"Sail on, silvergirl/ Sail on by/ Your time has come to shine"

A flawed man, beloved by many. And the secret to that love, my brothers? Admission. Contrition. Humility. Repentance. For most of his life. Repentance. Accept it. Even of those sins we do not think of as our own. (If they own us, they are our own.) Recall what bell hooks says of patriarchy: that it "doesn't just negatively impact women's lives but men's as well."

Paul Simon wrote "Bridge Over Troubled Waters" (1969), and many have covered it. Gorgeously. Johnny Cash recorded it a year before his death, his body weak but his mind strong and his will resolute. When he starts into the third verse, that's our cue to listen. Really listen. Especially to its fifth line, to the return of Fiona Apple's silvery voice -- there to help the singer as he sings of the sailor he is sailing behind.

When you’re weary, feeling small,

When tears are in your eyes
I will dry them all
I’m on your side
When times get rough
And friends just can’t be found
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

When you’re down and out
When you’re on the street
When evening falls so hard
I will comfort you
I’ll take your part
When darkness comes
And pain is all around
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will lay me down

Sail on, silvergirl
Sail on by
Your time has come to shine
All your dreams are on their way
See how they shine
If you need a friend
I’m sailing right behind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind
Like a bridge over troubled water
I will ease your mind

Peer Gynt

PEER GYNT [under his breath]: Thoughts, smiles and glances
             that pierce me like gimlets --
    they jar like a file when it grates on a saw-blade.

EXT. LANEWAY - NIGHT

Dinner at a friend's. In spaces ever smaller. A long narrow table that once stood in the middle of the room is suddenly the room. Conditions change. Too many bodies and things heat up. "Does anybody mind if I open a window?" You lift one -- and a picture is taken.

A small room behind a bay window. A single bed, a table and chair, and a sink. I could manage something larger, with more conveniences, but I could never match the view.

Too many books brought home at once sit like frozen dinners to be sifted through then left unread for a beef dip and fries at the pub.

Sometimes this sifting stares back as poems. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson's Dancing on Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence and a New Emergence (Winnipeg: Albeiter Ring, 2011) sat among these books, until I read it last year as part of my coarse work.

P
pandemics, 15
parenting, 128
     as an honour, 123
     attachment parenting, 130
     demonstrate qualities of
          leadership, 145
     paid parental leave, 128
     precolonial indigenous parenting
          techniques, 127
     raising our boys as agents of
          patriarchy, 60
     traditional Nishnaabeg parenting
     values, 130
patience, 108
     
   

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Testimony

Amidst the flow of yesterday morning's routine I followed the "live" tweets of the CBC's Charles Hamilton and Jason Warwick as they reported on the testimony of the murderer's twenty-eight-year old son, who gave his version of what happened after the SUV Boushie was travelling in arrived on his father's farm -- and immediately after Boushie was killed.

Not sure if it was the hastily written tweets, their content, the sequence of events, or all of the above, but I realized at the lunch break that this is not the best way to "follow" a court case, and that I need to take a break too.

My heart goes out to Boushie's mother, Debbie Baptiste, who had to leave the courtroom twice that morning when the evidence and the testimony turned graphic. Up and down, up and down -- the road to justice is a bumpy one, with no guarantees that it will arrive at its destination. If that's not a living hell, I don't know what is.

Narrative

Yesterday I expressed concern over the jury selection in the second-degree murder trial of the man who shot to death Colten Boushie. (How is a jury trial fair if the jury is not representative of the community in which the murderer and the murder victim reside?) Today my concern is over local media reportage, which has produced a narrative that pairs the introduction of the murderer's gun -- a Russian-made handgun that has Boushie's DNA on it -- with a 22. caliber rifle carried in the SUV that Boushie and three others were travelling in.

I worry that the implication here is of a gun fight, that the murderer's lawyers will argue that Boushie showed up with a gun and the murderer was only trying to defend himself -- when in fact long guns are common in vehicles whose owners live and hunt in rural areas (and high-calibre semi-automatic handguns packed by fence-building farmers are not).

Boushie was shot behind the left ear through the driver-side window [now passenger-side?] of the SUV. That Boushie's DNA was on the gun that killed him suggests that the murderer was close enough to Boushie for that to happen. Not a gun fight at that range -- more like an execution. As for the "splatter pattern," we are told that the SUV was left in the rain all night with the doors open (huh?) -- and this, the murderer's lawyers will likely argue, will have compromised the evidence.