apples

It's boyscout season and I have apples. I have the apples I bought at the greengrocers this morning and I have the 6 extra apples I bought on the way home after succumbing to the annual boyscout fundraising drive.

I do this every year. Once I have accumulated a few apples I tell myself that I'm going to stop, that I'll be stronger next time but then, a kerchief-clad gradeschooler flanked by a protective parent takes a few tetative steps towards me and before I know it, I'm pulling out my wallet.

I'm biased with my donations. I seek out the shy ones, the ones hugging the wall or being pushed forward by parents eager to get rid of the damn apples and return home to the weekend papers. If the parents are shy as well, if I detect that desperate "maybe I can just buy all of the apples myself and spare us both this agony" glimmer in thier eye - I buy two.

I recognize my patronage for what it is: a perverse attempt to compensate for my own early childhood fundraising trauma. As a child so painfully shy that conversations with my grandparents set off 'stranger danger' panic attacks, I hated girlguides and I really hated selling cookies.

Every year I would pair up with the same friend and we would make the rounds pushing our chocolate and vanilla junk. My friend was an outgoing chatterbox with matching ribbons in her pigtails. I was toungetied, unable to lift my self-styled, unevenly pigtailed head to make eye contact, and usually returned home with a full box of cookies.

And so, for every shy child and reluctant parent out there, I buy apples. I buy more apples than I could possibly need, I buy apples that I can't even identify, and I will spend the rest of the morning searching my recipe books for things to make that require lots of apples but very little talent because I can't cook to save my life. But that's another story.

ten temporary things

I was mock cleaning this weekend (you know, moving piles from one place to another) and I came across an article I'd saved entitled "Be fabulously disgraceful at 70". The side bar to this article contained a list of '10 temporary things' which I cut out with the intention of creating my own list one day. I haven't quite gotten around to my personalized list yet but there's no rush, the original did just fine:

youth
romantic infactuation
six-pack abs
your job
your troubles
professional importance
relationships
debt
hemmorrhoids
life itself

I'm curious, then, what could be thought of as permanent things...

wanted: kitty cat play date

I think my cat is disappointed in me.

The realization hit me tonight as I was rummaging through my fridge, scavenging for food...no cat. If there's one thing I can usually count on, it's that I'll be greeted by the sight of his crazy-sideways run rushing to meet me at the door each night when I come home. Usually. Tonight I moved around my apartment, meowing-dervish-free and, when I thought about it, I realized that last night was sans cat as well. Although my first inclination was to go and look for him, it was my second inclination that won - the one that said "Hey, this is nice! He's not going anywhere, finish your dinner". My reaction, or lack of, wasn't quite as blasé as it may sound, I knew he was in the apartment somewhere and it was kind of nice to NOT trip about the apartment for once.

It didn't take long to find him. As I turned the corner to move from the kitchen to the bedroom I stopped in my tracks: there he was. Looking at me. Any teenager who has broken curfew knows ''the look'. The one you get when concern has faded to relief before turning into disappointment; that reproachful, wordless stare that says "How could you?" and "I expected more ". Apparently my cat knows 'the look' too. And he wasn't in a forgiving mood; my conciliatory approach was met by his hasty retreat beneath the bed.

I retreated to think about this surprising turn of events. My cat was mad at me. What to do, what to do? I ran the possibilities through my mind. Food? Check. Water? Check. What else is there? Having been raised in the land of dogs, I'm pretty fluent in dog but cat? Now that's a language that is still foreign to me. Language barrier aside, as I thought about the past week I realized that I don't need to be fluent in cat to know that the fact that I was able to count our human-cat interactions over the last several weeks in minutes was NOT a good thing. I've been ignoring my cat, no wonder he's upset with me.

For some inane reason, this realization reminded me of the mid-80's brat pack movie "The Breakfast Club". The one where Molly Ringwald played the 'prom queen', Judd Nelson 'the delinquent', Emilio Estevez 'the jock', and Ally Sheedy...well, I forget her label...but that's kind of the point. When all is said and done, when lunch has been eaten, drugs imbibed and romantic ties forged, the characters share the source of their collective angst: their parents.

