There was a wedding, full of colour and music and love (I’m waiting for some good photos to be shared with me), and some days in Victoria, and now a few days on a beach south of Campbell River. Not Miracle Beach (which John confused with Lyrical Beach) but close. Last night, pizza at Mattone at Salmon Point where salmon leaped high out of the water just beyond our window and seals swam nearby in anticipation.
I brought two books from home for reading during this week away. I didn’t sleep very much in Victoria so easily finished Adam Zagajewski’s Two Cities: On Exile, History, and the Imagination, with its transcendent long essay on the city of his birth (and exile), Lvov, and his family’s removal to Gliwice, and how the former haunted him at every turn: its light, its culture, its streets, its meaning(s). I thought about it a lot as we drove and walked in Victoria, the city where I was born, the city where I learned about history (the old houses of Fairfield, the layers of occupation along Dallas Road, the graves in the Ross Bay Cemetery), where my heart was broken in my teens and early 20s, where I met my husband, where my parents moved into a kind of exile in their last years (an apartment on Mount Tolmie that they hated and were confined to at the end). I read the essay, and then the ones that followed, finding such a congenial mind at work, and a perceptive one. From “In Defence of Adjectives”:
And there would be no memories if not for the adjective. Memory is made of adjectives. A long street, a scorching August day, a creaky gate leading to a garden, and there, amid currants coated with summer dust, your resourceful fingers (all right, so “your” is a possessive pronoun).
And now I’m reading the second book I brought from home, Marilyn Bowering’s gorgeous More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod. Last night I carried its cadences and Scottish place names into my sleep, the sound of the ocean just beyond the door.
...Theresa Kishkan 