Here’s a sad but true fact of life: everyone farts, and no one looks good flossing. Once you accept that reality, the world is your oyster.
You can look in the mirror, and realize you are perfectly normal. No matter what.
You can walk down the street, and know, that no matter how you jiggle, or what you might be wearing, or what you look like — you are just fine.
Enjoy the feel of the air on your face, and the sounds in the air.
I first met June when she arrived in my grade five class at Bronx Park School. Fresh off the boat from Scotland, her accent was so thick we could barely understand her and she made us laugh a lot. She and I were friends as much as 10-year-olds can be, but eventually were taken in different geographic directions.
When I was 11 we moved from LaSalle to the ‘wasp’ suburb of Pointe Claire, where she eventually moved as well at fourteen after more than a two-year gap in our friendship. I was living in the winding newly built suburban streets, while she was living in the old “village” – “downtown” Pointe Claire where the economically less privileged lived among French Canadians and immigrants. My neighbours were all white, English-speaking, with pretensions: We knew how to set the table, wore gloves and hats to church on Sundays, and certainly would not have sex before marriage. We all had the same accents, skin colour, and uniforms and the more people are alike, the more individual differences stand out. I was different. And I was miserable and homesick for the place where I’d felt free to be me.
One day at my school locker I happened to look up. There was June, in her awkward adolescent glory, and I was thrilled and relieved to see this delightful symbol from my happy past.
June and I saw the world in a similar way – and shared our ‘outsider’ status in mutually supportive ways. We both did badly academically – because we were too pre-occupied with our feelings and lives to focus on intellectual endeavors.
Besides, the world was much more fascinating than school – with frequent post-war news about the holocaust, the threat of nuclear war, not to mention the civil rights movement with its fascinating and horrifying revealing of extreme racism in America. Those were the same days when we’d read a newspaper account of a ‘negro’ boy our age being killed by white racists for whistling at a white woman. Or reports of another black lynching. It was an amazing and scary world to a couple of girls who had already been overly sensitized by emotional issues in our homes.
We did a few risky things together – for those times. Like hitch-hiking. Only in hindsight, of course, did we realize the potential danger of our ‘adventures’. But her father realized it. Living in the U.S. ‘getting rich’ while his Canadian family lived in poverty, he eventually placed her at 16 in a strict boarding school. (Which was when I met Betty – https://thinkinganddreaming.ca/2012/06/14/witness-to-poverty/)
At 17, June ran away from the school and hid under my bed for a few days. My sister and I secretly brought food to her until she was discovered and shipped back to school.
During those two years of close friendship, I was learning a lot about poverty without realizing it — though it often struck me as ‘unfair’ when she didn’t have money to do things I could do, like go to a dance or a movie. Some of my memories of that period still provoke tears: like the time she stole a white scarf from a “5 + 10” in order to give me a gift. Or the mortifying embarrassment she endured in having to make her own sanitary napkins from cloth rags. Or their Friday night treat of chips (“fries”) wrapped in newspaper – no fish.
Or the times that their exhausted single mom would, after they went to bed at night, close all the windows and turn on the gas. June would then quietly open the windows and turn off the gas. She would talk about this as if it were a hilarious game, and we’d both be bent over laughing. Only later did I get how desperate her mother must have been.
June and I stayed in touch off and on until our thirties in Montreal, through my first divorce and other misadventures. By then she was a single ‘welfare mom’ with two little boys, struggling to survive financially. I’d visit over a cup of tea and she’d tell me the latest about her — and her neighbours’ — struggles. She was always smart, quick-witted, and we always laughed a lot. In fact laughter to the crying stage was the one thing that always characterized our get-togethers.
But behind the laughter was her continuous frustration with the life she couldn’t give her boys – though a more affectionate, excellent mother I’ve seldom seen. She eventually came up with a brilliant scheme to get them up and out of it all, into her dream of living in Vancouver. Timing was of the essence, and she did a creative combination of holding back her rent payment for a few months and selling her furniture, so that she and the boys could fly a one-way trip to her dream city. Her old friend got her to the airport and onto that flight. I can still see June and the boys in the boarding lineup.
