Miniature World

People can be so tiresome. First World problems have made many of us into petty, selfish individuals whose focus extends no further than our own property line. My own excuse for such behaviour was acquired at a rock concert in 2005, when Matchbox Twenty’s frontman took his solo tour on the road and stopped in Victoria. He told a story of being picked on in high school, then of making it big and returning to his hometown. Suddenly, everyone who had taunted him as a teen was asking him for tickets to the show. He paused in the telling, then told the audience, “Sometimes, it’s okay to be small.”

That’s true. Sometimes it is. At other times, though, it’s sad evidence of how mean and spiteful humans can be.

Granted, there are always three sides to a story. Everything is subject to perspective and no one can explain another’s behaviour with any kind of accuracy unless they know that person extremely well and, even then, how can we claim to know anyone else when so few of us know ourselves? Looking in the mirror is a scary thing. A lot of us dislike what looks back. Ironically, what we dislike in ourselves is often what we judge harshly in everyone else.

We simply can’t, or won’t, admit it.

I practice tolerance every day (and some days are more successful than others). I tend to forgive everyone else for “being small” more quickly than I forgive myself, but in truth, there is no blame. People everywhere are hurting. I don’t mean there is no responsibility—ye gods, we are all responsible, but again, we can’t or won’t admit it. We may wish otherwise, but the responsibility for a better world and healthy society is not next door or down the street or on your friends/family/community/employer/government.

It’s on the face in the mirror.

As the Crow Sings

My music collection has been pared back a few times over the years, but staples remain firmly in place. Duran and Def Leppard, Alan Parsons and David Usher, Sarah McLachlan and Sting figure prominently in that I’ll buy anything and everything they put on the market—sometimes more than once. While de-cluttering for our first residential move in seventeen years, Ter and I discovered no fewer than four cassette tapes of Seven and the Ragged Tiger; a true puzzlement considering that we owned no more than two cassette players in 1987. I’ve grown up a little since then. When the re-mastered special edition was released a few years ago, I sent my original CD of the same album to the used disc shop because, pfft, who needs two?

I recall an interview wherein the father of my unborn children discussed his album collection. Of course he doesn’t listen to everything every day; with any extensive collection, who has the time? But once in a while, he pulls out vintage Bowie or Roxy, gives the LP a spin, then puts it back in the cellar to be enjoyed, like a fine wine, a few more years down the road.

I went on an Alan Parsons bender last year. I just lay on the couch and remembered why I love the Project’s work so much. More recently, the Leppards were trotted out to prep for their tour and, boy, was it fun rocking out to X and Yeah! With Paper Gods due for release in September, Duran is resurfacing on my playlist to reacquaint me with their more recent work (Astronaut is truly brilliant, and not just because it features the Original Five). And, for some reason, last week I began looping my favourite track of Sheryl Crow’s extensive catalogue, so I pulled her CDs on Sunday to remind myself why I liked her so much back in the day.

Actually, it’s a bit of a mystery because she borders on country with her syrupy drawl and penchant for steel guitar, but I bought her first album in 1993 and didn’t stop until Detours in 2008. She played Victoria on that tour; by then she had enough ammo to play a greatest hits set, so of course I went to see her. Great show, lame crowd. I couldn’t tell if I was in an audience or an oil painting. Oddly, I can’t remember if she played The Difficult Kind; I think she did, but nothing beats the album version off The Globe Sessions … currently in heavy rotation on my turntable. This live version got good reviews, though, so please ...

Enjoy.

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 3)

I was extremely lucky to get “the needle guy” that day in 1995. During the following years, he helped to:

a)     alleviate my PMS. Acupuncture, however, wasn’t as effective as the B-compound vitamin intra-muscular injections he dispensed—we referred to those visits as his civic duty and the treatment as my anti-homicide shot;

b)     manage my allergies. Naturopaths test allergies via a machine that reads the body’s energy fluctuation when a suspected allergen is brought into proximity. No cuts, scrapes or scratches required. Just an ability to read my aura. (Early on in my alternative medical journey, my wee sis began calling him my “voodoo doctor” and it stuck);

c)      deal with a kidney stone. He sent me to Emergency when I called him at home one Sunday night, in so much pain I could barely breathe. After x-rays and a shot of Demerol, I was released on my own recognizance and went home to bed. I won’t lie; I took the prescription pain killers when necessary because pain that blows off the lid on a scale of ten demands immediate relief, but acupuncture helped my system to rid itself of that pesky little nugget without resorting to surgery;

d)     cure a back seizure that had me off work for six weeks in 2002. and

e)     generally kept me healthy with immunity booster shots, various supplements, and regular acupuncture tune-ups.

