Home-Staging / I am the Walrus / Safari Man

My Real Estate Agent
 

My first mistake was to tell her that I thought my house was special and that I wanted top dollar for it. Her first mistake was to tell me that everybody thought their house was special and wanted top dollar. As if I didn’t know that. What I really needed to tell her was that my house was my home and I didn’t want to leave it at all. In fact, I was feeling quite tender and maybe, at that moment, a bit hard-done-by. And what she should have done was to look around my home in astonishment and offer me a million dollars. No harm in that. 

 

I was wary of barracudas sniffing out my soft spots, my resolve, the urgency of my situation. In fairness, she was not a barracuda. But not a rainbow trout either.  She came highly recommended as the top seller in my area, and I could see why. She was a professional. Honest, thorough and tough. But what I needed at that moment was a soft mother.

Being a professional, she saw my home through the eyes of a prospective buyer. I was seeing it through the eyes of a creative person who saw potential, had a vision, wanted challenges. I was still seeing my property in the way Rod and I first saw it, as though we had just fallen through the rabbit hole and entered Wonderland. 

 

It was 23 years ago that we stumbled onto this place. The real estate market had been super hot. We were desperate to move out of the city, but we entered the game late, and there were few properties left on the market. In fact, Jack, our agent at the time, didn’t even want to show us this property. It had been on the market for ages, and the price had come down considerably (a good thing, but telling). Also, there was the threat of a dump being built just downhill from it. But what the heck, so far we’d seen the best 3 properties in our price range, and none of them appealed to us. Jack took us in his car, drove past unpromising fields backing on to HWY 401, then turned south on an unpromising little side road, and parked in front of a sort of shack next to a cedar hedge. Was this all that was left in our price range? No wonder he’d been hesitant to show it to us. But then! It was when we first stepped through the opening in the cedar hedge that we fell in love. A long golden field led to the edge of the hill, and in the distance was the lake. On both sides of the field there were mature trees.

The house itself? Jack was right, no one in their right mind would want to live in this old farmhouse. The stucco had crumbled ages ago and it was hard to tell what colour it had once been. It was still inhabited by, for lack of a better word, young hippies, who sat on the floor with their legs sprawled out. Furniture was scarce. We had to step over their legs, as they did not acknowledge us and did not budge. But neither were they hostile. They just lived in their own world and felt no need to ingratiate themselves. That was fine by me. The little house was basically a shoebox with a few gingerbread trimmings suggesting a divide between two spaces, er, rooms. The windows were charming, made up of small square panes. The kitchen was like an afterthought, narrow as a hallway, but with a window overlooking the edge of the woods. The shack in the parking lot, it turned out, was now a work space, having once housed horses and, I suppose, a tractor.
 

Maybe we weren’t in our right minds. We thought the place was wonderful. Soon after buying it, quietly one day, the value of the property went up considerably when the threatened dump was not to be, at least, not in our back-yard. And now, 23 years and two major renovations later, people ask us how ever did we find this magical place tucked away behind an unassuming cedar hedge. Yes, I know, everyone has a story to tell when asked how ever did they find such a special house. 

The truth is, I wasn’t in my right mind when I met with Marilyn, the real estate agent. She brought out an “attitude” in me, when she implied that my home left much to be desired. It didn’t get any better when she pointed out that my artist’s touches would not be appreciated by the average buyer – in fact, they could be intimidating or off-putting. What? The average person couldn’t see beyond the paintings on the walls and the sculptures placed here and there? They couldn’t see beyond my chosen colours, pale apricot with silver-mauve trim? They couldn’t see beyond the rather old-fashioned kitchen that does not have a granite counter-top? Beyond my “tired” bathroom?

She explained to me all about home stagers. As if I didn’t know. But now I feel the needle on my emotional compass is beginning to tremble, not knowing which way to point. Something is amiss. I’ve seen the websites of those home stagers. Most made-over rooms look like IKEA show-rooms: Stick to neutral colours, create focal points, get rid of clutter … and thus you move from “untidy” to “elegant”.  Place a couple of potted plants by your door and transform your entrance from “unappealing” to “welcoming”. And yet, I had to step over some sprawling hippies when I first saw my house! Dust bunnies everywhere. How does that work? Marilyn said that not everyone has the eyes of an artist, like me. Ri-ight. Nevertheless, I can’t argue with reality. “Staged” homes apparently do sell more readily than unstaged ones. What has happened to us? What has happened to human imagination? Now everyone wants a home like the one on T.V. after the make-over crew has come and gone.

