You Catch My Breath

Posted on May 31, 2012 by

Bit by bit, I’m manufacturing a volume of poems tentatively titled You Catch My Breath.  The poems are a series of flashpoints from a rambler’s perspective, out and about, solitary and speculative, witnessing Toronto from a poet’s puzzled, curious, engaged, and entertained sensibilities.

In other words: I look; I pause; I write. There’s always a notebook and pen shoved deep inside my pocket and many bright coffee shops with window-tables for me to settle at and reach for them.

The “You” in the title is multiple and refers to inanimate life as well as other folks strolling past. I am ecstatically involved, at times, with every manifestation of what is alive in this city and in my wandering thoughts.

While some people leap from note to note in music, I am led by the actions and expressions around me; they become more alive when I shape them into words and hurry them home to my keyboard.

During my ramblings, my breath is frequently “caught” like an excited child startled into another discovery of pleasure.

I am a middle-aged lesbian feminist activist, recently finished raising my son (Toto is a freshly cooked adult now.) He is alive in my poetry. So is the experience of having been on the vanguard in raising him, during the early 90s, with two gay men.

I write about walking on Church Street on a blistering June day with babe in arms, dads by my side, and having people step up to us and say “thank you for doing this.” (Historical Note: there were only a few hundred people on that pride march in 1992!)

As an obituary writer I am very much alive in the present but reside, in some sense, as a storyteller among the dead, shaping and sharing their stories with a large audience of interested onlookers.

I record the history of personal achievements of dozens of people and many times this work seeps deep inside my poetry (the poetry also infuses the journalism), adding a rich flavour to my experience of being among the lives I encounter during my foot-travels in Toronto. Again, it has to do with memory and imagination—the pleasure in stories.

Not sure how I’d structure the poems into a manuscript. There are many jangling edges and smatterings of this & that. I’d love to have the steady, persistent, and patient companionship of a mentor to help me through this process.

I’d be thrilled to create a cohesive, enjoyable study of urban life bubbling from inside memory and sometimes from outside time, somehow integrating the treasures of life with the (seemingly contradictory) treasures of death.

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DEAD LINE (Two)

Posted on May 28, 2012 by
Death

Death (Photo credit: tanakawho)

“Noreen,” she said. “I just found out Deirdre’s dying. She probably won’t make it through the weekend. I’m really worried and want to know whether you’ll drive up and see her with me.”

Her breathless, hurried voice rattled me and together with the substance of her words, forced me to sit in the chair and think. Think just a little bit before emotions smashed down on me without mercy. Deirdre is our sister, the second eldest in a family of eight children. She has Down syndrome and has lived in an institution since she was a child, a handful of years after she was born to our 23 year-old mother, during the dark days of the early 1950s.

The thought of a first sibling death caught in my throat, even though I haven’t seen Deirdre more than a few times during the past twenty years. Still, it was the kind of news I needed time to digest and wasn’t sure spending the day writing an obituary would do it. It might unsettle what was settled more than I’d like.

I might have to give in to an involuntary surrender. Meanwhile, deadline loomed. I stumbled during my conversation with Kathleen, no doubt asking the wrong questions or breathing a flawed response.

“What should we do? I guess you’ve spoken with mom and dad about it already?”

Our parents winter in Florida. They’re nudging toward their mid-eighties and travelling back and forth is no longer easy for them but they still drive there and back twice a year, with several motel stops along the way somewhere in the south. I was concerned with how they’d receive the news, the imminent death of their child, alone thousands of miles away from home.

“Mom asked me to arrange the funeral,” she said. “They’re not coming back for it.”

Today, at Tango Palace, my local coffee shop, I write about death. No, that’s not quite it. I actually write about life. My subject, Dr. Elspie Shaver, another doctor. Her story began with her birth and that’s also how I shall begin.

I begin to sketch a life. But the present moment is only a ticket to the past. There’s an old woman across the room who wears a smack of orange like a sharp dart on her mouth. Time travels. I return once again into my own long ago. Suddenly I remember being fifteen, working behind the F.W. Woolworth lunch counter wiping smears of brilliant lipstick from beige enamel coffee cups.

There are these moments, yes, and there will transpire a firm blending of time past, present, and hopefully to be. I live within the folds of its skin, snug behind a wing.

