Annual Foolishness - December 2012

I thought I had just written an Annual Foolishness! but that was last year, and , and here it is mid-December again! and I am late as usual .  I haven’t even got around to mailing many of last year’s Christmas cards. Now I have to figure out which labels I need to print and which labels are already sitting on envelopes in the box downstairs. We will see how far I get with the project this year. It’s a random affair.  Please do not feel slighted if you did not receive one last year. It was/is chaos, not intention. I seem to be losing the clutter battle in our much reduced square footage.  I noted in last year’s letter that we were still working on re-establishing contact with friends and family in NS, and a year later, we still  are. I also thought at the time, that we should be cautious about any rejoicing over the Arab Spring in Egypt, and, here we are, round about where I thought we might  be. The first year history course at Potsdam State Teachers’ College in upstate New York was one of the most astonishing courses I ever took - definitely not High School history. The text was Crane Brinton’s “Anatomy of Revolution”  Wikipedia has an article summarizing what I spent a term absorbing. It should be required reading. I have also finished my square to contribute to Storytellers of Canada annual fund-raising quilt, which brings both angst and delay into my Christmas preparation, but a great feeling of accomplishement. I don't make "things" much anymore.  You can check out the fruits of our collective labour  our website’s quilt pages: http://www.storytellers-conteurs.ca/quilt.html.  Creating these pages is one of my labours of love, and I even won the quilt back in 2005.

A small sampling of visitors:   Most recently, Celia Lottridge from Toronto, a storytelling friend, and fascinating person to have at your table. I insisted she tell Ron and Dad about her ancestors who had been Christian missionaries in Persia before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and were caught up in the maelstrom of World War I.  Her book for younger readers, and us too,  Home is Beyond the Mountains, is based on her aunt’s experience with the orphans who fled and were trying to return home. 

 











Ottawa friends Ian and Sue McMaster popped in for lunch in the summer, followed by my friend of longest standing: Marilyn Oliver and her mother Mary (with us in the photo above), who is  a friend of Mum and Dad’s from our days in  Bathurst. Judy May came from Corner Brook to see a new musical at Neptune Theatre, based upon the diaries of Adele Hugo, daughter of Victor, who went mad after an infatuation with a fortune- hunting English soldier. She followed him to Halifax, then Barbados. We dragged Dad along with us. Over dinner,  Judy filled us in on the plot; she had assisted with the translations  while a graduate student, and even visited the house on the Guernsey where the Hugos lived in exile. The show starred Marty Burt who grew up in Corner Brook. 

Julia Rank, who was one of our “best women”  visited at Thanksgiving. We all went to see Sweeney Todd at Neptune, and got together with mutual friends Cliff LeJeune (who was the villain in Sweeney Todd) and Emund McLean - all in photo.

 











Dad is a pretty good sport about these adventures. “Want to come with us to Cabaret, Dad?”
“What’s it about?”  “Well, it’s a musical about the Nazi takeover.”
“Want to come with us to see Sweeney Todd?” “What’s that about?”
“Well, it’s a musical about a serial killer.” “Sure”, he usually says. “Why not?”

We did exhaust his patience by dragging him to a screening of “Nosferatu” with live, and cleverly  selected, organ music by well-known local organist, Shawn Whynot.  We loved it;  Dad declared a “complete waste of time”,  and the pews "unbearable". He HAS enjoyed shows at the Carleton Grill where we have dined and heard the likes of The Once, the Rhapsody Quintette and James Hill & Ann Janelle. My cousin Jane and I went there to hear Laura Smith and had a great evening.  I have endured many  pain-inflicting pews this year, particularly the  barely 12" wide ones at St. Mary’s Basilica for a gorgeous concert by the Walter Kemp singers. Walter is the director of Opera Nova Scotia. ONS  provides “prelude talks” before the Met Opera’s  live in HD broadcast in the Empire Cinemas in Nova Scotia. Walter writes them, and volunteers deliver them across the province. I am the Dartmouth volunteer. I am learning so much. I even wrote a fan e-mail to Jay Hunter Morris, the ebullient Texan tenor who took  over the role of Siegfried with two weeks notice, and nailed it brilliantly. And he answered! attaching a photo of himself  relaxing at home afterwards bathing his little 3 year boy, Cooper Jack! I read his reply at the broadcast, and then we decided to see Siegfried and Giulio Cesare live!  in New York at the Met in April. 

