Choosing Battles

A mindful person, of comfortable means, should take care not to direct too much energy toward any spindling and mutilation received individually at the hands of vast corporations and revenuers and all, but sometimes, ya just gotta fight back, even though it's not personal.  Perhaps you choose the days when you feel your efforts to save the bees and whales seem to be going nowhere, and you just read that a vast underground glacier of radioactive waste - a remnant of developing The Bomb that fell on Nagasaki  - is drifting toward the Columbia River from (PUREX), the ironically named Plutonium Uranium Extraction Facility in remote Washington State. Perhaps you will take a day off from all that to compose a Letter of Complaint to a corporation that has dealt you an admittedly first-world boo-boo.  You know it won’t work, but surprise, surprise: it does. Hurricanes, earthquakes and fires are tearing up half the continent; the Orange One rants on, but the mailman has delivered, or rather deposited in our super mailbox down the street, a cheque from the offending corporation. The cheque arrived with no explanation except a stub noting “overpayment”.  You now have an extra $186 you can direct toward whatever cause you choose, and you will write to the offending corporation telling them of your plan, and retract your plans to blacken their name so energetically. After, there are other causes, that require much more attention and energy. Back to the bees. 

Here is the letter of complaint and my letter of thanks after having received the cheque.'

July 27  Dear UPS

$50 brokerage fee!!            
I received your bill yesterday. The company I ordered from is a small company that I have ordered from before. They haven’t developed a system for collecting duty and taxes like Lands End which is the only company in the universe that sells jeans that fit me. I had put the cautionary note on 2 previous orders, but this time I made the fatal error of forgetting to write on my order DO NOT SHIP BY COURIER. USE USPS.

When the driver arrived at the door with the bill for $180, I was so shocked I refused the shipment. How badly did I really need a new pair of linen pants?  I understand when the Post Office collects GST and/or duty, and charges their $10 for processing,  but on this bill there appear to be taxes upon taxes upon taxes, and brokerage fees upon brokerage fees, much of which you must remit to our government, ie “us”,  but $50 for an “Entry Prep Fee” for a tiny little package that barely weighed a kilogram!   Seriously.  Did you take it out to lunch?  Was medical attention required?  What did you do that was worth $50?  I paid the little company the $40 COD for return shipping and had the stuff shipped back via USPS.

I’m paying the bill because I know I’ll be plagued to the ends of the earth if I don’t, and I certainly wouldn’t want  to cheat the Canadian taxpayer of the $130 taxes on $CD 300 worth of clothing  which I could not find on a Canadian website  -  though I tried.  Meanwhile in Saskatchewan - Cameco Inc is trying to cheat the Canadian taxpayers of $2.2 billion with its shell companies in Switzerland.  I would pay my $130 in taxes and duties much more cheerfully if I thought such companies would pay their share, too.

However, as a service to other small purchasers of small things, I will spare no effort in making everyone I know to make sure they write Ship by USPS.  NEVER  use couriers when ordering anything from away. I am a storyteller and an ankle-biting FaceBook person, and will spare no effort to blacken your name whenever I can. 

Nov 4 Dear UPS

Further to my letter of July 29,  2017, thank you for the cheque reimbursing all charges on the $186 invoice sent  for a shipment I refused, including the brokerage fees.  Not having delivered the package, would have absolved UPS from remitting all those duties and taxes to Revenue Canada, but it did cost you something to get the package to me and therefore I call this good public relations. 

I have donated the entire $186  to the Nature Conservancy of Canada to help their campaign to raise funds to purchase back lands for an urban wilderness park in the Williams Lake area of Halifax Regional Municipality.  Although this  area was zoned for development of this park ten years ago, land-speculating developers continued to acquire property there, and used this to try to pressure the city to re-zone it for high-end residences, or else have to  buy back the property at inflated prices. It looked like the council was  going to cave in to this pressure.  We ankle biters called upon the council not to back down on the zoning, and a deal was reached through the efforts of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. The NCC is soliciting donations to buy back the land. It shouldn’t have got that far, but the park will be there for future generations. 

I seldom need to use courier services, but should I in future, I will consider UPS,  and will share my story of have received a satisfactory response to what was a very irritating experience. 

Annual Foolisness

Annual Foolishness has a new home - in a little side directory on my my main web page.
http://www.elinorbenjamin.ca/AF/

The Fabrics of Failed Intention

 - originally written in 2010, but still on topic, discovered in a de-cluttering effort on my computer in Fall 2016

How quickly and easily I avoided getting rid of anything last week. The provincial drama festival was in Corner Brook - six  nights of wonderful plays, presented amateur drama groups from across the province. The “amateur” is mostly in terms of their not being paid. The shows were good quality theatre, IMHO.  I can’t imagine anything like this happening in a larger place. Everyone knows everyone. Who knows what seething envies lurked beneath the surface, but the spirit of the festival seemed to be friendly competition, and enjoyment and appreciation of each other’s work. 

And so - I avoid facing  the Fabric of Failed Intentions for over a week, but the project now begins to take shape. There are two categories of fabric, one purchased by Selima, my alter-ego, former practitioner of the Obscure Anatolian Boogie, and the other by me. I used to enjoy sewing, but no longer do. My eyes are failing. Nice fabric is hard to find. Time is scarce. Needs are simpler. Clothing is far too cheap and far too available. And yet, I have 2 suitcases full of the  fabrics of failed intention, of which I plan to keep two metres of black silk crepe, and two other lengths of dress fabric, which I will have someone else make into dresses for me. The black silk crepe - ah well, since we no longer indulge in black silk crepe for funerary purposes, I hope to have it converted to the ultimate pair of chic black pants, which have so far evaded my grasp. 

