digging deep

i know i'm being less than regular with this blogging thing of late. somehow it seems harder to make the time to do it at this time of year - the earth warming up, birds clearing their vocal chords, summer breezes.

i've been out back, clearing the yard of a truckload of overgrown "native plants" (aka weeds). so far i've taken out almost 10 yard bags worth of stuff and 2 (diseased) trees. it makes a body feel good to shake off the evidence of neglect in such a tangible way. the problem i'm having, though, is that it's decidedly harder to weed the stuff inside. my own emotional backyard is proving rockier ground to till.

it started, i suppose, with the waitlist thing i posted on a couple of weeks back. the public side of not making good (and god knows the need to achieve is a thing i've struggled with for most of my life and that battle shows no sign of resolving itself anytime soon. the irony is that in waiting to resolve it, i seem to be achieving exactly nothing). then there was the family visit. my dad and sister in town for the may long weekend. the old patterns re-enacted: more of the same desire to make good, only desperately so. more failure, only less public. there's the pressing issue of the plan B. now that plan A seems less and less a possibility, what to make of the Future? in the park today, jane and mary making commiserating noises about the feeling of not knowing. the transience of the feeling-good-today, the blindsiding force of the not-so-much-now.

and it troubles me, too, that on some days, my plan B seems to reside in a notion of children. what would it be like to have kids? would that bestow some purpose to this rather bleak landscape i've been contemplating? and isn't that exactly the wrong reason to bring new life into the world? i've always said it was. god forbid that i should trip into that now.

35 is a funny age. it's a bit of a threshold really - biological clock winding down, approaching the time when more than half of your life has likely been lived. living up to one's potential starts to become a bit of a joke, and deferral seems just downright stupid. and yet. what to do when you've been stuck in the notion of potential too long? i remember having a brief conversation with my cog sci buddy wendy about this right before the exam last month. there was a time when it seemed principled to reject the conventional trappings of ambition and success. when rejecting expectations seemed a valiant thing to do. i can't remember why that was anymore, and what i thought was so bloody noble about that position. and i'm hoping it's not too late to turn some of that around.

i weeded the backyard wholesale, with a spade. efficient as it was, there's something kind of violent about ripping away so mercilessly at all those roots. it's a shame that planting new growth involves so much death.


dave matthews band - digging a ditch

phil, i hardly knew you

i remember when i interviewed to volunteer in palliative care, i thought that what i wanted/needed/felt compelled to do was to bear witness. see a life through. sit with. be with. stand by. i remember being asked what i thought it would be like, and tentatively imagining the way small comforts could mean something so much bigger at the end of a life. i thought about the stories that needed to be told, or the silent being-with that might lessen the fear that must always, somehow, accompany the closing in of the inevitable. i thought mostly that the significance of the work there lay in being of service to the dying.

of course, i had a personal stake. for me there was the death of my own mother to contend with - that i missed it, that i was not able to sit with for her, that i missed the long goodbye. i figured that spending time in palliative care might stand in for some of that, allow me a proxy with which i could exorcise some of that impotent love/grief/care that i've carried around for a good number of years now.

and this is going to sound trite, but what i hadn't envisioned - and i mean really envisioned - was how changed i become in doing it. how those small comforts and conversations with the dying become part of *me*, part of my ongoing memories. the dying die, and with them go the only other witnesses to those moments, which in the grand narratives of their lives play no role at all. but i've got memories now, laid out in a small shrine to the scraps of lives that i've been given by people i know hardly at all.

so thank you, ursula, who never did get that nail moved out of hospital room wall. and thank you, joan, who was so concerned about disturbing her roommate with her 2 am near-death experience which came only days before the real one. and thank you, phil, who showed me his wounds with something close to pride, who could talk a blue streak through the morphine, who asked me sheepishly a few weeks ago to be his date for his daughter's july wedding, and who died two months short of it. i had thought you had more time. i'm sorry i didn't get a chance to say goodbye.


dylan - knockin' on heaven's door

heads are for thinking

mental note: wear a bike helmet.

