Poem

The Perils of a Critical Education

for Karen O'Shaughnessy

the local gourmet cracker queen calls

to ask if the shelter has room for a donation

seconds after a yes, thank you! her van 

at the back door honking, surrounded

by a camera crew, its director urging us

to keep coming! keep coming! you

in the vest to the passenger side, you

in the toque, I want you to hug 

the driver, an older woman who was for years

a resident until her meds got the better

of everyone and her pastor found her 

a basement room at the manse

I don’t know what’s going on, she giggles

as her door is opened for her, I've never

been behind the wheel of a car before

let alone a van as nice as this one

it took two takes to get the hug right

and three to get the gift given, but

by then the damage was done: we broke

receiving's cardinal rule 

when we looked in its mouth 

and saw not those pretty boxes

of sweet 'n' savoury crackers

but a six-foot tube of rock hard heels

Kay Boyle on Robert McAlmon

"When I had gone back to the bar to sit with McAlmon again, what happened then was in a sense a parable acted out for exactly what this man was. He had switched from gin to scotch, and we were sitting there silenced and saddened and embittered by the ugliness and the opulence of the middle-aged people. French and American and English, who danced, and ate, and drank, and threw their money away in handfuls instead of giving it to the poets and the beggars of the world. And then, between the silk draperies that completely concealed the window that stood open on the summer night (they were green, those curtains;  I can see them clearly, stirring, wavering a little in the night air), suddenly a miserable hand reached in from the deserted street, a black-nailed, dirty, defeated hand, with a foul bit of shirt sleeve showing at the wrist. Without a word McAlmon placed his fine, tall glass of whiskey and soda into the fingers of the stranger's hand, and the fingers closed quickly on it and drew it back through the draperies into the lonely dark."

McAlmon's Chinese Opera

Every few years I pick up Stephen Scobie's McAlmon's Chinese Opera (1980) and read it from start to finish. Last time I read it (five years ago) I recall thinking how lopsided it was, how well it started, but how so much of it (too much of it) was given over to his final "desert" years. Not so this time. This time I thought its proportions ideal.

Poetry has some McAlmon online. Here is his poem "White Men" (1920):

Before they died.
There would be no more white males,
None so clear a white as these;
Only some tinged with grey -- dusty.
But I could not watch them rush to the forest forever --
Not one did I see arrive there --
A cloud or night or blackness always intervened.
I saw them rush forward and disappear,
And then saw no more of them.

Maybe 2 (Image Culture)

When walking with Maybe people ask us what she is.

"What is she? She's a mix, right?"

I don't know, I say. I wasn't present when she was conceived.

"But if you had to guess?"

I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine.

"If I had to guess, I would say your dog's part chihuahua, part Scottie."

Really? I see her more as a Snoopy/Woodstock cross.

Maybe

Yesterday afternoon I walked to VGH to visit Amarjot, who had emergency surgery last week. As much as I wanted to bring his and Althea's dog Maybe with me (she is staying with me until Am is released), hospital rules are strict about animals at bedsides. Instead, I brought with me a coat covered in Maybe's hair and the picture above, which I took on Friday.

"Hey, Whoopie Cat!"

A lesser known mondegreen from Side Two of Led Zeppelin IV. This was the side that provided Mike Carroll, Roger Nay, David Holmes and I our soundtrack during a fateful 1978 trip to Gabriola -- an island from which we were subsequently banned.

All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward

Great to hear Tanya Talaga on the road with the 2018 CBC Massey Lectures.

Last night's "All Our Relations: Finding the Path Forward (I Breathe for Them)" broadcast came from Tanya's stop in Saskatoon, Treaty 6 Territory, home of former Saskatchewan premier Tommy Douglas (1904-1986), the "father of universal medical care in Canada," she told us. The "father."

As much as I appreciate Tommy Douglas's push for universal healthcare in Canada, am I wrong to bristle at this personification -- as the father of Canadian healthcare? Is there not a non-patriarchal, less singular way of acknowledging his role? I am asking.