pupdate: sad (but not that saddest) news

Our Cookie has a torn ACL and needs surgery. Surgery itself brings worry and concern and inconvenience, and of course, massive expense. But none of that is the worst part. The worst part is Cookie's future. Her days of running free on the beach are over. For me, that is heartbreaking.

This is our third dog who has had a repaired knee. Our first dog, the amazing Gypsy, had a busted ACL. The surgery was cutting-edge at the time. We had to borrow a car to take her to a specialist in the suburbs north of New York City. We were about to leave for vacation in Alaska, when she developed a post-op infection. I remember being at a baseball game in the Kingdome in Seattle, calling our dogsitter from payphone. So many ancient words in that sentence!

A few lifetimes later -- six months after moving to BC, after we had adopted both Kai and Cookie -- Diego tore an ACL. He was still recovering from the surgery when the other knee gave out; the repaired knee wasn't strong enough to hold him as a tripod. Apparently this is very common. He was an older guy, and we felt the only viable option was to say goodbye. (Story here, here, here, and finally here.)

Our beautiful Tala developed degenerative disc disease. This was very similar to what we're about to go through now. There was a long period of rehab, after which Tala's life could never be the same. No more running at the dog park or on the beach. On-leash walks only. It was heartbreaking. 

There are some great pics of Diego keeping Tala company while she was confined: first here, then here. (That second link was super hard to find! My stupid cutesy titles are not search-friendly.)

And here we are. X-rays, bloodwork, surgery, meds. Confinement, rehab, new life.

celebrating indigenous people's day with a beautiful evening in the port hardy library

We always host something special for Indigenous Peoples Day at the Port Hardy Library, and this year was our best program yet. That wasn't because of the numbers of people who showed up, although turnout was strong. It was the quality of the program, the feel of the evening, the feedback we received from participants. For me personally, it was extremely gratifying.

We hosted two Indigenous elders, both women, who led workshops in an art of their culture. In one, participants created mini button blankets; in the other, people learned cedar weaving technique, using paper and other materials substituting for cedar. 

Why was it such a great program? 

* The participants were both First Nations and settler. That, sadly, is rare. The library is one of the few places where we see the two communities interact in a positive way.

* People were relaxed and happy, chatting quietly while they sewed and wove. 

* Three participants had never been to the library before, and signed up for new library cards! This is a big win!

* Everyone kept thanking us for the experience, telling us what a great night it was.

* Both these elders have been struggling with isolation and depression. They have both lost many family members in the past few years, many who were very young, from addiction and suicide. They each told me the program gave them a huge uplift, a chance to connect with people, a reminder that they are not alone. This is valuable beyond measure.

And for me personally, this program was an opportunity to look back and see how far we've come. When I first came to Port Hardy, Indigenous people wouldn't step foot in our library. The library's relationship with the community was tense at best, and often much worse. 

Navigating this new terrain, I often felt like I was fumbling blindly. I made mistakes. I learned. I persisted. My staff and I, supported by library leadership, slowly built relationships, proving our intentions by being respectful, accessible, trustworthy, and caring. We built relationships by being allies. 

rotd: where freedom is concerned, do not wait for others to present it to you

 Revolutionary thought of the day:

Mrs Touchet was confused. "All I intended to say was that I feel confident that the arguments I heard today, on the Downs, although at the moment only concerned with the enfranchisement of working men, will surely, in time---"

"Time!" The noun itself appeared to disgust him. "Why should I wait for what is mine by sacred right? Who can give to me what was never theirs to possess?"

"I really can't think what you mean."

"Mrs Touchet, my freedom is as fully my inheritance as it is any man's. It has no time, I need not wait for it, it was mine from the moment of my birth. Does it surprise you to hear me say so?"

"Well, for one thing you speak as if my freedom is perfect."

"I know it is not. And where freedom is concerned, Mrs Touchet, I would advise you not to wait for others to present a false gift of it to you. You will be waiting a long time. Better to 'take up arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing, end them'."