Sewing ran in my family.  My maternal grandmother, Nanny,  was a seamstress, who  raised a  family of four with her sewing and money mailed by my grandfather, who left to work on the assembly lines of Detroit during the depression when my mother was four. Why the family didn’t go with him, is a mystery that has followed them all to the grave. One cousin said she refused to go, that she didn’t want to dislodge her children from Nova Scotia to raise them in a wicked American city, and that the marriage was not going all that well. Some said he just went off to work in the States because there was no work in Nova Scotia, plain and simple, not unlike what happens here in Newfoundland in 2010 where the money is sent home from the tar sands of Alberta. Whatever happened, the bottom fell out of industrial Nova Scotia even before the depression. My once prosperous native town of Amherst, on the edge of the Tantramar Marshes, had a piano factory, a foundry and Christie’s Luggage and Coffin Factory where my grandparents were working when they met. My grandfather was a carpenter building coffins, and my grandmother sewed the linings. They liked to go skating together on Christie’s Pond after work.

My Grandmother sewing in the 30's,
with a drawing on the black board made by by mother

The workers at Christie’s once played a trick on a woman who worked there and was known for  hitting on the men. They put a corpse in a coffin, crowded around it and waited for this woman to sidle her way among them. She ran off in horror. I can’t imagine how they had the corpse there in the factory unless it was connected to a funeral home. I’m sure it was not the corpse of my grandmother’s father-in-law, who died choking on a home-made donut from his lunch bucket.

This was one of the tales that came from my grandmother, who, for most of the time I knew her, was bedridden with MS. She was diagnosed at 29 in Montreal by the famous Dr. Wilder Penfield. My mother drew pictures of her at work. She always sewed with a mouthful of pins, and was famous for being able to copy any of the fashionable dresses in Margolians’ windows without using a pattern. 

In home economics class, I sewed horrid flannel pajamas with flat fell seams and dreary aprons that fit on hard plastic hoops that pinched your waist. At home, I sewed glamourous Oleg Cassini knock-off dresses for my dolls. I made a batik print shift  in secret, very beatnik I thought, and wore it to Greenwich Village when we sneaked to the city to go to coffee houses on Saturday afternoon, using our allowances for the commuter bus, and stood in line to get measured for Fred Braun sandals. After Doctor Zhivago came out, I made a double-breasted grey Russian military coat with Persian lamb trim and a matching hat on my treadle machine in the wretched Greenwich Village apartment I shared while a student at CCNY. The coat was long gone when a cat peed in the hat. When cats pee in furs hat there is no restitution; it was discarded.  I made my first husband a Maple Leaf tartan sport coat with the plaid matched very well. He had a pair of trousers made to go with it. His relatives in Norway were dismayed when they saw our wedding photo. “Poor Paulle - if we known he didn’t have enough money to buy a proper suit, we would have sent some.”  I made a pair of white jeans with an embroidered pocket - with flat fell seams stitched in red. They were, for their time, HOT. I probably was not, but I was young.

As Selima, the belly dancer, I had a voracious appetite for striped black and gold fabrics. Perhaps it started with the party dress my paternal  grandmother sent from Florida the Christmas we all had mumps and measles together in Amherst, and Nanny died. I scarcely remember opening my gifts in the darkened room, but when at last the light was turned on, there was an Oriental splendour of a dress, gold and black satin stripes, with a little black velvet bolero.  That grandmother also made beautiful smocked cotton dresses in pastel colours, which I liked because they felt good, not the nails-on-blackboard sensation of nylon party dresses, which I hated. She also bought me an orange polka-dot bikini when I was 15, and visiting her in Florida. 

Armed with my credit card, Selima bought miles of lame, chiffon, glittery knit, crushed velvet, sequins, beads, Indian voile, trim and costume coins and filled large plastic bins. Some of these were made into costumes, but then I got very sick, and lost my sewing groove. Now they are packed in a huge plastic storage tub in large freezer bags measured and priced for the next Belly Dance Soiree. What doesn’t sell will go to the SPCA garage sale. There are vintage costumes which will probably be shunned by current dancers. The beaded bra, belt, necklace and headpiece I spent 80 hours making are not among the collection, having been borrowed by a vain young student and never returned. Two beautiful paisley print silk chiffon veils have also vanished. Will anyone want the old-fashioned coin belt I made from large Australian pennies and brass bells? My first husband taught me to solder, operate a drill press and make strong chain link from brass rings. One night when I was dancing in a North Beach nightclub in San Franciso four chaps in the front row called out. “Are those Australian pennies,” in broad Aussie voices. “Right they are, mate,” I returned in my best imitation. I met them afterwards and we had a good laugh speculating on what the Queen would think of being shimmied about like that. It was probably a criminal act on my part to deface the royal coinage.  

Now, they wear cheap scarves trimmed with fake coins and beads. These scatter trimmings on the floor regularly in class, but my 40 year-old belt was built to outlast its owner, who outgrew it a long time ago. 

