Because We Don't Arrange Enough Play Dates, Obviously

Categories: Sloane

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This One's Mainly To Panic The Grandparents

I got weak in the legs, watching Sloane traverse over these 3m-high loops at the local playground (on the occasion of our Ramsay Safe Walk evening, post to follow). Turner called me over to see the feat, reportedly sick to his stomach watching her the first time, himself.


Sloane, Dada, and Mia Ho.

In my day, I was also a great climber, me. For which I give my mom & dad HUGE props for being completely cool with letting us climb all over everything, including up onto counters and tables, and for providing us with swing sets and jungle gyms in the backyard throughout our youth. John and Ainsley and I all grew up with no fear of heights, and amazing core abs strength as a result of all that monkeying around.

But I very clearly remember visiting Nanny and Grampa at 206 South Hill Street in Thunder Bay, and climbing up onto the kitchen counter to fetch this ceramic bird from a shelf beside the sink - it was one of those things you fill with water and then blow through, producing a very passable bird tweedly-tweet-tweedly-tweet! So I'm scrambling up onto the counter with basically no trouble, and standing there picking up the bird, and Grampa comes in and yells, "GET DOWN FROM THERE! YOU'LL HURT YOURSELF!" And me: ...Really? I will? How?

This exact scene was to be repeated many, many, many times with my grandparents over the years, well into my twenties. And every time, the whole idea that I might possibly fall and hurt myself always struck me as absolutely ludicrous. Frankly, I had excellent balance and had the gymnastics balance beam medals to prove it. On a two-foot-wide counter I knew exactly what I was doing. Their fear of my inability to keep myself safe while climbing truly made me question my grandparents' judgement. I never fell. None of us did. And I wondered how grown-ups got things from the high cupboards.

When we moved to Calgary I was sent to Sam Livingston elementary in Lake Bonavista. In the schoolyard, there were these peanut-league soccer goalposts that had an extra, lower, set of bars within their frame. Me and the other gymnastically-inclined girls would play up there all recess and on lunchours, doing half-kips and baby drops, great fun. And then in grade five, along comes Lindsay Schooley. She was new, having moved to Calgary from somewhere else. She wanted to play on the bars with us. She didn't know what she was doing, and she fell, and broke her arm. We all got to sign her cast. But after that no one was allowed to play on those bars. And I remember, even as a 10-year-old, feeling so indignantly gipped by the whole situation. Pissed off: I most certainly wasn't going to fall and break my arm. Lindsay didn't know what she was doing and had tried a baby drop and missed it and now suddenly all of us were banned from the best part of the playground equipment. (I'm sure Lindsay Schooley is now a very capable adult leading a productive life. I'm sure she's a very intelligent and nice person. Let me not imply that Lindsay did anything wrong or bad by breaking her arm on those bars at Sam Livingston elementary way back in the early 1980s. I'm just noting here that she ruined it for the rest of us.) Even as a young person I had my suspicions that Lindsay's parents didn't let her climb around on the counters at home.

But! now! as a parent, I can really understand the concern for the first time. It's an actual physical feeling. It's as though you, yourself, are in danger. The blood sugar crash, the rush of sound in your head. Danger! Watching Sloane climbing these loops, my legs went tingly and strange. I really really really wanted to grab her and pull her down. You know, to keep her "safe".

So I now doubly, triply, quadruply appreciate my own parents' restraint when it came to this stuff. I'm sure they went through the same thing, that same gut fear. But they squelched it. (Or just didn't care. ...Just kidding! Kidding, kidding.) And I grew up strong and able and athletic, with excellent balance and no physical fear. Turner and I have talked about this - the climbing - a lot. He absolutely didn't do stuff like this when he was a kid. Turner wasn't allowed to stand in chairs or climb along the backs of couches, and of course the famous example in his family is that he wasn't really allowed to look down into the Grand Canyon when they visited it. ... And Margo, I know you're reading this! I want you to know that I COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND where you were coming from. That fear - it just doesn't go away, does it? I think it never really does.

At this point, I can completely believe getting emails from Sloane at university, with photo attachments of boat races and cheerleading pyramids, and still getting that crazy parent vertigo.

For now, however, we're biting our tongues and fighting the nausea. And hoping she ends up with an "Excellence" in the Canada Fitness Test (when they re-institute it, of course), and never falls off a counter. Because then, of course, my grandparents will roll over in their graves and yell "I TOLD YOU SO!"