It feels like I just started reading  The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire again (3rd attempt)  but I see that it was almost a year ago; I’m still working at it. The trouble is whenever I tackle this book, I always get distracted and digress to other books about the Roman Empire,  more balanced  and more up-to-date in research, but seldom as entertaining or full of such quotable quotes. Consider: The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful. And thus toleration produced not only mutual indulgence, but even religious concord. Imagine that! Why  am I reading about the Roman Empire? Well, you might ask - or not!   It’s a question I ask myself almost daily. I wasn’t born this  way. Last year I started reading as much as I could about the Icelandic sagas for a project in Alberta in the spring.  Karen, a storytelling friend of mine in Calgary, descended from the good Icelandic settlers of Markerville, a tiny farming community near Red Deer, Alberta, issued a challenge to anyone interested, to learn the Saga of Grettir the Strong to tell aloud over the course of a full day at the Markerville community centre with suitable pauses for food, drink, dance and chat. Since Ron and I go to Calgary once a year, and the timing doesn’t really matter, I was able to accept this challenge with great enthusiasm. And thus we arrived on a bitter night to bunk down at the Baha’i Center at  Sylvan Lake on May 4. The ice was still being blown up and down the lake in the gentle spring breezes - so authentic. It was a grand adventure. Twelve tellers -  lots of vinatarta.

This  pursuit of  Icelandic saga took a veer south after we saw the Met Opera broadcast of Wagner’s Ring cycle. I wanted to know more about Brunhild and Siegfried and that crowd. Wagner, as you may know, delved into the Icelandic sagas for source material for his ring cycle, as did J.R.R. Tolkien for his Lord of the Rings. I decided to read the German version, the Nibelungenlied  which has nothing to do with The Ride of the  Valkyrie,  Rhinemaidens, Norse Gods,  or a divine  origin for the dragon-slayer hero, Siegfried.  Brunhild, if she existed,  is not the daughter of  Wotan, but a warrior Queen of Iceland, which is odd, since 5th  century Iceland wasn’t inhabited by anyone we know. That’s when these events were supposed to have taken place. She was not enchanted by Wotan in a ring of fire on top of a mountain, nor did she ride onto Siegfried’s funeral pyre on a magic horse. There were a few bits of standard magic left : love potion, helmet of invisibility,  magic dragon’s blood, ring of power. It is not written whether Brunhild was fat, or sang, but she did engage in a serious  hissy fit with Siegfried’s wife  Kriemhild (Gudrun in the opera) which led to the murder of Siegfried by Kriemhild’s brothers, the Kings of Burgundy. Both ladies were Christians but they were the WRONG kind - clearly. There were lots of the wrong kinds of Christians running around in those days. I’m reading about them now.  Kriemhild decided to avenge Siegfried’s death by marrying Attila the Hun - like you would -  to try  to enlist him and Dietrich of Bern to kill her brothers.  Lovely people. Almost everyone dies. There does seem to have been a war in which a Hunnic-Roman alliance clobbered the Burgundians (or Ostrogoths) around 436. There are rumours Attila married an Ostrogothic princess named Ildico, but he is said to have died on his wedding night, so that wouldn’t have left the 12 years that it took for Kriemhild to exact her revenge on her brothers.  Dietrich of Bern is actually Theodoric  the Ostrogothic king of  Italy 493 to 526 CE - a total anachronism.  There  may have been a Visigothic noblewoman named Brunhilde, but she lived  in the following century, too - after Attila  and Kriemhild.. The Nibelungenlied wasn’t written down until the 12th century, so total recall of the facts was probably about as true as the stories  about King Arthur and his Knights, told by the 12th-century bards, or the feats of the Trojan war as sung by Homer.  I am so lucky that I am married to a man who is not bothered by these strange pursuits. He once even crawled out of bed and headed for the computer when I gasped in exasperation from the other side of the bed, “Who the heck is Budli?”  It’s complicated. He might  have been the father or brother of Attila, or perhaps the father of Brunhilde - depending. My confusion is not remarkable. I love pursuing these strange, and often violent, disjointed stories that come kaleidoscoping through the ages in strange, brilliant and colourful snippets. I cannot say why. Is it ancestors whispering?  According to the Mormons, I'm descended from the famous Viking Ragnar "Hairy-Breeks." Who can trust any of that stuff?  I'm also descended from Mrs. Odin? and Ethelred the Unready? There are many sides to every blanket - and lots of typos. It's fun.

