by

Places that we’ve come to trust

 

When I was a child, the world was an even stranger place than it is now. I knew so much less then, and the boundaries of almost every experience were unexplored and mysterious. I suppose that’s to be expected when the menu is large, and the stomach limited. So, with no internet to answer each question, and teachers who, despite their qualifications and zeal, were unable to fill in more than a decidedly modest number of the blanks, children my age migrated to the Delphic Oracle of the era: the library.

Although sometimes an imposing stone-and-pillared structure in the middle of a large city, in more modest towns it was often only a converted cottage, or a tiny building that housed the books. But however it was dressed, it was the library with all those answers on the shelves, all that magic in the musty perfume of the books. And yes, there was the reigning priestess, the keeper of the tomes, who seemed to know just how to organize our questions and then lead us directly to the shelf where the answers lay.

It was an enchanted place, the library, and one we children got to know even years before we started school. A place where we would gather each Saturday morning in a little circle on the floor to hear someone read stories to us of faeries that danced on little flowers, of kings and queens who disguised themselves as people just like us, of bears who spoke, and fawns that cavorted through the woods all day then slept in beds of moss each night.

Later, of course, we began to read things for ourselves, and to decide what made sense and what to believe. We would read a book the librarian recommended, and then another that she hadn’t -just to check. I sometimes thought I’d wandered alone and secretly through the new ideas, but then she’d smile and congratulate me on my journey when I saw her at her desk.

I suppose we’re never really on our own when we have a book, though. It is the world, or at least its a door that opens inwards. The book is the sacred space, not the shelf on which it is forced to sleep. And I have long suspected that many things are similar to that -a school, for example, or a yoga class, a police officer, or a program on the radio -they each represent an expertise we cannot all possess. A knowledge so extensive we must partition it out in little bits to make it work. It is what a civilization does; it is what constitutes a society.

I found an incredibly insightful article entitled Truth is also a place in the online magazine Aeon on the subject that helped me to set things in context: https://aeon.co/essays/labs-courts-and-altars-are-also-traveling-truth-spots  It was written by Thomas Gieryn, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, who suggests that ‘Some places make people believe.’ He describes the aura of wisdom ascribed to the ancient Oracle at Delphi. It was in a place so remote that even getting there was a struggle, and hence no doubt augmented the reliability of whatever advice was proffered. Other places, he argues, are similarly sacred: law courts, churches, laboratories, and so forth. The very stability of their location, and their often unique and recognizable architectures, lends an almost sacred air to their functions. ‘Ordinarily, truth-spots stay put over time, and those who seek believable knowledge must travel to them – not the other way around.’

But he wonders if the reliability and permanence of the location is still really necessary to perpetuate the authority. ‘[…] is longevity in a particular location always needed in order for a place to make people believe? Some truth-spots travel: they inhabit a place only temporarily. Sometimes a portable assemblage of material objects might be enough to consecrate an otherwise mundane place as a source for legitimate understandings – but only for the time that the stuff is there, before it moves on. But if a church or lab or courtroom can be folded up like a tent and pitched someplace else, can it really sustain its persuasive powers as a source for truth?’

In the abstract, that seems like an unlikely possibility. After all, part of the solace of religion, say, is in the majesty of the venue -the comfort of the pew, the quiet place that is a refuge from the busy street outside. Or, at other times it may lie in the reverberations of the organ, or the echo of a choir singing somewhere hidden in a large cathedral.

But Gieryn illustrates his thesis with examples of how the authority, if not the venue is transportable. Travelling justices can set up a court in the most unlikely of locations -a small village in China, for example, with ducks and geese waddling past. Justice can be fairly meted out to the satisfaction of villagers who might otherwise never be able to travel to a big city courtroom. Religion, too, could be promulgated outside of the boundaries of a church so long as those ceremonial symbols seen as sacred and important, accompany the duly recognized religious official.

But I suppose these things are so common nowadays, with our internet connections and social media flurries, that the very idea of immutability has become a myth. With the possible exception of religious structures, buildings permanently dedicated to a particular purpose, seem anachronistic. Atavistic. Time itself is out of joint.

Surely we are not so shallow that we think that it is the edifice that contains the authority, so naïve that we confuse the vehicle with the driver. It’s not the library that contains the book, nor even the book itself we need -it’s the ideas, the perspectives, and the wisdom travelling in an ever-expanding ripple that we should attempt to grasp…

And yet… I’d miss the smile of that wonderful lady with the dirty glasses, who sat behind the library desk and watched with motherly pride as I carried out an armful of books for another week. Call me sentimental, or just an old man trapped in reverie, but I think there is still something sacred in a place where a person like her could sit and watch -and smile encouragingly- as we struggle past.

