It has been ten years since I've been here.

Much can change in a decade.

Perhaps I will muse here again sometime soon....

Flutes and French

I was thinking about my friend Diana the other day, because of another E flute I have acquired. This one comes with a Raven.

Whenever I head out on a bit of a wander, I lug my flute around.  I never play it.  Or hardly ever.  I think about it a lot, and I carry it.  It's kind of like the French that runs around in my head.  It's a lot like the French that runs around in my head, actually.

My maternal grandmothers (the 10th great-grandmothers mostly) collided with Champlain and his men at Tadoussac, and Port Royal, and Trois Riviere, and Nippissing:  creating a complicated Metis geneology that pre-dates me by 500 years. Tragically, I am the first generation in 500 years that does not speak French. I understand French, sort of, if people go slow.  But I am mute when asked to speak.

I was thinking of Diana today because I'm lugging my flute again.  This time I'm travelling in Newfoundland.

I met Diana because of needing to figure out how I might play my first flute, the one with the eagle carving that I carried all through Spain while walking the Camino.  I tried to play a bit back then and planned to go to Diana to be taught.

Then before I went to Zimbabwe in 2011, I spoke with Diana again.  I knew I would bring my E Flute with me but I was also quite desperate to have a little A flute to bring too - one that would be better for my small hands.  I pestered Diana about it, in fact. 

Diana gave me an A flute.  I carried it with me but I didn't play that one either. 

Instead I gave it to Tonganai.  Tonganai is a very different man than most. He is, some might say, a schizophrenic.  But in the rural part of Zimbabwe there are no institutions, and no diagnosis or treatment of such things. 

So Tonganai simply is.  He used to be a math teacher, and now he is not. 

Tonganai is a  fast-talking, fast-thinking human being.  He's hard to follow. He is sometimes very close, and a tad bit frightening.  He gets agitated.  He believes in things that I can't see and hears things that I can't hear. 

Just before I left Tonganai came to my room with a gift he had made for me: a hand-made guitar made of scrap material, held together with bent iron from a railing and amplified by an empty beer can.  He played and sang to me. I have never been given such a beautiful gift.  Not ever.

It was hard to know what to say to Tonganai when he asked me to marry him and told me that no-one could love me the way that he did.  I have the love letters to prove it.  I told Tonganai that he was right - no one else has ever loved me that way.

And so I gave him the A flute. Tonganai understood the A flute completely and immediately began to play it as though he had played it all his life.  It was easy for him.

Maybe I will be able to master both my flutes and my French someday. Time will tell.  It's on the list.

Death Starts in the Feet: A Remembrance Day Fugue for my Father

As this Remembrance Day winds its way down, and I sit at the fire to escape the damp bleak that is Southern Ontario in November, I can see my ten-year-old hand in my dad’s with his wide, wide fingertips, and white fragile knuckles scarred from burns when he was young.

It would have been 1978 and we were watching the parade march to the Thunder Bay Armouries.  It couldn’t have been that cold because I can see my hand in his.  Or maybe it was cold but dry which, as we say in the north, is a different kind of cold.  That is the cold that I’m used to, not the cold damp of here.  I’ve been in Southern Ontario for far longer than I lived up north, but the climate of Lake Superior is where my bones grew and so it is still that type of cold that I'm used to and I like my fire because it dries my insides and warms me up.

I think that 1978 might have been the only time in my childhood that my dad and I went to a Remembrance Day parade.  The next year my mom was sick with brain cancer, and the years after that she got sicker, and then after she died and until I left home I think we might have been just too sad.

My dad was born in 1926.  He was 17 when he signed up for the war in 1943. He was then shipped “south” for training, at Camp Borden I think.  When the war ended, he was on a train west to be shipped out, further west.

Here he is in his uniform. My dad was disappointed that he didn’t get to go overseas after all that training. But I think that bit of luck is perhaps why I exist at all and - shortly before he died, when he recounted the stories over and over and over – I told him so.

The next Remembrance Day I spent with my dad was long after I was no longer a child.  It was in Millbrook, after he came down here to me with the beginnings of dementia and a host of other things.  He squeezed into his old legion jacket and put on his beret and we went downtown.