O.K. My compass needle has stopped quivering, is settling down in a specific direction. Here is what is bothering me me: We are told that selling a home today is essentially the same as selling a product. And a whole new profession has materialized to make us feel insecure about our own abilities to enhance, or add value to that product. I get it. Why not? As a painter, I know that visualizing space is fun, and why not do it for money for other people? And how can I complain about a whole new niche market having been carved out? People need jobs. I guess what bothers me is that professionals are now inserting themselves beween us and our imaginations. Maybe I should hire someone to help me enhance my visual appearance too, choose my colours, my style, my whole wardrobe … Oh, wait! Didn’t I just see that being done on TV? What next? Someone to arrange my intellectual life? Someone to choose and pre-read the books I ought to read? (NYTimes Literary Review does that.) Choose my friendships for me? Pre-date potential husbands or wives to see if they are good enough for us, save us the trouble of dressing up or being bored? And if I were younger, choose my husband? Oh ... that's already been done too? You see where I'm going with this? There are endless niches that could be carved out by professionals, sparing us the need to think at all. I feel some basic hard-earned freedoms are being given away if we're discouraged from visualizing, from examining our own selves, our personalities — but, this is getting too heady for a small blog. I'm just saying.

Well, Marilyn knows her job and she does it well. Her parting offer was to pay for a home-stager to come and visit me and give me advice. Over my dead body, I thought as I thanked her and demurred. Since she left, I have entered into a frenzy of wall-painting and de-cluttering and re-thinking to my own heart’s content. In any case, down-sizing is inevitable at some point. I don't want my kids to clean up the attic and wonder whether mom would have thrown out those hideous lamps. And what should they do with those old love letters? After all, their dad's name was not Harry.

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I Am The Walrus


Walking around my property, where we have lived for 22 years. The garden has grown according to my energy, my needs, the plants available – a rambling garden, meant for walking through. The wind is fierce. Forty years ago I might have imagined myself at the end of the dock – wind from behind, my skirt billowing romantically. Always someone watching, of course. The big willow and the smaller corkscrew willow by the dock dancing wildly. The male gaze holding me in focus. A reason to live.

Forty years ago, like Scarlet O’Hara, I would have resolved to hold on to this Swallow Hill at any cost. What is there to say when a good thing comes to an end? Then you are left with memories, until, at some point, the memories, too, come to an end.

In the meantime, my husband is in TO at the moment, seeing his oncologist at the Princess Margaret. If his blood chemistry has come up to an acceptable level, he will have round 6 of his chemo cycle this week. There may be 8 rounds in all. So far so good, though there are some glitches. What can I say? The garden is overwhelmingly beautiful even now when the trees are next to bare and the morning sun lights up their trunks.

Last night I was trying to get some depth into my sleep but my husband was snoring, albeit ever so lightly. You know the kind of snoring where each breath that is exhaled sounds like the death of a tiny bubble? But the rhythm of the breathing is oddly compelling — the bubble is easy to visualize and you find yourself rooting for it — maybe this time it won’t burst! I decided to take a closer look to see how it actually worked. I kept the tiny flashlight away from his eyes but let the edge of light fall on my husband’s mouth. To my surprise, there was no bubble. It’s the soft membranes of the lips which barely touch, and then are blown apart by the exhalation. Anyway, I ended up in the spare room, where I still couldn’t sleep, but at least could concentrate on different visuals — the action takes place somewhere in the brain, though it feels like I’m watching Imax.

Sometime before dawn, one of my 5 cats let out a heart-rending yiaaaooowl, and my heart was rended. I felt great pity for her. My cat in trouble? Perhaps being bullied by the other four cats? My cat yawning out of boredom? My cat expressing the joy of living? Why could she not be more specific? It would all sound the same, wouldn’t it? A cat-whisperer I am not.

My sadness at my cat’s plight kept growing. Who of us has never cried out in the wilderness? Who of us has never experienced the fear of being misunderstood? Finally I had to scold myself. It’s not cool to have one’s heart rended so easily. If we all went around weeping, stopping at street corners to blow our noses whenever we felt misunderstood, this country would come to a halt.

 Ah, tenderness, you are so under-appreciated! Living with nature as I do, I’m already helping lady bugs off their backs and onto their tiny feet. I gently lift them onto a leaf of a house plant, thinking that if there are any aphids, that’s where they’d be hanging out. At the same time, I vacuum up the the hoards of ladybugs that accumulate in corners of windows or in the track of my patio door. But tenderly. I do weep as they rattle down the vacuum hose. I am the Walrus.

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Safari Man

I met a man once who took white men on safaris. This was perhaps thirty years ago. He had friends among the tall lion hunters with spears, that is, the Maasai. He had feasted with them and sang songs with them by camp fires. Taking white men on safaris was his way of making a living so that he could travel. What was he doing at a Rosedale party mingling with women who shopped at Holt Renfrew and hired nannies to look after their children? Well, he was drumming up business. He showed slides of his beloved Africa, and of white people on safaris enjoying the sighting of elephants, giraffes, lions, rhinos, and so on. After he was finished with his presentation, we all went outside into the garden. There Safari Man became the outsider. Obviously not at ease in the enclosed Rosedale backyard, he stood to the side, his back against the trunk of a copper beech tree.