One is abusive, another has high expectations and yet another uses their daughter as a pawn in their divorce. All of this pales in comparison, however, to the pain incurred by Ally Sheedy at the hands of her parents. When pressured to share her story with the group, Ally Sheedy looks up from under her shaggy bangs, pale skin shining luminously, eyes lined with heavy black kohl and dejectedly whispers "they ignore me". She wins the 'whose parents are worst' contest, hands down. Physical abuse, overwhelming expectations, messy divorce - none could stand up to the stark reality of being ignored.

I'm living with the kitty cat equivalent of Ally Sheedy. What I think are random (and lets be honest, irritating) meows are probably cries for help; anguished pleas to the birds flying by and people passing below in the hopes that someone, anyone, will hear his pain: "she ignores me".

I'll have to start closing the windows ;)

what is Peru like?

Worn stone steps holding the mountain sun's warmth.

Church after church after church, each bearing their own grand staircase and prefaced by a central square laying green and beautiful at their feet. Children in uniforms walking home at 6:30pm - are they really returning from school so late? The mountains hugging the town are toppped by a crystal clear blue sky. Laughing kids, blessedly indifferent men, chiming bells, taxis honking for attention, and business savvy young touts fill the square. The touts spout facts about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky when they think I'm American and Toronto and Ottawa before quickly running dry on facts when they learn of my true Nationality. Granola that is actually just puffed wheat - sugar crisps without the sugar. Steep stone steets flanked by white buildings. Doorways revealing art, bright textiles, restarants, and unexpected entryways into grand courtyards with more of the same. Tourists of all kinds - I like the ones fully decked out in their jungle-trekking finery the best.

Warm spots in the sun that quickly turn cold when the sun sets behind the mountains as it just has....

Cusco, May 2004

overheard in Toronto

While basking in the sun on Moonbeam patio this morning...

young girl to her father: "Daddy, are you ever going to see Michelle again?"
father: "Not on purpose"

Made me laugh.

the 'i can't even...' game

I was thinking about Gwen Stefani on my drive into work this morning.

It was one of those "and I can't even..." mental conversations where I look at the accomplishments of others and compare them to my own lack of by realizing that I can't even (insert babystep to the accomplishment here). I'll give you an example: when I heard that my friend's 27 year old boyfriend bought his second house, one of my first thoughts was "Geez, I can't even commit to a magazine subscription at my rented apartment and this kid is on his second house?".

Back to Gwen. I was thinking about how she'd created her 'L.A.M.B.' clothing line around her favourite words: love, angel, music, baby and I thought "Geez, I can't even pick my four favourite words let alone design a clothing line, run a company, and sell millions of records" and I felt bad. At first. Then, the more I thought about it the dumber it seemed.

The ability to select four favourite words is NOT an accomplishment that I need to add to my (admittedly small) repertoire. In fact, it seems kind of gradeschool-ish; like picking my four favourite friendship pins or scratch 'n' sniff stickers. Out of the hundreds and hundreds of glorious words at my disposal where would I even begin narrowing the possibilities down and why would I want to limit myself that way? What would my criteria be? Mood? Temperature? Atmosphere? Activity?

The beauty - the pure, decadent luxury of language is that I can be unhappy or distraught, cool or freezing, happy or ecstatic and, although they fall into the same broad categories, they have wildly different meanings. I love words. I don't want to be able to pick my four favourites, it would be like asking a parent to pick their favourite child. In fact, NOT picking my four favourite words is my accomplishment.

But just for the record, if I were to create my list, the first to be voted onto my word-island would be Zephyr which, in my opinion, beats all four of Gwen's somewhat-simple favourites hands down anyway ;)

disappointment

"Do you know about the pre-cambrian shield he asked?", her mind scrambled desperately through her options. Could she say yes? Would he believe her if she did? She knew enough now to know that questions like this inevitably led to a backstory followed by another seemingly innocent question leading to even more explanation all of which contributed to a very long story rife with meandering tangents best titled "I don't give a sh*t".