I can't remember if my dad was well enough to come out for another Remembrance Day downtown. I think there might have been one more, preceded or followed by breakfast at the restaurant, and I think he may have been adamant that he was in Kenora.  I can't remember now if that was Remembrance Day or not.  As my dad's dementia progressed, the present mattered less and less to him, and perhaps that is why I don't remember either. They always had a Remembrance Day service at the long-term care facility in Millbrook where he lived and I definitely remember those.

The last one was in 2009.  I had taken the day off work with the plan to head over after lunch for the service but the nurse called me first and told me to come early because my dad had gone into congestive heart failure and the doctor was on his way in.  

Decisions had to be made. We would skip the Remembrance Day service and head to the hospital instead.  Or at least that is what I thought the decision would be.

And so I arrived and sat on the bed while Dr. Van Loon explained to my dad what was going to come for him.  His heart was failing and would continue to fail.  His circulation would move to the centre of him and that meant that his diabetes would be complicated and his feet, already in major trouble, would get much much worse.  Dr. Van Loon didn’t tell us that my dad's foot and leg would go black halfway up the calf before he died. 

Dr. Van Loon also didn’t tell us that there would come the day when my dad was going to be getting into bed for the last time and it would be obvious that it was so.  No-one could have known that when that day came, in December, my dad would demand that the nurses leave him alone, demand that they stand back away from him against the wall, while he took 10 minutes sitting at the edge of his bed planning his route - planning the full trajectory of his torso and legs, mapping it in his mind – before he gathered his strength and swung his legs onto the bed for what we knew was the last time.  

And then with his characteristic flair, and knowing that there was an audience (my dad loved an audience) he raised both legs straight to the ceiling, held his black toes perpendicular to his body for long enough to inspire something greater than awe, and then dropped them and lay flat.   And that was that.  He didn’t really move again, though he continued to speak and sing for a while more.

One of the things he said, while pointing at his toes, and while he was giggling at his own black humour, was this:

"Just remember, death starts in the feet." 

Before all of that, on Remembrance Day when the first decisions were made, Dr. Van Loon told my dad that he could go into the hospital to see what might be done, as per his Level 4 "keep me alive" instructions, or he could stay where he was and get ready for what was coming.

And my dad, as though the years of annual care-planning meetings and my railing against the Level 4 note had never happened said:  

“Well, why the hell would I go anywhere else?  I’m staying right here where they’ll be good to me.” 

And they were.  For five weeks, right to the end, they were so, so good to him.  I can’t think about the nurses and the PSWs who cared for him, and me, without weeping.  

After my dad made his decision, Dr. Van Loon explained the palliative orders.  He said it could be days or weeks, there was no way of knowing.  While Dr. Van Loon was talking I could hear that the Remembrance Day service in the main hall had started without us.  And then Dr. Van Loon left.

My dad and I tried to listen to the Remembrance Day service from his room until it ended and then sat in the quiet.  We sat side by side on his bed, and he grabbed my hand.  I tried really really hard to be a big girl.  I tried really hard not to cry.  I can see my grown-up hand with its bitten fingernails being squeezed by his, with the wide wide fingertips and paper-thin white knuckles with purple veins.

And then from that quiet, the piper from the Remembrance Day service came down the hall with his bagpipes, stood in the doorway to my father’s room, and played for a good long while.

He did not get to fight in the war, but my dad was a brave, brave man.

Doing Nothing

The Camino Letters continues on in my absence.  I am older.  Malakai is all grown up.  What an amazing child she is.  She has been, since day one, a very wise one.

I get emails from readers in response to the book, I respond.



And the bits of magic that sometimes spark into daily life continue on.

The Camino was really just something that happened to me in the middle of the rest of it.  And in those particular days, with those particular feelings and circumstances, I happened to write some letters to some friends. A point in time.  A speck of dust.  A note struck each day, before the day passed to the next.

Some of those friends have died, or are dying, and time marches...  it does, with all of its ache and joy and endings.

