Did you ever notice how hard it is to eat healthy when you’re away from home? We’re entering a period of long absences from home for a myriad of reasons and during our first few days, I find I am sorely missing my fridge’s crisper full of vegetables. The older I get, the more I understand how eating lots of veggies (and fruits) in their most natural state makes my whole body feel better. So french fries and onion rings don’t count. And neither does ketchup, which has been touted as a vegetable to make Americans feel better about the poor state of school cafeteria offerings.
I don’t remember my mom badgering us about eating our veggies – the veggies were just…there. All the time. Fresh lettuce salads in the summer, tomatoes all day long as soon as they started ripening on the vine, cucumber sandwiches – so much organic produce before organic produce was cool. And almost every day of the year, there was always Mom’s Vegetable Soup.
Maybe it wasn’t every day. Sometimes there was borscht (the best on the planet) or chicken soup with homemade noodles. But soup was a staple in our house at lunchtime, an appetizer or a meal in itself. I never got tired of Mom’s vegetable soup or of dipping her homemade buns in the broth and slurping it all up. Over the years Mom probably tweaked her recipe to change it up a bit – she started adding chili powder at some point. (We ate a lot of chili, too, so Mom must have liked it, as it is a cook’s prerogative to mostly cook what they themselves want to eat.)
Mom didn’t leave behind recipes, per se, but she left behind tastes, as in: This tastes just like Mom’s. I still haven’t completely figured out her perogies or her cabbage rolls, but I think I’ve come pretty close with her vegetable soup. I used to think soup was too mysterious to make from scratch and mostly stuck to opening cans of Campbell’s tomato or mushroom soup, whisking in some milk and calling it lunch. But eventually that just didn’t cut it anymore. And one day, after falling in love with The Mom 100 Cookbook, I decided to try the vegetable soup recipe, and after making my own Mom-inspired tweaks, I now have my own recipe.
And so I’m looking forward to going home and pulling out those simplest of ingredients – onions, carrots, celery, potatoes, some stock and some salt and pepper – oh, and a can of tomato soup for that tomatoey-goodness – and feeding my body and soul. I think of Mom every time – she was also no-nonsense and down-to-earth just like her soup. And it makes me happy that such comfort and goodness can be found in a simple bowl of homemade soup.
[Some weeks I realize a little too late that I am one day behind. So today, I’m sharing one of my favorite poems – maybe because it’s in the form of a to-do list , my love language – ha! Enjoy.]
Rick and I took a little trip east this last week, to Montreal and our nation’s capital. We flew to La Belle Province and after a couple of days there, rented a car to drive the two hours to Ottawa. On the last night in Ottawa, after supper with a friend, we drove back to the hotel and talked about what a good holiday it had been: the weather was hot but not unbearably so – we enjoyed a Friday night in a park close to Notre Dame listening to a busker and Saturday night walking home from a jazz club along Rue de St. Catherine among the young and hip of Montreal; both cities were very walkable and we (hopefully) worked off all the poutine/smoked meat/seafood calories we over-ingested; and really, all of our loose plans had fallen into place.
But talking about how good something has been before it’s over is like saying “shutout” at the end of the 2nd period of a hockey game. Cue the proverbial fat lady.
As we exited our rental, Rick looked askance at the trunk of the car, which didn’t look exactly closed. And when he popped it open, the latching pin came loose and the realization dawned on us that we could not travel in this car with a trunk that would no longer close. Hmmmm. After the initial pseudopanic – someone (probably me) bemoaned the fact that we didn’t have a bungee cord handy – Rick macguyvered it closed and then we went to our room to call the rental car’s after-hours help line. When I finally got a real person on the line – we’ll call her “Shelby” – which is the fake name she gave me so I couldn’t complain about her later – she said there was no problem, she would send someone to tow the car and amend our rental agreement to switch out to a new car. The only catch was we would have to get ourselves to the rental car place in the morning – the day we had planned to sleep in a bit. Oh well. An hour later the tow truck showed up and we sent our VW Lemon (I mean seriously? Have you ever had a trunk latch pin fall out before?) off to the lemonade stand.