My mother once told me about taking Deirdre home for a few days within a few months of admitting her. “We took her to my father’s house, slipped her up to the screen door and knocked on it. Then we hid behind the bushes,” she said.

“My father came to the door and he was so excited to see her, he opened the door and took her into his arms,” she smiled, lost in this but it shaded quickly. “He was dead within a week.”

That year, the year I was born, I lost my older sister and three of my grandparents. Grief flowed through with my mother’s milk during those months.

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DEAD LINE [One]

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

I meant to write about death, only life came breaking in as usual.

—  Virginia Woolf

The woman has been dead a month. I have a few hours to turn it around, the obituary I am writing, before my editor pounds out a frantic email to me—gentle, but frantic, because the policy at the Globe and Mail is to publish these essays within a month of a person’s passing. I’m a well person, midway through my life, and I live in Toronto’s east end, near a city park with century old maples and a water slide for small children. I am surrounded by lives, both in my home and in my community. Each day my son plugs himself in, gives me a quick hug, and slips through the front door.

My neighbor, who resembles Stevie Nicks, straps a knapsack shaped like a casket on her back and threads in skull earrings and walks past our house each morning. There are the well-dressed dogs in booties tugged along by reluctant humans preferring to stay in bed those extra few minutes each morning than trudge around after shit; rushed moms determined to beat the school bell’s reminder that breakfast dragged on this morning.

Earlier this morning, while working at home, from the corner of my eye I watched the cat shift position and settle into a deeper sleep, snoring in wisps and sputters. Whenever my typing slowed down, his head popped up. He is lulled by the sound of clattering keys and the motor in my thinking.

I tell other people’s stories and thousands of other people read them. Meanwhile, the first viewer is my cat. Once I started thinking along these lines, my eyes on him more than they are on the screen, I decided it was time to leave the house. Downstairs, as I was snapping up my coat, the phone rang. It was my eldest sister, Kathleen, and because she rarely calls—and when she does, it’s often with worrisome news—I picked it up.

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Angelica Garnett

Posted on May 17, 2012 by

Angelica Garnett with Virginia Woolf

I got bumped by Virginia Woolf’s niece this morning. Fetched the newspaper and carted it up to bed with my coffee. Opened up the obituaries page, expecting to see my piece on Canadian Aboriginal activist Lillian McGregor, but instead discovered that Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant’s daughter, Angelica Garnett, had died in France, age 93.

I learned a creepy detail from her biography: She ended up marrying her father’s former lover, David (Bunny) Garnett, who once peered at the newborn Angelica, admired her 2-day-old beauty, and vowed to wed her.

“Its beauty is the remarkable thing…I think of marrying it. When she is 20 I shall be 46–will it be scandalous?”

Angelica moved into Hilton Hall, Cambridgeshire, Bunny’s home, in 1942 and had four daughters: Amarylis, Henrietta, Fanny and Nerissa. The marriage lasted 25 years.

After my coffee and a quick read of this obituary I up-and-dressed as per usual but never effectively regained a toe-hold onto my day: I was Bloomerburyized and knew there was no escape. I plucked from my shelf Woolf’s diaries and read passages about Vanessa’s daughter’s birth on Christmas day, 1918.

“Has [Angelica] got a lovely down at the back of her neck. Shall we all be allowed to kiss her?”

The baby remained without a name for several weeks; the two sisters pondered possibilities, including Venetia, Sabina, and Euphronosyne.

“I don’t like Claudia–pompous and aristocratic,” Virginia wrote, “I like Susan–Suzannah suggests an old Negress on a Savannah–”

For awhile, she was called “Anonyma” by her odd and angular aunt in Richmond.

And so I surrendered my day to books, scattered in tiny mounds beside me on the living room couch, letting the curtain beside me ride the breeze similar, I imagined, to Virginia’s gusts at her writing desk as she slid the pen forward and sipped her steeped tea, awaiting another disturbance from pesky servants.

I’m in the death business and this blog tells stories about the ends of lives and the bits between, but landing upon Angelica’s obituary this morning balled me up and tossed me high into the snare of a story about a birth nearly a century ago. I simply gave in and let my thoughts wander along with the Woolfs, Bells, Grants and others who periodically tempt me away.