It's important not to be stuck, as Proud Woman taught.  Remain slick, not sticky, so that things fall as they should. 

When a Bird Falls from the Sky

-->

There are some stories that just need to hang for a while – as threads and beginnings of the same fugal looping of life, and the inexplicable moments that sometimes come in small and blinding flashes.

The story of the hawk that was in my freezer when I returned from the Camino is a long story. I knew what it was, and I had been told what I was to do with it.

But I don’t climb high, that is not something that I do.

That hawk stayed in the freezer until after I happened upon an eagle one warm June day in 2010, when I was out for a walk in the woods searching for a railway tunnel with my friends Harold and Marleen,

These birds, these birds.

Harold was my witness, he said so.

And then there is the strange and almost-not-believable story of a book club and a little brown thrush, feet crossed on the threshold with a still-vibrating warmth in its belly.

What?   I said as I turned to face her.

Is she alive?  She said.

Did you know her?  I said.

Yes.  She said.  A long time ago.  

Did my first feather come from your hawk?  I said.  

Yes.

Working

postcript - September 15th, 2012

There was.

Freedom in that.

I was right.



postscript - May 25th, 2012

quiet.  working in the white space.

I will be back to the ocean by July, and I think there may be some freedom in that.

by then.

I hope.



A postscript - Jan 28, 2012  

I remain so quiet, so absent, from this digital stage.  All that is worthwhile comes inside the white space and that is where I am resting.  Working.  Doing things I don't particularly want to talk about.

I'm absent.  Quiet.  Working.

My mind is so often in places like this

in the middle of my working days

words rattling, corners shifting

in the law, with its tatted seams

and then this lifting edge

bit by bit in the shifted corners

where I took that piece that was ebbing

wrapped it in sunburst and dust

and lodged it with the tide for safekeeping

---------

On Being Called a Pinko

I have been called a "pinko" more than once in my life - in the same mocking tone that is used in all the same old circles.  It started a long time ago when I was a single mother on welfare protesting cuts to daycare subsidies in Ontario, and it has continued on and on into my life as a lawyer - like a long, sad, sarcastic drone without substance, without content but for money, and surely without love, hope, optimism, generosity and tolerance.

I have been growing weary of this mocking by people who are concerned with things that I don't understand.  I'm at once too old to listen to it, and too young to ignore it completely.  At times I have just wanted to retreat into writing, and leave the public - the actively outward - part of my life behind.  Indeed, while I walked on the Camino, I struggled with exactly this. 

I read a letter from Jack Layton to his fellow Canadians today.  When I was in law school, I recall reading a very early Charter case involving Jack Layton and the right to protest.  I can't find the case right now - I'll have to go back into my archives to remember what exactly it was about.  I should remember these things.

Layton should be thanked and remembered for his hope in the face of death and his wish for a country for my children that would cling to, and return to, the fundamental principles of democracy.  The Charter is important. The rule of law is important.  Canadians would do well to try to understand how these things work in practice, and what exactly it is that they protect.

It is relatively easy to live encased in concrete here in Canada, separate and apart from needing one's fellow humans most of the time.  But anyone with an understanding of history knows that this is an odd state of affairs.  Generally, humans have needed each other day to day, far more than this.  We likely will need each other again at some future point.

If and when it comes time for the tide to turn, Canadians can now reach for this:

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

Jack Layton 

It Must Have Been Your Intuition

I'm at the ocean on the east coast of Canada in our new summer saltbox with no plumbing.  The postmistress said to me today:

"My God, how did you land here of all places? It must have been your intuition."

Life's Objects - for example: my mother's teddy bear and paper cranes

My daily pilgrimage at the moment is a late-in-the-day trip to the Pastry Peddler, which is perhaps a bad habit at this stage of life's metabolism.

I was there today, and Rae is working there now, She was wearing the most amazing purple shoes, walking past the lemon squares and cherry cream cheese tarts in the display case.  A mesmerizing spectacle of colour and life exists in this small shop, tucked away in the village.

There are two chairs and a small table in a sunny window.  And in that window, Rae says, she will be hanging folded paper cranes.