Rising early, we decided that the 30-minute walk to the rental car depot that “Shelby” sent us to (assuring us that they had plenty of cars) was better than taking a taxi. Or for fighting for a reimbursement later. And really, it was so much better. A bit cooler weather but no rain and we got more steps on the Fitbit.
But then we got to the depot where they informed us that: 1) they could not view the agreement online from that particular location; 2) that they, in fact, did not have any cars available; and 3) that we would have had better luck with probably any other location, including the one DIRECTLY ACROSS FROM OUR HOTEL.
And so, we walked back. The service at the new location was excellent but guess what? There were no notes on our rental agreement from “Shelby”. [Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that when I found out that she was from Calgary and I, confessing we were from Edmonton, made some offhand comment about the upcoming Battle of Alberta that was about to commence?] Our new best-car-rental-friend, however, believed our story, tracked down the towed car and gave us a new rental with a full tank of gas.
Years ago, I read – and loved – the book A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller. Part of the book chronicles his Pacific to Atlantic bike trip. Sounds pretty cool, right? Biking with friends for a good cause, seeing the sights, building up your quads, getting a stellar tan. But also: flat tires, torrential rainstorms, bicycle butt, and a lot of asking “What was I thinking?” And much as I thought that that bike trip was cool for him, all that yucky stuff would be too much for me. It was more about avoiding the bad than gambling for the good.
Now, granted, sometimes EVERYTHING goes wrong and then you wonder if traveling is really worth it, but most of the time it doesn’t go all wrong. Sure, we’ve drowned a cell phone, been stuck on Splash Mountain, had trouble at the American border, forgot Simon at the bathroom in Disneyland, had a wheel come flying off our holiday trailer in an epic manner, thought our car was on fire, and I once got instant food poisoning from eating one peanut dusted with ghost pepper. But those things were just sprinkled in with all the other really good and great things we did, like a good spice. (But seriously, don’t mess with that ghost pepper.)
Long story short, it’s all worth it. I mean, you could stay at home and still have all kinds of things go wrong, right? Or you could think about all the fun you had on your last vacation while waiting for Air Canada to deliver your luggage to Vermilion because it didn’t make it on your connecting flight. Which is what we’re doing right now while watching the first game of the Battle of Alberta.
[A annotated hockey throwback – I guess this would be a backhand shot?]
Now that Easter is over, our household has entered the next holiday season: Hockey. I can call it a holiday because just like after a big meal at Christmas or Easter, it’s difficult to get my husband off the couch – unless, of course, he’s actually going to a game. I consider it fortunate if Rick agrees to do something else with me if the Oilers are on TV. [We’re currently on vacation, in a city whose team thankfully did not make it into the playoffs, while Rick’s beloved Oilers did. But my husband, while he still loves his hockey, forgot to factor in that he’d be missing some first-round playoff hockey in the safety of his own province when we planned this getaway. Clearly, he now has too many other things on his mind.] It’s also not worth it if the activity is something where he can talk a lot, openly reminding me what he’s missing while he could be enriching his mind with the edifying commentary of Ron MacClean and Don Cherry. [We all know what happened to Don Cherry but Ron is still holding down the fort.]
I’m not sure exactly why I’m not a hockey fan. Along with Edmonton [football team] games, it was one of the times I really enjoyed, because most or all of the family would gather around the television like it was a fireplace on a frosty Canadian evening. But, out of a family of seven kids, I am probably the only one who has never watched an entire game on TV. I’m more the type that comes in for the commercials and goes to fix snacks when the game resumes. My brothers were diehard Black Hawks fans: it was a banner Saturday night in our house when the Hawks were on and a cause for real celebration if they won. My two sisters had more focused interests, namely Bobby Orr and Bobby Clark, but they, too, actually watched the game.
When I became a teenager, however, I did begin to show an interest in hockey, but it manifested itself in a covert Wayne Gretzky newspaper clipping collection. You see, in my house the Edmonton Oilers had become the equivalent of watching Oprah Winfrey win another Emmy for Best Talk Show. [This is called Toronto Maple Leaf Fan Syndrome now.] But Wayne was only a few years older than me and his long flowing locks did the same thing to me as Guy Lafleur did for other women 10 years earlier. [R.I.P Guy Lafleur April 22, 2022.] Years later I married an avid Oilers fan (begrudgingly accepted by my big brothers). When I confessed to Rick years later, after the said clipping collection had gone the way of the burn barrel, that I had once harboured a secret Wayne Gretzky adoration, he said he would have felt the same way if he was a girl. [My mother saved those clippings for years after I had left home. She must have liked him, too.]