Advertisements
by

A Childless Motherhood

Well of course! Did we think there would be no consequences? Did we actually think we could get away with it? That there weren’t two sides to the story that we all needed to hear?

Sometimes I think we are so focused on our journey to right a wrong, that we wander off the path to those we hope to save. Things are too partitioned -a modern day rendition of the biblical Matthew 6:3 where the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing… Or, perhaps, is not doing.

If one side of a page seems to contain all the information I seek, I may miss what’s written on the back. I feel no need to turn it over. An article in the Conversation turned the page for me:

https://theconversation.com/losing-children-to-foster-care-endangers-mothers-lives-93618

The author, Elizabeth Wall-Wieler, a PhD student in Community Health Sciences at the University of Manitoba, writes that ‘Mothers whose children are placed in foster care are at much higher risk of dying young, particularly due to avoidable causes like suicide. When a child is placed in foster care, most of the resources are focused on the child, with little to no support for the mothers who are left behind.’

In retrospect, of  course, it seems obvious -the mother-child bond is not something easily missed, and whether or not we attribute it to physiological changes such as oxytocin levels in her blood, or less reductionist, atavistic mechanisms, it is a powerful thing, dismissed only at her -and our– peril.

The author was involved in two large studies, one of them published in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, which ‘[…] looked at suicide attempts and suicide completions among mothers whose children were placed in care.

‘In this study, we compared rates of suicide attempts and suicides between 1,872 mothers who had a child placed in care with sisters whose children were not placed in care. We found that the rate of suicide attempts was 2.82 times higher, and the rate of death by suicide was more than four times higher for mothers whose children were not in their custody. […] Mothers whose children are taken into care often have underlying health conditions, such as mental illness and substance use. In both studies, we took pre-existing health conditions into account, so that was not the reason for the higher mortality rates we found.’

And, the author feels, ‘Most legislation pertaining to child protection services indicates that families should be supported, but the guidelines around what is expected of the child welfare system when it comes to the biological mothers are not clear. The main role of social workers is to ensure that the child is doing well. Social workers are already so busy, so it is often hard for them to justify spending their limited time to help mothers resolve challenges and work with them to address their mental and physical health needs.’

Other studies have also addressed the issue of sending children to foster care: ‘A study in Sweden found that by age 18, more than 16 per cent of children who had been in foster care had lost at least one parent (compared to three per cent of children who had not been in foster care). By age 25, one in four former foster children had lost at least one parent (compared to one in 14 in the general population). This means that many children in foster care don’t get the chance to be reunited with their families.’

I thought that the whole idea of fostering a child was care and sustenance until a more permanent placement was achieved or, ideally, the birthparent was able to reassume custody. This is perhaps more likely if the child can be placed with members of the same family -grandmothers, aunts, etc.- but even then, if the mother does not receive adequate support and treatment for the condition that led to the apprehension of her child, the results are apt to be the same.

In Canada, it seems, the mothers most affected are those from the indigenous community -our First Nations. The Canadian Minister of Indigenous Services, Jane Philpott, addressed indigenous leaders about this issue at a two-day emergency meeting on Indigenous Child and Family Services in Ottawa in January, 2018. http://www.cbc.ca/radio/thecurrent/a-special-edition-of-the-current-for-january-25-2018-1.4503172/we-must-disrupt-the-foster-care-system-and-remove-perverse-incentives-says-minister-jane-philpott-1.4503253 ‘The care system is riddled with “perverse incentives”. Children are being apprehended for reasons ranging from poverty to the health and addiction issues faced by their parents. In some provinces, rules around housing mean that your children can be taken away if you don’t have enough windows. “Right now dollars flow into the child welfare system according to the number of kids that are apprehended.” […] If financial incentives were based on “how many children we were able to keep in homes, how well we were able to support families — then in fact there would be no financial reason why the numbers would escalate.”’

But it’s not too difficult to read something else into all of this, of course. Uncondoned behaviour -behaviour frequently associated with poverty or marginalization- is often penalized isn’t it? Sometimes it is as simple as avoiding the transgressing community, further marginalizing it, but increasingly it is intolerance. Refusal to address the underlying issues. Not even trying to understand.