At the time, Vancouver was brilliant. It was almost as if they laid out a red carpet for her. A city worker drove her and the boys on a tour of the city, found her a home, furniture and everything she could need. To her, all her struggles had just been rewarded and she had arrived in heaven. To this day, I appreciate the differences in societal attitudes toward ‘welfare’.
I did visit her there too – and it was obvious she had made the right move. British Columbia was at its compassionate best, and comparatively speaking, she and the boys were well taken care of. Many years later I visited her in Powell River, where she, with her usual smarts, took me on a tour to show me the environmental damage done by MacMillan-Bloedel (known as “Mac-Blo” to the locals). She knew her stuff, explaining the biological aspects of a crystal-green, absolutely clear, pond she showed me – with absolutely nothing living in it.
From our teen years on, June often said, “The good die young.” And she did – at 53. I can instantly and vividly remember her laugh, her voice and her dimpled smile. I miss her still.
Betty was a foster child when I met her. We were both 16. She believed that her foster family had taken her in only to help around the house. Who can say if that was the truth, but it may have been. They had a toddler, and the mother did seem like a “cold fish”.
They lived a two-minute walk from our house – a quick jog through the park where we used to sit on the swings together and talk about life.
She was a Cheerful kid who laughed easily. Even in the saddest times she was to experience later on. When she moved back into tbe city to live with her mother again, I visited her a few times, and kept in touch periodically once we became working adults.
She “got herself pregnant” as we used to say, but Jimmy and Betty seemed to live happily together. Eventually we drifted off into our separate lives – hers from 18 on, a typical life of poverty like the one she’d grown up in, and mine that of an independent working woman entering my first job at 19.
One day when we were 20, she called and wanted to talk. She came to my apartment that evening after work. Through her sobs, she told me that Jimmy was gone and she had given up her two-year-old for adoption. The unbearable story was that Jimmy had apparently experienced a severe depression and breakdown, then disappeared.
In those days, there was no quick welfare fix available. Betty did have a social worker from her days as a foster child, and had gone to her looking for help. The social worker, had convinced her that the most loving, considerate thing she could do for her two-year-old would be to give her up for adoption and a ‘better life’.
I cried with her, as it was easy to see the unbearable pain this had created. Though I had not yet experienced motherhood, I could see this would be a permanent wound. I raged inside at the unfairness of it all.
We did drift apart again, no doubt fading in each others’ memories. Then many years later, it all came back when I adopted a two-year-old. Now I understood at a deeper level, for the first time, that a two-year-old is not a baby, but a person. Unlike adoption of an infant, with a child that age the situation is more like an arranged marriage. I could see and experience some of the emotional adjustment my two-year-old had to go through – her own little ‘shock and awe’ so to speak. Taking her away from her foster family – where she’d been from the beginning – was akin to ripping someone’s arm off, then putting it back and trying to make it heal.
Now, 27 years later, I can still remember the wounding of my daughter. And I still sometimes wonder how Betty’s daughter has done in the world. These events deeply inform my beliefs today as a witness to the reality of poverty.
Whatever cynical myths I hear about ‘poor people’ can never change the bitter truth forever imprinted on my heart.
I must have been eight when Linda’s house on Second Avenue burned down. The news of her burning house spread by word of mouth – people passing it on as they walked by – people milling about in the street, perhaps shouting to a passerby “Did you hear about the Matts’ house?”
My grade three self reeled in shocked disbelief. Linda was a grade before me, and it seemed like the most horrible thing that could happen to a human being, shattering my sense of a secure world that could be taken completely for granted.