Dad's Birthday Cake - The Sequel

In the short period of time during which these less than cosmic events occurred, many terrible things happened in the world. Perhaps once in a while, a first world nano-drama offers respite and distraction from the horror. Two days ago I posted on Facebook that I had ruined Dad’s birthday cake. Here’s what happened. It was Ruth Reichl’s recipe for “Elvis Presley’s Favourite Poundcake”. This is a superior comestible and simple to make. What could go wrong? Three cups of sugar, creamed with a half a pound butter, seven eggs added one at a time, followed by vanilla, a cup of cream, cake flour, and then beaten violently for five minutes, into the pan, into the oven, wait an hour and – voila - a simple cake so rich that needs no gilding . BUT suppose you accidentally punch the “clear off” button as you’re putting the cake in the oven and setting the timer. You will then have baked a cake at no temperature whatsoever for an hour, and will open the door to - pancake batter?!! I banged my head on the fridge door. I howled, I wept but no tears would come. Ron said, “It’s alright we will go buy a cake tomorrow.” Wrong response!
I let go a bloodcurdling, film-noir scream as loud and as high as I could. Perhaps I should be alarmed: no neighbours called the cops and no one pounded on the door to tell me to stop creating a disturbance. I was probably drowned out by all the fans. Honestly, I felt better immediately. I recommend an utterly unfettered scream every now and then. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the desertion of the Kitchen God. Perhaps it had to do with a week of cleaning blood off the bathroom floor, bandaging elbows, quality emergency room time, and a dear almost-95-year old man who simply could not grok why he had this annoying and awkward thing on his hand. He had broken a small bone near the wrist. He had never had a cast in his life. I remember that perhaps he had cracked a few ribs on a fishing trip back in the 50s in New Brunswick, but neither one of us could remember anything else. The next day he had picked away at all the gauze around the half cast until he looked like a half plucked goose. Back to emergency . New cast. The technician said, “Next time, just cut the gauze if you think it’s too tight.”
The next night when I went into his room and he had undone all the gauze and there sat the cast on his desk. He said, “I didn’t think I needed it anymore.” I reapplied it and wrapped it myself. Then I made a big label with yellow highlights that said, “Do not remove. Remember: broken bone.” I fastened it around the cast. He thanked me. After that, the cast stayed on. It was a few days before we tackled: “The Shower” - with plastic bag on cast. That’s a different story.
Back to the cake. This is about the cake. Though it was 10:30 at night, and the kitchen still stifling, I turned the oven back on, put the cake back in and baked it for an hour. It was dense, but it is hard to make half pound of butter, a cup of cream and 3 cups of sugar taste that bad. Though not Proustian, it was worth keeping to make a trifle or something like that. In hindsight, I should’ve just turned on the griddle and made pancakes. I expect they would’ve been wonderful. I determined to make another one early in the morning. Ron dutifully went out fetched more cream. I was not happy to be using the oven on one of the hottest days of the summer with the cleaning lady about to arrive. Dad’s birthday is always the hottest, closest day of the summer. As I measured the sugar I discovered we were a half cup short and there was no sugar anywhere in the house. This has never happened before. Out to the store went Ron. He is a good man. The cake went in the oven. The cleaning lady arrived. I started churning the three different flavours of ice cream I had made the day before so we could have Neapolitan ice cream with the cake that night at my cousin Tony’s. The cake came out of the oven and I set it to cool. After the cleaning lady left, I upended it, but it was still not cool enough and came out of the pan looking like it had experienced something seismic. It was meant to be a simple, easily transported cake with no icing. It was also meant to have 9 and 5 candles on it to celebrate the years, but they were no longer on the counter where I had left them. Hmmm? I could not find them anywhere, but I did find the mixer beaters, not hermetically sealed in the running dishwasher as I had feared, but in the wrong drawer. I had egg whites left from making the ice cream and so I whipped up a batch of seven minute icing, a substance that has covered many a culinary fissure in my life, and probably others'. A complete search by Ron and I did not produce the candles any time in the next two hours. And thus the cake was iced and balanced on my lap over all the potholes en route from our house to Tony’s along with nine old birthday candles that had been moldering in the drawer since Heaven knows when. As Nora Ephron says: “Everything is copy” or at least batter. If I decide to try out the recipe as pancakes some day cooler, I’ll let you know how they turn out.

Shredding - or Shedding - Selima

Selima's last stand, ca 2005

How do we part with our younger selves?  We hope to do it with more grace than Miss Havisham of Great Expectations.  Some parts of my life seem so far away now as to be nothing but stories I tell. I am grateful that I was not a war criminal or something equally horrible that could be ascribed to "another" life.  I did little more harm than practice The Obscure Anatolian Boogie, as my ex-husband once called it in anger.  It was a great passion, which contributed to the downfall of that marriage, but brought some little wisdom, and many friends and experiences, including a trip down the Nile with a group of the similarly addicted.

I had studied with the legendary Jamila Salimipour in San Francisco in the '70's. Jamila knew how to teach and inspire the movement known as American Tribal Belly Dance.  It was quite a cult. I did not make it into the inner circle of her votaries, true believers, nor of the Mother Goddess's, which seemed to be part of the the package.  Though Jamila told a friend of mine that I wasn't made of the material of professional dancers, I was welcomed into another dance group run by one of Jamila's stars, the stunning Nakish, and performed with her group to the music  of the equally legendary drummer Vince Delgado, his wife, Mimi Spencer, and his daughter Devi-ja; both women died of cancer far too young. I took drum lessons from Vince, learning enough to understand the music a little  better. Their music was wonderful, and they were lovely to be with, as were the other dancers. I stayed friends with one to this day. 