I made 1000 paper cranes once in about 1985, and gave them to a friend for Christmas.  They are probably long gone.  But I have never forgotten how to make them. When I was in Zimbabwe  I spent days and days folding them with women at Howard Hospital.

Sometimes there is a conflation of objects.  Sometimes things show up where they ought not to be, or at least where you could never have imagined they might be found.

Like my mother's teddy bear.

Page 65, The Camino Letters: 

My mother was in hospital for the last eighteen months of her life. She would wander. She walked out the front door of the hospital in her housecoat one day and got into a police car stopped at a red light, thinking it was a cab waiting to take her home. She marked her teddy bear so that the nurses wouldn't steal it. She hid behind furniture in the lounge or in the room of other patients. The nurses would sit her in the hall in her wheelchair and tie her to the railings so she wouldn't fall. She undid the knots and they called her "Houdini".

This teddy bear was bought in Rochester, New York in December 1979 and brought to my mother by my father on the eve of her brain surgery at the Mayo Clinic.  It had velco hands at the ends of its teddy bear arms and a small bear that sat between them:  the little bear tucked between the velcro was supposed to be me.

I've lost the little bear, I don't know where it went.  The big bear is old and worn, left with only velcro too old to hold anything tight.

Imagine my surprise and delight when I saw my mother's teddy bear (or rather its identical twin) in Zimbabwe on my friend Tavengwa's shelf !  This was a shelf in the middle of Mashonaland.

"What are the chances"  I asked my friend Brian

 "Oh, I don't know... about one in a trillion."  Brian said.

Here are pictures of the twin bears. The first one is my mother's and it used to have a mouth a long time ago.  Look at the way the legs of the teddy bears are mirrors of each other.  How on earth did that happen?

My mother's bear

Tavengwa's bear 

Slow Down; Get Slick

The bear runs through the forest carrying seeds on its coat. The bear doesn't pay attention to where the seeds fall, and doesn't worry about where they will land.  The bear's coat is slick.

Proud Woman 

This is a life long lesson for me, and she knew it. 

I am becoming pretty slick. I have no staff.  I have moved my law machine far away from where it is visible.  I do my work.

I'm almost at the point where I can't remember what it felt like to have a door opening and closing, day in and day out, all day long and then into late evenings when I often felt like a bit of a money trough for others - because it is the lawyers who make the big money after all.  Living life as a trough, why was I surprised when the trough became sticky?

I am getting light on my feet, and there is a whole pile of white space.  The forest feels good. 

Feet and Blood

My feet. My feet are 42 years old and I will have them with me, I hope, until the day I die. I spent the first 40 years of my life completely ignoring my feet and what they do. Mostly, I have lived my life in my mind. I am a lawyer. And working in law means working with ideas of justice, and fairness, and trying to achieve a right result. In my work I hear all about people’s problems with their fellow humans and then I try to use my mind to solve them. I love my work, but often the conflicts and the disputes between people are very silly – mostly about money, or power, or ego, or just plain gossip and ill will.

Quite differently from all of that, when I went for a long walk in Spain eventually I felt as though I was rooted to the earth with my feet, step after step.

In Spain they say this: paso por paso – step after step.

In Zimbabwe they say this:  famba shavanaka - walk well.

My father says this:  put one foot in front of the other, until you walk off the cliff.

I realized on the Camino that solitude is important to cultivate, important to take and protect for oneself. Without solitude life becomes sticky - sticky with life, sticky with people, sticky with the world and its wants.  As I walked in Spain, my daily life was physically tactile. I left my mind and started to feel my way through grief. I began to feel the power of my own body, and the vibration of my own spine. And I started to think about the energy and the sound that lives deep within each human. And about music, and whales, and physics, and math.

I know for a fact that human beings have a sound deep within because I heard it in my brother's arm. When my brother was receiving dialysis, one of his arteries was brought to the surface of his skin and connected with a smaller vein to form a fistula. The sound and the vibration that ran through his fistula was as strong as the ocean.  The truth is that the song and the force of my brother's beating heart could be heard at the surface of his skin.  His very life had a sound.