The day after the fire, we walked over to see the smoldering ruin. I remember the piles of black rubble, and a still-standing chimney. My sense of horror remains. I obsessed about it for days, insisting that we buy a toy for Linda, as they now had nothing. I still remember the doll we bought for her.
As it turned out, the fire did ‘ruin’ them. They did not have insurance, and joined ‘the poor’ in the neighbourhood. A few years later they were in a rental flat next door to us, and my now 10-year-old mind saw Linda only as ‘the girl whose house burned down’. I knew that the black dress she wore was meant for a woman – probably her mother – and that she didn’t have many choices.
In those days, poor people didn’t have TV or order in pizza. And there was no ‘poor ghetto’ – they had to live next door to people who could afford a more luxurious lifestyle, with the embarrassment of the difference.
From Linda’s lost home, I learned about insurance and very vividly about how poverty can happen. I learned about how dramatically life can change overnight. That experience has been reverberating in me ever since.
I was thinking about my life-long love of ‘discussion’, when it struck me that focusing on a subject in solitude was more productive and rewarding, because there is more time and space to dwell on each thought that arises, with no pressure from ‘the other’.
In a discussion, while it’s true that we get more instant feedback and ideas, we also tend to get a lot of passion and emotion, with some ‘arguments’ dominating and others receding, based on passion rather than reason.
An everyday example for me would be the subject of gentrification. Such a discussion would tend to quickly evolve into ‘pros and cons’, instead of an organic movement of an idea through a kind of ‘trying on’ of each thought, which is how I tend to think an idea through by myself.
The solitary approach has often been more productive and satisfying, I thought, so began to wonder what might have motivated my urge to converse. The answer must have been lying there just waiting for my question, for what instantly popped into my head was “affirmation”.
It seems to me that perhaps an unfulfilled need for affirmation has floated under and behind me in many parts of my life, so I avoided doing anything that could possibly be criticized. Until recently, I almost never let others read what I wrote since adolescence; I was afraid to speak in front of people in spite of many public speaking courses; I certainly couldn’t sing for an audience, despite three years of voice training.
Now I write without fear, and have spoken in groups, and even sang in public recently. So what has changed? I think it’s not that I no longer need affirmation, but rather that I now affirm myself.
I suppose I could romanticize what has happened, but I believe the reality is much more practical, simple and straightforward: years of working on breaking habits of thought have begun to come together. For example, I stopped the hymn of self-criticism and judgment that used to play in my head most of the time. And I’ve ‘practised’ a feeling of contentment enough that it has finally replaced chronic low-grade anxiety or depression most of the time.
Kind of amazing what the ‘inward journey’ can produce. So now I can produce paragraph after (just censored “boring”) paragraph. That was a typical example. Even for the sake of self-deprecating humour, it is important to eliminate self-destructive habits like that.
Which brings me back to productivity vs. conversation. Maybe it’s time to work on a few more habits – like being productive before I indulge in that other pleasure – conversation. Perhaps coffee, then conversation later in the morning…. This requires some productive reflection.
And meanwhile, I absolutely give myself permission to write – and publish – a piece which some would consider boring; and let that be the reader’s issue, not mine.
Poetry…. Nostalgia…. History…. Political rants …. Hey, it’s my blog and I’ll do what I want with it. That’s the incredible, amazing thing about blogging.
I’ve come to think of it as a new form of communication, (as opposed to ‘publishing’ for example) and as such it is changing the world. In fact, now that I think of it, this really is related to that phrase we hear floating by now and then, “information wars”. A new world struggle is forming around the question of who controls information. Is that why there are issues around internet security, internet ‘regulation’?
Imagine a world in which, for the first time in history, everyone on Mother Earth can communicate with everyone else. We’re almost there. Obviously we don’t all speak the same language, but even that has been changing. Looks like English is increasingly the international language. Lucky me. A quick search can find me in conversation with someone just about anywhere in the world – especially in northern Europe.