People living in the margins eventually bump into each other, so we did. He had many stories to tell me. Perhaps he thought I had money and was pitching to me, but I think he was in love with Africa, and lovers love to talk about the beloved. Anyway he was not a good salesman because he said nothing about sharing his beloved.

He told me something I have often thought about. That the people of the Masai tribe had no existential problems. They were at the center of the world. They never doubted that. They would not understand questions about identity, or existential angst. O lucky men! Could this be so, or is this western fantasy? I believed him, of course. I'd like to believe that someone somewhere has never asked the question: Is the self an illusion?

They never doubted that all cows belonged to them, even if they were kept behind white men’s fences. They did not understand property laws. It was soon discovered that to sentence a Maasai warrior to spend a few weeks in the confinement of prison was the equivalent of a death sentence. To a Western mind this might seem like a romantic gesture of defiance: give me liberty or give me death! But, inside those prison walls, what was happening inside the warrior’s head? What caused him to die? Death by grief? By the unraveling of identity, of the mind, of meaning itself?

My western mind wondered whether wrestling with a bit of existential angst might not have made him more emotionally resilient? It seems almost an obscene question because the romantic notion of the warrior is so beautiful and pure. It’s a bit like saying that innocence should be corrupted in order to give it a better chance to survive. But it doesn’t work like that. Once you go down the path of knowledge, once you are introduced to the bogeyman, there is no turning back.

Sometimes I can almost see my own desire to survive as obscene. Me with all my contradictions, a product of fragmented cultures. A Maasai might well wonder what I have to live for. Occasionally I have done so myself. As a student I never envied the simplicity of the cultures I studied in anthropology. I saw them as prisons. And now? Well, once you go down the path of fragmentation… In other words, it's too late for me to imagine the sort of wholeness that once existed for the Maasai.

All that happened thirty years ago. So much has changed. I wonder if Safari Man still sits around a campfire with his Maasai friends.  Is there anything left on this planet, which has not had to adapt to the modern world?

From Wikipedia: 

Cold Calls

I don’t like telephones and avoid making or taking calls until absolutely necessary. But my husband is mindful and decent, answers all calls, even the 1- 800 ones. He’s been Canadian all his life, which may account for his moral diligence.

I’m talking about 8 o’clock last night. The phone rang. I could tell by the sound of my husband’s voice that the call was for me and someone was going to ask me for money. He handed me the phone with an uncharacteristically sly smile. Deal with it. I sighed my ill humour but took it.

Good evening, Miss…is it Lou-gas? Already I knew it was my Alma Mater calling. I had not honoured my last pledge, due to financial difficulties, so I braced myself for some very artful guilt-tripping. (Were you ever helped by a bursary, or scholarship, Miss Lou-gas?) Instead, the young man started to tell me all about the wonders of the Robarts Library. You must be familiar with it, Miss Lou-gas.

Well, actually I had never stepped inside it, but I felt much relieved that we were not going to dance around the subject of dishonoured pledges. I told him that I had watched the library being built when I was a graduate student. His vocal cords did a strange little bird call, not wanting to call me old, exactly, but needing to indicate that he understood what I had just revealed. And then I told him to hold on while I turned the radio down. That’s when I realized that I didn’t mind talking to strangers, especially the young – just didn’t like the abrupt surprises that come with answering the phone.

Don’t know why I had to tell him I’d been listening to a CBC account of the continued repression that was happening in Syria. Surely to impress on him that though I was old, I was still engaged with events of our times. Also, let it be said that he had a strong accent, and I guessed that he, too, was keenly interested in world events, the thrust for independence despite cruel reprisals. In fact, I think that’s what I was after— I wanted to hear a young voice express concern and consternation for what was happening on our planet. By his response I could tell that clearly someone had passed him the baton, and he had taken it. It was good to know. I liked him.

It’s odd what bonds are possible between strangers. Outside the constraints of any social boundaries, we established a sort of trust. I sensed he was far away from home, and perhaps was susceptible to a voice that carried no agenda, made no demands and told no lies.

As the older person in a discourse, one might be aware of the opportunity to impart some wisdom. I don’t remember recognizing wisdom when I was in my twenties. Practical advice, yes, such as: take care of your kidneys and wear woollies when it’s cold. Wisdom came from the strangest sources, and often went unrecognized until some specific predicament arose. Easier then to let the young man in on what the terrain looks like, way out here in his future. Hey, we’re still having fun; we’re still rocking, as amusing as that may sound. Most of all, we have great perspective on who he is, how wonderful he is simply because he is young, starting out on his long, exciting, frightening, mysterious journey. We can tell him that all young people are beautiful and that pricks along the road can be detoured. The world is large, but wherever you go, there you are! (I love that one. Thank you Jon Kabat-Zinn.) We wish them a long fruitful life, and, towards that end, before they put the phone down we can be excused for reminding them about the woollies.

 Next, of course, he had to tell me about the various services and functions that Robarts provided, and how much it cost to continue the excellence of it’s programs.