When you’re cooped up in a room with someone for hours at a time, you get to know them pretty well. We shared stories of family, personal history, politics, religion, and philosophy. We talked cars, hockey and chocolate. Books and music. Poetry and medicine. I could tell him anything, knowing he would keep my confidence and maybe offer some useful advice. He was a genuinely caring, compassionate, unconventionally conventional individual whose primary mission in life was to help and heal others. I fondly referred to him as a free radical. Bureaucracy drove him crazy, and it didn’t help that he was smarter than the folks who raided his clinic in search of infractions. (They never found anything.)

People drop in and out of your life as required. As I was beginning to rethink my health strategy, circumstances conspired to part me from my voodoo medicine man. Over the next few years, I began a program of therapeutic massage coupled with chiropractic to keep me on my feet, but I didn’t sign on with another naturopath. I didn’t want anyone else, so I dawdled. And dawdled. And dawdled.

I occasionally wondered about my voodoo doctor, about where he was and how he was doing. Ter and I would laugh about our history with him, because some of the stories are hilariously funny but you really had to have been there. Recently, “occasionally” thinking became “often”, and I found myself at the sink one night, wondering aloud about what had happened to him.

Two days later, the phone rang and guess who it was? I was so overjoyed that I shut my office door, propped my feet on the garbage can, and raved at him for fifteen minutes. “Where have you been? How are you? Oh, I’m so glad you called; Ter and I were just saying the other day …”

Turned out he had been thinking about me, too. “We’re on the same psychic network,” he said, to which I replied, “Well, yeah! Weren’t we always?” He learned that my life had done a complete one-eighty, I learned that his had done pretty much the same thing, and here we are, come full circle and reunited once more.

Part of me worries that he’s back for a reason, that some sinister health issue only he can fix is lurking in my future. The greater part is simply delighted at reconnecting with someone who means so much to me. He’s been put to work on my trick ankle, trying to coax it toward “a new normal” following an untreated incident from a zillion years ago, and so far, we’ve caught up on family, politics, medical theory and the best cocoa content in chocolate. Oh, yeah … and the ankle is coming along nicely.

Welcome back, Doc.

Sunlight and Rain

“Help me to be in the world for no purpose at all except for the joy of sunlight and rain.”

                                                                                                                                   - Tom Hennen

There’s that word again. Contrast.

We rainforest dwellers gripe about the rain. Then, when the lakes dry up and the grass turns brown, we gripe about the sun. Too much of one makes us grateful for the other … until we get too much of that other. Gratitude inevitably devolves into griping and the cycle begins again.

I am certainly not exempt from whining. It’s hard to sustain one’s appreciation for too much of anything, especially in the weather department.

It’s a cool, showery weekend, and I am loving it. Sunlight sharpens the lines and punches up the colours, but green assumes a different hue beneath a cloudy sky. Shadows grow soft and mysterious. The ocean turns pewter, shimmering rather than sparkling under a muted sun. Rainfall whispers in the night outside my window, and tea becomes a warm comfort rather than an iced relief. I actually put on my fuzzy socks, last night, and I reveled in them!

With hot sun all week and the shift in the forecast happening on Friday, it would have been typical to grouch with my co-workers about rain on the weekend, but nobody is complaining … yet. Give us a few days of granite cloud and wet pavement and we’ll be complaining again.

Without one extreme, we have no appreciation for the other.

That about says it all, doesn’t it?

Simple Syrup

Flanked by his buddies after Moonie's fall, when the light bothered his eyes

Moon Pie fell off the back of the couch when he was about a year old. He liked to climb up and look at the streetlight outside the living room window—he thought it was a star. Specifically, his star …. but he is a polar bear and they are loaded with ’tude. One night, he was perched in place atop the back cushion and from the corner of my eye, I saw him tip toward the window …

Why do these things always happen in slow motion? I started moving as soon as I saw him tilt, yet I knew going in that he was going down and sure enough, he executed a perfect somersault and disappeared before I was fully out of my chair.

Whump!

When I got to him, he was spread-eagled on his back, thoroughly winded and staring up at me from glazed eyes. Of course nothing was broken, but I was certain that he’d given himself a concussion—a certainty that remains to this day.

