it very differently. Some day, I'll figure out how to record me reading it and I'll redeem it. Till then, you can read it (again) if you like, but you've got to imagine me talking slow and straight. No bullshit. All straight up.

The Evolution of the Heart

Once upon a time I was in love. I was married and in love. But then there was a death - of a marriage, not a man - and I am not in love anymore. I am not in love with the man I was married to. But here is the thing, and you should lean in close because I am about to tell you a secret, I love the man I was once married to.

Once upon a time, eleven years ago, we were madly in love and married in June, because that is what you do when you are madly in love in the month of June, which everyone knows is the month of weddings. But our madness only lent us seven years of marriage, and it has been four years since we walked away from it - took off the rings and split up the debts- but here I am four years after the end of a seven year marriage, and still, I look around at myself, and at my life, and at my heart, and my heart says to my self, "Self, you love that man." And so I do. And so does he: he loves me, too. I have heard those words from his mouth.

Now you, dear reader, do not jump to conclusions or illusions: There was no gentle fade to black here. It was a glorious end, the death of our marriage: full of tears and anger and betrayals: no slow and gasping sickness for us, no silent suppers, no bored conversations, no pulling teeth for communication. It ended in a flashy show of gory blunders: the kind that leave your liquefied heart oozing out your eyes and mouth while you lie dying: the kind that remake your soul so that it is unrecognizable to itself.

And as our marriage died there were lists of furniture divided, the rising bile of custody panic, the sickening ache of love replaced, cold sheets, empty seats, long nights, metallic mornings. There was no gentle easing into a new version of life: only a crash course (with blood and guts) on moving forward and learning how to walk and hold a soup spoon again. There are scars.

Once, I gave money to a woman to tell me how to make all the dying hurt less. Once a month I sat in a chair across the room from her and she asked me questions and wrote on a lined pad of paper and said things like, "But do you think he ever really loved you?" and I tried not to vomit on her ugly office floor. She determined that the answer to my grief lay in amputation: to slice out that festering wound of a heart that had been in love with him and toss it in the trash with all the other un-recyclables. To begin again.
I tired. Really, I did, but I'm a bit of a pack rat and I hate to throw things away. And if I threw that away, I would also have to throw out our first kiss, the way my fingers felt threaded through his, the softness of the skin on the inside of his arms, our first Christmas together, our sixth Christmas together, all those birthdays in between, mornings drinking coffee, Saturdays reading the paper, road trips to Vancouver, bottles of wine, random driving, walking along train tracks, swimming naked in the river, "I love you, I love you, I love you." I am not willing to lose those things; there has been enough losing.
So in the end, there can only be no end, only forgiveness for the loss of a future as planned. Because really, there are no new beginnings, only becomings: adaptations and evolutions into different ways of loving. I loved him once for his blue eyes and his kindness, his wit and his patience. He is still blue-eyed and kind. He is still patient and witty. A broken heart does not change these things; it only sometimes changes the ability to see them. But if I stop seeing them, if I look at that man I was once married to and only see him through the hurt and the bitterness I have felt, then I will be saying to the girl I once was, "It was all a waste. You knew nothing of love." And that is not true. Because there was real love once. On a rainy day in June, eleven years ago, we stood in a church and I was beautiful, as beautiful as I've ever been, and he was noble, as noble as he's ever been, and we held hands, and my father cried, and I meant every word that my young heart said: I will love you till death do us part.
And I do.
I do.

Boliv-e-iv-e-iv-i-a

2008-09-29T14:01:00.000-06:00

One week Thursday I leave for Bolivia. My church is sending a small group of us to go down there for two weeks and do whatever they ask us to do: Work. Hang out. Visit. Travel. Hear their stories. Share ours. When I was asked if I would consider going I was pretty torn. It would mean that I couldn't be a part of the writing program I wanted to be in this fall, or apply for any teaching positions which I've been considering, or take any of the classes I wanted to take. I asked India what I should do, and she told me to go be with the poor kids, so that's what I'm doing.
I'm really excited.
I'm really excited now, because I was asked to write a piece about our trip to read in church last Sunday and I said, "Sure. No problem," and then spent two sleepless weeks fighting with God and myself and my cynic, and wondering if this was a completely masturbatory, self-serving affair that I was about to undertake on behalf of the poor. It darn near killed me to work through the writing of that thing, but when I was done I felt like I had won something huge and beautiful, and when I read it in church people told me I had given them something huge and beautiful. I don't mean the writing, of course, I mean the sentiment behind it. It felt like a gift. And now I feel so ready to go.

If you're the praying kind please pray for our safety? Things are getting riled up there. And for India to be alright without me?And for my rheumatoid arthritis, which is being a bitch? Damn that bitch.
If you're the money giving kind, you could always give me money. Money is nice.
If you're neither I also accept nice thoughts and warm waves from wherever you are.

Email me if you want to read what I read in church. acs3@ualberta.ca

(still no word on my momma. I wont be going if the news is bad. Pray for that, too?)

Dear Email Angel,

2008-09-27T23:44:00.000-06:00

Some of my friends have told me that my email is being a chump and eating things they send me. I never get to see those letters. They never make it to my inbox, or even junkmail, which I check regularily so there is no need to waste time with that.

Please, Email Angel, keep my email safe. Bring them home to my happy and waiting arms, or how else will I ever learn how to become a real man and grow two inches to please her in bed?