Ron and I  both took a course on Virgil’s Aeneid this fall at SCANS (The seniors college class network - good courses, but no exams or papers to write) taught by our friend Michael Parker, who used to teach with Ron at Grenfell in Corner Brook,. There was no total recall involved there at all. It was ALL  made up, total propaganda, sucking up to an Emperor, who had confiscated his farm!  Talk about poetic whoredom. So this is what I’m doing with my retirement, besides running the website for Storytellers of Canada, and being their secretary, which has turned out to be more than I can chew, because I simply do not grok Microsoft Word, in which I must compose the minutes. I’m a WordPerfect girl (in spite of its habit of  crashing). I am not a total luddite, but I do not tweet and Word irritates me no end. Separately, Ron also took a course at SCANS on Japanese history and I did one on Homer, also taught by Michael. Ron continues to dance with the Thistle Dancers, and has discovered, as with all performing arts, you can get some weird gigs.  How about being the warm-up act for a Mr. Bean imitator at The Third Annual British Motoring Festival held on the beautiful grounds King’s-Edgehill private school in Windsor, NS on  a hot day in July, when you’re dancing on lumpy grass in a wool kilt. I minds the time I was the front end of a cow in a gin joint in San Francisco. Ask me sometime. He was supposed to be dancing at the Victorian Christmas Festival at the Citadel a few  weeks back, but wrenched his back moving a bag of recycling. Whoever thinks recycling is not an extreme sport has not lived in Halifax.

I am officially a senior now so it is not surprising to find myself trying to clean glasses with sunscreen or applying drops of vitamin D to my eyeballs instead of Visine, and vice versa. None of this caused serious harm, although it did take a fair amount of dishwashing liquid to get the glasses clean. And really, when I think about it, it has been over 20 years since I last tried to brush my teeth with Preparation H, so there are signs of hope. I just learned that my tiny American Social Security check is about to be increased by 1.7%  as concession to the cost of living. And so my American friends, as you face the economic cliff, you can blame this foreigner for draining off  $3.34 more from the American exchequer each month. It was  a nice surprise to discover that I was actually going to get something for the 10+ years I paid into the US system. It made up for what I lost on my Canada pension and old age security for having been out of the country “so long.”  After much negotiation, I have managed to score 34/40th  of the Canadian Old Age Supplement, which about covers the portion of my civil service pension clawed back by the government of Newfoundland when I turned 65. I’m not complaining. I lived long enough to collect a modest pension, and when I look at what’s happening to pension plans today, I know I was born under the very lucky star, and feel sad for everyone trying to get settled in anyway in the 21st century, with all the outsourcing to horrible factories in Bangledesh and union busting and civil servant bashing  in full flower. The treatment of some  pulp and paper workers in NS has been a sad story. Dad is savage about  what has happened to Evironment Canada. The “true north strong and free” has also decided to fund only scientific research that is directly related to achieving "economic ends". I will try to say no more about the ravages being heaped upon my country - lest you shred me.

In February, my excellent physiotherapist, who had set  me on the path of CFQ Xi Gong practice,  ordered me to the naturopath. With  the help of  Dr. Craig H., I took  on the elimination diet – no gluten, no night shades, no sugar, no caffeine!,  no dairy,  no  etc. etc. diet, supplemented with super turmeric tablets and super probiotics.  After three weeks, all gastric disorders and a substantial amount of pain had subsided  and I was feeling SO much better I stayed on it for quite a few weeks more. Another discovery was that Magnesium and CoQ10 enzyme reduce the horrid side effects of statins. I cut back on some meds, shed a few pounds, which have stayed off,  and added most things back in moderation,  and occasionally indulge in Ron’s gnocchi, but wheat plays a much smaller role  in my life, and Dad has developed a fondness for gnocchi, which he hadn't encountered before. Life’s  a little more complicated - and the guilt!  “Oh father forgive me for I have eaten gluten! - or was it the cucumber? Mea culpa. Mea culpa! I have not done my Xi Gong practice today. ”  One of the downsides, or upsides, perhaps, of living in a country with publicly-funded medical care, is that if you want to be a good citizen,  you really ought to take responsibility for your own health, because we all pay when we don’t. One thing I noticed when I tried to cut back on the “happy” pills -  a low dose of Celexa prescribed by my perceptive doctor in Corner Brook, to help deal with chronic pain:  I wrote  more rants to the government. You don’t suppose “happy pills” are a conspiracy to shut us up - like Orwell’s soma.


 
















Sam the tabby continues to consume liberal, east-coast writings: Adam Gopnick's New Yorker article on the Spanish Inquistion, and an article on capitalist greed in Harper's. Thank goodness we now have back up on-line to finish reading the articles he has digested before we can. Remember : this is the cat that ate Alberta, when I inadvertantly left my new atlas open on the sofa.  The caption on the New Yorker  cartoon at the left reads Remember you were an alley cat once and you can be one again. We have just spent an obscene amount of money on our youngest cat, Otis Red, the big orange feral guy who joined on just as we were leaving Newfoundland. There must be a special place in hell reserved for aging DINK’s  who spend that much money on having a cat’s teeth cleaned when there is so much big sorrow in the world. We have lost cats to gum disease.  It is a small sorrow. Old Clara, still ticks a long. I suppose she is about 14 or 15+  and takes  4 expensive pills a day, and a special diet which she detests. Amanda Tickle still tickles. Each cat, on a different formula, prefers the bowls of the others. Felis domestica recapitulates homo sapiens.