on second thought

i remember reading somewhere recently that athletes who medal silver are less happy than those who medal bronze. i thought that was kind of odd, but the more i thought about it, the more it made sense... it kind of sucks more when you think you were just *that* close to the gold and didn't quite touch it, whereas if you're taking the bronze, it's somehow easier to just be grateful to have made it to the podium.

those of you who know me know i ain't no athlete. hell, the closest i think i've ever gotten to anything that resembles a medal was getting some kind of ribbon in the three-legged race in grade 4 sports day. but today i got waitlisted for acceptance to medical school at mcmaster, and it feels a little like the silver medal.

don't get me wrong - i'm way grateful, and even still a little surprised. i was pretty much psyching myself up for the "thanks but no thanks" letter (even as a tiny part of me was holding out hope for the "hell yeah c'mon in!" letter) but this morning, as i was heading to an early morning coffee date with my friends susan, jeff and wee dominic, i thought to myself: i think the waitlist might be a little more hellish than being rejected. i don't mean that i wish i had've been rejected. i really don't. it's just that i am SO BAD at waiting. the astrologers call it venus in aries. i call it jonesing for the now now now.

and i've been trying to be patient, trying to melt into the heat of anticipation, trying to embrace the que sera sera. i've been practicing talking myself down, perfecting the couldn't-care-less. but the truth is that i do care. and i hate waiting. and even though i know some things are worth waiting for, it doesn't make the silver shine any brighter. 'cause even when you've got the silver in your hot little hands, you've still got your eye on the gold.


ani difranco - the waiting song

homecoming, homegoing

there's something about coming home after being away for a time - even a very short time - that makes me see where i am from a whole new vantage.

we've just been to calgary for our friends suzette and tonya's wedding, and took a few days at the end to kick around wild rose country. j's been wanting to take this trip for a while - the loop of highways and back roads that wind through the rockies and open out into endless plains and big big big alberta sky. j grew up in alberta, worked in jasper, started growing her adult skin, maybe, on the columbia icefields, in bear country and backstage of the ski-hilly glitz of banff and the CP majesty of lake louise. her alberta a slightly different landscape than that of oil fields and rodeo kings. we didn't see any of that alberta - at least not up close and personal - but the swell of calgary's freeways attests to the prosperity of oil and gas, and i've a suspicion that the bootjack in the basement of her dad's suburban home isn't just for show.

it's always a bit of a trip - literal and otherwise - to walk through the childhood museums of your partner's heart. there's family, of course: the meet and greet, putting faces to the names of people who have been central foils - the heroes, the villains, the clowns - in the fables of the beloved's youth. there's the pointing out of landmarks: old houses, sites of first kisses, the well-worn and not-quite-forgotten paths from schools to home. there are stories full of people in cameo roles, whose names you commit to memory like you're playing concentration. the memorable stops on the route your partner took to become the person - the one standing next to you, the one you wake up with, the one you love - that you think you know inside and out. you probably don't.

maybe the thing about travelling with someone, and probably too about travelling solo, is that you end up tripping into all kinds of unexpected tenses. past, present, future conditional. home becomes a shifting state of mind; we have, have had, so many different homes. so coming home to the now-home, the here-home, is a little bit jarring. a little bit suspect, even, for the inevitability of its underlying transience.

and here, on this toronto street, in this toronto morning, the leaves have come out on the trees in our absence. everything looks different. smells different. and our stuff is still our stuff, and our animals still remember us, and our friends still know where we live. but things are kind of different. or maybe we are. still, it's nice to be home, whatever that means.





simon and garfunkel - homeward bound

off to cowtown

so we're off this afternoon to calgary for tonya and suzette's wedding. looking forward to wide open sky, and if we're lucky maybe a little spring skiing? i've no idea if that's even possible at this time of year, but my board skills are so rusty and aching for a little grease...

and in the vein of a little cowtown music from way way back, with a dusty childhood memory attached too, with an acknowledgement of the disturbing misogynist and ridiculously racist overtones, a little marty robbins. let's call it consciousness-raising - it never ceases to amaze me - and disgust me - how much morally objectionable garbage i was exposed to as a kid, and my fondness for it persists by way of nostalgia, despite all that i know better.

marty robbins - el paso