My three sons have yet to develop any sort of attention span when daddy settles down to watch a hockey game. All I have to do is dangle the Berenstain Bears or Dr. Suess in front of them and I have company. But they love wearing the Oilers hats that Dad got them and pretty soon they’ll probably sit with him for longer that it takes the theme song to play out. [This has definitely come to pass. Now, if we’re all together, WE gather around the TV like it’s a fireplace.] At that point, I’ll have probably have time to do my thing. Or maybe I’ll actually have to learn to enjoy watching hockey as Rick is always hoping. Chances are good that I’ll be hanging out in the living room, still doing my thing, but enjoying the four of them jumping and cheering when the right team scores. [I actually do enjoy watching hockey now, but even more, I love being part of Team Donily – of which Oil loyalty is a given. Go, Oilers, Go!]
“There’s nothing I hate more than nothing. Nothing keeps me up at night. I toss and turn over nothing. Nothing can cause a GREAT BIG FIGHT.” – Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians
We’ve been cruising through the Seinfeld catalog of episodes, watching one or two every couple of days. Its basic premise is that it’s a show about nothing,the minutiae of daily life. Every episode is ridiculous and inane, but like coming upon a relationship accident, I can’t look away. We will finish watching the whole series. Nothing is going to get in our way.
Unless something does. On any given day, all of my best-laid plans – to exercise, to not procrastinate writing my latest blog post, to watch the next episode of Seinfeld – can so easily get derailed by…nothing. Nothing is another word for regular life. “What’s new?”, an friend will ask and the first thing that comes into my mind is: nothing.
Which isn’t true, right? If you keep any sort of diary or journal or even if Facebook assaults you with some weird anniversary (Celebrate 10 Years of Friendship with Your Accountant!) and you look back two, five or ten years ago, you can quite plainly see that things do change – maybe at a snail’s pace but still. Even a snail moves at 0.048 km/hr. That’s better than the average couch potato. I can plainly see my routine has changed from two years ago (because: Covid), my face looks different from five years ago (hello: wrinkles) AND I have a different accountant from ten years ago.
This blog is sort of about nothing. I’ve been trying to shape it and figure out what it’s about since I started. I write about writing (very meta!), about memories (how ephemeral!), about what I read lately and occasionally about stuff that happens. It’s a pretty good antidote for thinking that nothing happens when I read a post from two years ago or a throwback from twenty years ago.
Sometimes I wonder why I keep writing. And then when I write, I figure out why I do. It’s nothing, really.
I tend to write a lot about memory and things from the past – specifically my memory and my past. It’s not that I don’t like living in the present, but I am a ruminator of days gone by when it comes to putting things down on paper (or computer). Maybe it has to do with my reticence to form an early opinion – you won’t find me Tweet-ing or Status-ing a heck of a lot. I read the backlist of books more often than new releases. I like to cull pictures and memorabilia five or ten years later – when I have some sense of what’s really important to me.
What’s important to me is subjective, but as a memory keeper for my family I do sometimes hold onto things that I think maybe my boys will one day agree is important: their favorite t-shirts from teenager-hood, picture books from toddlerhood and even some baby teeth and the locks of first haircuts. Rick and I also have things saved from our teenage and toddler years and then, beyond that, I have things that I saved of my mother’s – greeting cards from us kids, her wedding invitation collection and a stack of Edmonton Journal comics pages that I cannot recycle. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
A couple weeks ago Rick and I wandered into the Old Strathcona Antique Mall, a place burgeoning with nostalgia, complete with price tags. We have a few things we might want to sell so we were looking for similar things – and we quickly learned we weren’t going to get rich. But it was fascinating to see what was deemed saveable and saleable: a used paper cup with a John Deere emblem, a framed and signed photo of Wayne Gretzky on ice only wearing skates and gym shorts circa 1980-something, hundreds of mugs and badges and signs emblazoned with old logos and all the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys books ten times over.