I admit that it is a difficult journey, and the road that winds between the abused child and its troubled parent is fraught. To empathize with the mother when her conduct may have been so clearly unacceptable, is seen as anathema. And yet, an attempt to understand is not a plea for condonation, merely a search for a solution. Nobody should get away with family neglect -but nothing happens in a vacuum. And there are always unintended consequences, aren’t there? Even our best intentions miss something in retrospect -solve one problem, create another. Our focus is often far too narrow -helping one person misses the one standing beside her.

Perhaps it’s time for us to stand back. As Ms Wall-Wieler puts it, ‘Specific guidelines need to be put in place to make sure that mothers are supported when their child is taken into care. This would improve the chances of reunification. And, by virtue of being a human worthy of treatment with dignity, mothers deserve support, even if it does not directly relate to how she interacts with her child(ren).’

‘Of the good in you I can speak, but not of the evil.
For what is evil but good tortured by its own hunger and thirst?’ Kahlil Gibran

 

 

 

 

 

 

by

Beggaring All Description

Beauty is many things, I suppose, and attempts to define it are fraught. It seems to vary between societies and eras, with some cultures deciding it is appearance, and some opting for demeanour. One such view, influenced by the Greek diaspora following the conquests of Alexander the Great, Koine Greek, used an adjective for beautiful: horaios, which derives from the word hora -or hour. There was a delightful description of this in (sorry) Wikipedia: ‘In Koine Greek, beauty was thus associated with “being of one’s hour”. Thus, a ripe fruit (of its time) was considered beautiful, whereas a young woman trying to appear older or an older woman trying to appear younger would not be considered beautiful.’

I find this useful, because it suggests that beauty -at least in a person- resides in being recognized for what one actually is -not what artifice may try to disguise. Admiration, in other words lies in more than appearance. I am reminded of Shakespeare’s Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘Love looks not with the eyes but with the mind.’

And yet, whose eyes -one’s own, or that of others? How we see ourselves is almost as important as how we are seen. Think of the agony than can be inflicted by acne in the teenage years -a time when self-identity is often linked to group identity, and self-esteem is dependent on the approbation of one’s peers. It is a time when we are defined by others, because we have not yet defined ourselves.

Memories of my own speckled past were awakened, Phoenix-like, by a short article in the Conversation on the beauty -or not- of skin: https://theconversation.com/beauty-is-skin-deep-why-our-complexion-is-so-important-to-us-91415?

As the author, Rodney Sinclair, Professor of Dermatology, University of Melbourne observes, ‘We’re all attracted to a beautiful face. We like to look at them, we feel drawn to them and we aspire to have one. Many researchers and others have investigated what we humans identify as “beautiful”: symmetry, large evenly spaced eyes, white teeth, a well-proportioned nose and of course, a flawless complexion. The skin is of utmost importance when people judge someone as beautiful.’ There may be an unintended bias on his part, of course. A dermatologist would see the world through a lens of pores and complexions, but I suspect he is merely tapping into the current ethos -one that seems characteristic of an era of Snapchat, and Facebook posts where ‘Even the best facial structure can be unbalanced by skin that is flawed.’

I’m not certain I agree with some of his views about how much we value complexion. For example: ‘When choosing a mate, men rank female beauty more highly than women rate male appearance. Female beauty is thought to signal youth, fertility and health. Beauty can also signal high status. People with “plain looks” earn about 10% less than people who are average-looking, who in turn earn around 5% less than people who are good-looking.’ I suspect there has been a bit of cherry-picking of studies that bolster his opinions, although I suppose we all do that.

But his point about the importance of the cosmetic industry nowadays certainly seems spot on: ‘People spend a lot of money in attempts to regain their youthful appearance. The global cosmetics industry is worth about US$500 billion. Sales of skin and sun care products, make-up and colour cosmetics generate over 36% of the worldwide cosmetic market. We use foundation makeup to conceal freckles and blemishes, moisturisers and fillers to hide dryness, concealers to disguise broken capillaries and pimples.’

And yet, I find myself inexorably drawn to that Greek idea of beauty residing more in ‘being of one’s hour’, than in forcing one’s time. Accepting the ineffable allure of the moment in which each of us lives.

Many years ago, I met Dora, a woman with quite visible facial scarring from long-ago acne. She was probably in her early thirties, and was employed as a receptionist in a doctor’s office. But she was so gregarious and friendly, I had ceased to see her face whenever I had occasion to visit. A warm smile would emerge like a puppy bounding from the woods and greet me from across the room. Her eyes were alive, and sparkled even under the unremitting glare of the overhead fluorescent lights. But she would have lit a path to her desk even in a power failure.