In my mind I was already calculating what sort of donation I could make to his cause. I didn’t want his efforts to go unrewarded. Maybe a smaller pledge. And then, in a flash I saw the truth of this whole situation — what he was required to do — what was to be achieved — and at whose expense.

I said to him: I know this is your job, but the person you are talking to is an artist, and artists are not doing very well under the current economic circumstances. Wouldn’t it make more sense for you to talk to corporations, or to those who are profiting?

Ah, you are an artist! His game changed instantly. He then proceeded to tell me about his own aspirations in architecture and design, &c. As for corporations, he had, in fact, approached several, and mostly they were very rude. Most often, the person at the other end simply picked up the phone and hung up.

I sympathized and told him that I could never in a hundred years do what he was doing. Cold calls. Absolutely true. But that is another story.

Now he was making different bird sounds, soft cooing ones. Then he thanked me for our conversation and wished me a good night. And that was that. He let me off the hook. No pledge. No guilt. 

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That phone call from a stranger reminds me of another one, so, so different, many years ago…as many as 40! I was in my early 20’s, married, reading a book in the evening with my first born daughter fast asleep in the adjacent room. My husband was working late. The phone rang, and the second I said hello, I knew there was a heavy-breather at the other end.

What are you doing? a voice asked in a hoarse whisper.

I played dumb. I’m reading a book. How does this work? I was wondering. This was something I’d read about, and I knew that I was supposed to accuse him of perversion and slam down the receiver. But I was curious to know more.

What are you wearing? he asked.

Sweater and sweatpants. Um…how does this work? What are you doing? Are you, like, looking at a centerfold or something?

The breathing normalized. Yeah. Sometimes I get so…so…you know…and I just dial a number and work it off. Or something like that.

So you just dial at random?

From the phone book. Sometimes the wrong person answers the phone but you sounded nice.

Really, I laughed. Just the way I said Hello? You sound pretty young. Are you a student or something? I sensed I was talking to someone roughly my own age, a bit younger.

Second year at U. of T. He perked up, sounded almost proud telling me this.

Really! So you must be pretty smart. What are you taking?

Mostly interested in psychology…might switch to pre-med. Don’t really know.

I took some psychology too. In fact, maybe you know my husband. He teaches—

CLICK

Later, I told a girlfriend about the call. At age twenty-four I had thought it was pretty funny, especially the speed at which he hung up.

My friend looked at me with incredulity. Of all the things she knew I had done, this was the dumbest, she said.

It was my turn to look incredulous. She was a coke-snorter, for heaven’s sake! At her parties there was always a special “powder room”. At the time I had been so naïve I hadn’t even known what it meant, and had entered in thinking to fix my lipstick! It was a strange room, full of mirrors, but no one was looking into them. Instead, several heads were bent over a table.

As for the ‘pervert’, maybe he learned a lesson. In any case, his first serious girlfriend would sort him out. Or not. Once a pervert….?  I really don’t know. Sex perverts have nowhere to go in this world. Once they’re discovered, it’s over. They are the social lepers of today. No one wants even a “safe house” near them. Has anyone thought of “pervert colonies”? I understand that in the middle ages, people with red hair were thought to be agents of the devil and, so, were cast out. They formed their own little colonies and survived the best they could. In the case of “sex perverts”, it would be interesting to see what moral codes they would work out amongst themselves. Would they calibrate the degrees of “perversion”? How many? How severe? Mother Theresa, where are you?

My Pushy Cat

Crazy ideas you get when you’re feeling overwhelmed. This is the time when plants could be divided and transplanted. This is also the time to get my house ready for the summer market if we should decide to sell it, which, at the moment looks like a wise idea. And this is the time I should be drumming up business for portraits and other paintings.

On my way to sleep last night, I was mentally sorting through my priorities for the next day, when, there was Tippy glaring at me in the forefront of my brain. Tippy is our jet black cat with yellow eyes and a white tip at the end of her tail. She’s also our pushy cat. I try to love all my 5 cats equally, but Tippy is a problem: she thinks outside the box. Every morning I must hunt down the little present she has left me before I step in it. And I leave an old towel around for her to pee on. With five cats I struggle with odours as well, so I’ve been thinking of giving away the two youngest who are the best behaved, most loving. Both of them just walked in the door one day, and never left. They have doubled in size, since.

But I can’t think why anyone would want Tippy if they knew her habits. So, I've been thinking of letting her escape outside where the foxes and coyotes are. We keep the cats inside now since we have lost 4 to coyotes over the years. And then I think of all the terrible things people do to people and I can’t allow my pushy cat to be carried to a lair and be ripped apart. But what if she were drugged, fast asleep and not aware of what was about to happen? Could I find it in my heart to do that? What do I have in my medicine cabinet that could knock out twelve pounds? What about accidental poisoning? I have something growing in my garden which is supposed to be lethal. Aconite. I believe there was a play or opera in which a young nun took her own life by drinking some potion containing aconite --- also known as Monk’s Hood. But I have heard it’s a terribly painful way to go. Can’t bear the sight of Tippy writhing in pain. I think of farmers who have no trouble disposing of unwanted animals – drowning kittens by the bagfuls, or killing the excess piglet or the unwanted male calf in a dairy farm. Not to mention what they do to chickens. How hard would it be to slit Tippy’s throat or pound in her skull with a hammer? Or put her in a bag and drown her? 

