Monthly Archives: August 2020

About Writing: One Year Later

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There are two ways for me to look at this last year of blogging: it has been either a complete success or a total failure. How I choose to look at it could be an illustration of that classic conundrum: is the glass half empty or is it half full?

Or, is it neither of those things?

Perspective really is everything, so let’s look at it first from the glass half-full side of things. I DID NOT get as much accomplished with my writing as I had hoped in this past year since I started my (second) blog. Because the blog was supposed to be my side-thingy, my practice space, my other writing project.

This is the assessment of someone who writes admittedly unrealistic to-do, to-read, to-write, to-learn, to-visit, to-cook, to-go, to-knock-out-of-the park lists. When I compose such lists, I have endless resources in my estimation: all the time, ambition and money necessary. And then reality hits that ALL of those things are finite: I HAVE TO CHOOSE how to use WHAT I’VE GOT. Half a glass is plenty to get me where I need to go. It can get me to the bathroom, if that’s where I want to go, eventually.

To flip things, my half-full glass was a lot. A year ago, I was trying to figure out what kind of blog I wanted to write, what the heck were widgets and plugins (in blog-speak) and how to get over the fear of just putting my words out there into the blogosphere (a.k.a blogophobia.) Frankly, I’m still trying to figure out those things.

And then, there’s the simple fact that for the last year, at least once a week, I posted something to this blog. When I hear about the discipline of someone like Seth Godin who posts every single day, I’m humbled in my efforts. Sure, his daily posts are super short but any kind of regular writing simply requires: 1. ideas of any calibre; 2. actually writing the ideas and; 3. coming back to the keyboard again and again and again.

I haven’t yet become an no-day-without-the-line kind of writer (which I have resolved to do on at least one of my to-do lists) but 52 weeks times about 750 words is…well, it’s a book. So bravo, Bon. It’s only a novella, perhaps, but some of my favorite books – The Little Prince, 84 Charing Cross Road, The Wizard of Oz, The War of Art, Animal Farm – are just teeny-tiny but they have a pages and a front and back cover and I bought them without any qualms that they weren’t what I thought they were: a book.

But maybe, just maybe, this last year of writing has been something else. Not pee in my glass, exactly, but certainly not what I expected. I mean (said in a Monty Python voice): NOBODY EXPECTS A GLOBAL PANDEMIC. And if I was not writing my blog, I probably would not have reflected on it as much as I did – at least not for public consumption or in any coherent way. I would never have written about George Floyd or a letter to Santa Claus or about Clarence the TV Dog.

So what is this other thing? It’s a glass, of sorts, a receptacle, it’s a ball diamond in the middle of a cornfield. If I hadn’t built it, I wouldn’t have come to the page week after week. Maybe I haven’t knocked it out of the park – yet – but at least I wrote about it.

And I can let that be enough.

About FOMO and JOMO

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I don’t know about you but I’m not sure that I want to be a part of this global pandemic thingy anymore.

Okay, I know I don’t really have an option. But after nearly six months of this, some serious FOMO is starting to set in. Even though some of the things I’m missing aren’t even there anymore. Like outdoor festivals (which I usually don’t go to) or sports (which I usually don’t watch). So it’s not so much FOMO as just MO.

Plus, I’m starting to miss weird things.

Like the ridiculous amounts of Back-To-School fliers that inundated my recycle box in all the previous years that didn’t begin with the numbers 202… Or the over-zealous same TV commercials that showed off tiny children wearing clothing way more fashionable than mine. Instead, there’s just Apple and Amazon commercials telling me that It’s going to be okay. (Because they’re the two companies making the most moneys right now. So I guess it’s nice of them to share…sentiment?)

I also find I’m missing crowds. Normally I can do without shouldering my way through people in shopping malls. But a visit to West Edmonton Mall this week was just eerie. I mean, WHERE DID ALL THE PEOPLE GO? Answer: At home on their iPhones placing another Amazon order.

I’m also missing playing chicken on the sidewalks. I mean, in a normal non-COVID season, one would walk towards someone on the sidewalk and play that little psychological game with them of “You-move-I’m-not-moving.” You might even (gasp!) TOUCH THEM as you swerve by. But now oncomers move differentially to each other, creating cow-paths on peoples’ lawns and preferring oncoming traffic to touching an actual human being with a six-foot pole. It makes me want reflexively check my deodorant levels, but then I remember – Oh right, it’s just an epidemic.