As we wandered the aisles, we did a lot of “I remember that!” and “My auntie had one of those!” and also plenty of “I can’t believe that someone would want that/pay for that/saved that!” But then, everyone’s memory is subjective – and important. I recently read Susan Orlean’s The Library Book, which chronicles the history of the Los Angeles Central Library told with the through-line of the devastating fire that nearly wiped it out in the 1986. I found it so interesting that the library wasn’t just the storehouse of books, magazines and DVDs. Of course, I’m aware that most libraries have collections or archives of some sort. But a large library like the one in Los Angeles also is the repository of old maps, single subject book collections (like about rubber or oranges) donated posthumously by a passionate collector’s family, and any and all paraphernalia deposited there by defunct social action groups. It’s like they think everything is important.
And it is. Maybe not to you or me, but to someone else it could the connection to a history they thought was lost. Or never knew about at all. It reminds me ofan episode of Marie Kondo’s show Tidying Up, where a retired couple had never cleaned out the house they inherited from the husband’s parents, just moved in themselves. Once they started sifting and purging their closets, old photos surfaced and antiques they never knew about – and never would have if someone hadn’t saved it in the first place.
I’m not saying we should save everything – gosh, people are paying too much for storage lockers as it is. But curating a collection of things important to you – in a bureau or a box or a book – is actually good way to secure your place in the future, a way to remember and be remembered.
In any random list of writing prompts, this is a question that often pops up. After all, everyone thinks about it when you hear what the Lotto 649 Jackpot is this week: What would it be like to win a million or ten million or fifty million dollars? What would it be like to really be rolling in the dough?
There are, of course, the stock answers, the ones that kind of make sense: I’d pay off my mortgage and maybe all my family’s mortgages. I’d quit my job. I’d travel the world. I’d never have to shovel snow/mow the lawn/clean the bathroom again – unless I really wanted to. I would buy a new [fill in the blank]. And then I would ridiculously wonder to myself if a million or ten million or fifty million dollars would really be enough, you know, to do it ALL.
The brilliance of the question is that if you’re really honest with yourself, you can figure out a lot about what you really want – right now – without the lottery. If telling your boss “I QUIT” is your first impulse, then maybe that job isn’t serving you so well anymore and you need to find a new job or a new attitude. If travelling is first on the docket, then maybe you need to figure out how to get to Mexico or Moose Jaw more often. Me, I would buy up all the tired little houses and fix ’em up and sell them without worrying about making a profit. Maybe even give them away. Not practical, probably, but it would be kind of fun, right?
There’s also the darker question, the one we might not think of right away: what kind of lottery are we talking about? A Shirley Jackson lottery? You remember her eerie story that you read in high school, the one that pinged in your brain when you watched the movie The Hunger Games– where A PERSON is selected by lottery? And not for anything good. No thanks, I don’t want to win that one.
In Neil Pasricha’s book The Happiness Equation, he admonishes his audience to REMEMBER THE LOTTERY whenever we start thinking ridiculous things like “my life sucks” or “there’s never enough”. Our human brains have a propensity to look for problems, so such pessimistic thinking is actually natural. It’s a bit of a survival mechanism. It’s what spurs us to keep buying lottery tickets in the first place. But we can also remind our brains: Hey, remember? You’re alive, you’re here. And that means you’ve already won. You’ve survived this far.
Remember the lottery. Being alive means you’ve already won.
It used to be that around Easter, every grocery store would sponsor something called a Coloring Contest. A parent could pick up a photocopied coloring page of an Easter bunny or a decorated egg or – jackpot! – both (see above) and take it home for their child so they could enter the realm of arbitrary competition by coloring the picture and then dropping off the completed masterpiece back at the grocery store. Odds of winning substantially increased if your parent dropped it off at the same store. You could check for yourself if you went before the specified holiday and found yours among the multitude of identical holiday icons, taped into place like another brick in the wall.
The week after Easter you would find out who won the contest when you read the Vermilion Standard where we went for all the latest tweets before the advent of smart phones. I never knew how first prize (a bike), second prize (a ham) and third prize (an Eastalta Co-op-logo-emblazed t-shirt that would never be worn, ever, except maybe to paint the barn) were awarded. I assumed, at the tender age when coloring pictures was a passion, that it was because of serious coloring skills. Alas, I realize now that after Easter, someone probably crunched every last page into a ball, threw them into a bingo barrel and picked out three AT RANDOM.