What am I thinking? This is me, the person who fell on her knees to beg forgiveness after slicing a toad with a spade by accident.

So, that’s that. Tippy is my darling pushy cat, my bully cat, my half-moon-eyed cat. What’s a box, anyway?

p.s. Since posting this, we've built an out-door compound for the cats. No more odours!

Leonard, where are you, I'm almost seventy...

I recently revisited the two novels by Leonard Cohen. The Favourite Game, and Beautiful Losers.  It surprised me how good they were. I wasn’t expecting it. I think now that I read them at the wrong time in my life. I think male sexuality was defeating me at the time, moving in on me too quickly, before I had a chance to understand my own. Now almost a half a century later, Breavman and his amazing hormones are no threat to me. I enjoy seeing women through his eyes. I see myself as I was. We were encouraged to see ourselves through men’s eyes anyway. The book is copyrighted in 1963 when I was twenty, and very aware of myself as an object of interest. Breavman gives me insight into the problems I ran into. 

I read about the beautiful Lisa: “Breavman thought perhaps she dreamed as he did, of intrigue and high deeds, but no, her wide eyes were roaming in imagination over the well-appointed house she was to govern, the brood she was to mother, the man she was to warm.”

Oh no, Leonard! I don’t think so! At least, not me! Try me... oh, try me! I knew nothing of well-appointed houses, could not imagine raising a brood. Of course I wanted to warm a man, but I never dreamed of a domestic setting. I don’t know what I did dream, except that the future was wide open. I called myself a humanist. I was enamoured by existentialism. That was before I realized that first I needed to take the rather long detour through feminism. I wanted adventure, I wanted an interesting life. My deficiency was that I didn’t see what was happening, never saw the web around me. Oh Leonard, you saw the web. You thought it was to my liking.

But I don’t want to go down that road.

Leonard Cohen walked me home one night, or so I now fantasize. It was somewhere back in 1963 or 4. I have read in magazines that there are a zillion women out there who claim to have slept with him. My claim is far more modest and, I admit, very, very likely a fabrication. 

I was so unhappy that night, and did what I did on many unhappy lonely occasions. I sat in a coffee house, and looked sad.  Possibly it was at the original Coffee Mill in Toronto, though I seem to remember going down the stairs at the Colonnade at Bloor and Bay. It’s unlikely that a young, attractive, single human being hoping for adventure is unaware that sitting alone looking sad might attract someone’s attention. But that night I truly wasn’t fit for company. Nevertheless I was aware of possibly starring in a French ‘New Wave’ movie. I could not get away from my own gaze, never mind the ‘male gaze’.

Earlier that day I had walked into my boyfriend’s apartment and found him with another woman. The woman scrambled up from bed to fix her hair with some bobby pins. I was immobilized. But reason told me this was drama, useful experience, an opportunity to discover who I was. For some reason, anger was not accessible to me. I felt sick at heart and terribly confused. All I knew at that moment was that I did not want to lose him. He’d been the first man I could really talk to. We had amazing conversations. What did I know about sex? I had thought I was at least adequate.

So, what was I to do? I asked if they wanted tea. I didn’t want to appear possessive. My boyfriend tried to convince me that nothing happened. I served tea. I can’t imagine what we talked about. I was noncommittal as to whether I believed him or not. Later I found hairpins between the sheets. And later still I was introduced to amazing male bullshit when my boyfriend denigrated the other woman and denied that anything had really happened. 

Deny, deny, deny! That was the mantra offered to guys when caught "cheating". A good friend, a therapist told me about a man who was caught by his wife on his own living room couch making out with another woman. The woman disappeared in a hurry, and the man boldly told his wife, "That was not a woman, that was a water-fall." How does one deal with that, supposing one loves the guy? My friend offered this as an example of what he called mind-fucking, all in the name of deny, deny, deny! Well, there's something wrong with the whole set-up, isn't there?

