A Crack in the Sidewalk

A crack in the sidewalk, 

jagged and out of place 

and I asked myself why 

it wasn’t neat and orderly. 

The answer rose beside 

the question: because the 

earth moves. But it doesn’t 

stop me from stepping over it 

or for children to draw with 

chalk for a game of hopscotch

A crack in the sidewalk, jagged 

and in the place it was given.

“Sometimes the questions are complicated and the answers are simple.”

~ Dr. Seuss

Why It Matters

Why does it matter? 

A question seldom asked. 

Just follow the rules of the 

boss, society, culture, family…

To step back give an idea time 

  for thought, 

    for consideration,  

      to speak to the inside person 

who wants to be heard

It does matter!

  

 The special turn of phrase  

  

the manner of a hug. 

  the voice that speaks and laughs

    

is only yours.

“Never forget the essence of your spark!”

~ Taylor Swift

Where Do I Go?

Where do I go when 

the argument becomes 

reddened with anger?

Can I find the place 

where roiling, boiling 

waters have calmed?

Following the seasons, with 

storms and destruction, 

stepping into shelter is wise.

Shelter within my soul until 

my mind can be at peace, my 

words become measured and kind.

“Anger is an acid than can do more harm to the vessel in 

which it is stored than to anything on which it is poured.”

~ Mark Twain

The Question of Quality

My theme for the month is quality. What do I mean by quality? Is it goodness, image, presentation? When I think of quality I think of something long lasting, almost perfect - no flaws. But when related to a human being how can that be? We, as a species, seem the most flawed and yet there is a shared belief that, not only are we at the top of the food chain, we deserve to be there. Then we have the audacity to believe we can do anything to the very world that supplies us with everything for our very lives. Where is the quality in that? All our characteristics and qualities are not fully formed at the time of our birth. They are fed to us, honed and developed over the years. From parents, role models, mentors, colleagues, friends and experiences; not to mention this era of social media, truth and disinformation. Children are to develop into quality human beings. They are to make decisions that fit in with their family and community at home and abroad - no black sheep allowed. No wonder our world is so confused. What I do know for sure is that quality feels good, works well and is satisfying. As all who have travelled our path with us through life crumble away, we are alone but never lonely depending on the qualities we have taken into our lives.

“The quality, not the longevity, of one’s life is what is important.”

~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Disguised

Maturity ~ questionable……..

especially with heavy snow

weighing down the branches ~

but we all know that 

hair dye covers some snow.

“Another belief of mine; that everyone else my age

 is an adult, whereas I am merely in disguise.”

~ Margaret Atwood

Book Review: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid

You could be forgiven if you saw the title, a beauty in an emerald green dress, and turned away from this compelling story. Protagonist Evelyn Hugo certainly would not blame you. She was born in 1938 in Hell’s Kitchen New York, the daughter of Cuban immigrants. Losing her mother at a young age, she was an only child raised by her father. It was an unhappy time for her. As she grew into her beauty, she also blossomed ~ and blossomed. Becoming aware of the power of her beauty and her sexuality she determined to get of Hell’s Kitchen, thus her first husband, Ernie Diaz. At age 14 (she told Ernie she was 16) and married, he was her ticket to Hollywood. However he didn’t fit with her driving ambitions. Evelyn Elena Herrera created Evelyn Hugo, changing her hair colour from dark brown to blonde. Her skin was light bronze, enough to carry the blonde hair.

At age 79, she contacted a popular magazine Vivant and, in her signature powerful style, she insisted on a specific writer to write her life story. Monique Grant, a ‘newbie’ employee with Vivant, was that writer. No one, especially Monique, could figure out why when there were so many far more qualified. However, it was Monique or no one. Throughout the story the question hangs temptingly ‘why?’ Tempting because more than once I wanted to turn to the ending and learn the answer, but I wanted to know the story behind the answer more.

The other six husbands? Don Adler, as handsome and driven as Evelyn. Mick Riva, a famous singer who only wanted to bed her fame. Rex North - in a sexless marriage, he was as ruthlessly ambitious as Evelyn. Max Girard, a well known movie producer, also charming but wanted only eye candy. Harry Cameron, Evelyn’s best and longest friend, father of her only daughter, as well as her producer of her first movie. Robert Jamison, brother of Celia St. James who was the love of Evelyn’s life.

In the world of glamour and stardom, when Evelyn Hugo and Celia St. James were at the peak of their careers, same sex relationships were absolutely shunned. The incredible machinations they needed to protect their careers was stunning and sad. 