Or maybe (more likely) someone from the store chose their three favorites, perhaps because The Winning Color-er used a particularly lovely shade of yellow for the Easter chick. Or because they painted their bunny rabbit the sanctioned brown or white, the usual bunny colors. (But not purple or blue or black. You probably couldn’t win with a black Easter bunny. Not when I was a kid.)
I harbour particularly bad feelings about a particular substitute teacher when I was in grade five surrounding a memory about coloring pictures of Easter bunnies. I probably thought it was pretty lame that IN GRADE FIVE we were given pictures to color for “art class”, but I this was also back when I was in Obedient Student mode. If you gave me an school assignment, I was on it. (Well, except for maybe gym class.) So, I colored my Easter bunny some very lovely shades of violet and mauve, thinking I could at least go the avant garde route.
I probably still hadn’t recovered from The Yellow Submarine Fiasco of Grade One when I discovered my picture pinned up on the back bulletin board with a mark (a mark!!) of 55% on it – for everyone to see and to compare. Oh, and I compared! My coloring was impeccable! I had added tufts of grass around the bunny’s feet! I used gold-leaf to embellish the Easter egg! This was a travesty! Meanwhile, my academic rival, who happened to be this teacher’s neighbor and favorite, colored his rabbit plain old Laurentian number 10 brown and got 95%.
The angst is not unlike that of this comedian – skip ahead to time 2:47 when his father derides him for coloring a monkey purple. (Purple is obviously the choice of us “artistic people”.)
I suppose that it’s these kind of childhood events that “build character”. For sure, they build grudges memories. But even more, I like to think that this was when I started to call out the status quo, to contest the idea that “teacher knows best” if only in my mind. What’s wrong with a purple cartoon bunny anyway? Where’s the creativity in everyone’s picture looking exactly the same?
I’m a big fan of creativity. And sometimes that looks like standing out and looking different from everyone else. And it’s definitely not something that should be marked and compared. Just sayin.
When I was in grade one, my teacher (Mrs. W.) gave our class a writing project – an exciting culmination to the whole “learning to read” thing. She showed us how to fold a few regular papers in half and staple them at the folded edge to create a booklet, upon which we could immortalize our words and illustrations.
Unfortunately, I don’t have it anymore. So much for immortality.
But it is my first remembered effort at publication. And I do recall – rather clearly – both the text and my drawings, probably because of the traumatic circumstances that surrounded my budding authorship. Namely, when my minimus opus had made the round-trip journey from my desk to the teacher’s and back again, I discovered that it had been marred with the frightening letter “C”. It was my first rejection letter as a writer.
Why, you ask, did my teacher NOT LIKE my story? (Imagine me as a miniature person, with short crooked bangs and spindly arms, feigning a thrust of a dagger to the heart. Actually, see the picture above, taken sometime before Mrs. W. crushed me.)
What had I written, you ask? Let’s see, it went something like this: We all live in a yellow submarine… Yeah, that was the start of it anyways, with accompanying pictures of stick people looking out of the portholes of a yellow spaceship-y thing. It went on like this for a riveting eight to ten pages.
Okaaaaay, so technically I stole the idea from the Beatles. At least I can’t be blamed for my taste, even though I did gravitate at that age to the Ringo songs. Maybe I wasn’t reaching as high as I could have. It doesn’t really matter because I was just borrowing a tried-and-true line so that I could learn how to write a story. Also, I must have missed that day in grade one that we learned about copyright law.
Needless to say, this memory bothered me for a long time – not (necessarily) because of the “C” but because I felt I had done something really wrong. That is, until I discovered Austin Kleon, one of my favorite creative people. No one vindicates the fledgling (and also the mature) artist better than he does. I’ve written about him before.Steal Like An Artistis now ten years old and his blog is way older. Both are an homage to how artists learn by stealing.