Also, I’ve lately been working through a tattered old copy of  The Years, and have wanted to describe some of what I’ve found in this early Woolf novel as well, clearly biographical, beginning with the death of Virginia and Vanessa’s mother. The sisters tended to the sickroom.

“When she came to the bedroom door with the jugs and glasses on the table outside, she paused. The sour-sweet smell of illness slightly sickened her. She could not force herself to go in. Through the little window at the end of the passage she could see flamingo-coloured curls of cloud lying on a pale-blue day.”

Bloomsbury has stolen from me a pale blue day of my own. No walk to the Don River with Heather this morning; no tea in the back garden; not even a satisfactory work day. Lost in their lives, for several hours, but not any longer. I’ll hammer the pages shut and catch up with my own life.

And then tomorrow morning, Lillian McGregor, another old woman with a fascinating pedigree, will get a chance to tell her story.

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Jane’s Walk: Dance in celebration to Jane Jacobs

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

Death and irony, that’s the theme of today’s blog post. And Jane Jacobs is the headliner.

Last weekend my partner, Heather, and her 81-year-old mother joined me on a “Jane’s Walk” in Toronto, one of several held each spring to honour Jacobs and in recognition of her remarkable input into the city’s spirit.

Doreen had her walker and we had our concerns: she wouldn’t manage the walk, couldn’t keep up with the others, would miss the megaphone recitation, a local activist speaking about gentrification of the neighbourhood, “keeping up with the Joneses” gone wild here in our Leslieville…

Where did that expression come from? Have you ever wondered? Here’s an aside, about the Joneses, and about Jane Jacobs’ former city home in Manhattan. While strolling along through my neighbourhood the other day, stopping now and again to smell the peonies, lilacs, roses-of-Sharons new to the vine, I turned up the sound on my iPhone so I could better hear a recording on Edith Wharton, early 20th century novelist, friend to Henry James, lover of speedy automobile jaunts through Europe.

As a novelist, Wharton was known as a little sister to James’s genius–until feminism increased her popularity.

(I shall return to Jacobs and our Jane’s walk, have no fear!)

Before marrying and divorcing Teddy Wharton, Edith Wharton was Edith Jones. Her parents were New York snobs, hobnobbing with Rothchilds and the like; Edith didn’t want that life so she ditched Teddy and fled to France, following a literary path carved by her friend Henry.

“Keeping up with the Joneses” originated with her Manhattan family. Failing to keep up with the Joneses is perceived as demonstrating socio-economic or cultural inferiority.

And now back to Jane’s Walk in Leslieville last weekend.

These walks began shortly after Jacobs died, in Toronto, in 2006. She was an urban  activist whose writings championed a community-based approach to city planning. According to the website for these walks, Jacobs wrote about the importance of dense and vibrant cityscapes, famously uncovering the ‘sidewalk ballet’, that intricate dance between neighbours and passers-by that make a street enjoyable and friendly.

“No one can find what will work for our cities by looking at … suburban garden cities, manipulating scale models, or inventing dream cities. You’ve got to get out and walk.” 

Walk with a daughter, with a daughter-in-law, or with a walker. Lift your eyes above the gardens to see the ghost-stencil of a long-ago industrialist above the door of a small factory now housing latte-ladden loft residents.

Glide along a narrow strip of row houses tucked into street corners; smile at women on stoops balancing infants on hips, and think: “I no longer even know where I am!”

Make the familiar unfamiliar and think of Jane.

The irony? Just this: Jane Jacobs died without knowing her fullest impact: Toronto residents, each spring,  just plain walking side-by-side with their neighbours. Catching up to the megaphones and filling-up their heads with local stories past and present.

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An infant daughter’s death sentence

Posted on May 1, 2012 by

My two elder sisters: Kathleen and Dierdre

My sister Deirdre turns 60 this month. She wasn’t expected to live longer than five years. Born in 1952, she was the second daughter held by my 21-year old mother, with six children to follow. Right from the start, Dierdre failed to meet the milestones and she looked oddly different, swollen and unfocused. She wasn’t after love.

Off slap-dash to a series of doctors.

And then the truth was revealed.