For most of us, that sound is deep within and more or less silent while we go about the business of living.

In Zimbabwe, I became friends with a woman named Mirriam and spent a lot of time rubbing her foot.  She had lost her left leg and foot to a crocodile, and lost her baby to the river at the same time.

Mirriam told me the story in English, and she mixed up the “I” and the “You”.  So the story became this:

“You holding onto tree” 

“Crocodile eating you leg” 

“You take baby off you back” 

“You put baby on ground” 

“You baby fall into water” 

“You … Kushinga….” 

“You holding onto tree” 

She said:  "My baby died."  I said:  "I had a baby die too."   She said:  "My brother is dead."   I said:  "My brother is dead too."   She said:  "My mother is dead."   I said:  "My mother is dead too."

We understood each other, Mirriam and I.

One day when Mirriam's dressing was changed on the stump of her left leg and she cried for her mother:  "Amai! Amai!"  I had to give her my arm to bite because there was nothing else I could do.

Kushinga is a Shona word that has no direct translation in English.  It was explained to me as a particular form of courage; an active courage; courage in action.

I like to think that the sound in my brother's fistula, that sound in all humans that remains hidden most of the time, is something akin to kushinga.  A quality of sound, a quality of life, that can sometimes become a verb.

A Poem Sent by Kate

When you travel,

A new silence

Goes with you,

And if you listen,

You will hear

What your heart would

Love to say.

A journey can become a sacred thing:

Make sure, before you go,

To take the time

To bless your going forth,

To free your heart of ballast

So that the compass of your soul

Might direct you toward

The territories of spirit

Where you will discover

More of your hidden life,

And the urgencies

That deserve to claim you.

May you travel in an awakened way,

Gathered wisely into your inner ground;

That you may not waste the invitations

Which wait along the way to transform you.

May you travel safely, arrive refreshed,

And live your time away to its fullest;

Return home more enriched, and free

To balance the gift of days which call you.

(credit - John O'Donohue - thank you Kate!)

The arrival of this poem made me think of this ...
a bronze from the Alto del Perdon
Camino de Santiago

Day 4, Chapter 4, Letter to Ted

Lifting the Gaze

When I have blood taken I have to lie down, and turn my face to the wall, covering my eyes with my arm.  I had to have blood taken last week too, lots of it.  It took longer than I would have liked and so I found myself blathering on to the lab technician about my brother - about what a wimp he had been about needles and hospitals until he got sick and spent five years on dialysis because of the autoimmune destruction of his kidneys.  That rid him of his fear.

My brother rode his bike to and from dialysis as much as he could, head up and eyes forward.  He continued to live despite it all. He went to work.  He kept raising his kids.  He kept loving his wife. He kept coaching bowling.  He got used to the needles.

The alternative thoughts - death, pain, darkness - were best not to think about, my brother said. Death, for my brother, was not an option.  Until it was. And then he died.

I have a body like my brother's which turns on itself.  I am immune to most other things.  I haven't had a cold or  virus for four years.  Autoimmunity is what lives in me.  It's stronger than any bug.

My brother taught me that lifting the gaze and being alive is very important work.  That's what he taught me.

Twas the Week Before Christmas

I'm just not ready.

For any of it.

The mirror worlds are filling my life today:

kids away / kids home

the need to shop for Christmas / the need to pack to fly to Zimbabwe

a thank you note to a book club in Calgary / Christmas cards not yet sent

the coming to the end of good work done / the worry of not being able to make it right

the squeamish girl getting needles for thyphoid / the squeamish girl contemplating the possibility of the death of the first of her mother's sisters.

the anniversary of my father's death on Sunday  / one year since the death of my dad.

I am the little girl who loved her daddy. And I love my Aunt Pauline. And I loved my mom. And my brother. Ouch. So much death.

And I love my children who are very much alive and arriving or about to arrive home - the "family assemblage" as one of them emailed me today.  I am only now booking his flight home.  There are no Christmas lights on my house yet.  I'm am not doing what I should when I should be doing it.