This is, after all, where all artists begin – by copying. Picasso didn’t always paint those crazy limp-necked, weird-eyed bird people: he only did that stuff after he drew a whole bunch of (recognizable) bowls of fruit. And even the Beatles – who I first riffed off – started out as a cover band. It’s only after you imitate the giants who came before you enough times are you able to jump off their shoulders and start doing your own thing. And sometimes, just writing down someone else’s lyrics so you can memorize them or filling out a paint-by-number is good enough to satisfy the creative urge within us. That doesn’t make it any less of a creative endeavor and it always delivers that positive, constructive feeling of putting your own hand to something.
Check out Steal Like An Artist in a special 10th anniversary edition! It’s an eminently readable book – with pictures! – and plenty of encouragement for all.
Recently, while reading through Amy K. Rosenthal’s Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life, I was amused by her “Table of Most Memorable TV Shows and Movies”. AKR was born shortly before me so a lot of her choices were happily familiar – The Carol Burnett Show, The Electric Company, The Love Boat and (not the re-booted) Fantasy Island. Thinking about them took me back to the living room(s) of my childhood – how differently we used to watch television.
First of all – the word television: does it even apply if you watch a show on your laptop or tablet or phone? Often you don’t even hear the phrase “I’m watching TV” anymore. Instead, we’re often watching Netflix or YouTube. I do still watch THE TV – the news, the shows we’ve PVR’d and of course, Netflix (and Disney and Prime) when we’re looking for commercial-free binge-ability.
What struck me this last week while my husband was away for a week-long convention and I wasn’t watching any of “our shows”, was how different the experience of watching TV was from when I was a kid. The physically obvious: there was no such thing as a remote control. If I wanted to change the channel, I would have to get up off the couch (or reach up from where I was laying on my stomach in front of the TV) and turn the channel dial. No buttons, no electronic lights. If my Dad or any of my older siblings wanted to change the channel, again, I would get up off the couch and turn the channel for them. (Little siblings everywhere were a prototype for the universal remote.)
And channels? The word barely registered as plural. We had three and sometimes one didn’t work. And that was only after my dad had a rotor installed so we could actually turn the giant antennae on our house to catch our choice of network: CBC (which was CKSA Lloydminster), CTV (CFRN in Edmonton) and if the airwaves aligned correctly, we might also get CITV from Edmonton, which was somehow kind of cooler because it was a new station in the ’70s. Our antenna wasn’t quite like a tuneable satellite dish – Rick’s grampa had one the size of a hot tub parked on his front lawn – but it did the trick.
Because that was all I knew. I memorized the TV schedules (didn’t we all?) – at different times during my growing up years Sundays was The Waltons, Fridays was Dallas (and Good Rockin’ Tonight after my parents went to bed), Thursdays was St. Elsewhere, Saturdays was The Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show. And if you missed it, you missed it. If you weren’t home the day that Mary Ingalls became blind or Mary Richards finally moved out of her studio apartment and then you missed the re-run (and who knew when that would happen?), then you might have to wait until the nineties or the aughts to find the show on VHS or DVD.
As a teenager, I would often spend a week of my summer vacation staying with my older siblings once they moved to The City and graduated to the fascinating world of cable TV. Most of my “vacation” with them was spent with the television while they were off at work. For the first time, I watched The Price is Right, Eight is Enough, even Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood – all offerings that my local networks didn’t offer. While I was there, I also read all their magazines or listened to all their record albums, but I could also ask (nicely) to borrow them when I went home. Cable TV stayed where it was so that kind of made it special.
Isn’t it funny how we need the entertainment, the news, the sports? One of the first things my roommate Reva and I did when we moved into an apartment before we started university was to sign up for cable TV. Annnnnnd Superchannel which was (gasp!) Only Movies. If the U of A had offered a course on Terms of Endearment, I would have aced it. Because there still wasn’t that much choice when I turned on the television. If the choice was between Terms or studying for mid-terms, the TV probably won – at least until the panic set in 24 hours before said midterm.
And now, if I need to go to the bathroom or fix a snack in the middle of a show, I just hit pause and go. There was a moment last week when I did just that and it triggered the memory of how we used to only do that during commercials. As soon as the break happened, when watching TV in real time, you would run to the bathroom or the kitchen because otherwise you would miss the show. And I kinda missed that. For maybe a minute. Then I sat back down with my snack and resumed my show.
