Listening: All night I kept waking, the sound of rain on our blue metal roof so welcome after a long dry period. I’d wake, and listen, and then let myself be lulled back to sleep by the soft staccato.
Thinking: In the night, when I wake, I think about the past, mostly. How it’s a complex tangle of threads, sometimes with a discernible pattern, a colour way, a texture, and sometimes just the tangle itself. Yesterday, in Sechelt, we parked beside a truck with a small scribble of writing on the side: Ridgedale Archery. A thread shimmered. Could it be the same Ridgedale near where we lived on two occasions when my father was stationed at the radar base on Matsqui Prairie? The same Ridgedale where my dad would stop at Pringle’s Store for a wedge of strong cheddar wrapped in paper and to shoot the breeze with George? The same Ridgedale where I was taken to the banks of the Fraser River to see a sturgeon someone had brought to shore, huge and prehistoric, its gills fluttering? The same Ridgedale where we picked blueberries on the low slopes of Sumas Mountain, hearing them ping into the lard buckets until there were enough of them to soften the fall? So I looked up Ridgedale Archery and yes, it’s the same Ridgedale, and even part of the Ridgedale Rod and Gun Club (my father was a member in the late 1950s and early 1960s). So I was following that thread through the tangle, along Harris Road, along Beharrell Road, and up Fore Road, past the Gilberg’s farm to the mountain.
Looking: This morning the lilies are drinking deeply, their roots, their throats, their leaves.
Reading: Last week I read In a Dark Wood: What Dante Taught Me About Grief, Healing, and the Mysteries of Love, a memoir by Joseph Luzzi, published in 2015. (Sometimes the shelves at the Sechelt Library serve up true surprises.) There are several strands to this memoir: the author’s place in a large Calabrian-American family; the loss of his wife Katherine from injuries sustained in a car accident, just after giving birth to a daughter; Luzzi’s family’s role in helping him to care for his child; and how he is also sustained by his deep love for, and knowledge of, Dante’s Divine Comedy. Mostly I enjoyed the book and remembered how John and I read Robert Pinsky’s translation of the Inferno in the aftermath of a fall I had in the winter of 2018, one which injured my tailbone and (more seriously) resulted in damage to my retinas. (An essay about the experience, “A Dark Path”, is included in my Blue Portugal & Other Essays.) A poem can be a detailed map to take us through difficult terrain and Dante might be the best guide of all:
Midway on our life’s journey, I found myself
In dark woods, the right road lost. To tell
About those woods is hard–so tangled and roughAnd savage that thinking of it now, I feel
The old fear stirring: death is hardly more bitter.
And yet, to treat the good I found there as wellI’ll tell what I saw…
Anticipating: my grandson Eddy is a bit taken aback by the fact that I don’t really speak French–he and his brother have bilingual parents and speak English and French interchangeably. In Gatineau in May, I was helping him with his reading homework. Or let’s correct that: I offered to read with him but then realized the books he was reading were in French. We devised a plan. He would read and I would translate as best I could. And I muddled through–I can read French better than I can speak it, and I can’t do either with much skill at all. So I have some French books from the library and Ed and I will read a couple of them via Zoom this morning. I am eager to see him but also I also anticipate many corrections during the process of reading La clé à molette and Les Trois frères. (I also have Rumpelstiltskin to end with.)
Surprised by: How used my reading copy of The Art of Looking Back looks already. It came out a month ago and I did quite a few readings, using stickies to indicate various pathways through the book. For one reading, I concentrated on the narrative; for another, the emotional trajectory. And so on. So when I saw the book on the counter this morning, an elastic band to keep the file cards inside from falling out, with the little flags of various colours, I was surprised. And then not. Every book I’ve written, the ones I keep in a big bag by my desk so I can reach in if I need to consult one, has the same clutter of tags and notes sticking out, some held in place by elastics, some by string.