Thank God I have finally found my passport but I can't find my suitcases.  I'm leaving on January 9th or 10th, I can't remember.

My Dad's Toboggan Hill

I woke up this morning to an amazing amount of snow covering all of the things in the garden that I have not yet brought in - my hoe, the flat-edged spade, my pitchfork.  Each year I panic about the pitchfork because I never bring it in on time, and I worry that an impaling will result before I find it in the snow. It's a terrible annual routine, really.  You would think I would have learned to spare myself this.  But fall is busy, and this fall was especially busy, so I will hunt for the pitchfork and forgive myself for not getting the garlic in after all.

When I was little I lived in Thunder Bay and things in our small yard were usually in the right place because my parents were good at that sort of thing.  There were no pitchforks laying around, and my dad knew how to build a shed.  He tried to teach me some of these practical things - like measurement, and how to use a saw, and how to change the oil in the car - but I think my brain is far too verbal and so I only remember lessons from my dad running alongside my stream of questions and little-girl chatter.

In my childhood there was always a lot of snow.  And a lot of bundling up, although it was a dry cold, very cold - not the Toronto sort that drags you down and chills you to the bone.  Toronto, the cold.  That was not my world.

I remember sometimes having to be carried home from school during a snowstorm on the shoulders of one of my sister's boyfriends because the snow was up to my waist and I couldn't walk.

On Saturdays and Sundays if it snowed, my dad would shovel the driveway with me sitting in the big square scoop shovel (do they still make those or is it all gas-powered winter noise?).  My dad would build a small pile in the front yard and then use me, in the shovel, to run it smooth.  Up and down, up and down, until it was high enough to dump me off the top edge.  And high enough to toboggan down.  Or use my little red skiis.

There is a home-movie of this somewhere and my mission, this Christmas season, is to find it.  There is also a home-movie of my mother skating with me, while wearing her Hudson's Bay coat.  Malakai gave me a vintage Hudson's Bay coat for Christmas which I still need to have altered.  My mission, on Monday, is to bring the coat to the tailor - and I'll find the pitchfork in the snow too!

Stage Lighting

A week ago my childhood friend Ravi said:  "It's time to start.  Stand here."

And so I settled into the music that wrapped me, I danced with ghosts in that space.  A review came out today in the Toronto Quarterly.

http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.com/2010/12/julie-kirkpatricks-camino-letters-in.html

I am amazed at what the performance appears to have looked like from the front row.  That is because I have no images, no visuals, no internal spatial sense to match to my experience of speaking those words from that stage.  That is not how my brain works - I can really only understand those sorts of things by their reflection.  Strange isn't it?  It means that I find it very hard to take direction or understand where I am to stand in relation to others....

Good thing Ravi was there.  He's known me since I was about 5.

Reading Out Loud

Listen to an interview with Mary Ito on CBC Fresh Air on the morning of the performance http://www.cbc.ca/freshair/2010/11/saturday-nov-27.html

And look at these gorgeous photos taken by Wayne Eardley. This what it looks like to read the letters out loud as a call and response with Ravi and Ernie, and Besharah, as if one might be a whale, as if one believed in frozen music...

At the end of the evening,  Ravi's father quoted Einstein to me:

"No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. "

For those who have read the book, this would be the math solution I've been looking for.  Ravi's father is a math professor and knows of what he speaks.

It was an amazing night.

Getting Ready to Play with Ravi Again

THE CAMINO LETTERS in PERFORMANCE

Saturday, November 27^th, 2010, 7:30 p.m.

Trinity-St. Paul’s Centre, Toronto, Ontario

I drove to Toronto in the rain this morning to drink cappucino with Ravi and finish planning for Saturday. And so the countdown has begun...  

Today was only the third or fourth time I've seen Ravi since I got back from Spain with my letters.  Before that I hadn't seen him since we were teenagers, but I was thinking of him because of a huge butterfly I wrote about in Chapter 2.  Ravi and I also used to float toothpicks down the melting rivers in the street in the spring.  I remember that, and I remember that sometimes we whispered about magic - though not very often.