He’s always been a sweet little guy, cuddly and loving as few of his compatriots are. The other bears—even his paunchy older brother, Jarkko—watch over him as if they know he’s had a head injury and has special needs. I dunno. If he hadn’t whacked his head that night, he might not be so loving and good-natured (I repeat, he is a polar bear), but I see him wake up every day with bright eyes and all sorts of enthusiasm … and I envy him.

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 2)

I am lying on a table. One pillow under my head, two stacked under my knees. The blinds are drawn, but the windows are so big that the overhead light isn’t required. It’s a nice room. Peaceful, quiet. The only sound is my heart hammering against my ribs.

What the heck am I doing here? More mysteriously, how did I get here?

The doctor comes in and I am reminded. Oh, yeah. Blue eyes.

He asks me how I’m doing and I say let’s get going. He smiles—if the eyes don’t get you, the smile will—and my first acupuncture treatment proceeds.

It was so long ago now that I don’t recall the details. I’ve had so many treatments that it’s almost become a snore, but something interesting always happens whenever a point is activated. Be it a spark, a zap, a rolling wave or a lightning bolt, my body feels it. I do recall asking the doc if the points were plugged into anything to generate the response. He said, “No. It’s all you.”

The needles, by the way, are not needles in the conventional sense. They vary in length, not so much in thickness. An acupuncture point is like a metal fishbone, so thin and delicate that it will quiver if you blow on it. The doc sets them in place by tapping them, one by one, along the circuit wherever he senses an energy blockage. Millennia ago, the Chinese healers mapped out the human body’s circuit board, identifying meridians through which our internal current runs; if a snarl occurs and energy is blocked, physical and/or mental symptoms can result. Acupuncture frees the blockage and allows the body to reset naturally, without chemical interference. Sometimes the symptoms disappear at once. Other times, a few treatments are required but, hey, that’s why we’re called patients. A precondition or a longtime trouble spot might not be relieved at first crack, so hang in there. Eventually, the treatments will take.

After the points are in place, the doc gives each one a little twist to activate it. This is where the fun really starts. A surface spark can happen right away, a bright little ping! not unlike a carpet shock. Sometimes I get a deeper, rolling sense of an engine trying to turn over before the point ignites. Sometimes it feels like a charley horse, other times I get an oh my God thermal implosion. By the time all the points are in play, each response, however intense, has faded out to nothing. That’s when the doc leaves me in peace, to rest and let the points do their work.

I usually fall asleep. The doc can tell when I’m cooked by taking my pulses. I can tell because I shift from dreamy mental meandering to a disco beat reverberating in my head. The points are plucked pretty well in the same sequence in which they were placed, and I’m good to go. My energy is better, my mind is sharper, my emotions are stabilized … and during the next few days, I’ll occasionally feel the ghost of a particularly intense point as my body continues recalibrating.

To be continued …

Food Porn IX

“Achey Bakey Heart”

Wee sis and I used to bake when we were bored. As teenagers in the sticks, where bus service was thrice weekly and all on Monday morning, we baked a lot. We discovered that the quickest way to get chocolate chip cookies is to spread the batter in a sheet pan, bake for twenty-five minutes, and cut into squares. Warm from the pan, these bar cookies were comfort in your palm.

The best smell ever? Bread baking.

The second best smell ever? Ter’s shortbread baking. The recipe is actually my mother’s, which she got from a neighbour in the aforementioned sticks. A perennial favourite at Christmas, since going gluten free, we’ve discovered that these melting little vanilla/almond-scented morsels are better than the original version, so they’re now a teatime staple. Ter baked a fresh batch for me just last week … and another will be necessary in the not-too-distant future. They’re a perfect complement to my Blenz Mumbai Chai, now served at home.

On a cool misty day, I am almost compelled to bake. Muffins, quick breads, scones, drop cookies; on any given grey day, I can be found in the kitchen, setting up the mise en place for some sort of emotional gratification.

Today, it was gingersnaps. An old AP flour recipe taking the GF route and it worked like a hot damn! The cookies are crunchy, gingery, and I am so confident that they will fool a lab rat that I’m taking some to work tomorrow. My motivation for baking sprang from waking to a foggy morning, plus the fact that I need a foil for the teatime shortbread/chai combo. Aside from hot chocolate, gingersnaps are best accompanied by either gyokuro imperial green or Yorkshire Gold black. Or, as pictured above, a glass of cold milk.

Yum!