Mom, Dad, Nana, Kathleen (who was a little over a year old), and Dierdre gathered in the living room of their Anglesy home to absorb the news: Dierdre has severe Down syndrome. “Luck of the draw,” was suggested by these doctors but hopefully not voiced. And then there was the next day, my young mother curled around a non-responsive infant fresh with a haunting diagnosis.

Five years, they told my parents, and then your daughter will die. Maybe earlier, so make your plans and for God’s sake have more babies. But suddenly Dierdre was seven years old and sputtering around the kitchen while our mother prepared to slip the pasta into the pot, angling herself across a regatta of high chairs, tiny limbs reaching toward her from the newest three babies birthed since Dierdre’s news.

Dinner time in a house of small children: pots and pacifiers and squeals beneath crucified Jesus, slanting down from his wooden post above the door frame. My father was due home on the 5:45 commuter train in 20 minutes.

Dierdre pulled the bubbling pot off the burner and onto her small, unsteady self.

Third degree burns spread on her chest, her face, her neck. She still lived.

Dierdre turns 60. Old, old, they say, for a person with Downs. She can no longer walk. Probably can’t see. She has never been able to speak, so language isn’t lost it’s just still absent. She lives in a nursing home with old women who have forgotten their lives and stare vacantly at pictures of people they are said to know.

“Is this my husband,” one woman asks. “He looks like a nice man,” I tell her, twitching a new tune on her radio and returning to my sister.

We live with our memories of each other, our memories of Dierdre and her 21-year old mother and 22-year old father who bore the unfathomable news of their second child’s impending death at five.

When Dierdre dies, I’d like to write her obituary but it will be a fantasy, a series of guesses as to how she lived, what she achieved, whom she loved.  Her three brothers, four sisters, and both her parents are still alive–full lives with travel, work, families of our own, meals in nice restaurants, night school courses, and celebrations.

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Ross Bay Cemetery, Victoria, B.C.

Posted on April 24, 2012 by

This picture arrived in my email inbox from Victoria, B.C. on one of those dreadful when-will-spring-arrive mornings. For a minute or so after it landed, I brooded no longer. I imagined drifting with the deer on ocean air among the burial markers…

Victoria used to be a ferry ride away for me but Toronto is now my home. We have a tiny ferry across the harbour to the Toronto Island, but it’s rare to catch deer–although not impossible!

A few years ago there was a single, lonely doe lost among the Bay Street bank towers. It’s unclear where she came from. But in front of a sizeable urban crowd loaded down with iPhone cameras, city police cordoned off an area, released the SWAT team, tasered the animal and carted her away. So Toronto is not completely deer-less.

But these deer resting upon tombstones at the Ross Bay cemetery in Victoria,  arguably the most historic cemetery in Western Canada, begs for a wholly different kind of reflection, one I so enjoy having that I’ve saved the image forevermore to my desktop and now I’m sharing it with you.

My friend Chris Gainor sent me this photograph. His house rests on the edge of the cemetery and so his neighbours include many pioneers of B.C. and Victoria, several B.C. premiers, and one of the Fathers of Confederation.

“Emily Carr is probably the most famous person buried there,” wrote Chris,  ”On many occasions I’ve pointed tourists from as far away from Japan to it. People often leave flowers, pine cones and other things on her grave.”

Up the block and over a few markers from Emily is Nellie Cashman.

In 1898, Cashman left Arizona to join the Klondike Gold Rush. She became known as the “Angel of Cassiar,” for taking charge of a six-man search party and rescuing miners hit by an avalanche in B.C.’s Cassiar Mountains.

“After 77 days of unfriendly weather, Cashman and her party located the sick men…some estimates credit Cashman with saving the lives of as many as 75 men.” (wiki)

Later in her life, she returned to the U.S. and settled in Tombstone, Arizona and kept a saloon. She died in 1925 and returned to be close to Emily, whom she probably would have liked, up the lane at Ross Bay .

“The cemetery lies between our neighbourhood and Ross Bay in the Strait of Juan de Fuca,” wrote Chris.  ”I often walk through there, and that’s what I was doing yesterday when I got that photo of the deer.”

Emily Carr (1871 – 1945)

Nellie Cashman (1845- 1925)

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