Dutch woman in the park

Image from Australian shepherd lovers

My friend had just arrived from another overseas job and had only a few days before she had to leave again. We agreed to meet on Commercial and have one of Joe's famous lattes.

The evening was fine. We had our coffee and wandered along the Drive. Then by silent mutual consent, we turned away from the busy atmosphere of the main drag.

We strolled into the park, sat on the bleachers and watched some kids playing ball with a long-haired young man in a lavender shirt.

They had an unusual dog with them. His large ears seemed too big for his skinny body, making him appear unnaturally alert. He was very good with the children.

After awhile an older woman sat on the bleachers nearby. Judi greeted her and we began chatting. We asked about the dog. The woman said it was an Australian Shepherd, a great pet.

She was from Amsterdam, and it was her last evening in Vancouver. Her son had come here to join a girl friend he'd met on the internet. This mother left her husband at home and used her vacation time to come to Vancouver to see her son and his new girl friend with her three children. She told us she was glad to have seen where her only child was now living.

"He was nearly finished his Master's at university, but he dropped out." She sighed. "He seems happy. It's his life of course." She talked to us frankly, and I was very glad my friend had made the effort to speak to this woman. Our conversation felt easy, right and true.

Zit

When I was a teen, I almost never got pimples. As an adult, I've had only an occasional one. The last was years ago.

The other morning I woke up with a tender feeling in my nose. When I looked in the mirror, there it was. A big zit. It hadn't surfaced yet, but the signs were unmistakable. At my age. Jeez.

I appealed to my young adult daughter for help.

"Look at my nose. Is this a pimple?" I asked her, still in denial. Turning me to face the light, she confirmed what I already knew.

I groaned. "Can anything be done?"

Never one to turn her back on a straight line, she said "Nothing!" and added a gusty sigh. Then she cocked her head on the side, and regarded me. "Too bad it's not Hallowe'en or anything. You could have been a clown."

Finally she took pity on me, got her potions and went to work. First she dabbed a bit of cover stick on my nose, then powdered it gently over. She regarded me critically. "Nobody would notice a thing. Now all you have to do is wait. And don't touch your nose!"

"How long will it take?" I asked.

She waved her arm breezily. "A few days. Just forget it for now."

Now I was the kid, and there was my own advice coming back at me.

Scandinavian hair

When I was young, I considered myself poles apart from both parents. With the unbounded ego of the young, I used to wonder, "How did these people give birth to ME?"

As I grow older, I notice increasing similarities to both my parents. Among other things, I seem to have inherited my father's hair.

As a kid, I used to think Dad's hair strange. I was born on my father's 49th birthday, so I remember only a fine soft gray thatch. I wondered how gravity permitted it to stand on end.

In the mornings, I liked watching him shave. He used a hand basin, a shaving cup and brush, a cutthroat razor and a small mirror set at the right angle on the window sill. His fine hair reached upward in undulating waves like underwater seaweed.

After shaving, he would wet his hair, part it and comb it down, pushing it deftly into the waves it naturally wanted to form.

My hair is also soft and fine. I used to be annoyed by its limpness. But recently, it seems to have metamorphosed. This morning I had to use water to forcibly subdue a large clump that was standing vertically on one side of my head. To no avail. Next time I glanced in the mirror, the obstreperous locks had risen again.

My reaction was also new. Instead of feeling annoyed and unlovely, I smiled wryly. Anti-gravity hair. Part of my Scandinavian heritage.

"Fortune favours the bold?"

Friends and former colleagues Don Rathborne and Jean Kay Canwrite! 2010  Victoria

Under my new writing regime, I am trying to keep my desk top -- the real, not the virtual one -- tidy. I pick up a folded sheet of paper.

At the top of one side is written: "Fortune favours the bold. From the Romans?" Beneath this is the scribbled question, "Who burned the library of Alexandra?" Definitely my scrawl.

Then comes a name and phone number in my husband's hand. I flip the paper over and see, in my daughter's neat, vertical printing, three TV cable channels: BBC Canada, Biography, TSN2. After that, a couple of phrases in my husband's hand: Night Panicked America. Orson Welles.

Flipping the paper around 180 degrees, I see in the palest pencil the words "Sask Tel" with a phone number. So that's why I brought it upstairs from the TV room. Last night while I was watching John Alderton's P.G. Wodehouse videos from the 1970s, I got a call from a friend who is in Saskatchewan with her aging mother, and wrote down her new cell number.

Such small and interwoven threads form the web of our lives. From these we glean the connections that become stories.

What's the story about the picture? These two used to teach people on cruise ships how to take, improve, and use their photographs. Before the conference, I had a load of pictures on my computer. Now, after Don's wonderful workshop at Canwrite, I'm finally able to use them.