Back to the coffee house. Yes, somebody materialized out of the soft evening and asked if he could join me at my table. I said suit yourself but warned him that I would be very bad company, and besides, I was going home soon. He said he had nothing better to do. He was visiting from Montreal. He offered to walk me home. I said I didn’t mind. On the way home I told him the whole sorry story of my relationship with  my boyfriend. We walked slowly in the dark. Hard to say, but I lived maybe 3 or 4 miles uptown. Some of it was an uphill walk through sweet neighbourhoods with front porches and small gardens. It was a warm summer night and he listened quietly. I told him everything, about how my boyfriend had obsessions with other women's muscularity, their breasts, their hands, and their knees, for some reason. I was not aware at that moment that I was a feminist-in-waiting. The stranger said very little. Perhaps nothing at all because I was rambling about my unhappiness, my background, the differences between me and my boyfriend. Eventually we reached my house, and to be minimally polite I thanked him for his companionship and asked him his name. He told me. He said he was a school teacher in Montreal. I shook his hand and thanked him again.

I didn’t know anything about Leonard Cohen at the time. Nor was that the name the man gave me. Only when I discovered his poetry and saw his picture on the dust jacket, the thought came to me, because he had a strong resemblance to the stranger: same height, same dark hair and distinctive nose. And when I read the poetry, I wished it to be true. Oh yes, years later, somewhere in one of his many poetry books I ran across a single line: “Marika, where are you? I’m almost forty!”

I’m a realist. But I did wish that I was Marika.

the lucky ones/ dark night of the soul

"Lucky" is an interesting word. You'd think it would be used mostly by people who have trouble-free lives, but I've never heard it used as often as I have in the chemo ward in the Princess Margaret Hospital. There you have over thirty men and women sitting in comfortable chairs attached to chemo-drips, and each one has a story to tell about how lucky they have been. Yes, and so they are. Some chairs are side by side or almost facing each other. People love to exchange stories about their experiences with cancer. 

The lady next to us one day was a woman probably in her mid-forties. She wore a piece of cloth tightly fitted to her head. The colour — dusty blues — must have been chosen to go with her beautiful colouring, which was probably heightened by the chemo she was receiving. Her father and sister had both died of cancer not long ago and she had been genetically tested — it was not very clear how that worked — her English was good but with some accent. I pieced her history together partly from her conversation with Rod and me and from phrases she used when talking to the nurse:....avoiding lymphodema....surgery on both sides. It sounded like the double mastectomy had been preventative surgery. A couple of times she said she did not want to be dead in 6 months, as, apparently, her sister had been after diagnosis. And yet this woman found a reason to consider herself lucky: she lived in Canada and received excellent care in an excellent hospital. And, she was alive.

Another day, the woman across from us spoke loudly about a long chain of events which led to her early diagnosis and so, her hopes were to be cancer-free. Everyone wants to know how your cancer was ‘caught’ --- which is considered lucky in itself. So far I’ve never heard anyone ask, “why me?”

Rod will soon be having his 6th round of chemo treatment. So far so good. This chemo is supposed to be much more virulent than the one he had 5 years ago, but so far, it seems much kinder, and Rod is very cheerful. He had expected terrible reactions, as last time, but so far there are none -- not even nausea. We hope for the best. The last bout of chemo bought him 5 years. Hopefully this will do the same.

                                                   *

The dark night of the soul. How many should one have in one life time? Do you count only the darkest one, in which case you don’t really know which it is until you are about to die--- and then, would you care about comparative darkness? Obviously you can’t have too many because that would render the expression rather lame, as in, “oh yes, I had one of those just last week.” You might think my darkest hour was when my child lay close to dying. It was a frightening time. And yet, it was not one of my darkest hours because I did not believe that Valerie was going to die. I asked Dr. Palombino what her chances were. Dr. Palombino was a visiting doctor from Argentina, there at the inner city hospital in Philadelphia, a city where I knew no one. My daughter was lying on an operating table, under bright lights. It was well after midnight and Dr. P. and her colleague had been working to restore her chemical balance for hours. Her body looked so frail, emaciated, and her teeth were covered with a greenish gunk. That’s when I asked my question. And Dr. Palombino did not back away from it: her answer was: 50-50. And my reaction to that was: Thank God! I was afraid she might die! 50-50 meant to me that she would survive. It’s perhaps the only time in my life that I have seen the glass half full. That was that. To tell the truth, I didn’t really hear her answer until 20 years later — and only then did it occurred to me, ‘Oh my God, she could have died!’.

Thinking back of that time — maternal instincts defined me. A woman with children has the strength of a lioness. I would claw back my daughter from the brink of death. I had carried my sick child from doctor to doctor in that alien city, until someone finally thought of the simple test that would identify her illness. At the same time I was carrying another life inside me, my other daughter. She was providing me with mysterious warmth and strength and resilience. Love, strength, purpose. It was the one time in my life I knew what I was born to do. And with Dr. Palombino, luck was on our side.

My darkest hours, I think, are the times I have lost faith in myself — lost my way, perhaps. When my first marriage fell apart, the rupture led to a lot of self-doubt. I was not lovable. I was not useful. I was without talent or purpose. Oh, who can remember the weight of all that hopelessness! Who can remember just why they felt so helpless, curled up on the floor, holding their belly, wailing. I was so lost.

