Mrs Parker

Mrs Parker taught Grade 5 at Quilchena. I had Miss Arms for Grade 1, Miss Gray for Grade 2, Mrs Switzer for Grade 3, and then in 1971, as I was going into Grade 4, the school implemented the "Alternative Program", an attempt to break from the stratification of grades and have three deskless classes of students aged 9-12 converging en masse for certain projects (remaking scaled-down versions of world famous rivers in the sands of Kitsilano Beach, for example), while returning to our own age cohort for more rudimentary classes like Arithmetic. The three teachers who led the Alternate Program were Mrs Harrison, who normally taught Grade 4, Mrs Parker (Grade 5) and Mr Hamel (Grade 7). No one had to tell us that Mrs Thompson, who taught Grade 6, was too old -- and too square -- to be participating in something as "hippie" as the Alternate Program. 

By the time I was in Grade 4, I had in my child's mind a sense of Quilchena's teachers and staff, and this sense was based largely on who was "easy" and who was "strict". From what I had gathered, everyone was easy -- compared to Mrs Parker.

Mrs Parker was an imposing figure. She was tall and lean and muscular, with eyes that saw to the end of our playing fields and, if necessary, a voice that could reach you there. If you pretended not to hear her, she could get to you just as quick by foot, and you better believe that her voice would be even louder once she got there. Before she was my teacher I saw her and a group of runners practicing at the oval track outside of the high school below us. In her aerodynamic shorts and t-shirt she looked like an athlete you might see on ABC's Wide World of Sports, her long bare legs tapered perfectly into shoes that looked like slippers -- if they didn't have spikes coming out of them. I relayed the story to my Mom, and she said, "Oh yes, Mrs Parker was in the Olympics. She's one of the fastest women in Canada." I was impressed but not surprised.

Shortly after that, while eating my lunch on a ledge beside the school parking lot, Mrs Parker breezed past then stopped to talk to another teacher. She was wearing a skirt that ended just above the knee, and I stared at the profile of her well-defined calves, when suddenly she flexed one, and I jumped. I looked at her face and, though she was listening to the person talking to her, I felt the kindness from an eye that made me feel like that eye was directed at me, and I wanted to cry.

The teacher assigned to teach Arithmetic to the Grade 4 Alternate students was Mrs Parker. Arithmetic, as much as soccer and softball, was a competitive subject for those of us who excelled in it, and we were always taking shortcuts to make us faster. Once, in an effort to finish First, I turned in a test where I got 3/50, and was singled out by Mrs Parker as both a jerk and, oddly enough, a victim of our reckless game. I will never forget the look on her face when she handed me back my test. I was terrified, not because I had failed her test so miserably, but because I felt she knew my terror was something I was unfamiliar with, and that the real lesson here was how I might sit with it, a question that had me wondering the same about her when she was my age.

Something happened at school one day, a Friday I think, though the day doesn't matter, only that it began in the morning and it was in 1972. Because both my parents worked jobs that started early, I would arrive at school shortly after 8 a.m., a half-hour before the janitor, Mr McIntosh, unlocked the doors. There was a group of us, all boys, all ages, and we would huddle in the sheltered "Boys" entrance, except this time when I arrived, no one was waiting; everyone was down by the gym.  I followed, and as I walked I noticed all sorts of black felt pen graffiti on the exterior walls of our mint green school. Standard Rat Fink and Big Daddy Roth stuff, but then one drawing was of our principal, because his name was below it, and then oh my god as I turned the corner and saw on the gym wall a drawing that had no name below it, only a human shape, thin, with a head of kinky Bride of Frankenstein hair and a pronounced and rounded belly with an arrow pointing to it that said WHO DID IT? The drawing was of Mrs Parker.

The terror I felt after getting back my test was nothing compared to the terror I felt after seeing this drawing. And I wasn't the only one who felt this way. Jamie Emerson came running up to me with tears in his eyes, "We're all going to die!" Yes, I thought, we are all going to die, but I had no sense of how Mrs Parker would kill us, only that she could, in the way Medusa could, or that Indigenous spirit we learned about recently, Dzunukwa. Emerson continued running, and I followed him to the end of the field, but something made me stop, and as I did, I looked over my shoulder and saw Mrs Parker taking in the drawing of our principal.