So overwhelming was her presence that I would never have remembered what she was wearing, had I been asked. Everything was subordinate; she ruled the room like a queen and the radiance lingered even when she was on vacation, or had taken a sick day. It was as if the empty the space was holding its breath. Or so I thought.

One day, when I arrived for my appointment, the office seemed smaller. Duller. It had been more than a year since I had been there, and so I couldn’t immediately decide what had changed. Dora was not there, unfortunately -I had been looking forward to seeing her again, but I assumed she had taken a few days off.

As I approached the desk –her desk- I was tracked by a set of razored eyes as if I had inadvertently chosen the wrong door. The wrong office. There was a smile, of course, but it was cool, and applied like the makeup on the rest of the obviously impeccable face. Long blond hair fell in ringlets to her shoulders onto a dark blue silk blouse -a very attractive person to greet the entrant, I suppose. But it was not Dora.

I forced a smile onto my lips and introduced myself. The woman immediately checked her computer screen and her face marginally softened at what she found. I took this as an opportunity to ask about Dora.

I could see her pupils momentarily contract and something tensed in her cheek.

“Dora no longer works here,” she said with a forced affability, and as if she were tired of having to explain.

I couldn’t hide my disappointment, I’m afraid, and the woman noticed.

“The doctor thought she was a bad advertisement for his practice,” she said with an obviously rehearsed face.

“Oh…” was all I could think of to respond.

The face perked up briefly. “He did offer to help…” she stared across the empty room for a moment. “But she said she was happy with who she was –‘with who she’d always been’, was how she put it…”

And then, although she tried to disguise it, she rolled her eyes and sighed. “Anyway,” she said, unrolling her eyes and resting them on my cheeks, “she decided to resign.”

But when I continued to stare at her, she shrugged, as if everybody was better off with Dora gone. “He gave her a good reference, though,” she added at the persistence of my disappointed expression, and shifted her attention back to the screen in front of her with a little smile.

 

 

 

 

by

Should You Wish Upon a Star?

I’m of two minds about magic. On the one hand, it seems too good to be true -too naïve and unexamined, too much like Santa Claus; but there’s a part of me that wants to believe in another world where faeries dance on dew-soaked blades of moonlit grass, and bird song fills the dawn forest as a paean to the aborning light. In a place -or was it a time– where anything was possible, because no one had proven that it wasn’t.

Unfortunately, I grew up and found an adult proof -or thought I had. I suppose most of us do, though. It’s not even a choice -as we wend our ways through the interstices of everyday life, we shed those things which impede our progress -like a shirt on a hot day, unregarded magic is in corners thrown, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Our route is littered with it, if we cared to look. But we don’t anymore. We can’t be bothered.

And yet, in my darker days, when I find myself staring into the ordered chaos that encloses me like a cape, I sometimes wonder if it was all a mistake. Perhaps we were meant to keep a little in reserve. A curtain we could peek behind in times of need. In times when we realize that what we have is not enough… or, rather, too much.

In one such mood, I happened upon an article written by Frank Klaassen, an associate professor of History in the University of Saskatchewan, entitled The Magic of Love and Sex, who characterizes himself as a scholar of medieval magic. I have to admit, that anybody who purports to be able to unmask the most mysterious trappings of an enchanted, faraway age has got my ear -or in this case, at least, my eyes. https://theconversation.com/the-magic-of-love-and-sex-91749

He says that ‘[…] passing the magazine stand at the checkout counter is like stepping back in time.’ Both the men’s and the women’s magazines promise to divulge secret methods of procuring unattainable things we all want, yet could only dream of: sex, power, influence… ‘Bronislaw Malinowski [a Polish-born British social anthropologist] says that the function of magic is to ritualize optimism, to enhance “faith in the victory of hope over fear.” By this he means that when we perform magic, we ritualize our hopes, even if that ritual itself produces no effects.’

‘There is a massive modern industry that leverages our vulnerabilities. Hundreds of scientifically unproven techniques offer not only power over love and sex, but health, wealth, good luck, influence over other people, improving appearance, intelligence and public speaking, assuring happiness and protection of self and family.

‘Modern books on magic like Starhawk’s The Spiral Dance and New Age handbooks like Shakti Gawain’s Creative Visualization have become classics over the past 40 years and have sold millions of copies. They cover pretty much the same ground. With few exceptions, the goals of medieval magic were identical to these personal growth manuals from the 1970s, and fulfilment in love tops the list.’