Sincerely,

Angela

My mom says - No news is good news.

2008-09-25T12:56:00.000-06:00

No word yet.
Thanks for your prayers.

Excuse Me, But Your Armpits Smell Like Soup

2008-09-18T20:30:00.000-06:00

I was cooking up a big pot of carrot and coriander soup for supper tonight, and I added some cumin, you know, 'cause cumin is so good and all, and then I went to add the carrots - the ones I wanted to use up before they spoiled - only to find out that they had already spoiled. Nice. So I hopped in the car to get some more carrots and noticed, within the close confines of the car, that there was this distinct smell of gross coming off me. Like dirty sweat. I don't usually smell like dirty sweat. I started sniffing. I have a good nose: my arms, my elbows, my armpits, even my knees. It all smelled like a thirteen year old boy after a rousing game of floor hockey.

Friends, I am here to tell you all that hot cumin cooking in a pot of broth and onions smells like armpits.

Consider yourself warned.
Now go forth and multiply.

I dunno.

Hey, Party People in the House...

2008-09-16T20:56:00.001-06:00

I just got an email from an editor at the Globe and Mail. They want to use my essay The Evolution of the Heart that was published this summer for the launch of their new podcast...

!
!!!!
!!!!!!!!
!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WAHOOOO!!!!!

I'll post a link on September 30th when it goes up.

I can't post the essay right now because my computer's gone and bust and I don't have a copy. Ahhhh, me.

Tricky little Boogers

2008-09-16T13:06:00.000-06:00

At supper last night:

India: Gross. There's a big booger on my forehead.

Me: Yuck. Weird things happen when you have a cold.

Five minutes later India starts looking around, lifting up her plate, looking on her pants...

India: Now, where did that booger go?

First Baptist: Edmonton

2008-09-14T22:21:00.000-06:00

This is a re-occurring event in my life: I am sitting in church, in my pew in the balcony, and someone is talking down below at the pulpit, and I start to twitch. I shift. I look out the window, out the door. I drink my coffee and stare at my hands, and I tell myself: Self, don’t leave. You will miss out.

And it’s true.

Some days, I swear I need to mount those stairs to the pew in the balcony with a sack of nails and a hammer, and pound my shoes to the floor because (lord almighty) I can hardly breathe from what’s being said, and then other days I sit, I drink my coffee, and God sidles up alongside me and smashes my heart to smithereens with all that beauty he’s got pouring out of the light of those tall windows, that preacher’s mouth, that 200 year old song we just sang, that grandpa that camps out at church to keep the furnace going in the winter, those flaws, flaws, flaws.

I love my church. It disappoints me, hurts my heart, leads me astray. And it elevates me, heals me, and shines God’s face on me.

It ain’t heaven yet, baby. That’s not the point.

I read this.

If your name is Caroline and you're my older sister, you're not allowed to read this. Seriously.

2008-09-09T21:57:00.000-06:00

Hey.
My momma's going in for surgery next week Wednesday. They are worried it's cancer. She, of course, is not worried at all about the cancer and only about feeling nauseated from the drugs. She hates being nauseated more than anything. Even more than cancer, apparently.
I'm not going to think about the what ifs. I've thought about the cancer approximately three times and have immediately turned into a weeping, slobbering mess. Not going to think about it.

I've been swearing, and crying without reason, and snapping at everything lately. I think it's possible a renegade part of my brain is thinking about the cancer without telling me: I'm feeling really breakable.
It's silly.
Everything's going to be just fine.
Fine.
Fine.

Now, Tell Me The Truth:

2008-09-06T23:12:00.000-06:00

Does this moustache make me look fat?

I AM smiling.

2008-09-06T13:02:00.000-06:00

Seriously. If one more man tells me how much he likes me but that he thought I was a pretentious snob when we first met, I'm gonna karate chop him in his bobbing adam's apple.

Kindergarten

2008-09-04T13:08:00.000-06:00

I just dropped India off for her first day of kindergarten. My heart is all kinds of happy/sad.
Ouch.
Ouch.

Fly, little lady. Fly.

2008-09-01T20:39:00.001-06:00

I came back into the bedroom once and he was doing a headstand in the middle of my bed, him and his beautiful hands, till his legs wobbled and he fell. So I tried, too, mostly naked I think, at least I remember him tapping my bare stomach as I balanced upside down, toes pointed victorious. And then I crashed and twisted my neck in the falling so badly that even now, years later, I wake some mornings and can't turn my head to the left for days.
Ha.
I don't mind so much. It was a good try.

Time

2008-09-01T18:31:00.000-06:00

Here's the thing:

There's no cure for the missing,
just waiting for memory
to pass from sharp edged to dull.

That's no kind of healing at all.

This Spring

2008-09-01T09:11:00.000-06:00

Have I ever told you that India wants to be a vet? True.

That's my slip. India wanted something soft for the poor fella who, I assume, flew into a window and then sat dazed and panting on our lawn. I wanted something I wouldn't want to wear again if it needed to be buried in it.

This is the point when India decided that something needed to be done. She was going to bring the bird inside and "heal it". This is also the point that the bird decided that something needed to be done and mustered up its strength to fly away to a nearby tree scaring the bejesus out of me and India both.

I think we prayed for that bird for a while at bedtime, right after the bit when we pray for God to protect the fairies. Now, she loves to tell the story of the day she healed the blue jay. Sheesh, my kid is cute.