In the end Evelyn’s life had nothing to do with “Why Monique?”, but everything to do with the final answer.

“When you dig just the tiniest bit beneath the surface, everyone’s love life is 

original and interesting and nuanced and defies any easy definition.”

~ Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Title: The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid

Copyright: 2017

Publisher: Washington Square Press - an imprint of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Type: A Novel

Format: Soft Cover

ISBN 978-1-5011-3923-9

ISBN 978-1-5011-6193-3 (pbk)

ISBN 978-1-5011-3924-6 (ebook)

Carpé Diem?

Setting up new life and living

with wrinkles and silvering hair;

with excitement and trepidation,

a question slips into my thoughts ~ 

what makes me think 

I’ll step out of my dreams?!

Outside I may look like an adult

but my insides are only three!

But ~ I’ll stand still slowly,

with one breath, one step at a time

I'll set up new life and living

with wrinkles and silvering hair.

“Keeping up the appearance of having

 all your marbles is hard work, but important.”

~ Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants

 

One Question

To ask 

one question ~

what do any of us

know of another’s life?

To ask 

one question ~

Is there a design flaw

from within that 

is ours to fix? 

To ask 

one question ~

Or do we look

to the design that 

truly is ours to reshape?

“There are always answers. We just have to be smart enough.”

~ John Green, Looking for Alaska

Answered

He paced and paced

  one fist slamming into

the palm of the other

The stubborn question

  persistently unanswered

’til ‘Eureka!’

A smile wreathed his face

  frustration vanished 

as leaves on the wind.

“Isn’t life a collection of weird quizzes with 

no answers to half the questions?”

~ Pawan Mishra, Coinman: An Untold Conspiracy

Seeding?

Seeding?

“Energy that hasn’t existed before?”

Uncle Thomas seemed confused and he didn’t even have white hair yet. My parents named me after him but everyone called me Tommy. When I grew up, I wanted to be called Thomas. I thought I was pretty grown up already because I would be seven years old on my birthday this month. But people keep asking me what I want to be ‘when I grew up?’ Don’t they know I want to be a farmer like Uncle Thomas, and I kind of am already. I guess I got pretty confused too about the energy thing so when I asked Uncle Thomas, the best farmer in the world, and he just asked me back I was worried. See, I was going to plant beans in the spring when it was time. The ones that climb on bean poles - I guess that’s why they call the poles ‘bean poles’ - and they have red flowers. But the beans I had for seeds looked dead. Like there was no growing kind of energy in them at all. I didn’t want to plant a bunch of dead seeds and be the worst farmer in the world when I was just starting out. Uncle Thomas gave me the bean seeds and a little patch of his garden for my farm! Well, I guess it’s not really a farm yet, but you have to start somewhere, you know. Uncle Thomas isn’t mean. So I decided to ask him the energy question that made his forehead wrinkle up. 

“Tommy, do you remember where those beans came from? Remember we talked about it last fall harvest. We talked about all kinds of seeds. Wheat, oats and beans and peas and all the things your aunt and I plant in our garden and in the fields.”

“Now, I remember! The plants get energy from the sun and the rain. Nitrogen and oxygen from the rain. And the sun……is the word photo….something?”

“You’ve got a pretty good memory, Tommy. The word you want is photosynthesis. All that energy goes into growing the plants and making the seeds so a new plant can grow in the next year.”

“But why do the seeds all look like they’re dead?”

“Well, they look dead but they are dormant. Being dormant is rather like keeping a secret or maybe sleeping. Their secret is that they are alive. When you’re sound asleep, you are still breathing and your heart is still beating. Sleep lets your energy build up at the end of a day. When seeds are dormant they are doing the same thing, except they can stay asleep for a long time. It’s up to us farmers to wake them up. With beans, we wake them up gently by soaking them in the house before putting them in the ground. But why all the questions about planting? Spring is too far off to get your garden growing.”

“I think every farmer should know this stuff and I didn’t want to wait until spring to ask. What if I forgot my question or you were already in the field and I couldn’t ask you? So I’m glad we had this talk now.”

“So am I. Let’s go out to the kitchen and work on my new jigsaw puzzle. Aunt Marg has some hot cocoa and cookies for us. When it’s not planting time but feels like it should be, it’s almost a sad thing. I think we could use just a little cheering up - don’t you?”

“Kids don’t remember what you teach them. They remember what you are.”