But interestingly, similar to today, Klaassen says that scholars back then were also critical of magic and superstition. ‘Medieval philosophers expended a lot of ink demonstrating how seemingly miraculous things were just natural effects […] To respond to these attacks, writers of medieval magic books often did exactly what their modern counterparts do —they tried to make them look like they were scientific. They used scientific ideas and language.

‘In comparison, one would think that modern people would be far less interested in magic, particularly given our advanced sense of how the physical world functions and the scientific educations we all get in public school.’

But, I think the crux of his point is to compare the two modes of thinking, and whether things have changed all that much over the years. ‘[…] it challenges the idea that scientific thinking somehow banishes magical thinking. Clearly, it doesn’t.’

‘[…] Modern science may have helped us live longer but it hasn’t made illness and death any less inevitable. It certainly hasn’t made it possible to make ourselves more wealthy, desirable, charismatic, intelligent or successful in love.

From one perspective, love magic is biological. We are biologically programmed to try anything that might help us reproduce ourselves. Skepticism would just get in the way of that. Hope, on the other hand, keeps us creatively trying things out and doing whatever it takes: The perfect clothes, the right music, giving flowers, perfume, beautiful words, … or magic.

From another perspective, as Malinowski suggested, magic springs from human qualities that we all value very highly: Optimism, hope and creativeness. Where would we be without those? If our ancestors only stuck to the tried and true, things they knew would not fail, we’d still be in the trees. We’d certainly have no love songs.’

I like the idea that magic is hope. And hope is no less real because what we wish for hasn’t yet happened; there may not be faeries dancing on the lawn at night, but if I want to believe that if I hid out there under a blade of grass one night I would see them, should you lock me up? Or put me on medication? All of us hear stories, some more fanciful than others -and not all of them are as we remember. We colour our narratives with almosts and often sneak in a few might haves to spice the tales. The rest of us wink at the clever interpolations, and then add our own when it’s our turn to speak. Who’s to say what really happened -what might have happened?

There is a ragged border between fact and fancy sometimes, and maybe your misspeak is my magic -or at least my hope. Would you really want to take that away from me… and should you? Like Shakespeare’s Hamlet, I want to believe there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies…

by

With mirth and laughter, let old wrinkles come

“Bear with my weakness. My old brain is troubled. Be not disturbed with my infirmity”, says Prospero in Shakespeare’s Tempest. But at what age does one become old? And if we could answer that without resort to comparisons would it be a useful thing? Or does it, in fact, require perspective to sort it out? The famous passage in the King James version of the letter Paul wrote to the biblical Corinthians declares, ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.’ Really? I’ve always thought of the journey through the years as more the chiaroscuro in a painting. I can still see shades of childhood, despite my age, in the bright colours of a laugh, or the shadows of a memory. Indeed, I’ve come to see my life as a pentimento -nothing wasted, nothing forgotten, merely painted over as best I could.

I am drawn, therefore, to others who recognize their own plasticity and smile when the veneer of time is chipped. The patterns underneath persist -or would, if encouraged with a little wipe. It has become fashionable to talk of today’s ‘seventy’ being our parents’ ‘fifty’, although, again, a comparative rather than an established fact. A trope, rather than a datum. But, there are hints that this is changing, as an article in the BBC reports: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-43308729

‘Doing lots of exercise in older age can prevent the immune system from declining and protect people against infections, scientists say. They followed 125 long-distance cyclists, some now in their 80s, and found they had the immune systems of 20-year-olds.’ As a long-time runner, and avid cyclist, I am happy to hear this kind of thing.

‘Prof Janet Lord, director of the Institute of Inflammation and Ageing, at the University of Birmingham, and co-author of the research, said: “The immune system declines by about 2-3% a year from our 20s, which is why older people are more susceptible to infections, conditions like rheumatoid arthritis and, potentially, cancer. Because the cyclists have the immune system of a 20-year-old rather than a 70- or 80-year-old, it means they have added protection against all these issues.”

‘The researchers looked at markers in the blood for T-cells, which help the immune system respond to new infections. […] They found that the endurance cyclists were producing the same level of T-cells as adults in their 20s, whereas a group of inactive older adults were producing very few. […] A separate paper in Aging Cell found that the cyclists did not lose muscle mass or strength, and did not see an increase in body fat – which are usually associated with ageing. “You don’t need to be a competitive athlete to reap the benefits – or be an endurance cyclist – anything which gets you moving and a little bit out of puff will help.”‘

A few months ago I was driving back from a day of cycling along some forest trails in the mountains, and feeling rather smug that I had managed to avoid the rain now pounding down on the car. I was still on a narrow, pot-holed asphalt road winding through the trees, and even though my bike was securely fastened to the rack on the trunk, I had to drive slowly. Visibility was limited because of the meandering road in the rain, and more than once I confused a tree, waving its limbs in the wind, for someone standing along the side of the asphalt wanting a lift.