I turned to the I Ching for direction. I took the whole business very seriously. First of all, I bought a book which taught me the procedure and the frame of mind that was required. I read the poetry that went along with the various hexagrams,  and I found it very beautiful. I threw coins instead of yarrow sticks, but this was within the limits of acceptance. And I made a vow that I would toss the coins only that one time and not repeat the procedure in hopes for a more favourable hexagram. You know you have reached rock bottom when you know you will not cheat, no matter what.  If my intentions were not pure, there was no point to the exercise. 

How do you signal the pure state of your mind when you come from a background where there is no ritual and no tradition of prayer? And to whom, or what, do you make your vow? How do you know you are not subtly bullshitting yourself when there is no one to observe? My Jewish friends speak of a covenant with God, describe how they wrestle with him. Before Him, their soul is naked. There is no possibility of bullshit. Well, however it happens, encountering your naked self is a sacred event.

I threw the coin. I drew the hexagram: three solid lines above; three broken lines below. Hexagram 12. The hexagram is named “obstruction”, or “stagnant” or “selfish”. Earth below; heaven above. Well, I was gobsmacked. So, the I Ching did not give me direction, but it did give me a precise location. This was my one and only throw and it nailed me.

It didn't occur to me to ask how this information could help me. In retrospect, was I not the cartoon of the man crawling on hands and knees through the desert, weak with hunger and dying of thirst? He reaches a signpost, looks up and reads, "You are here: X".

Nevertheless, at that moment I believed I was facing the only solid, undeniable truth. (Though you might ask who put the signpost there, and why?)

The ‘selfish’ interpretation I discounted without hesitation. If I had been any more selfless, as a wife and mother, I would have been either a robot or dead. Stagnant. What a word! What kind of swamp-creature had I become? Obstruction was everywhere. I had to assume it was self-imposed, for I was no one’s slave by law. I must confess the poetry of the I Ching is so ambiguous that I felt free to relate to it according to the thoughts it triggered in my mind. Superior man? Inferior man? How does a late 20^th century woman relate to that? That is not meant as a criticism, but reflects the limits of my creative thinking as well as my unwillingness to invest more time, and perhaps a degree of arrogance in thinking I could make my own poetry from there on.

But the experience, the inner bargain, not to repeat the process in hopes of a better hexagram, had been sacred. The temptation do do so was pretty strong, I can tell you, for I did not like the look of the bald face of truth staring at me. As for the bald truth, well, you recognize it when you see it. There is nowhere to hide.

the human response

Time goes on, eh? Gaddafi is dead, Wall Streets around the world are occupied, and I had my appendix out. Not much to say about that last one except that a friend of mine informed me, laughingly, that appendicitis is an affliction of the young. Laughingly, because to her I am 12 years old.

As soon as I heard the news that Gaddafi was dead, like millions of others I watched the earliest videos on youtube. The videos were up before the event hit the front pages. All the script was in Arabic — no translations, no explanations.The footage was as raw as it gets, the image blurry, but there was no mistaking the head of Gaddafi as his body was jostled about. I was expecting a surge of satisfaction when I saw him so defeated, but there was something about the intimacy of his bare skin, the underside of his chin which revealed the exact line where his beard ended, that made him ultimately a human being, and instead I felt a nausea that sent me to the bathroom. When you get down to fundamentals, the human response is not really ours to control. Had I been there, had my relatives been tortured under his regime, I might have been tempted to kick his head. In any case I would definitely not have been in the bathroom.

So, a spokesman for the UN has said that the circumstances of Gaddafi's death must be investigated. Summary executions are illegal. Ahhh. Who knew? My responses to this would sound childishly sarcastic and ill-informed. For a worthwhile response, one really has to read something like what NR Greer wrote in News Letter this morning.  It starts out:

"CHARGING a man with murder in this place was like handing out speeding tickets in the Indy 500.” Captain Willard, the central character in Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam war epic Apocalypse Now reflected on the idiocy of trying to impose the rules of civil society in the middle of a raging war in a place where all semblance of civility had long gone.

http://www.newsletter.co.uk/community/columnists/nr_greer_why_investigate_gaddafi_s_death_1_3180839

(I'm new to blogging and will hopefully learn how to make these links.)

The fundamental human response? We can only observe. And yet, miraculously, civil society happens from time to time. Thank you, "Occupy Wall Street" — what took you so long? Good  luck!

Bite the Peach

     Does the world need another blog? I ask myself. Of course not. But I have decided I will eat the peach. Passion is a juicy, sloppy thing, as is my love of words and need for self-expression. Also there's that bit of advice that goes around: do something today that you've never done before. With any luck, I can say something every day, that I've never said before.

      Some big surprises this late in life. Who’d have known? The first: my beloved husband has cancer and is in the middle of his second round of chemo treatments. With this particular kind of C, it moves slowly, but there is actually no way to stop it. Needless to say, this is the big one. The other surprises don’t compare. There’s a little sleepwalker dance that people have to learn at some point in their lives. To walk and talk as if certain facts about their lives are way far off in the future. The fact about my husband’s health is the one I am not ready to fully register. Nevertheless, it makes the remaining surprises more pertinent.

