"the faint hope line"

Photo: Jabley

I, and about 10 other hopefuls, stood on a staircase at the Harbourfront Centre, in what the gentleman behind me called "the faint hope line". We were waiting, with quiet expectation, for the possibility that somehow the powers-that-be would allow us into the sold-out Joan Didion reading.

Logical entreaties -- "you could let us slip in the back, we won't take up much room", were answered with logical responses -- "we've already added extra rows."

But, one by one, as the reading began, the powers-that-be found tickets to release, and all of us, and one or two latecomers, had our hopes answered.

I had read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking when I ostensibly bought it for my stepmother for her birthday. Didion's memoir, for which she recently won the U.S. National Book Award, is about the year following the sudden death of her husband of 40 years, a year in which their only child, a grown daughter, was critically ill. Since then, sadly, their daughter has died as well.

Having had both of my parents pass away in the last year, and my stepmother having lost her husband of 40 years, I felt the book was a must-read. I was right.

But knowing Didion through this book, and The White Album, and having seen various photos of her, where she looks frail and ghost-like, I was surprised to find her girlish, somehow youthful, an evergreen spirit.

Despite a writing persona that cries out depression or detachment, her voice was full of humour and light, as she recalled how her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, had to constantly assure people that she was not "depressing".

And she was not.

my first celebrity sighting

in the film mecca of Toronto. I'm never in the places people are usually 'seen', such as Bloor West, and deepfried's old bookstore in the Annex, so am still in a glow over spotting:

Chris Cooper and a female companion browsing outside a bookstore on Queen just east of Spadina.

Cooper is one of the best actors out there, and I've had a crush on him ever since I saw the very fine and little known film Thousand Pieces of Gold.

Not a lot of other celebrity sightings in my life:

Sara Gilbert (yawn) of Roseanne fame spotted in SoHo, Manhatten, and

Bob Seger, (respect) the master rocker and poet, who was visiting a bandmate in a Royal Oak hospital outside of Detroit and rode in an elevator with our family. No one else recognized him. I never said anything to him. I felt I was intruding just with the realization of who he was.

These things are always kind of surreal. You see these people and feel you know them, but of course you don't.

slouching

Oh, Joan Didion is sold-out for her reading at Harbourfront Centre on Monday night, and I don't have a ticket.

I'm thinking I may go anyway, hang around the edges, and maybe get in. Maybe there'll be scalpers. Maybe they'll be kind.

the pointlessness of candy

is why candy, especially chocolate, is such a delight. And despite not being pointless, Tim Burton's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory is a delight, too.

I'm late seeing this film, just released on DVD, and was not expecting much except bright colours, even though I am a die-hard Johnny Depp fan. I was never able to get into the earlier Gene Wilder version, but this newer version has made me want to read Roald Dahl's books.
And as these things go, and Joan Didion eloquently speaks of in her new book The Year of Magical Thinking, I was soon in a vortex of my own, one thought within six degrees of connection to the next.

I was familiar with the children's author Roald Dahl because he was the husband of the phenomonal actress Patricia Neal. She who won an Oscar for her portrayal of the earthy, laconic older woman to a young roguish Paul Newman in Hud. She, who like my mother, suffered a massive stroke at a young age. And she, who like my mother, battled back against huge odds to live her life with dignity.

That is how I knew Roald Dahl. He was Patricia Neal's British husband, who helped her with her recovery, invented a medical shunt for their brain-injured son, and then, after 30 years of marriage ran off with her best friend. I knew he wrote dark children's books.

Which is perhaps why I could never get into the original Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory film. It wasn't dark and I wasn't getting 'the point'. Yet, this new film's darkness is bitter and warming, like a rich chocolate. And it made me delight in the original story. It introduced me to Roald Dahl for his imaginative storytelling. I'm so glad I have a young niece and nephew who will probably love his stuff. (Well, maybe in a few years. I don't want to traumatize them).

And I sure would like to zip around, in any direction, anywhere, in a glass elevator.

poppies -- red and white

Photo: Andwar

November seems to be the right time for Remembrance Day, with its grey and sombre weather. Even when the sun shines, November is a month of serious things.

In this Year of the Veteran, remembrances of wars and the people who have fought in them are especially vivid and touching. Many of the veterans of World War II will not be with us much longer as they are people in their 80's and older.

The retrospective on CBC and the coverage of Parliament Hill services have been moving. The light shining through the window of the War Museum, on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, to frame the headstone of the unknown soldier, is the realization of a beautiful and respectful vision.

The terrors of war and how they destroy souls are vividly depicted in Crash Landing, to be presented on Passionate Eye again this upcoming Monday.

And white poppies, something I had never heard of before, but which have apparently been around since after World War I. White poppies to promote peace, not to replace the red and the life-blood they represent, but to complement them.

my mother's homefront

my grandparents, Evelyn and Floyd Baillargeon
my mother Joan, her brother Floyd Jr.






















Major Floyd Baillargeon






















My grandfather, a handsome man, spent most of the war years overseas, an absence my mother and uncle felt keenly during their young teen years. A lawyer upon entering the Canadian Army, family lore has it that he provided legal aid at the Nurembourg Trials.
My grandfather, like many of his time, did not speak to us about the war, but it seemed to be a memory of great pride for him. I wish I knew more.
The marriage of my mother's parents, troubled beforehand, did not survive long upon his return and both married again.
My grandfather remained a handsome, dashing figure until his death at age 80, even as he played a losing hand of Old Maid with a gaggle of giggling grandchildren.

stratford 1990 -- autumn

for seamus: august 13, '29 -- april 12, '05

Photo: Sara/akaPCat

Birches
By Robert Frost

WHEN I see birches bend to left and right
Across the line of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay.
Ice-storms do that. Often you must have seen them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow-crust —
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
And they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.
But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
(Now am I free to be poetical?)
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows —
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches;
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.
I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate wilfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:
I don't know where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.