And then I saw him -or rather it: a figure walking slowly along the side of the road with its head down. It didn’t acknowledge my approach, and I couldn’t really tell if we were heading in the same direction. The figure was sodden in the driving rain and walked with a pronounced limp. Wearing a rather thin jacket and a toque, it slogged doggedly on as if it didn’t mind the weather.

I don’t usually offer rides to hitchhikers, and especially not here in the wilderness, but sometimes conscience beats down harder than rain. I slowed, and rolled down my window enough to shout at the bedraggled figure. On first glance he appeared to be a thin man, but as I stared inquisitively I could see long grey hair streaming across the face, almost covering a pair of bright, but suspicious eyes inspecting me.

“Do you want a ride?” I yelled, trying to be heard above the din of rain pounding on the metal of my car.

The eyes, alternated between wariness, and disinterest as they inspected first me and then the car. And finally, when I could see them resting on the bike on the trunk, they suddenly softened. “Yes… Thank you,” said a very female voice.

We were both silent for a while as we wound along the endless sinuous road, each of us waiting for the other to speak. Finally, my curiosity won out. “So, why were you walking along a lonely forest road, so far from town?” I asked. She was probably in her nineties and certainly not dressed for the weather.

Her eyes made the trip to my head at last, but danced about trying to find a place to settle. Finally, they chose my cheeks. “I try to go for long walks each day…” she said slowly, obviously trying to decide how much to tell me. She was, after all, a vulnerable elderly woman, in a car with a stranger.

I smiled. “I was out for a rather long ride today myself,” I said, trying to open up the conversation further.

She smiled in return and stared out of the window at the rain for a while. “My husband and I used to ride our bikes every day -even in the snow…”

She trailed her sentence off again, like she didn’t know how much she should reveal to me. “And now you walk?”

She nodded and I could see her sigh with the memory. “My husband had an… accident,” she said, looking out the window again.

“I’m sorry.” It was the right thing to respond, I suppose, but it sounded so anemic, so empty, in the full fury of a May storm.

She looked down at her lap, her face contorted for a second before she wiped her cheek with a damp sleeve.

I glanced at her out of the corner of my eye as I drove slowly and carefully along the bumpy road through the increasing fury of the wind-driven rain.

“We didn’t mind the rain,” she began again. “It was a challenge to see how far we could get before one of us noticed the other was tired. Neither of us would ever admit we were, of course.” She sighed again, this time deeper -as if it was a relief valve for things that were building up inside her. “But we always looked out for each other.”

I was concentrating on the road in the worsening conditions, but I could tell she was watching me carefully.

“We were always like that,” she continued, as if she had to let me know. “We’d ride until we were exhausted.” I could feel her eyes poking at my cheeks like little birds. “In our younger days, we’d take a tent and strap some supplies on the bikes and just take off. It didn’t matter where… Just to be together on a new adventure, not knowing where we’d end up…” She sighed again -this time loudly. Then she was quiet, as we both listened to the rain on the windshield and the wipers pretending to help.

“I really miss him,” she said suddenly, her voice barely audible as the car visibly shivered in a gust of wind. “It will be a month tomorrow since he died…”

I risked a glance at her. Sorrow was written like a paragraph across her face, but her eyes were resting on me in a coda of gratitude, and I think I blushed.

She took a slow deep breath and exhaled it softly. “I wasn’t going to turn around, you know,” she said, suddenly. “I was just going to keep going…” A gentle smile slowly formed on her lips and she closed her eyes and sat back on the seat, relaxed and relieved that she’d been able to talk about him. “Then I saw your bike…” she sighed again. “He had one just like it.”

And then uncertain quite what to do, she reached out and touched my arm. “I know he was telling me to turn around…”

by

The Feast of Difference

I don’t read many children’s books anymore -my own children have long since had children of their own- but every so often I am reminded of how important books can be for them.

Whatever you may think of political correctness and its enthusiastic exhortations for sensitivity, or its celebration of differences, there are times when it can have demonstrably beneficial consequences. Sometimes it is helpful to advertise a spade as a spade -helpful to celebrate disparity and variation. Children’s literature is one example. https://theconversation.com/why-there-need-to-be-more-autistic-characters-in-childrens-books-90054?