By the time I got back, Mrs Parker was standing before "her" own drawing. She seemed neither angry nor sad, and I wondered what else she could be feeling. But after my wonder expired, she was still there, still looking. Only then did it occur to me that what I was looking at was not simply an attempt to injure, but a response to that attempt; a staring down of that drawing; indeed, a demonstration of the incredible strength of a woman who, with her brother Harry Jerome, represented our country at the 1960 Rome Olympics, both of whom, I would later learn, experienced horrific acts of racism, a racism that Mrs Parker, whom I know today as Valerie Jerome, continues to experience.

The best stories I know come from late night car rides or kitchen tables

"The best stories I know come from late night car rides or kitchen tables" is the name of an exhibition of work by two artists, Brenda Draney and Tanya Lukin Linklater, both of whom were born in 1976 -- Draney in Treaty 8 territory (she is a member of the Sawridge First Nation and lives in Edmonton, Alberta), Linklater in Southern Alaska (she is of Alutiiq and Caucasian ancestry and lives in North Bay, Ontario).

The title of the exhibition is taken from an artist talk Draney gave at the University of Ottawa in 2016, a larger portion of which appears in the gallery handout intercut with a text by Linklater. Though Linklater's text is the more self-consciously poetic -- consisting of sentence fragments, conjunctionless run-ons, intermedial line breaks and enough blank space to build a snowoman -- it is Draney's straightforward statement (evocative of what is said while riding in a car or klatching at a kitchen table) that makes a poem of her thoughts on storytelling.

Draney's oil on canvas paintings are rich in "blank" spaces that are in fact an oatmeal colour. These spaces are earned in so far as the attention Draney pays to line requires them. The line and the lineless work together, and the result is the language these paintings "speak". I'm not even talking about these paintings as figurative, or being "about" something: they include tents, a line or lines (like the ribbon one cuts to "open" something), a couch, a wall of fake wood-paneling, men, men in RCMP uniforms, women, a fireworks explosion. As curated, the arrangement of these paintings resonates like a chapbook of lyric poems.

Lukin Linklater's contribution features a monitor'ed voice-over video of young dancers at work in the studio (... you are judged to be going against the flow because you are insistent, Parts 1 and 2, 2017), a sculptural installation of an unfurling poem on grommeted canvas squares occasionally redacted (enhanced? protected?) by kohkom scarves and a ziggurat of American Spirit cigarette packs (go//go, 2022) and a video projection of hands moving purposefully over a rough marine wood "screen" as its subtitles tell a story of America's most powerful earthquake (They fall the ground beneath you, 2018).

It is this last work of Lukin Linklater's that finds itself sharing CJG's smaller gallery with Draney's Vanity (2019). In Draney's sin-object conflation, a naked (undressing?) figure stands before what seems like the end of a multi-sinked counter, the kind one finds at an airport or a night club. The mirror above this counter makes it a vanity, but it is in fact the doubling of this (vain?) figure that makes its double the painting's mirror. Draney writes in the gallery handout:

"In the paintings there can be stand-ins and omissions. But then I have created something else again. Is it trustworthy? Decisions have to be made. Which parts are the most honest? Why is it important to be honest here and not there?"

Draney shows us what she does well enough to encourage us into her work, which can be a fine place to be for those of us looking to vacate our messy-bedroom/dumpster fire worlds without altogether abandoning them -- an experience from which we return to our daily lives refreshed, invigorated. In Lukin Linklater's work, I often feel like I am being lectured to, told, (t)roped-in. This is not to say that the work of these two artists makes for an unsuccessful pairing; on the contrary, we have much to learn through difference. Best to think of this exhibition as a teaching tool.

Mary Seacole (1805-1881)

When I was growing up, it was Florence Nightingale, not Mother Teresa, who tended those too sick to tend themselves. Last night, while watching Simon Schama's A History of Britain episode "Victoria & Her Sisters" (first aired June, 2002), I learned of another tender, someone who volunteered to serve as a nurse during the Crimean War, but was rejected by Nightingale.

Mary Seacole was born of a Scottish father and Black Jamaican mother. She was knowledgable in traditional medicines and, after saying to hell with Nightingale, traveled to Crimea on her own dime and set up a l'hôpital des refusés (the British Hotel) near the front lines -- much closer to those lines than Nightingale's hospital. Indeed, Seacole, or Mother Seacole as the soldiers called her, was known for tending to the wounded while under fire, making her more a medic than a field nurse. And in a dress, no less! Amazing. Simply amazing.