I went to two workshops run by Jamila's daughter, Suhaila Salimpour, in Toronto in this century and both after My Big Illness of  2004, When I mentioned to Jamila's daughter,that I had not been one of the favoured, she laughed and said, "Maybe you didn't give her presents."  It hadn't occurred to me at the time. Suhaila was right!  Jamila was right. I certainly did not have the constitution to endure the slings and arrows of working in nightclubs, and dealing with sleazy club-owners, and thereby hang a few tales of folly. I had a ring-side seat at the underside of San Francisco's North Beach and Tenderloin districts. If I were a writer  ...   My life in "Show Business" can be summed up with a simple anecdote:  the  gig that paid $35 resulted my breaking a front tooth with a finger cymbal, requiring a $150 crown. It always seemed to work that way.  My first and favourite job paid $5.00 a night - a Persian restaurant in Oakland, run by two very nice Irani gentlemen. I cannot remember names now, but there were backgammon boards, a pleasant customers, and sometimes one of the brothers would play his drum and sing what I now realize was probably very old and traditional poetry.They gave me my stage name, "Selima", which was their grandmother's name. At the end of the night we would all eat the crunchy, buttery bits of rice at the bottom of the pilaf pot.  

 I danced for friends in Denmark and England, when I left my San Francisco life for the obligatory post-divorce travels in Europe and found a sisterhood of dancers in Ottawa, when I returned to Canada to stay with my parents and to save up to go to library school. 

I discovered I had some talent for teaching this beautiful dance while I was at library school in Ontario back in 1977, where I was recruited to teach one class a week  in an adult evening program. It kept me sane during that insane year. 

On stage at the Arts and Culture Centre
 in Corner Brook in the mid 80's

I brought the dance to Corner Brook, Newfoundland, when I was hired by the Newfoundland Public Libraries to be the district administrator for the West Coast. Corner Brook had a Lebanese community. They understood what I was doing but few others did. I became known as the belly-dancing librarian. I loved my dual personality and I was not alone. It wasn't long before the Internet appeared and I found a sisterhood of belly-dancing librarians.There is a vast literature out there on the topic, some of it quite hysterical. Consider the  florid text of the Amazon blurb for  John Norman's Dancer of Gor 

Doreen Williamson is a quiet, shy librarian on Earth. Like many other young women, she is distrustful of her attractions, frightened of men, introverted in manner and sexually inhibited. She lives within a quiet, lonely, dissatisfying, sheltered, frustrated desperation, distant from her true self, her nature denied, her only friends books and her secret thoughts. In the realization and enactment of a profound fantasy, after acute self-conflict, she dares to study a form of dance in which she is at last free to move her body as a female, a form of dance in which she may revel in her beauty and womanhood, a form of dance historically commanded by masters of selected, suitable slaves: belly dance. She must then dance, for the first time, before men. In doing so, she discovers her own desirability and that she may be well bid upon. Rediscover this brilliantly imagined world where men are masters and women live to serve their every desire.

In your dreams, Mr. Norman!  I  think I can safely say I have never lived to serve anyone's every desire.  

I began to teach in Corner Brook.  I loved teaching. I loved analyzing what people were doing with their bodies and trying to find new metaphors to explain how to improve each movement.  Occasionally I went away to workshops, including the one on the Nile, and two with Suhaila. Eventually, I had enough students to form a little performing group, which we called the Turkish Delights. I loved my students, women of a variety of ages, all in the middle of life in its various manifestations.  Marriage, child birth, divorce, major injuries and illnesses visited us.  

Somehow the bond formed by our group helped us through these. 

After a  a life-changing illness of my own - a Staph infection, I tried to keep going, but in spite of the tremendous support of the group, it became too much. I was grateful when a native Corner Brook woman returned from Ontario where she had studied belly dance with a good teacher during her recovery from cancer, and was keen to share what she knew. The timing was good. One of the projects I'd undertaken just before I got sick  was to attempt to create Isis wings for all my group  (see above). These wondrous creations are circular veils which  attach to a band at the neck and have dowels in the two side hems, which can be manipulated in great spiraling circles as you dance.  Everyone was enchanted with the ones I had bought from a professional in New York, and wanted their own but they were very expensive. I used my set as a pattern. I spent many hours crawling about the floor with yards and yards of organza, cutting out giant circles and hemming them, which I am sure used up miles of thread. 

After much experimentation and expenditure of money and time, I discovered I could have them pleated by a professional pleating Company in Toronto. The first quote I got was from a group in Montréal, who returned my first set saying they were too large for their pleating machines.  I took one set in person to a company in Toronto, then sent eight more sets to be done later when I found they could handle it. The dance I was supposed to choreograph was sabotaged by my illness and the dynamic in our group had shifted. Everyone had agreed to pay for the wings, but when they finally arrived, people had drifted away, and only a few  of my faithful adherents actually purchased them - probably more out of kindness to me - and recognizing the investment I had made. I managed to perform a dance with the gold ones I had purchased after I "recovered" from the infection, and one of my students had a friend at art school who wanted to make a short film of the dance and interview me. I agreed to do this provided that I would be given a copy of the video. With a great deal of effort I got my act together for the filming; the student was unhappy with the quality of her photography and asked if we could do it again. With even more effort and pain, I managed to oblige, but my student who was supposed to give me a copy of the video never delivered it, and also went away with my best costume, which I had loaned her -  a minor betrayal in the cosmic sense, but a disappointment,  because it would've been one of the few pieces of evidence for my old age to prove what I had done in my flaming youth, which by then, was pretty well burnt down. But it has been my habit to practice ephemeral arts. 

The garden is going on without me. Here are some of the earlier group and some new additions performing my choreography to Zagharuta Helwa by Maza Meze of Toronto at the International Women's Night dinner in Corner Brook, which it was my pleasure to attend several years ago when I went back for a March Hare week-end. 