I hope Ravi's mom and dad are able to come on Saturday because both of mine are gone. Ravi's mom remembers my great big butterfly right down to the last detail - I remember that it was black and white, she remembers that it also had yellow on the inner part of its wings.  It was as huge and wondrous as I remember from when I was six - I know that because she told me so. Ravi's mom believes in magic too, I think, and she was my mom's friend.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon with Lizzie and her band Besharah.  Lizzie and I travel around in a grown-up version of connect the dots - that's what Lizzie and I do.   And so I met Brandon and Carey and Saskia for the first time and, driving home, I realized that I will never be the same after being in their company with the music that they are wrapping around my letters.  I think Saskia and I would agree that it's about the fugual nature of things, but that is another story that you will need to hear in music rather than words.

None of this is part of my plan for my life.  I've never stood on a stage anywhere.  I didn't do theatre when I was young.  I can't sing to save my life.  If you had told me a year ago that this - all of this - would be the life I was living I would have said:  Never.  Not ever.  Not me.

I stand and talk all the time as a lawyer. But I face in one direction and I say planned and scripted words, crafted for a specific purpose and offered to the judge sitting ahead and up high.  What I'm doing with Ravi on Saturday is not that.  That's for sure. 

I can't wait to see what magic Ravi and I are going to make this time, with new friends, floating along once again on our little toothpick boats.

Showing Up ...

When I was planning this little book tour, intending to hop and skip west from Saskatoon, there were some people who thought I was a bit silly to organize myself simply by convincing a few people in each city to invite me into their space (bookstores and churches mostly).  All I really planned to do was show up with my letters and read.  And guess what?  A whole pile of other people - sometimes the most surprising people - showed up too.

Resting in the Company of Older Women

I was reading today in Calgary, where I am staying with Marty's sister Anne and her husband Ken.

At dinner tonight with Anne and her dear friends, Pat and Maureen, I basked in the company of beautiful women, older and wiser than me.  I'm learning to rest in the company of older women, that is something that I am learning to do. 

Men too.  Ken didn't come to any of my readings, but he quietly and perfectly tied up my Calgary time in a small, simple, bow by reading to me from Ulysses in his kitchen: 

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield....

Saskatoon Winter in October

There is snow here in Saskatoon which is a bit of a surprise since it was about 18 degrees at home the other day. I brought almost all my shoes with me but didn't bring the right boots. Oh well.

There are many things that are surprising about Saskatoon - the river, for example with its lovely bridges. And the Mendel gallery. And my nephew's Steven's grown up life, with his beautiful wife and their baby Sonia born last year just before my dad died.

Here I am being hosted and fed by the little boy I used to babysit. He's driving me around Saskatoon in his big white Land Rover. Steven needs a Land Rover because he is doing amazingly interesting things up north. He's a senior archeologist for a company based in Calgary, and also a Ph.D. student. He travels about, flies into places, drives over bodies of water, meets with elders, dives into bear caves, and so on.

I was a happy auntie driving back from a book signing at McNally Robinson with my nephew in the white Land Rover, with white snow on the ground.

And then there was the 1997 white Westfalia with a for sale sign gleaming at us in the sun.

George and I have been talking about this lifestyle plan - the camper van plan - for months. And there it was. I said to Steven yesterday, with a wink:  "Just watch and see how this turns out!"

Today I spent a beautiful afternoon with Ray and Marie. I drove all around Saskatoon with Ray, out to the university, over the river, onto the highway and out to the farmers fields. We turned around near the polka dance hall where Ray has enjoyed many good times. Ray approved of the way I drive, and asked me who taught me. My dad, of course - and he taught me how to polka too!

Apparently no-one but Ray has ever driven this van until I happened along. They can't drive the van anymore and its a hard thing to let go of since so much joy of their later life was lived in it.

It's kinda like when we brought home the perfect toast-colored dog named Oliver.  Bringing this dog home was definitely not the most practical and well-thought out decision in the world, but yet it was one that came upon us with some force.

This van was like that.

Ray and Marie kissed my cheek with great force as we made our arrangements and plans for pick-up in March.

You just never know what's waiting for you in Saskatoon!