Over the weeks she had created a game where, as she watched his mouth form the words of the story she never asked to hear, she tried to trace the conversation (if it could be called that) back to it's roots question by question. Today's lecture began as usual with her only contribution to the conversation: "How was your week?" which was all he needed to launch into his Saturday morning monologue. This week he had visited the Sharon Temple and she groaned inwardly when he named the place - she'd never heard of it. Of course, he asked, and as she replied in the negative, she eyed her morning papers longingly knowing what was to come: a surprised "Oh, you don't know where the Sharon temple is?" and a description of how to get there town by agonizingly small town; one town was built using the 'board and beam' style unique to Ontario and his question "Oh, you don't know what 'board and beam' is?" was followed by a detailed description of the style, chosen because of the hardness of the wood which came from the pre-cambrian shield... at which point she interrupted him, conjured up a breakfast date with friends and made her escape.

It's not that she didn't mean it when she asked him how his week was, his weekly adventures were part of what had charmed her when they first met. She felt that each story he shared contained a lesson: stop and smell the roses, be curious, look at familiar sites with new eyes, explore, read, learn...this was back when they were new friends. Before his comments about her 'nice ass', before he started referring to her in the third person while she was sitting right in front of him 'and what does R. think?', before his probing questions about her childhood, before he started caring so much about what she thought.

Why did men have to be so predictable? The opposite sexes were never allowed to just be friends, they were a FEMALE and a MALE first, friends second. I. was more than twice her age, she knew his comments about her appearance were harmless but they were irritating all the same. Why the f* did it matter? Why did he feel the need to comment at all? It was so freaking predictable, exept she hadn't expected it. She hadn't expected him to fall into the male habit of deferring to her first. It was annoying. She had enjoyed thier conversations specifically because they were just that - conversations. Now as he talked, she couldn't shake the feeling that his monologue was rehearsed; that as he had moved through his week, gone about his adventures, he had been mentally planning how he would present them to her and that all she had to do was ask the question, "How was your week?" for his prepared monologue to come tumbling out with barely a pause for breath.

Far from looking forward to their Saturday morning coffee-talk, she had begun to approach them with a mixture of dread and disappointment. She continued to show up with her papers and coffee in tow hoping that they could revert back to their old pattern of reading their papers in compatible silence, sharing headlines when so moved. This was never the case. Instead, I. talked and she carefully arranged her face with the appropriate expression: surprise, sympathy, interest...all the while resenting her obligation to do so, his refusal to notice that she'd contributed nothing more than 'uh-huh' to the conversation, and, lately, a feeling of suffocation at his cloying, inappropriate comments.

wah wah wah

In bed by 9:30 last night. Phone rang 2x, E. checking to see if I'm ok. No. I'm depressed. Drowning. Floundering in water, arms trailing above, watching the light fade as I sink deeper and deeper - depressed. I can see the light, I know that I used to be a part of it and that it was effortless to be there but I'm gone and I don't know how, or why, or what to do to find my way back.

I want to be rescued. To be attached to someone stronger to pull me through, to rely on someone else's strength for a while. I'm tired - no - exhausted and I'm through doing it all on my own.

Today on the subway I watched an older, blind man struggle with his cane - bent parallell to the ground, cane swinging without reason before him, buffeted by the people rushing through the subway. I rushed past too and then stopped and watched him for a few seconds. The platform had cleared and he was making his way towards the stairs leading up to street level but he wasn't moving with direction, with purpose. When I asked if he needed help he responded like someone who was drowning himself. Yes. He was looking for the eastbound trains accessed by the stairs in the opposite direction from which he was headed.

I offered him my arm and we walked down the stairs where, for once, the eastbound train was waiting. My first thought when I began typing this was a question: what right do I have to be depressed? Wah, wah, wah. Life is not what I thought it would be, so what? It's only as I type this that I realize there's something else there for me: the realization that I let someone else attach themself to my strength for a few moments and it felt good. Really good.