Still flying after flying in the face of fear

It's a week since the CAA Canwrite! 2010 conference began in Victoria. It ended last Saturday night, and I'm still on a high.



Photo: Poet Bernice Lever reads at the open mike. Bernice also read from the works of absent CAA prize nominees.

For me, the kickoff was an appointment to show an early draft of my manuscript to bestselling novelist Patrick Taylor. I was scared but not for long. Patrick's comments were very helpful, and we laughed together as he showed me flaws I couldn't see for myself.

Every writer needs an editor. This is advice I often deliver to my students as they bewail making "stupid mistakes." Patrick's comments located me on the other side of this knowledge. After many years of correcting pronoun reference errors for my students, I laughed with chagrin to see those very monsters in my own work.

And the meeting was fun. "You need a sense of humour," my experienced adviser told me, raising his hand high to show me the remembered pile of drafts he works through before each novel is published. Also, he gave me a signed advance copy of his latest: An Irish Country Courtship (New York, Forge, 2010). He wrote my name, and added the note, "Keep on writing." How good that felt.

The open mike session was a blast. Moderated by Victoria poet Sheila Martindale, it featured a variety of short readings from members.

There too, I took my courage in both hands and did what I've wanted to do for a long time. As I read through my piece, I burst into song when I came to the lines from the old ballads we loved so much in the sixties. Like the meeting with Patrick, that was exhilarating.

For me, the anticipation of both these conference highlights was a bit scary, as ventures onto new maps often are. But the rewards were rich. A week later, I'm still flying.

Muddy Whirlpools in the Fraser

I was glued to the window while the train crossed the high muddy river. A brown whirlpool mesmerized me, pulled me back in time.

Spring flood. The most exciting season of our childhood year. The Skeena flooded every June, a few days before school got out.

Every afternoon my brother and I bolted our snacks...cheese or peanut butter crackers and milk. Then we raced off down to the creek to see how much the water had risen.

Waiting for high water, we stood on the low wooden bridge and watched sticks, branches and leaves whirl away downstream.

Breathing in the dank smell, we watched the brown water roil around the frail structure of the bailey bridge. Would it hold?

The "creek" was really a narrow arm of the Skeena River, separated from the main channel by a fertile island with half a dozen farms and a few houses. If the water rose above the bridge deck, or the bridge washed out, the islanders would be trapped.

Some years the low-lying island flooded, making the farmer's hayfield look like a small lake with a stand of cottonwoods along the edge. This was pure magic; we knew, yet didn't know the place.

When the water receded, our play places were changed. The trees beside the creek were caked with drying mud. River sandbars had been re-sculpted. Best of all, ahead lay the tantalizing prospect of a whole summer of playing outside, exploring our altered world.

A farewell evening stroll in Victoria

CAA's Canwrite! 2010 in Victoria left me in information overload. I'd been doing a lot of sitting too.

After the awards ceremony, Jane (from Langley) and I (from Surrey) met Ann from Whitehorse and Ruth from Ontario and stood in front of the hotel talking of the G20 in Toronto.

Psychiatrist, comic poet and blogger Dr. William Hay entertains his fellow members of CAA.

Ruth and Ann told us they were going to walk down to the houseboats. But Jane and I, both in heels, headed for the elevators. Jane was planning to watch the CBC news for the latest G20 developments, but I felt restless. I changed my shoes and went out in the balmy air.

Passing the big hotels, I followed Kingston around, turned down St. Lawrence Street and walked along beside the silent houses with their fragrant flowering hedges to Ogden Point.

The cruise ship pier was a blaze of light with three ships in port: the Norwegian Pearl, the Sapphire Princess and the Osterdam. To get close, I had to avoid a steady stream of buses and limos.

As I turned to walk back, I noticed the trunks of some huge Garry Oaks that butted right up against the narrow sidewalk. One tree had some roots cut off. The rough-barked tree resembled the leg of an enormous elephant, the cut roots its neatly clipped nails.

Over my shoulder, the rising moon looked close to full. It disappeared behind a house, and reappeared swathed in a variety of clouds. Such innocuous-looking clouds, Julie and Colin Angus said, had presaged the hurricane that tried its best to sink their tiny boat in mid-Atlantic.

As I returned from my quiet half-hour stroll, I was amazed to see a parking lot advertising a daily rate of only $4. Last week when I had an evening event in Vancouver, I had to pay $5 just for the 15 minutes that I arrived before the evening parking rate kicked in.

Ahead loomed the castle-like Empress Hotel, its venerable stone flanks swathed in vines and bathed along the front in pink light. This time in Victoria has indeed been a lovely change of scene.