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 1)

My time with conventional medicine was done years ago, though I stayed on file with my GP until he retired. He had been our family doctor since the early 1970s, when we had just landed in Victoria and my mother found the clinic in the Yellow Pages. He was the junior partner at the time and man, did we luck out with him. He was the one who diagnosed my bones, referred me to the eye guy who pegged my Horner’s Syndrome, and kept the rest of my family alive throughout his career. I liked him enough to trust him, and that is no small favour when you’re dealing with someone’s compostable container. I was also fortunate with most of the specialists I knew growing up; though Mum was continually apologizing for my attitude, I think (hope) most of them appreciated my spirit.

On leaving the nest and hooking up with Ter, my medical route veered off the beaten path. I started seeing a chiropractor. Ter had her allergies tested. We began paying attention to our diet, not to count calories or fat grams, but to monitor the components of what we were eating. Ter was reading up on alternative medicine, i.e., naturopathy, homeopathy and acupuncture, as a more proactive approach to health care, something I agreed with because of my control issues. I believe in pre-emptive measures rather than calling in the experts when it’s too late; I’m unsure when this belief took root, but it feels like I’ve had it forever.

So, in the mid-1990s, when a warning light went on within my system, rather than call my GP, I called the naturopathic clinic located near my home. By then I was all for natural remedies; tell me what herb to make my tea from, point me at the right supplement, take me off sugar, whatever, I’m good with it. Just don’t stick me full of needles, okay?

I made an appointment for that Friday morning. The clinic was a partnership between four or five practitioners, each specializing in something but all fully licensed naturopaths. The fellow who came out to greet me had the purest blue eyes I have ever seen. He spoke softly, held my gaze when we were talking, and took copious notes. I answered every question as honestly as I could considering the personal nature of my symptoms. It takes real courage to describe a female malfunction to a total stranger—especially when that stranger is so attentive that you forget what you’re saying in mid-sentence.

When he had filled up two pages with notes, he looked me in the eye and said, “We can fix this easily enough, but I really think you’d benefit from acupuncture. Would you be willing to try it?”

I immediately froze.

“Does acupuncture scare you?” he asked, when I said nothing.

“Yes,” I replied. No point in lying, since he’d already figured me out. I had no interest at all in trying acupuncture; I had done my time with needles and it was never fun. They were all the size of darning needles, for one thing, and blood was always a factor. Mine.

Well, my magical voodoo man explained the basics and cleared up my misconceptions. I threw a hundred questions at him and he never flinched. His voice never changed its timbre, his eyes never left mine, and when he was finished with the overview, he turned up the voltage on those pure blue eyes and said, “Will you come back and try it?”

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

I walked out of the clinic with a follow up appointment and a disquieting sense that I had just surrendered my will to Dr. Svengali. Only when I was in the car and heading back to work did the charm lose its power. %&$#*%! I thought in disbelief, I got the needle guy!

To be continued …

Little Sting

“After Dark” is Elliot Sumner’s latest single. Who is Elliot Sumner, you ask? She (yes, she) is Gordon Sumner’s 24 year old daughter, also known as Coco. Dad is also known as Sting.

If I heard this song without knowing the artist’s name, I’d have thought that someone unearthed a previously unpublished song by the Police. I can’t get over how much like her daddy this girl sounds. The song is a new wave ditty straight out of the 80s, and darned if the bass in the video isn’t the iconic beaten-up bass that I’ve seen on stage at countless der Stingle concerts over the years. I doubt that she’s trying to cash in on her platinum DNA; my guess is that she genuinely wants to be a musician, and she may even have something to call her own … except that she sounds so much like the old man, one wonders how she can possibly stand on her own merit when the comparison is inevitable.

It’s confusing for a fan, as well. I like the song because it sounds like the Police. I like the vocal because it sounds like Sting. So am I a fan of the artist, or am I simply nostalgic for the early work of her father? Is her paternal bloodline a help or a hindrance? Could be that the next generation, the one that has no idea Sting ever played in a new wave band, will fall in love with her the way my generation fell with the Police, and that would be wonderful because she, like every other child of a superstar parent, deserves success in her own right. Tackling success in the same field takes some steely resolve, though. With traits so obviously inherited from a deity, I’d always wonder if I was famous because I was talented, or was the world just honouring my father?

Parents want their kids to be happy and successful … but it can be scary when a daughter is so much like her father.

Just ask mine.

FF Spinoffs

Rather than quit, I have set aside the novel for the nonce. I actually did return to the story of Margaret and King Charles for a time, managing to write a couple of new scenes and get a better idea of the plot before I was called back to Castasia, but not for Reijo’s romance.

This one is about Rikka.