 I greatly respected my teachers and loved the dance, and I believe I conveyed that to the many audiences for whom I performed for over 25 years.

As for the now unfortunately named "Isis" Wings, the rest of them sat in my closet for years, and moved with us to Nova Scotia while I tried to think of what to do with them. Then Randi, a dear dancer friend from Ottawa, came to visit and when she saw the wings she said they would be perfect for the Propeller Dance Troupe in Ottawa. I knew Propeller Dance. It had been co-founded by a storytelling friend, Alan Shain. Their motto is "If you can breathe, you can dance." I knew this would be the perfect home for the wings so I packed them in a huge plastic tub an entrusted them to the bus. In September, Randi sent an email with the attached photo of the wings - now alive and flying again. My heart soars with them. To read more about this wonderful organization see http://propellerdance.com/

PS Added Feb 2, 2025
  I have no videos of my dance life other than a bad digitization of an old VHS home movie, converted to DVD than onward. This was long before the ubiquitous recording ability we have today. It is like the old Nasruddin story, "the soup of the soup of the soup." My favourite part has always been playing the finger cymbals. I cannot seem to imbed it on this page, but you should be able to reach it with this link. 

Selima's Dance at Julie Rank's Dance Studio Recital 1987

"South Riding" by Winifred Holtby - an excellent read

   I’ve just finished as satisfying a novel as I have read in a long time: "South Riding" by Winifred Holtby, published in 1936. I don’t read a lot of fiction these days, but I like to follow coincidence where its leads. It started with seeing the recent film version of the early part of Vera Brittain’s autobiography “Testament of Youth,” a book which I’d had on my reading list for a long time. It should be required reading for everyone who thinks there is anything glorious or desirable about war. From there, I became curious about the group of women students who ended up with Vera Brittain at Somerville House, Oxford, after World War I, and their service in the Voluntary Aid Detachment (VAD) of the Red Cross. And thus, I came to Winifred Holtby who died at age 37, four months after finishing this book, which became a best-seller, and vow to read more of the books re-published by Virago Press. Oxford professor, Valentine Cunningham, has praised Virago for “trawling most impressively and fruitfully in the novel catalogues" of the 1930s for women's fiction to reprint.” This is a good place to start. 

    According to Brittain’s daughter who wrote the preface, “South Riding” was born of two powerful factors in Holtby’s life: her deep roots in the Yorkshire country side and her fascination with the comedies and tragedies of local government.” Holtby’s own mother had been deeply involved in municipal politics. As Mrs. Beddows, one of the novel’s most sympathetic characters, observes: “All this local government, it’s just people working together - us ordinary people, against the troubles that afflict us all ” - hardly the stuff one associates with great literature, but then as now, it is often at this level, that concrete things are accomplished. The tensions of conservative and progressive vie with opportunism and less than noble motives to produce enough drama to engage the reader from chapter to chapter. In the process of shedding light on a range of social issues such as education, unemployment, building projects, poor relief and the mental hospitals, Holtby has created a large cast of believable and complex characters, who experience life in all its varied joys and sorrows. Sarah Burton, a veteran of the nursing volunteers in WW1, the chaotic 20's, and principal of the local girl’s high school life is a graduate of Cambridge. She is convinced of her progressive principles, but her situation brings her into conflict with the local gentry, represented by Robert Carnes, a noted sportsman. It is slowly revealed that in the post-war period, the life of the gentry is in flux, as is Carnes' own life. 

   Sarah is well aware that the possibility of war has not been removed in spite of her advocacy of the League of Nations, an activity shared by both Holtby and Brittain. Throughout the novel there are hints of the growing dangers posed by Germany and Hitler. Holtby and Brittain had experienced young fascists first hand in their travels in Europe.
The novel reaches its conclusion as the community is set to celebrate the 25th Jubilee of George V. Sarah, cynical of such “ballyho”, finds herself caught up anyway in spite of receiving a letter from a socialist friend who has left the municipal government to fight on a larger stage: 

"I can’t rejoice here. We have miles of docks with grass growing between the truck lines. Men I used to know as the finest workmen in the world, skilled artisans, riveters, engineers, are rotting on the dole. Oh, no, they don’t starve; but they suffer from heart disease, T.B., and worst of all, perhaps, hopelessness. And the tragic sickening fact is that their only chance of re-employment lies in this arms race. They can return to life only by preparing for death."

From the perspective of the 21st century, many of us perceive the two decades between the two great wars as a mere cease-fire in the proceedings of international carnage, and find ourselves hopelessly watching the loss of meaningful work for so many people on the planet, and the near enslavement of others. In my own country, where we’ve heard recently of both government and unions trying to quash news of an enormous job-creating arms deal with Saudi Arabia, these words are as fresh as when they were written.

South Riding was made into a BBC mini-series in 2011. I think I’ll have a look for it.

Annual Foolishness 2014

Dear Kith and Kin

Hurray! the  quilt square I contribute every year to the quilt we raffle to raise money for Storytellers of Canada’s recording project is in the mail to Alberta.  For the story of the inspiration for quilt and this year’s Annual Foolishness Greeting Header- a quote from a 14th century English mystic named Julian of Norwich  - a woman actually, see details on my other blog http://elinorbenjamin.blogspot.ca  There are stories and pictures of  previous quilts on our website http://www.storytellers-conteurs.ca/quilt.html   

With God’s help and a toothpick - as my Aunt Ruth used to say -  I will soon be free of my marathon stint as webmaster of this organization. This escape has been slower than the lava flow from Kilauea.  