     The other surprises have to do with money. For sure, there are a lot of surprised people out there working well beyond retirement. Or, heaven forbid, now sleeping in the basements of friends, or in trailers, lining up at soup kitchens. There are millions of sad stories out there. And that’s not even touching on the misery found in violence torn failing states.

     The next big ‘0’ in my life will have a ‘7’ in front of it. True, maybe I’ve been the grasshopper fiddling away while the ants were busy storing up for winter. I could say that such is the life of the artists. We fiddle away. If we’re lucky we continue to illuminate lives into future centuries and the circumstances of our deaths will be found in footnotes. Most completed lives rarely make the footnotes…but after all, that’s not why we fiddle. The truth is more like the quote I found in a superlative book, Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell: “One writes music because winter is eternal and because, if one didn’t, the wolves and blizzards would be at one’s throat all the sooner.”

     Last week I had an appointment with a psychiatrist. My family doctor had arranged it for me because she was concerned about my stress level, which twice landed me in emergency with full blown symptoms of a heart attack. So I found myself on the ground floor deep in the bowels of Sunnybrook Hospital in the mental health division.

     When I first entered the admittance room, from the corner of my eye I noticed someone flitting about, someone who appeared to be an elf. He stopped to talk to the woman who held a stack of folders. They laughed heartily. The elf floated out the door and the woman glanced at me as if to say she would be with me in a moment. Then he flitted back in, having more to say to the receptionist. He had very large, very dark, very warm eyes, a prominent nose and a small chin which he seemed to press against his chest. Perhaps he looked shorter because he was lightly hunched, but he did not look much taller than five feet. And because he seemed to float rather than to walk, he looked to weigh not more than twenty pounds. Once more he disappeared.

     Down the long, grey hall, on one side, there was a row of doors, all of them closed. Facing the doors were several chairs, many of which were occupied by men and women invariably with their noses deep into books or magazines. Some follow you with their eyes, smiling, because we are all kindred spirits down here. I joined them, sitting across from the door that was pointed out to me, and reached for my own book from the bottom of my handbag. From time to time one door opened, everyone looked up but only one person stood up and was welcomed by the person who emerged.

     Ten minutes passed, and who should open the door to greet me but the elf himself. No sooner did I sit down across from him than he looked up at me with his fabulous eyes, and apologized for the word ‘geriatric’ in front of the word ‘psychiatrist’. We both snickered, though it’s hard to know why. Was it because of the he absurdity of counting the outer, visible years when the inner ones are so fresh and current? Or because of the uncertainty when facing a shortening future? Or do we snicker because we feel a joke is being played on us?

    The elf had a name. Dr. S. is sitting on my shoulder even as I’m writing this. It did not take long before all I was aware of were his sympathetic, questioning eyes. First things first, he needed to know something of my personal history.

      Ah, a personal history in a nutshell. By the time you’re into your sixth decade, you’ve stored away quite a few nuts. Did he want the pistachio, the quick, salty, tasty one? Or the hard to crack Brazil nut, oily, meaty, with a full complement of amino acids? That would take a while. Maybe start with the hazel nut, which is esthetically so pleasing in it’s round satiny shell, and in the sound it makes when split into clean geometric shapes. The break-up without the blame, the death without the pain; the blame without the hysterics and the pain without the tears. Once or twice Dr. S did offer a tissue, though my tears did not materialize.

      I don’t mean to sound glib. I take therapy seriously. You take out what you put in, and with interest. I’ve taken it twice before. Once when my marriage fell apart and once when my mother died, hard truths came to light, and my reality fell apart. I’ve been lucky. Both times the same person had helped me to find my stability.

     You fall in love with your shrink because you think you’ve found your soul mate. I won’t be seeing Dr. S. long enough for this to happen, but I have to say it’s an amazing thing to trip the light fantastic toe with a partner who feels your agility and moves in accordance. Everyone should experience a preliminary interview with a skilled therapist. One word of warning, though: they won’t dance if you won’t.

     Well, Dr. S and I both knew I wasn’t there to shed tears. My anxiety levels were perfectly understandable. He needed to know I wasn’t suicidal. It took him no time at all to discover that my anxiety was off the charts when I had to speak of my own skills. I know my lack of confidence has puzzled a lot of people because on the surface I know how to present myself. I know when to pull back, to disappear, to deflect if anyone begins to probe or to compliment.

     A light-year ago, a lover used the word ‘diffident’ to describe me. I had to look it up in the dictionary to see whether that was good or bad, whether or not I had been insulted, and to tell you the truth I still don’t know because at the heart of diffidence lies a Latin lack of trust.

     What was it I wanted? Dr. S wondered as we approached the end of our time together.

     
     In a nutshell? I told him I wanted to look after my husband.