 

From The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. Conversation between Bogle, a formerly enslaved Black man, and Mrs Touchet. England, 1869.

photos are posted

Photos from our recent trip to Tulsa, Kansas City, and St. Louis are now on Flickr. I'll also link each post to its album page.

My photos on Flickr are somewhat of a dump. I do delete blatant clunkers, but I don't crop or edit, and I don't spend a lot of time choosing which photos to post. It's not worth the time for my purposes. It's mainly a way to keep most of our travel photos in one place, link to wmtc, and use as a cloud backup. Meaning: the albums are large and repetitive. 

Some albums, like photos from the Bob Dylan Center, are a small fraction of what we have -- yet the album is still too large and repetitive! 

Photos of:

the woody guthrie center, tulsa, oklahoma

the bob dylan center, tulsa, oklahoma

art I loved at tulsa mayfest

tulsa art deco walking tour

tulsa murals

greenwood rising

red sox vs royals, kauffman stadium

kansas city central library

kansas city, random images

negro leagues baseball museum

gateway arch and other st. louis (includes busch stadium)

cahokia mounds state historic site (illinois)

jefferson city & tipton missouri (mennonite store)

coming up for air: two thoughts on aging from george orwell

I came upon these passages in George Orwell's 1939 novel, Coming Up for Air. They seem very appropriate to me today.

* * * *

The change in his appearance after twenty years had actually frightened me. I suppose you think I mean that he looked older. But he didn't! He looked younger. And it suddenly taught me something about the passage of time.

I suppose old Betterton would be about sixty-five now, so that when I last saw him he'd have been forty-five -- my age now. His hair was white now, and the day he buried Mother it was a kind of streaky grey, like a shaving-brush. And yet as soon as I saw him the first thing that struck me was that he looked younger. I'd thought of him as an old, old man, and after all he wasn't so very old. As a boy, it occurred to me, all people over forty ahd seemed to me just worn-out old wrecks, so old that there was hardly any difference between them. A man of forty-five had seemed to me older than this dodderer of sixty-five seemed now. And Christ! I was forty-five myself. It frightened me.

* * * *

If I'd had a mirror I'd have looked at the whole of myself, though, as a matter of fact, I knew what I looked like already. A fat man of forty-five, in a grey herring-bone suit a bit worse for wear and a bowler hat. Wife, two kids, and a house in the suburbs written all over me. Red face and boiled blue eyes. I know, you don't have to tell me. But the thing that struck me, as I gave my dental plate the once-over before slipping it back in my mouth, was that it doesn't matter. Even false teeth don't matter. I'm fat -- yes. I look like a bookie's unsuccessful brother -- yes. No woman will ever go to bed with me again unless she's paid to. I know all that. But I tell you I don't care. I don't want the women, I don't even want to be young again. I only want to be alive. And I was alive at that moment when I stood looking at the primroses and the red embers under the hedge. It's a feeling inside you, a kind of peaceful feeling, and yet it's like a flame.

happy birthday to me: retirement update edition

I have been alive on this planet for 64 years. Didn't I just write my last "happy birthday to me" post, like, a week ago??

I looked back at my last few HBTM posts, and I do have a few updates. 

Last year, in "happy birthday to me: retirement vs travel edition," I thought retirement was 10 to 12 years away. Plans have gelled since then, and I am planning to retire at age 70. I downloaded a countdown clock, now on my desktop. Today it clicked over from six years plus something to five-plus! 

I still love my job. In fact, I like it more than ever, now that I have set better limits on how much time I spend working, and feel so much a part of the community. I'm not counting down because I hate what I'm doing. 

The purpose of the countdown is to help me stay on track with our financial goals. This doesn't come naturally to me, it's something I need to be conscious of all the time. Seeing those very finite numbers helps.