Our Dartmouth Choral Society (DCS) concert was a great success yon Dec 7th. You can hear our exit number at  https://soundcloud.com/dartmouthchoralsociety/hearth-and-fire.   I’ve sung another Kurt Weill song  - Youkali - at my singing teacher’s end of term recital to positive feedback. A field recording exists as proof but is not going on YouTube. I also sang an “amusing”, and almost unknown, Irving Berlin number at DCS’s 60th birthday party - That Mesmerising Mendelssohn Tune (1909). It has a very slight YouTube presence, probably the measure of its worth, but it was suitable for the occasion as we were singing a Mendelssohn piece at our concert.  I should now aspire to learning a real song by  Mendelssohn. Now, at last, I can think about getting Annual Foolishness up and running and get some Christmas cards out into the world before Groundhog Day.

I’m still waiting for that Wordsworthian moment of tranquillity in which to reflect upon the emotions of 2014, but it’s not happening. That, dear kith and kin, is why I write prose instead of poetry. Be grateful -  very grateful!  I used to write bad poetry in my youth. Ron just arrived home with the first box of clementines this season.  Each of us remembers the citrus of childhood. In my case, the exotic tangerines came shipped from my grandfather’s orchard in Florida to frigid northern New Brunswick in a wicker hamper. Greater suspense proceeded the basket of grapefruit, fancy oranges, tangerines and the kumquats, than the safe arrival of Santa, who, after all, was comfortable with northern climes. Would the fruit arrive without having been frozen en route?  Not always. I once got in a fight with a boy in grade 5 - a smart-aleck from Montréal whose mother had a mink coat - who tried to tell me that kumquats were a kind of nut. I knew my citrus, even though I ‘minds’ that it was a rare thing in ‘them days’.  In Ron’s youth, mandarins from China arrived on the West Coast and thence to Calgary. I suppose if mandarins came from China, tangerines must originally have come from Tangiers. Wouldn’t you think clementines should come from Clemencey?  Perhaps you wouldn’t. This box says Maroc and we will enjoy them anyway. We seldom see mandarins around here - unless you count that crowd in Ottawa :-(  

What has happened to the globe since last I wrote?  So much grief in the world, it seems impossible it can be contained on one small planet, and occasionally, an item of note such as The European Space Agency’s landing a robot on a comet - the equivalent of landing a mosquito on a speeding bullet, as I heard one commentator observe - an astonishing feat, even though the robot is now in a shadow and has lost its power.  I’m not sure how much humanity benefits from sort of thing, but you never can tell. It certainly does not benefit from the never-ending terror, torture and intimidation, any more than it did when my ancestors were beheading and/or being beheaded for reading the Bible in English - not so very long ago in the history of the world. 

Our Dear Leader is basking in the glory of having one of the Franklin Expedition ships discovered on his watch. Much money was poured into this project to ensure it would happen on his watch, perhaps the money “saved” by slashing and burning many other less projects with less mythic potential, like the CBC, services to our new war veterans, or research on how to avoid the more extreme effects of global warming. They have already admitted they were doing it to assert Arctic sovereignty. I suspect that it is more about “seeking gold and glory” than our sharing our wonderment with Stan Rogers at “hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea.”  It’s part of Canadian mythology. By coincidence, a day later we accompanied Dad to a rather odd, almost secret, ceremony hosted by Veterans’ Affairs  where we met the personable, Rear Admiral John Newton, just home from the Franklin discovery; we enjoyed hearing his first hand account. His enthusiasm was infectious. Media representation was curiously thin - perhaps through fear of ministerial gaffes? - which do abound, frequently, from the minister involved.  We were not alone in wondering when this event might surface as a photo op to offset the public outcry at the our government appalling treatment of our current veterans. Ron heard a cynical grumble from one of the elderly vets he encountered in the loo. I confess, I ate the sumptuous hors d'oeuvre, swallowing my guilt, thinking of homeless veterans a few blocks away, and enjoyed the lovely woodwind quintet, too. Canada has added a few members to the club of celebrities falling from grace, which, of course, offers great distraction from Canada’s larger failings on the world stage - especially on the environmental front.  It is hard to remain unaffected by all the noise. Mercifully, we are among the fortunate to have found a few things to keep ourselves somewhat distracted until it all falls apart. 

With Dad, Pete Luckett and
Aunt Doris, now 90

We haven’t strayed far this year. We don’t like leaving Dad on his own, but there is lots to do right here in Nova Scotia, and we did enjoy some company - especially stragglers from my storytelling conference. When Dad was visiting my brother in New Brunswick, we  had a mini-vacation visiting Annapolis Valley wineries and stayed in a beautifully situated B & B near Cape Split. Lunch on the terrace of Luckett’s vineyard in Gaspereau, overlooking the World Heritage approved view of the Bay of Fundy on a beautiful sunny day in August is about as good as it gets anywhere. We took Dad and my Aunt Doris for lunch in September but it was a little chillier then. They provide blankets. Pete greeted us in person at the door. He started his career as a vegetable barrow man, then became a charming presence at the Saint John, NB market, a TV personality, an entrepreneur of an upscale grocery in Bedford with branches in Halifax and Wolfville, and finally launched his own vineyard - which is, I think, a great passion. What fun he seems to be having.  A worthy immigrant!! - from Nottingham.   Annapolis Valley white wines are getting better every year, but more expensive than their foreign competitors. We buy them anyway. There is a very exciting producer located at Benjamin Bridge, site of an ancestral saw mill operation. We have nothing to do with the vineyard, alas. They are producing some spectacular sparkling wines in the traditional style, but we can’t afford the most spectacular. The lesser ones are still very good. 