A solution, perhaps, would be to embrace JOMO – the joy of missing out. I mean, there is a certain simplicity in less: less people, less (physical) shopping, less decisions – because they’re just not there to make. But I feel like I’m completely glossing over all the really-real problems. After all, not-shopping is not technically a hardship, at least not-shopping for new clothes and school supplies at the malls when most of last year’s will do just fine.

Maybe there were aspects of the world as we knew it that weren’t particularly healthy – I mean, if people aren’t at the malls and in the restaurants and swerving on the sidewalks, that’s not really essential anyway, is it? But as I miss things as they were, I need to ask myself what exactly am I struggling with?

I am struggling with change. I kind of liked the world – with all its craziness – just the way it was. I’m sad for businesses and sports and churches that have had to shut down and are figuring out how to survive – or realizing they can’t.

I am struggling with uncertainty. I was told this week that THIS might last for two, maybe even three years. I don’t even want to say that out loud, but there it is. Buckle up and settle in – COVID appears to be the new tenant in the building previously occupied by HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, EMPLOYED and UNPHASED-BY-COMMON-COLD-SYMPTOMS. And we don’t know how long of a lease Mr. Epidemic took out.

And I’m struggling with plain old selfishness. I want things to be the way they used to be. I want to not wear a mask, not worry about visiting people outside of my bubble and not give a second thought to touching them. I want to travel again and not shake my head at Americans (over this). I also want kids to go to school and for teachers not to have to worry about disinfecting every surface, every second of every day. I want health-care workers to be able to relax a little and for people who are immunocompromised not consider everything a life-threatening decision.

Maybe it’s not even about shopping, not even a little bit. Maybe I want my party not just with cake, but with people, too, the way it used to be. I’m not sure I even want to think about Christmas and how different that will be.

But maybe realizing what I miss is actually making me more thankful for what was, what is. And let’s hope, for what will someday be, even if it looks a little different.

About Shel Silverstein and His Unexpected Art

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Shel Silverstein, barefoot, grinning and playing rhythm guitar
Shel Silverstein: Poet, Songwriter, Author, Illustrator

A few years ago, Rick and I took a trip to Nashville. We did all the important stuff: we went to the Grand Ole Opry for some truly toe-tapping entertainment, toured Sun Studio and stood on the Singer’s Sweet Spot, and walked Broadway and listened to live music pour out of every single bar and restaurant. And, of course, we went to the Country Music Hall of Fame, a gargantuan 3-storey repository of all things that twang and yodel.

On the top floor, we lucked out: one of the rotating exhibits then featured Johnny Cash’s creative and friendly relationship that he had with Bob Dylan. The display educated us about Johnny’s prowess in the musical world, his love for all genres and his openness to collaboration with oh, so many other artists. All the pictures, stories, music, movies and artifacts led us to a new appreciation of how country, folk and rock ‘n’ roll music were in each other’s back pockets all the time.

Of course, the usual suspects were there: Waylon and Willie and the boys. And then I rounded the corner and found Shel Silverstein.

Shel Silverstein? Of Where the Sidewalk Ends and Falling Up fame? The creator of children’s books Runny Babbit and The Giving Tree? Yup. It was the one and same. This was one of those times when my awareness of an author’s gifts barely scratched the surface of the sum total of his artistic contributions.

Silverstein didn’t look like your typical country music lyricist. Indeed, his roots were Jewish and he hailed from Chicago, far north of the Mason-Dixon line. But his words read whimsical and wise, not completely unlike a Jewish rabbi’s. They were also often quirky and dark.

The Giving Tree (also illustrated by Silverstein – yes, more talent) tells of the relationship between a young boy and a favorite tree – a tree that throughout the boy’s life keeps giving and giving and meeting all the boy’s needs until it makes the ultimate sacrifice. And then it still has more to give. (Read the book!) Its message is so poignant it can make you cry. It can also quite possibly make you mad – the book has been banned because it was interpreted as sexist: the tree exhibited some overexploited female qualities to some Colorado librarians in 1988. Read more about The Giving Tree here.

(Incidentally, you can find most classic children’s picture books on YouTube and have some gramma or grampa turn the virtual pages and read them out loud to you and spare you the embarrassment of checking out piles of picture books for yourself from the library. Like I do.)

Knowing Silverstein’s style, it all came together for me that day in Nashville as I read the huge placard that talked about his contributions to Country Music. And his connection to Cash? He wrote A Boy Named Sue. Well, duh.