~ Jim Henson

Passing the Edge

Intriguing experiments are often done at home, usually not accompanied by double blind studies or are ever peer reviewed. I can say I do feel rather blind when I ask myself the question:  ‘I wonder if…….’  As for peer reviews, when it comes to attempting a new culinary challenge, I’ve had many guests ~ friends and family ~ that have provided me with a degree of peer review. Always polite, their truth of these culinary results is often in question. Especially when I know that a dish was too salty, or missing something else, bread too tough, or not strong enough to support the thinnest sandwich. 

Scientific experiments begin with a question, followed by background research and then comes the hypothesis. Clear steps to define procedure, trouble shooting, re-experimentation, results that support or do not support a hypothesis. A ‘home’ experiment really has the same steps - usually beginning with the question: ‘I wonder if…..’ There are times when I do some cursory background research, but when the experiment is about my own abilities there are times even I seem not familiar with them and there is no data base to delve into ~ except maybe years of journals, but journals do not typically provide an index. A much too time consuming bit of research, I have tried and dispensed with it. (Another experiment) But, there is usually a gut instinct that I know the answer. My curiosity often is that I want to find out if I am actually able to answer my own question. Returning to the issue of food preparation, I may wander through my cookbooks for possibilities. The best cookbooks are the ones with pencilled in side notes by previous cooks. I seldom have a hypothesis, as a hypothesis is an educated guess about how things should work. Once again, in my own home, testing my own abilities, if education about home and food is missing from my personal data base, that hypothesis merely becomes a ‘what if?’.

My longest running experiment has been this blog, Standing Still Slowly. I started it in December 2011, at a time when my mood was extremely low, I was relatively new to Victoria and was in new stages of early friendships. My question? I wonder if I can write and post one small piece a day for one year. That year has telescoped into just over seven years. I have learned so much about word crafting, and developed a daily practice for writing. Being accountable to myself and, with much appreciation, to those of you who read my posts regularly has been a real learning curve for this home experiment - no one to set rules for me. From poetry to essay, prose to story with the occasional rant thrown in, I’ve written daily despite my circumstance or my mood. I have included memorials to so many precious family and friends that have passed from this world since opening Standing Still Slowly. On days when circumstance has prevented me from writing a new piece, I have reposted from my personal blog data base.

My new experiment is: ‘I wonder if I can maintain and, at the same time, develop my writing practice both long hand and blog posts on a daily basis for this first year of retirement.’ I feel confidant that I have the ability and the authenticity to dig deeper into this most intriguing experiment, creating a richer data base for any future personal research.

“Life is a concept, like the “universe”, that expands

 as soon as we reach what we think is its edge.”

~ Kamand Kojouri,  author, poet

Book Review: The Golden House by Salman Rushdie

The Golden House by Salman Rushdie is full of stories. There is never just one story to tell. One situation to describe. One family to recognize. Nero Golden comes to America with his three adult sons to establish a new life. Simple? Salman Rushdie’s characters stream through each other’s lives trying not to get lost in the currents and eddies of political strife, underworld machinations, cultural and gender shifting while adapting to identity, power, and greed to find and accept with an open hand, hope and genuine love. The narrator, one René Unterlinden, while writing a movie, takes from Roman mythology, Greek tragedy to the modern day Joker of the comic-book world. No super heroes to save the day but many anti-heroes litter the pages. An oft repeated question was whether a good man could be a bad man and could a bad man be a good man could appear to be the nub of the story.

My book group yesterday discussed the enormous number of words and ideas that were skillfully crafted by Salman Rushdie. Some of us enjoyed this novel, some of us were just overwhelmed by the sheer amount of detail that went into this work. I had not finished the book by time for book group so, while I had the latter opinion of feeling overwhelmed, I did not feel I could contribute much to the discussion. This morning, I finished The Golden House and found all the loose ends tied up as neatly as possible given the nature of the story. I say as neatly as possible given the very human situations. There is a great sense of reality to this book which, I must admit, engendered a sense of discomfort as much of this was too close to the state of the world today.

Will I read this book again? A book with this amount of detail will be reserved for its own time and place.

“This is what I am not: I am not one thing. I contain multitudes.”

~ Salman Rushdie, The Golden House

Title: The Golden House

Copyright: 2017

Author: Salman Rushdie

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Canada

Format: Novel

ISBN: 978-0-7352-7356-6

ebook ISBN: 978-0-7352-7358-0