Also last year, I was feeling like these important goals meant travel was no longer possible for us. I've had a mental shift about that, too. We had a great trip this year, and -- possibly for the first time ever? -- paid for the entire trip in advance. We paid for airfare and car rental with points, something we've never done before, and saved thousands of dollars on dog care by using TrustedHousitters. (More on that in a future post.) The rest I was able to save for, thanks to the privilege of our two decent incomes. And I was able to do this while sticking with The Plan. 

Upshot: we will still be able to travel, maybe taking (what I consider) a good trip every few years. For me, this feels monumental. A weight lifted. 

(Right now, instead of a trip, we're saving for a good digital sound system, something Allan is more excited about than any travel I could plan.)

For the rest, I'll do that thing where a writer quotes themself. In 2021, when I turned 60, I wrote:

There are tough things about aging, for sure. Unpleasant things. There's no denying it. But there were tough things at every stage of life. Being a child is not the proverbial picnic, nor being a teenager, nor a young adult. There are always issues, always heartache, and sometimes much worse. If we're lucky, there is also love and joy, wonder and excitement, adventure and meaning. 

Aging is a privilege. I feel incredibly lucky and grateful to have it.

That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Thank you for being part of my life.

what i'm reading: two by two favourite authors: part two: zadie smith's the fraud

In an earlier post, I mentioned that I recently read novels by two of my favourite authors, Roddy Doyle and Zadie Smith. I wrote about The Women Behind the Door here. Here's the second part: The Fraud.

A writer of vast and diverse talents

The Fraud is technically historical fiction, but this is Zadie Smith, so it's unlike any historical novel you've ever read. Whether or not you enjoy historical fiction, set aside your ideas about the genre before diving in to this gem.

I've read all but one of Smith's novels, and some of her nonfiction, and I plan to fill in what I've missed. She's an ambitious writer who has done a lot of different things. And like any artist who experiments with different forms, the outcomes can be uneven. (The exception to this is Colson Whitehead. How can he be so good at everything he tries??) I don't love everything Smith has written, but I love a lot of it, and for the rest, I want to come along for the ride. 

In this case, for me, Smith knocks it out of the park.

Who is the fraud? (Who isn't?)

The Fraud takes place in Victorian London, and focuses on three situations.

A sensational trial is underway: the Tichborne Claimant. After the heir to the Tichborne estate (presumably) died in a shipwreck, an Australian butcher came forward claiming to be Sir Tichborne. Despite all evidence that he was a charlatan and a fraud, a sizeable chunk of the British public loved and believed him. This is the most obvious reading of the book's title.

We also meet the life and times of a minor Victorian writer, a contemporary of Dickens and Thackery, now forgotten: William Harrison Ainsworth. We see most of the action from the point of view of Ainsworth's cousin and sometime lover, Eliza Touchet. Eliza, in Victorian parlance, is a widow, forever referred to as "Mrs. Touchet". She is also an intelligent woman, with a restless hunger for knowledge, dissatisfied with the tiny box that society allows her to live in. Mrs. Touchet has hidden identities that she cannot name even to herself, as they are well outside social norms of the time.

And there is Bogle: a formerly enslaved Jamaican man, who inexplicably champions the Tichborne Claimant, and who lends gravitas and credibility to the Claimant's cause. Through Bogle, we explore the lives of generations of enslaved Africans who came to be first Jamaican, then British.

Each of these people -- the Tichborne Claimaint, Ainsworth, Mrs. Touchet, and Bogle -- are all, in some sense, frauds. The Tichborne Claimaint is perpetrating a kind of giant magic trick on the public. Ainsworth is a fraud but doesn't realize it. Mrs. Touchet lives a fraudulent life, because she has to. Bogle's motives are more obscure. 

Keep reading, and you'll gain a sense that absolutely everyone is a fraud in some sense. The current Mrs. Ainsworth, who married "above her station". Charles Dickens, perhaps a fictional version of the great writer -- or perhaps a more authentic but hidden version. And on and on. Leading us to question what it would mean to live an authentic life.