The article discusses the importance of the depiction of children with differences so they can see and recognize themselves in familiar situations -in this case, autism and autism spectrum disorder. ‘Fiction plays a significant role in shaping how people understand and respond to autism. And in this way, books are often used by both schools and parents to help children and young people understand more about autism.

‘But the limited and skewed portrayal of autism means it is often misrepresented rather than represented in fiction. For an autistic child or young person this can be extremely isolating and they are often unable to find a version of “themselves” in a book.’

‘Ultimately, every story – whether in life or fiction – has characters, and all characters are different. So given that autism affects more than one in 100 people, there needs to be more done to represent the outside world inside story books.’

The more I thought about autistic children seeing themselves as valid characters in books, the more I realized that the same applies to all children of difference -autistic, or with other challenges. We’re beginning to see more of this on TV and in movies now; books are merely an additional venue, a more portable and perhaps more easily referable source for a child to self-identify.

*

I had some time to kill between flights in the Sydney airport a while back. There never seem to be any seats where you can find solitude in an airport -no seats where you can simply sit and process your journey so far. Of course, an airport is not made for thinking -it is a temporary storage facility, a slowly moving conveyor belt that discourages sequestration whenever possible. Like a drain, it is designed to empty its contents.

But even in a warehouse, there are token concessions to personhood, albethey profit driven, and after what seemed an eternity of peregrination, I found myself in one of those ersatz stores that sell candies and bottled water next to the pop magazines and a derisory collection of books. It was relatively quiet in there, though, and I amused myself by thumbing through a few of the more promising titles. In this particular outlet, there seemed to be no particular order in their placement, however -although I suppose the alphabetic one by author that they chose made as much sense as anything else to the owners. But a Fiction was as likely to be shoulder to shoulder with a Biography or a History, as long as the author names were similar enough. It was quite an adventure, really -I could never figure out what to expect as I moved along the shelf, quietly mouthing my ABC’s.

Only Children’s books had their own section, and it was along the bottom row -no doubt a pragmatically commercial decision. I probably wouldn’t even have noticed, had it not been for bumping into an excited little boy with a book in his arms and a kneeling mother with a backpack.

I bent over and apologized to the child and smiled at the mother. But I don’t think the boy even noticed -he was so excited about the book.

“I’m in this book, mister,” he said to me with an enchanting Australian flavour to his voice.

“Are you?” I said, delighted both with his accent and the sparkle in his eyes.

I’ve never been very good at guessing ages, but he was very young -maybe three or four- and wearing his own version of his mother’s backpack.

She looked up at me but returned an embarrassed smile. I could see the obvious resemblance between the two of them, and yet her skin was a few shades lighter.

“Want to see…?” He said, still holding me in his gaze.

“Of course I do,” I said, and knelt down beside him so he could show me.

The book was one of those large, hard-covered children’s books that is made to be indestructible, but he had no difficulty manipulating the big, thick pages and opened it to one with a drawing of a little dark-skinned boy smiling as if somebody was tickling him. The resemblance to the little boy beside me was quite remarkable.

I turned to his mother. “Did you…?”

Her smile grew and her expression immediately warmed. “No… His aunt -my sister-in-law- is an illustrator for children’s books. We have this one at home, and Jorry saw it on the shelf here…”

We both stood up while little Jorry held the book proudly against his chest.

“He just loves the picture,” she explained. “We’re a mixed family in a white neighbourhood, and he doesn’t see drawings of aboriginal kids in books very often. But he feels special now and shows it to all his friends when they come over to visit.” She rested her eyes on my face for a moment. “It’s amazing what that picture does for him, you know…”

She immediately blushed, as if she’d said too much -disclosed too much- and then glanced at her watch. “We’ll be boarding soon, so we’d better go,” she said and touched my sleeve gently.

Jorry carefully replaced the book on the shelf and looked up at me. “It’s a good drawing of me, isn’t it?” he said in a very adult voice and grasped his mother’s waiting hand. “We have to catch a plane,” he added, turning his head away like someone who needed to help his mother to the proper gate.

We are all stories, in the process of being told, aren’t we?

 

 

by

Texting LIVE

You know, I love being old -you get to learn so many things. For example, I found out that you should probably not admit you’re old at parties because it leaves you open to stuff, and not all of it is nice. Personally, I go in disguise, although we all have to find the door we fit through, eh? But, let’s face it, most elders don’t get invited out much anyway, so except for maybe the occasional funeral, we don’t have to say anything about our ages.