Face the Notion

North Vancouver's Lonsdale Quay will be 45 years old this summer. Once a repair dock, its conversion to a public market was an immediate hit, an arcade without the arches. Like the Canadian federal government's early-1970s conversation of the south shore of False Creek's industrial waterfront (Granville Island Public Market), the Lonsdale Quay provided the freshest seafood and the crispest lettuce. Over the years the Quay, like the New Westminster Quay that followed in the 1980s, lost its lustre, which is not uncommon now that malls in general represent not the perfection of our culture, but its remainder bin.

The English Reformation of the 16th century marked the bloody transition of England from a Catholic state to its national brand -- Protestantism. Of course there is more to it than religious sectarianism. A related transition concerned an increasingly literate Christian population who preferred to read their Bible, not bow to priestly interpretations of it in the form of images and objects. This, more than anything, has come to define the English psyche, and a reason why the English have never countenanced ambiguity as anything more than an aesthetic effect, a recreational decoration and not a road to something other than what one knows for certain. America gave us Gertrude Stein, Ireland gave us Joyce and Beckett. Even T.S. Eliot came to see his "Waste Land" (1922) as little more than a few pages of hastily scribbled notes.

The picture atop this post -- found in the window of one of the Lonsdale Quay's upper concourse shops -- is of a framed piece of writing posing as a landscape, where the neighbourhoods are represented in their textual forms. The land, as defined by this landscape, is unceded, and is the ancestral home of the Coast Salish peoples, whose relationship to the land is not so easily divisible. As for the shop, its stock and trade is based largely in notions.

A Moment in Time

The perfection of our existence can only be achieved through drugs and drug use. But drugs are not the answer. The problem is perfection.

Shigenori Nagatomo’s “Japanese Zen Buddhist Philosophy” entry on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy site begins: “Zen aims at the perfection of personhood.” What I like best about this sentence is its verb: to aim. Not perfection, but our attempt to achieve it.

To aim implies a point of focus, a place to direct an intention (our attention). The arrow of Time is pointed at its target: Space. The perfect "shot" is the pin-pointing of a place (in Space) at the exact moment (in Time) as its destruction.

 

So much science is concerned with the destruction of something by looking at it (Schrödinger), or the impossibility of measuring it (Heisenberg). I am content never to reach that which I am striving for because I have found by the time I (occasionally) arrive at such places, I am no longer the person I was when I set out to reach them, that I am still (mentally) in the place I stopped at the night before, immersed in its chowder, its lager, its roaring fire below a find-what-you-are-looking-for portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft ...

Crocuses

A sunny day yesterday. A little colder than I like, but then I'm not usually in the garden this early in the year.

The beds look better with fall and winter's junk out of them. Worst are the wispy stalks of oregano that present themselves like loose threads. My oregano is everywhere now, and I still find myself buying it at the food store! Must change that this year, though what I like even more about oregano, the herb, is oregano, the ornament -- its fluff and colour, particularly amidst the lobelia (blue) and the begonia (pink).

The crocuses (I cannot write "croci" with a straight face) are those that were planted by the Widow Bodnar who lived next door (west) until the 1980s. I knew her son and grandson, but she was long before my time. I only know her by the two people on our block who have been here since the 1960s. They remember her. It was one of them -- I can't remember who -- who told me about her garden.

photo: Judy Radul

Walking on Sunshine

We knew the day was coming: a full sun on our weather apps. Darkness for breakfast, then sun-in-your-eyes skies as I set out on foot for downtown.

Crazy to walk all the way to the West End to walk once more with an epic walker, but I did, and like the wounded (for all that walking!) I returned home on public transport, where people plonk down across from you and lower their masks (off their noses) because "I just ran for the bus. I can't breathe. Gimme a break, will ya! Sheesh."

Down Bute, along the Coal Harbour seawall around Brockton Point through the trees to the Aquarium past the Lagoon to Second Beach, English Bay, the Denman Place Inn for incredibly low-priced but within-their-expiry-date vegetable chips at the Dollar Store ...

The picture up top is my circa 1969 re-creation of DDR arborist Jonas Müller, known for refusing to "escape" the East after many opportunities (some designed to test his allegiance), but most notably to build a domed rainforest biosphere for Prince Faisal ibn Abd al Aziz ibn Saud.

Photo by Maegan Hill-Carroll.