Marthe Bernard, Mary-Lynn Bernard, Andy Jones,
Elinor Benjamin and Kate Sanders,
The Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Mar 15, 2014
after our children's show.

I got to the March Hare in Corner Brook, always a time of re-connection with many dear , dear people like those on the left.  I took a short trip to New York for a workshop with my storytelling mentor, Laura Simms, which included a “field trip” to the weekly storytelling session at the Hans Christian Andersen statue in Central Park, quick visits with my two high school friends in Westchester and New Jersey and a wonderful lunch with a bedsitter flatmate from my days in London  (Eeek!  1976?) and his lovely wife, whom I had never met. They live in Nyack, very close to Pearl River, where I went to High School. I  also went to Ottawa for a week-end to hear the Ottawa storytellers present their day-long epic telling of The Iliad, and visit more friends.  All this was stupendous. 

Kith and Kin at the Shore Inn,
Hubbard's, for Dad's 93th Birthday July 27.

Ron’s only venture out of the Maritimes, alas, was to fly to Calgary for the funeral of Ron Stevens, a dear friend since elementary school. That was a shock for everyone. He was able to stay another day and spend it with Ron’s wife, Phyllis, whom he has known since university days. Our family has lost a major elder - Dad’s cousin Allen, who was living in Florida. He was the family historian, and published his results in a little book which we have all cherished for years. This leaves Dad as the last of 10 Benjamin  cousins still alive, which has to be a little strange. We celebrated his 93rd birthday in July with a lobster supper at the Shore Club in Hubbard’s. As a result of the memorial service for Allen, we had the opportunity to become better acquainted with a number of relatives and finally got to see the old family burial plot in Brookfield, and visit Allen's son and wife in Pugwash.  I hope I can find the cemetery again. If you are reading this on my blog, you can go back to August and read the tribute I delivered at Allen’s memorial service. 

A 4-pounder to share at the
New Glasgow Lobster Supper

My annual storytelling conference was in nearby Prince Edward Island. We took Dad with us there, and spent a few days afterwards eating and visiting friends and relations, partaking of summer theatre, and an old Richards family tradition:  the lobster supper in New Glasgow, the village where Ron’s mother was born.  It is truly the best we’ve had anywhere. At the conference, I took advantage of my little spot on the conference programme to tell Pete Seeger’s version of Dick Whittington and his Cat;  it is a kinder and gentler version, less a legendary testament to capitalist speculation. It seemed like the right thing to do. Pete Seeger was a sublime inspiration to so many of us - a life to be celebrated, remembered and emulated. Too bad the efforts to get him a Nobel Peace Prize did not succeed. 

Undoubtedly, one thrill this year was organizing a successful concert for Laura Simms at the St. Mary’s Art Gallery which took place in the midst of Dartmouth Artist,Rose Adams’ wonderful 25 year retrospective Bird, Bones and Brains, an inspiration for an exciting evening of storytelling with a good crowd.  Our friend, Michael Parker is part of a group called Musikon. They produce several concerts a year of contemporary Canadian music at the Gallery, which is where I got the idea. Their recent conference presented during a wonderful show called Camp Fire: Queer Baroque   http://thechronicleherald.ca/artslife/1250878-musikon-goes-crazy-for-baroque

Another highlight was singing with Canta Mara, a once-a-year choir organized by the Nova Scotia Choral Federation to participate in a workshop and “Big Sing” with a guest choir. This year it was the splendid Elmer Iseler Singers, from Toronto. You get the music in advance, practice on your own, and show up for a day-long rehearsal 9:00 am - 9:00 pm with the Choir’s director Lydia Adams and Assistant Director Mitchell Cady, “ready to make music.”  Then you sing with them in a concert the next day.  Ron had a mathematician friend, sadly gone, who was a fine jazz pianist, who stated that one of his life’s ambitions was to be good enough to “play with the black guys”.  It’s one of those useful little catch phrases that crops up on various occasions in our lives when the subject of excellence comes up.  After the concert Ron  said: “You were singing with the black guys.”  Actually, all I did was pay for the workshop, which was a bargain, spend a week closeted with the music and YouTube, and get myself to the rehearsal, but I did feel ready to make music with a grand group of people.  It was a uplifting experience. 

Canta Mara and Elmer Iseler Singers with honoured audience member,Scott Jones, the young choir director from Nova Scotia who was so badly injured in a hate attack last year, and who has become such a inspiration with his “Don’t be Afraid” campaign. I’m in middle row, 2nd from left behind piano. Lydia Adams is in front with Scott. 