Categories: Dad-ness | Mom-ness | Olden Days | Sloane

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Globe n' Mail

Today Turner's sustainability column premieres in "Canada's National Newspaper", the Globe & Mail. This first one was titled "The Secret Greening of Calgary", and talked about the city's quiet commitment to sustainable energy solutions, despite the larger city's love of sprawl, SUVs and all things bling.

I was contracted to do the photos, which took me to southeastern Alberta to shoot the Taber wind farm (colour, Focus section cover photo, below the fold) and to the Erlton Ctrain station (three times, with three different children, to try to get the b&w ctrain-and-pinwheel shot they chose for page F9).

Categories: Ash | GeoHope | Sloane | Turner | Work work work

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Sloane's Pictoral Week In Review

Categories: Sloane

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The Truest Song

There are a lot of true songs out there.

But if you're from a prairie city. A Canadian prairie city, especially. (And if you're from a prairie city that you didn't want to end up back in, hoo boy.)

And you're missing someone... but it's over, really over. (And it's never going to be not-over.)

"Ah yes," I hear you saying, ironically, "Awesome." (Been there, fuck that, fuck me, gimme a beer.)

The song for you - and, I suspect, for all of us - is this one:


Left And Leaving, the Weakerthans

My city's still breathing (but barely it's true)
through buildings gone missing like teeth.
The sidewalks are watching me think about you,
sparkled with broken glass.
I'm back with scars to show, Back with the streets I know
Will never take me anywhere but here.

The stain in the carpet, this drink in my hand,
the strangers whose faces I know.
We meet here for our dress-rehearsal to say " I wanted it this way"
Wait for the year to drown.
Spring forward, fall back down.
I'm trying not to wonder where you are.

All this time lingers, undefined.
Someone choose who's left and who's leaving.
Memory will rust and erode into lists of all that you gave me:
a blanket, some matches, this pain in my chest,
the best parts of Lonely, duct-tape and soldered wires,
new words for old desires,
and every birthday card I threw away.

I wait in 4/4 time.
Count yellow highway lines that you're relying on to lead you home.

This song is about Winnipeg.

And although you could argue that although I've always loved Winnipeg (blindly, perhaps, as some have suggested?) for the wonderful childhood memories it provided me, it's true that I only lived there until I was eight years old. (Calgary, the city we landed in afterwards, and the city in which I spent my pre-adolescent and teenage years, is not generally known for its decay or angst, particularly.)

But for some reason, this song resonates for me. In some ways, maybe in the lives-unlived that I would have had in Winnipeg, or in Calgary if I hadn't left in 1991? I don't know. Maybe everyone who grew up Prairie knew and feared this future for themselves; lived it a thousand times in unremembered nightmares and panicked moments alone at university. Knew we didn't want to go back: might someday end up back there: and in such an instance, might need to kill ourselves.

It was a balance: make it, or die. Or, worse: face all those broken sidewalks and half-remembered faces and pound them through the glass door of your love, broken. (So really, might as well die...)

But even so, I see the St. Vital sidewalk this guy is pacing. The random smashed glass that didn't necessarily mean "trashy neighbourhood". The short summers that help make a southern Manitoba life barely worth living.

Me, I've been in those hopeful, hipster, far-from-the-centre mid-twenties venues where everyone is half-hysterical. Those ones with curtains for walls and everyone too excited (and somehow, embarrassed that they aren't who they were in elementary school, anymore. Apologetic. Defensive. And weird).

Really, I think the saddest, truest line has to be, "We meet here for our dress rehearsal to say: 'I wanted it this way' ": All of us, anywhere, everywhere, have been there. Lived this blow. Breathed this lie. Tried to live it. Failed. I've been that person, the one going about their business. And dying inside.

And, AND! the whole subtext of the city killing itself: so true to my own heart. Completely a true statement about Winnipeg, Regina, Calgary: My city's still breathing, but barely, it's true... Through buildings gone missing like teeth. I'm not that old, but I can still give you a tour of my adolescent Calgary landscape by what's gone. By what's not there anymore. All those buildings that they knocked down. The Theatrey. Studio A Go Go. The Westward Club. And so on. They live on in me, and they ache like a missing tooth.