Unfortunately, camouflage doesn’t seem to work for me online. For some reason, everybody knows I’m not one of them. At first, I thought maybe it was because I spelled words correctly and used punctuation. I capitalized the first letter in a sentence, and so everybody could be sure my thought was completed, ended with a period. It was when I decided to text my son instead of Emailing him, that he responded with a chastisement to put me straight.

“Ur gonna get trolled if u keep writing SAs dad everybodyl no” Well, it looked sort of like that, but I can never remember his abbreviations. At any rate, I was being warned about the rules. It was some time around then that I ran across a semi-explanatory article online in the BBC culture section, discussing LIVE (Live Internet Vernacular English): http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180618-will-we-stop-speaking-and-just-text

I’d obviously never heard of it, but I’m learning that there’s a lot out there that nobody thinks to tell us. Well, not us, at any rate. ‘Texting may be closer to speech than formal written language. […]  in its loosely structured live interactivity, internet slang […] is closer to speech than text. But it has its own conventions, some of which defy saying out loud. It’s a substitute for speech.’

Let’s take a step back for a moment. ‘Written language was created to give a record of spoken language. Not that written language is just the frozen form of speech. Over the centuries, it has gained features such as exclamation marks and italics to convey spoken features such as tone, but it has also evolved to convey things that speech doesn’t: the etymological traces carried by our spelling, the structure of thought conveyed by paragraphs, the aesthetics of fonts and other design elements. […] But live internet text is something new. When we tweet or send text messages, we are merging the fixed visual means of text with the immediate live performance of speech. It is as vernacular as speech, and it draws on vernacular speech.’

A while ago, I discovered emoticons and emojis at the bottom of my phone’s keyboard, and so I started using them -apparently incorrectly. I tried the yellow circle one with the straight mouth and the two eye-dots on my son in response to a text he’d sent me. I meant it as a sort of noncommittal shrug, but he thought I was upset with him. I wish I’d seen the article first. ‘Several studies have found that their [emoticons and emoji] primary use is not to present the speaker’s emotion but to help smooth out interpersonal relationships and to convey features such as irony. They are not about how the sender feels so much as how the sender wants the receiver to feel.’ Who knew?

As I sank deeper into the interstices of the article, I began to see how somebody writing like I do might be easy pickings for a troll. ‘Live is like a sci-fi story where people’s tongues and vocal cords have been replaced by keyboards and screens, and they have to learn to work with the potentials and constraints of their new anatomy. You don’t have volume, pitch, rhythm or speed, so what do you do? Skip using the Shift key and punctuation to show haste (sorry cant chat rn got an essay due) or casualness (hi whats up). Make a typographical error to show urgency or heedlessness – teh (for the), pwn (for own, as in dominate or defeat), zomg (for OMG because Z is next to Shift), and hodl(for hold in online currency trading); these all originated with errors but became fixed forms that are simultaneously more intense and more facetious than the originals.’

And yet, as I’m sure my Grade 12 English teacher would have signalled with her eyebrows, LIVE merely seems to be an excuse for sloppiness, although a proper linguist might have an opinion closer to that of James Harbeck, the article’s author: ‘But it’s all language, and language is always a performance that refers back to previous performances and helps show what you know and what group you belong to. Live is an idiom of a certain social set – or, by now, several different social sets.’ In fact, it seems to me that LIVE is a hybrid -almost a pidgin, a form of communication between people -especially elders, perhaps- not sharing a common language.

‘Live is affecting other forms of English, spoken and written, because we borrow from it and refer to it. Some Live is just not sayable, but you can hear people say “L O L” and you can see emoji in ads. Is it slipping into formal writing by younger people as they grow up using it and become adults? Studies have shown that it’s not. They learn how to write like grown-ups when they have to, just as we all have: we don’t use the slang we learned as kids in our annual reports.’

I have to try to remain open to change, I realize; I have to learn to give Youth and their technology a chance –‘When in Rome…’ as the old aphorism goes. But, as interesting as LIVE may be, and as pragmatically as it may function, I still can’t bring myself to strip the skin off words or destroy the surprise of a beautiful homonymic metaphor with the bones of a skeleton. But perhaps that’s what my son was hinting at when he told me to stop treating texts as essays -sorry, ‘SAs’. I suppose we don’t expect poetry in a phone conversation either, do we? And yet… and yet wouldn’t that be a gift?