As if there wasn’t enough for me to take in that day at the CMHOF, I whipped out my trusty portable encyclopedia – er, iPhone to you rookies – and found out even more lyrics he was famous for:

  • Loretta Lynn’s One’s on the Way – a cheeky tribute to exhausted motherhood
  • Sylvia’s Mother released in the same year by country singer Bobby Bare and, in the version I knew, by Dr. Hook and the Travelling Medicine Show
  • Put Another Log on the Fire, subtitled the Male Chauvinist National Anthem

The great thing about Silverstein’s songs? Like another Dr. Hook tune The Cover of the Rolling Stone? They were just so darn singable.

On the surface, Shel Silverstein’s lyrics and picture may have looked rudimentary and maybe even unsophisticated, but if you dig in you can see that “(they) sing about beauty and (they) sing about truth”. And it’s all told in a way to make you smile.

And really? What more could you ask?

About Gardening, Again

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So maybe my garden is not the hopeless case I thought it was going to be when I wrote about it a few weeks ago.

Okay, there’s still a bald patch where the cucumbers committed vegecide, but I could just pretend that some lettuce was growing there and we already ate it. And the beans are promising to make a nice side dish for supper next week.

There’s even some unearned glory, as we never planted this:

But the real redemption that happened is this:

REAL tomatoes. In fact, I still had some fake cherry tomatoes from my last Costco shopping spree and they were downright embarrassed to share the counter with such beauties. They’re not going to show their faces around here for awhile.

Tomatoes aside, this time of year has me hankering for all the other garden offerings, even some over large zucchini squash, as the seeds I planted stood me up.

In that spirit, here’s a throwback homage (from my old column, with a few updates) to that oh-so-versatile veggie that holds up the end of the alphabet:

            Every year a collective forgetfulness falls over all true vegetable gardeners. Inevitably, as they pass by the seed racks in the grocery stores, they pick up an extra package of zucchini seeds. Or perhaps it happened during the previous fall when they decided to dry an extra dozen or so. And then the funniest thing happens come planting time: they plant all of them! Or so it seems. Zucchini season hits and the squash are exploding off the vines faster than acne on a teenager.

            If you don’t have a garden, you aren’t exempt from the onslaught. The sweet Ukrainian lady next door who, in the summertime, you only glimpse bobbing and weaving between her giant beanstalks and rows of oak-like corn, sneaks over in the early morning and deposits 2 or 3 zucchini in a Tom-Boy bag on your doorstep. Perhaps they are concealed under a few onions, some new potatoes and two or three cukes, but all the same they’re there. And you know it’s her because you’ve seen her stash of vintage plastic. But unlike the proverbial baby in the basket, she has left no instructions of what to do with them. She was just happy to have a break from making another batch of pineapple-zucchini marmalade. (Or from pretending that zucchini curls really do taste like pasta.)

            So, once you’ve eaten your fill of zucchini bread, zucchini chocolate cake and you’ve canned enough zucchini jam for everyone under your Christmas tree, you may be ready for some creative zucchini alternatives. For instance, you could pretend you are any one of a number of fancy restaurants. After all, every time you go for a nice steak or chicken dinner, there it is on the side of your plate, a sautéed and garlicked pile of zucchini, disguised under the menu name “market vegetable”. (Or “gluten-free” spaghetti.)

            After you’ve exhausted every edible zucchini possibility, why not practice your carving skills? Use a paring knife to create a one-of a kind table centrepiece out of a monster zucchini: a boat with a cabbage leaf sail, a totem pole, a pair of Dutch clogs, you name it. Or just cut one into a basket shape, leaving a “handle” and scooping out the pulp. Use this as a serving dish for carrot and celery sticks. (Or for collecting more zucchini from your garden.)

            And finally, a truly Canadian option for the squash that got away on you: cut the zucchini lengthwise into slices approximately 1 inch thick and freeze them on cookie sheets. Once frozen, bag them, and then give them to your kids in the winter to use as hockey pucks on the backyard rink. It’ll make a great story for The Globe and Mail to dig up on your future Wayne Gretzky (Connor McDavid): “…so poor, the family couldn’t even afford a real puck…”

            It may be time to take an axe (or a paring knife) to the zucchini’s reputation that it is a boring and over-productive vegetable. As the days of summer (and COVID-19) go on, a zucchini may very well be the answer to the next time your child says, “Mom, I’m bored!!!” A word of caution, however: you may just run out of zucchini.

(Oh, and P. S. Go Oilers.)