So, me, right? I'm singing this sad song to Sloane tonight for the first time. It just came into my brain between Yoshimi and Country Roads, and I sang it through for her. And you might think, in the midst of singing it, as I did: should you really be singing this fucked-up, lonely, pseudo-stalker song about a dying city and its damaged man to your toddler?

But then, you (or me, for example, I) think:
1. That was all me, those lyrics. In ways. In feelings. In bits. And pieces. That was me. It is Truth. There is no more TRUE Canadian song. Blessed be.
2. And by the way, it's not like we're trying to hide Sloane from the actual truth bits of life. (See the "We showed Sloane Rooney's ripped-apart corpse and then let her watch Mama bury him in the yard" post from a few months back, for deets.)
3. Prairie childhood & upbringing, and the saga of same... she might as well hear it from us (in part by way of The Weakerthans, natch).
4. ... And heartbreak. You really, REALLY don't want your kids to know. But really, eventually, it'll happen to them. (And if it doesn't, they'll end up sociopaths. So you have to, in a weird and sadistic way, HOPE for your kids to undergo the torturous and revolting SAGA that is normal, everyday heartbreak.) And someday they'll be sitting there with the pain in their chests, just as sure as we were.
5. Plus, like, isn't it my JOB, like, as a parent, to, like, competely psychologically hobble my children? Don't all parents strive for this? (Shouldn't I be grateful that I was given such an early opportunity to do same?)

Or: it's just a song! Get over it! It's got a great tune! It's Canadian! It's slow and sounds like a lullaby to my toddler! She'll grow up with Canadian music pre-programmed into her subconscious, how lovely!

And: my life is great, it's not like I'm singing about the present. It's possible to be happy on the prairie. But there's a bunch of turmoil between here and there. Better to warn her, right?

Yer thots?

Categories: Ash | Canadiana | Mom-ness

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Ferrebe!?

Ah. You see, much of my adult sense of humour has been reinforced and justified by the (very few) episodes of Father Ted that I've seen. But I do certainly owe my introduction to same to one Alice Ferrebe of the UK. The same marvellous woman visited our very own John Johnston here in Calgary just in the last weeks and it was absolutely splendid to see her again.

Apparently she's never had any inkling - WHATSOEVER - to visit Canada. Pshaw! Our part in making Alice feel at home in our land was to put a best foot forward in the form of a Thai curry dinner (made entirely by Turner. Sloane and I sat around and ate bon-bons on the trampoline).

Categories: Friends

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Oh Woe, Oh Bliss, Oh Carolina

Taken from a long-ago seen funny bit of graffiti, is the title, here.

But me, I am 'oh woe' at the very least, because I am SO BEHIND in the blog postings-es. Lord ha'mercy, I have so much to tell. ...I may simply not live to tell it all, there's just too much from the last few months. But I'll try.

I'll start small: in height, that is.

Sloaner. She has a backpack. Alexis and I bought it at the Houston airport on our way home from Costa Rica. We all lurve it. So primary-coloured and tasteful and non-commercially-decorated (from "The Metropolitan Museum Store", apparently the design hails from a newly-unearthed Egyptian tomb). And it has a hippopotamus on it.

So this backpack, she takes it to school. It holds her (many) changes of big-girl underpants, an extra hat, some sunscreen, a granola bar for hungry days, and various other stuff.

I took this photo en route to school sometime in early August, when we were newly back from 'out east' and Sloane was re-new-ed-ly THRILLED to be putting on her own backpack. You have to be dead inside if you can't find something to laugh at when you live with a toddler:

Categories: Sloane

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Post-AFA

After a fine weekend in Canmore visiting Auntie Jackie and Scottishing-it-up at the Canmore Highland Games (largest in Western Canada, you know, a post about which will follow sometimes soon), we arrived home and I had to immediately launch into my Alberta Foundation for the Arts grant application. Due today. I was up until WAY past my bedtime. Went into the portrait studio with giant blue swirls before my eyes, today.

As evidence, my email to Mark "Marky-Mark" Heard, confirming our Wednesday night dinner planz, sent earlier this afternoon:

Mr. Mark. You rock. I, possibly, do not rock. I am too blurry to tell. Today, I am a weeble.
...I have the Tom Wilson "Biff" song from You Tube in my head all the time. Does that disqualify me from rocking? I suspect it does...

Categories: Ash

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