Loving: waking this morning to the weight of the cat on my legs and realizing I was sleeping in my own bed. As much as I enjoyed being in Victoria and Duncan over the past few days, I miss the way I know where I am, both in time and place, at home. How the light just beginning to come in through the white linen curtains (soon to dyed indigo) tells me it’s just after 4am, how the loons in the night tell me I couldn’t be anywhere else but home.
Hoping: that the peonies and roses go on and on and on.
Remembering: After the reading and discussion with Keiko Honda at Munro’s Books on Wednesday evening, John, Karna, Angie, and I went for a late supper to Wind Cries Mary, a restuarant in Bastion Square. I had one of those moments. Sitting at the table, drinking my glass of rosé and enjoying a plate of burrata with a tangle of greens, tomatoes, rainbow radishes, I looked up at the window more or less at street level and I realized the restaurant is in the former Leafhill Gallery location. In the early 1970s, my brother’s first wife, then his girlfriend, owned the gallery and I often dropped in, sometimes even to buy art (I bought a Wayne Ngan bowl and a Walter Phillips woodcut with extra scholarship money in 1973; I still have the former and wish I had the latter…) In 1970, when I was in grade 10, Pierre Elliott Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act following political kidnappings by the FLQ. I was trying to make sense of it. My father fulminated, which wasn’t much help. A social studies teacher talked to our class but was fearful about saying too much. So on a Friday evening, the day after the invocation, I was talking to my brother’s (then) girlfriend in the gallery about what the War Measures Act might mean to us. And through the window, the same window I looked up to on Wednesday evening, eating my burrata, we could see the lights of police cars in the alley, a number of them, and somehow the world felt troubled and on the brink of something I couldn’t begin to understand. And all that came back to me as I realized I’d been in the room before, and when, and how.
Reading: Ailsa Ross’s novel, Hovel, a strange and strangely beautiful book in which memory is a solace. Fragmented, almost an essay in some ways, the book is utterly itself. I loved it.
Listening: as we were driving our own long highway home from the ferry on Saturday evening, light falling past Thormanby Island, we were listening to Bruce Springsteen’s Western Stars, talking about his intelligence and how he fits within the tradition of musicians who take on the political issues of the time (I seldom watch television but when John called me in to see Bruce performing on Stephen Colbert’s farewell show, I loved seeing Bruce Springsteen with his guitar and his harmonica, singing “Streets of Minneapolis”, the ghosts of Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the living shadow of Bob Dylan gathered around), anyway, we were listening, and when “Somewhere North of Nashville” came on, I confess to pressing repeat.
I lie awake in the middle of the night
Makin’ a list of things that I didn’t do right
With you at the top of a long page filled
Here, somewhere north of Nashville
Appreciating: how bookstores and libraries are so welcoming to writers launching books, how they set up the chairs, open their doors, make space for those of us who are not on the bestseller lists, order our books, promote them, and how there is something so beautiful about reading from a new book in a room of books, all of them attentive and listening, as the people in the audience listen, asking questions afterwards.
Anticipating: my swim later this morning, even though it’s cool and grey, with rain waiting in the heavy clouds, even though the water will be cold, even though it will take me ages to warm up afterwards.