Our travels were modest this year. I used flyer points to attend a 12-hour telling of Homer’s Odyssey in Ottawa at the fourth stage of the National Arts Center in June. It was carried off brilliantly by 18 of Canada’s best storytellers. The Greek  ambassador even put in an appearance and stayed for two sets, although it was the evening before the Greek election. He gave a charming little speech. I wrote a review which appeared in our newsletter this fall, but I have just posted it here a couple of days ago.   I saw many friends and family in Ottawa,  too.

Ron and I both went to my storytelling conference in Montréal, where we were housed at College Jean Brébeuf, the alma matter of Pierre Elliott Trudeau. It was HOT, but we loved the conference, which was about as bilingual a conference as we have ever attended, although that is where I foolishly volunteered to be secretary. We had an all too brief visit with Ron's brother in Brockville before that. Then I had a short  trip to New York for an intensive weekend storytelling workshop with my inspiration, the storyteller Laura Simms. We were  4 women, Laura, and 2 lovely cats, “camped” in her wonderful loft apartment right near the Strand Bookstore on lower Broadway. I worked on “The Goose Girl” (Brothers Grimm) and  got to visit my two high school  friends, Tamsen (in Ossining) and Bobbi (in Bloomfield).













Bobbi and Ed  took me on a “RiverKeepers Cruise” on the Hackensack River where much has been done to reduce pollution and restore wetland habitation. Sadly, this area took quite a beating in Hurricane Sandy.  Laura wrote me about the silence in Lower Manhattan as she read by the natural light coming in her window  until water, power and phone service returned. Laura has more personal  knowledge of disaster, and runs a small project for children in Haiti which makes me wish I had a more Bill Gates like exchequer from which to assist. 

Speaking of  geese and technology, part of my daily entertainment  is provided by  the 12 geese who live on Sullivan’s pond at the end of our block. Twice a day, they waddle across the busy road to graze on the lawn of our community centre, and bring traffic to a standstill. There is always a straggler. I can't tell if it is always the same one, or who decides when they move. You have to love them.

On the family front, we lost another cousin from Dad’s generation,  Mary Roberta “Bobs” Benjamin, an interesting and lively, and determined  woman, who taught school in the Arctic for her working career, and retired to Nova Scotia, before Alzheimer’s set in. She was lovingly and patiently cared for  by her niece and her niece’s family. Now Dad and cousin Allen in Florida are the last of the 10 cousins from that generation. There was a large Benjamin memorial gathering in West Dublin. Our side is thin, but the descendants of Dad's cousin Fred’s 5 children, are numerous and multiplying as I write. I look forward to their Boxing Day gathering. I am so happy that we made the decision to move in with Dad. I can’t recall when I have felt better about a decision. We also lost, far too soon (57), a vivacious and beautiful friend from Corner Brook, Tina Dolter,  who taken away  by complications of  pneumonia. It was Tina whose portrait project,  “The Sensuality of the Maturing Woman” involved some of us, me included, who had so much fun doing our “calendar girls” project to raise money for the new palliative care unit at the Corner Brook Hospital back in 2001. Tina  was a positive force wherever she went, and is so missed. My portrait (at 55?) hangs in Gitano’s restaurant in Corner Brook, while my Dorian Gray self is still trying  to decide when to stop using  henna. I have now achieved a hair-do that has intimations of Alice in the Dilbert cartoon.

The sight of the end of page 4 footnote on the print version of this foolishness coming up tells me it is time to cease this self-indugent bundle of random musings.  4 pages is the maximum I will inflict on anyone. I  had, and still have, very little new to say about anything. The world is in endless re-runs. At 65, the only  bit of elder wisdom I can offer is this:  Don’t try to reach the second shelf without the footstool. In 2012, we still have the poor "always with us", and must continue the good fight. Did Matthew also know  know about “The  Donald”, whose bullying  ilk, alas, is always with us,  too. I would ask you to join me in a tumbler of Glennfiddich and sing a rousing chorus or two of Bob Dylan’s
    oh ye playboys and playgirls
    ain't a-gonna run my world
against the Donald Trumps of the world.  We have ‘em in Canada, too. Oh Cheers! and Up Yers, Donald.

May the force sustain you and yours through another year and bring us toward more Peace and Joy in 2013.With considerable affectation, I confess, but also with great affection