Ron’s had some lyrical moments this year, too. His performing group, the Thistle Dancers performed a nearly error-free version of a difficult dance, The Saltire Cross, at St. Matthews Church Summer Noon Concert Series. This is the church where Wayne Rogers is the musical director, and coincidentally the church in the picture above as well. I sang in several of Wayne's choirs when we both lived in Corner Brook. As the non-dancing "groupie",  I  shot the video. They were the first group to post it on You Tube:

He also performed at Government House where: Their Honours were pleased to welcome the Jane Austen Society of North America (NS) and the Playford Dancers for a fascinating presentation on the enduring fascination of Jane Austen and her world.  
https://www.flickr.com/photos/lieutenantgovernor/13630775253/in/photostream/

He’s also had very positive feedback on his skills at “briefing” dances, from a real Scottish Dance Expert 

My First Selfie

Bits of Constantine   

My first Selfie:  Chanelling a body part remaining from the huge statue of Emperor Constantine in the Capitoline Museum, to express my opinion on the microbe that invaded my arm after carpal tunnel surgery in May.  Actually - not  quite the first. Years ago I took a picture  of my toes in the Roman Bath at Bath with a film camera. A what? !  ? ?   Constantine employs a different one of the 250 known Italian hand gestures than I have chosen.  Care to speculate?   The Turkish marble in our bathroom was as close as I could get it get to the original setting. Speaking of body parts, I am now on “The List” for a knee replacement, as are half the people I know. Could be an up to two years wait, but I’m not exactly that enthusiastic to engage in more surgery. I still have to get the other carpal tunnel done.

The silver lining of illness is permission to be slothful. I went on a Josephine Tey binge while recovering from the infection. Having the complete works on my Kindle was a “deal” and didn’t require two hands to hold. I read my favourite, Daughter of Time, once again (3rd or 4th time?), and as for the others I have the kind of memory that never remembers who dunnit, which means I can re-read  favourites over and over again and still enjoy them. This enforced “rest” period, also brought on a indulgent week of Netflix binge-ing - including the entire House of Cards series. I should have been watching and reading more upbeat and edifying material, no?  It makes you wonder if there are any honest people anywhere in positions of power.  I tried reading a bestseller, a Joy Fielding novel, and made myself finish it even though it was boring. One of the non-boring books I read was Raj Patel’s  The Value of Nothing. He tells why a McDonald’s hamburger really costs us all $250 - if you add the taxpayer subsidies to agribusiness, food stamps and social assistance that enable corporations to get away with paying such appallingly low wages. There were some things that Adam Smith didn't even predict. Observant as he was, who could have predicted the amoral multi-national corporation beholden to no one. Aha!  Eisenhower did.  I read Adam Smith while in the hospital 10 years ago with the Real Infection. Quite a charming writing style, too, and not too large a tome for holding in a weakened state. Each chapter is a concrete little nugget, good for one sitting.  His  ideas have been co-opted and corrupted, just like every other wise man's.  Joseph Boyden’s The Orenda, a novel based on re-telling the story of  the first contact between the Jesuits and Hurons in a new light, was high on my list this year - a most worthy addition to Canadian canon. My cousin, Chris Benjamin, has just published Indian School Road on the shameful history of the residential school in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, another sad chapter in the long history of imperialism and cultural destruction. Then - on to a life of self-destruction Savage Beauty, a life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford. And even more grim, I turned to The Rape of Europa by Lynn Nicholas. I haven’t seen The Monuments Men, the film that was based on the real events, but I cannot imagine it could reproduce in the time of a film, all the evil. Oh my dears, imperialism, cultural destruction, and looting art are nothing new under the sun - obelisks, Elgin Marbles, Roman horses nicked from Constantinople, etc, etc  - but the scale was unimaginably Byzantine. The 20th century was pretty unimaginable, and the 21st looks to be shaping up to follow closely in its tracks. If people think they can get away with things, they will certainly try. I continue to send grumpy letters to editors, and government ministers and the PM, and post links to outrages on  Facebook. I am turning into a fine old termigant. People prefer my cat photo and food postings, and who could blame them. 

Our household is diminished. Who would believe that we would be down to one cat in one year. The two elders, Clara and Sam, “dwindled,” as our friend Lorraine puts it, after having lived respectably long lives for their species, but bouncy little Amanda, acquired a mysterious infection at age 12, and we lost her suddenly, in the spring, just before Clara. We think Otis, the orange one, the survivor, may still be in shock, or a state of gratitude. Unfortunately we can’t tell which. The week before Thanksgiving 1) we took Sam to the vet, and he did not return home; 2) I went away with my friend, Kira, to the wonderful Singing Storytellers Symposium in Cape Breton, and did not come home for a week; 3) Ron took Dad to the hospital after a dizzy spell and fall, the day after I left, and left him there overnight - he was rescued by a caring postman who brought him home and came by later to follow up. Who will do things like that in the new Canada, the one that Harper promised we “won’t recognize?” ; and 4) Ron and Dad drove to Cape Breton to fetch me, and stayed overnight for Thanksgiving dinner with Ron’s relatives. All of these departures in one week left Otis an altered beast. We are not quite ready to commit our hearts  to acquiring and vetting a new feline, but are going to take in a winter boarder for a few months while his owners go south after Christmas - a cuddly, long-haired black fellow of 17 named Denver. He has been over one afternoon for a play date, and no blood was shed, and he is here for a sleepover as I write. 

We are, all three of us  “dwindling,” but are generally in good spirits and grateful for the good life we live in our cozy little house in Dartmouth. Our community contains its measure of the evils of the world - and the good, too.  For now, we stave off despair over necessary losses with the things that keep us all afloat - family,  friends, good company and the arts. We wish that - All will be well  - with you this Season and in the coming year. 

Elinor (and Ron and Bob and Otis)

This portrait of Claire/Clara mainly know as "Mummy" was painted by my new "cousin-in-law-in-law" Janet Warnes-Morris. She is a retired primary art teacher.

And below is the one she did of Amanda. Why won't blogger let me space these pictures the way I want them :-(  


Here we are with Sam the day in October when the vet confirmed that he had cancer.

and poor Otis, our sole survivor. 

He didn't like having his picture taken by the vet.