The beauty of a series is one’s ability to write back and forth in time. Treason was the starting point for Fixed Fire, the legend of Lucius Aurelius told in a series of nine volumes. Side projects have sprung from main storyline, usually about the history of Castasia and the characters other than Lucius who figure in the present tale. Over the years I’ve written a few short stories and novellas about some who were either directly or indirectly affected by him in his youth.

Rikka is his twin sister, who probably suffered more from his absence than anyone else did. She’s alluded to it throughout the series, and one day I got curious enough to consider what her life must have been like after he left home.

In a word, yikes.

On the plus side, I am more interested in writing her story than I am in blogging or F***book, so what spare time I have these days is taken up with actual writing instead of writing about writing. It’s a relief to be obsessed again, and my revelation from a few weeks ago still holds true. This may be his sister’s story, but—you guessed it—it’s about Lucius.

Burning the Ground

The world is on fire. The entire west coast is burning so hot that the sky over Victoria is thick and jaundiced with smoke. You can almost smell it. The photo I took on the weekend looks like it was tinted sepia. It wasn’t.

It’s unsettling, the colour of chaos. BC is burning in some areas, flash-flooding in others. If only we could direct the water toward the fire sites, one might find some divine providence in it all. This early in the season and the wildfire budget (how the heck can you budget for disaster?) is already exhausted. The fire crews on the ground and finance folks waiting to pay the bills are or will soon be equally so.

The glorious spring we enjoyed has morphed into the summer from hell. Drought conditions create rock-hard soil so when the rainstorms come, the water bounces off the ground and rushes straight through people’s basements. Intense dry lightning sparks new forest fires almost daily. Rising night winds whip the flames to the point where they create their own wind and start crowning—that’s jumping from treetop to treetop, folks—and the dry brush underfoot, the wreckage from pine beetle infestation and heedless foresting practices, ignites to meet in the middle.

It’s not just in BC, either. If the prairies aren’t battling tornadoes and thunderheads with hail the size of golf balls, they’re on fire too. Fire crews in the US are fighting as hard as ours to hold off hungry flames with yummy homes and vacation cottages in their sights. Hundreds—thousands?—of people are evacuated with a half-hour’s notice and nothing but what they can stuff into their cars. Lives may not be lost, but they could be irrevocably changed.

I heard that a little earthquake recently rattled Nova Scotia (?!) I’m sitting in a subduction zone where, when that one plate shifts, Abbotsford will become waterfront property, and I’m getting a little nervous. “Mother Earth is waking up,” Ter said the other day, “and she is pissed.”

Her comment got me thinking. If Mother Earth had been Father Earth instead, would we have treated her with more respect?

Oh, Canada!

The manager of our local coffee house asked me yesterday if I was coming into town for the Canada Day parade today. I’m not a big parade person, mostly because the crowds get in my way, so aside from being surprised that there is a parade on top of the other celebrations, I wrinkled my nose and said most likely not. Then I asked him if he was going.

I love this guy. His brow lowered and his eyes got steely, and he said, “I’m not so proud to be Canadian these days. Our government isn’t doing anything to be proud of.”

“Yikes,” I replied. “A dissatisfied customer!”

That got a laugh, but we went on to discuss the upcoming election and where the Harpers are in the standings (below the Trudeaus, he tells me, though he added that the Liberals are responsible for getting us started on the downslide). We were interrupted when his trusty sidekick asked him to take a phone call—but his comment got me thinking about where the country stands on the global stage.

Truly, I don’t follow the news. There isn’t much to cheer about, given the media’s propensity to focus on death, disaster, and dishonour. And our national leaders, no matter what party they represent, do tend to look south for direction. We’ve been dragged into the war on terrorism thanks to radical extremists targeting everything in the First World. Politically, Richard has a point. From a personal point of view, however, I still take pride in being Canadian because our population is so diverse. We’re still friendly. We are (mostly) polite. We are passionate and compassionate. We are resilient and resourceful. We have the same social problems as everyone else, but we’re trying to solve them as best we can. Best of all, we live in a place where everywhere you turn, it’s breathtakingly beautiful.

Today, Ter and I are taking it easy. An idle saunter through Oak Bay is on tap, wandering Willows Beach and stopping for a pub lunch at the Penny in the village. We won’t be part of the horde of 50,000 converging downtown for the festivities and we’ll only hear the fireworks we used to see from our living room window at Rockland. I’m happy to be Canadian, but today, I think I’m happier just to be.

Happy Canada Day, eh?