We’re getting to know each other. If we, the human race, can successfully resist the attempts of governments to control the internet, we will continue to experiment with new ways of making choices together around the world. We can find new ways of making choices together, dialoguing, working/playing at understanding each other.** Learning to really listen to each other – without the interference of various bureaucracies. Imagine governments actually representing us, working for us.
Of course that would mean we’d have to get our acts together, and be careful and responsible — caring and responsive.
Long ago, I dreamed of ‘world peace’, assuming it would be brought about by slowly, painstakingly, moving governments in that direction. But now, limited only by our imagination and creativity, we can do it in spite of them!
** (Example!) –http://freespeechdebate.com/en/
When I was young, longing was a weakness – a character flaw. One would sooner express anything embarrassing, than admit to any kind of longing.
Instead we admitted nothing, closed our eyes in the dark, and listened to the poetry and music of longing much of it created by those who felt the “love that dared not speak its name”. No matter – it spoke to all longing hearts.
I hid my yearning in a diary. And smiled a lot.
The powerlessness of youth.
Now, with graying hair, I still smile a lot.
But yearn much less, and feel so powerful —
Compared to those naïve days
Before the ‘revolution’….
Starting with silence.
Let us not fill up the air between us
With nouns and verbs and adjectival phrases
Trying to build a bridge,
Trying to touch.
Let us simply sense,
What there is to sense.
Even
A potential sigh.
I tend to wrap you round about with words
Instead of arms.
Most of us float through life assuming we are ‘normal’. If we ever wonder about it, that might happen in our teens – when we’re likely to experience self doubt or at least think about the concept of ‘normality’ (Americans use ‘normalcy’).
If we pay attention a little, we might notice that not everyone around us conforms to some generally acknowledged standard of behavior. By the time we’re adults, we’ve generally known a few people who were labeled “non-conformist” or “unconventional”. And usually we’ve come across “weird”.
If we pay attention a lot, we may end up realizing there is actually a whole, broad spectrum of behavior and attitudes and some of it at one end of the spectrum is extremely different from that at the other end.
Or perhaps we could think of it as a circle – in which case there is no beginning and no end, but a very large collection of places on the spectrum where any of us could be at some time in our lives, and not necessarily by choice or happily.
I must have been in my fifties when it struck me like a thunderbolt that there was no such thing as normal. I began to look at people I knew – and people I didn’t know – through the simple filter of open-ended, non-judging interest and curiosity. As if my soul were asking an unspoken question: “Who are you with me?”
Thinking and Dreaming 
The sins of our “fathers”…
There we sat, in the café, a lot of Canadian history between us. Her ancestors indigenous Canadian and holocaust survivors, mine ‘Scottish Presbyterian’ and English settlers who imposed themselves on land that may never have belonged to them.
If my ancestors had only realized what a rich culture and vast store of knowledge they discarded because of beliefs. “Savages”, they believed. What ‘savagery’ existed in some tribes was probably not worse than the savagery that existed at that time among some clans where my ancestors originated – the Scottish Highlands and the Orkney Islands – tough territory.
Indigenous people, the children of holocaust survivors and yes, even the children of those Orkney Island descendants, all have suffered in their own way. And ironically, the very religion rigidly followed by settlers, which added to the misery of indigenous peoples as their identities were brutally erased, is the same religion followed by many of today’s First Peoples in their need for emotional support.
For so long, “our people” held onto our cultural identities, many of us believing ours was superior to the others. And now she and I, with our matching wild, thick grey hair, she the Christian, and I the atheist, agree we have to sacrifice and leave behind some of our “heritage”, but will gain so much more in the process.
After all, what is a heritage, if not whatever we choose to treasure in our store of memories and knowledge? And if ‘saving a heritage’ means ghettoization of peoples, the human race will not survive. But if it means sharing the best of what we are, we will.
Better for Mother Earth if we all embrace and learn from each other.
http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/politics/article/1210395–ontario-native-class-action-suit-stays-alive?bn=1
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