The great fraud of our own times

The Fraud works on an entirely different level, too: it maps to the current political situation: the fraud who now lives in the White House.

The Tichborne case and the pro-Tichborne public echo the Orange Guy and the MAGA movement in ways that are both obvious and subtle -- and entirely clever and humorous. There are anti-vaxxers (who certainly existed back then), and outlandish conspiracy theories that contradict themselves. There is an extreme distrust of society's institutions, coupled with a blind loyalty to people of great power, incomprehensible to the intelligent and well-informed. And there is, above all, an inability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Everything about the Tichborne Claimant trial and the community -- the cult -- that formed around it can be read as current and topical.

And there's more

Many critics have written about The Fraud as a meta-novel: a novel about novelists, about Smith and her profession, and about us, the reading public. Here's a good example from The Atlantic.

It is certainly that. There are plenty of postmodern, self-referential moments that loop around themselves, where you're reading about yourself, what you are actually doing at the moment: reading a novel about a novel. 

But I think the critics who read this ambitious book primarily as a meta-novel are focusing on the wrong thing. There is just so much going on. 

I will include one caution: The Fraud might be a bit difficult to get into at first, as it's written in a Victorian style. Or is it a faux Victorian style? Is the style a fraud?

Give it a chance, it's worth it.

what i'm watching: a complete unknown: not very profound (or kind) thoughts about this movie

Bobby, Suze, the Village, the Jacket

Several people have asked me to share my thoughts about "A Complete Unknown," James Mangold's fictional biopic about Bob Dylan in the early 1960s.

Allan and I were in no rush to see it, because we love Bob Dylan, and we are well familiar with the public versions of his story.

Allan dislikes fictional biopics, and while we watched the movie last night, I remembered why I also seldom watch them. I'm actually going into my various watchlists and deleting every movie of this genre. There are at least a dozen movies like this waiting; now I've lost interest in them all.

To me, "A Complete Unknown" was like a checklist of 1961-1965 Bob Dylan. I imagined someone holding a clipboard, checking off each person and each item. Here's Alan Lomax. Here's Albert Grossman. Harold Leventhal. Tom Wilson. Woody Guthrie, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, and Suze Rotolo (here called Sylvie). Check, check, check.  There's the cap. There's the jacket. The motorcyle. Check, check, check. Folk City, the Gaslight. Walter Cronkite, the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Check, check, check.

Predictably, it all leads up to the most famous incident of early Dylandom, the most-told tale, the hotly debated and revised and rewritten Dylan Goes Electric at the 1965 Newport Festival. We wondered if Mangold would repeat the legend of the ax-wielding Pete Seeger. I won't spoil it for you.

It appears that most of the casting for this movie was based on looks, which seems to be how this type of movie is made. Woman with long black hair equals Joan Baez. Heavy man equals Albert Grossman. The actor playing Baez lacked any semblance of the singer and activist's beauty and charisma, and above all, her rich, melodious voice and incredible guitar playing. Maybe that's to be expected, but it still felt like a seventh-generation photocopy.

For those who don't know this story, the film is a history lesson. For those who do, it's a hackneyed re-creation, plus a few scenes that in all likelihood did not happen. I got nothing out of it. Had I been watching alone, I would have turned it off halfway through.

For those wishing to know something about Bob Dylan, I recommend Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary "No Direction Home". Even Scorsese's "Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story" -- a fictional, somewhat surreal homage to the greatest rock tour of all time -- captured more Dylan than this movie that tried to adhere so closely to the real story.

I'm guessing this was a much better movie if you didn't know much about Dylan and don't value him as I do.

what i'm reading: two by two favourite authors: part one: roddy doyle's the women behind the door

I took a break from reading nonfiction to read novels by two of my favourite authors: The Women Behind the Door, by Roddy Doyle, and The Fraud, by Zadie Smith. I thoroughly enjoyed both of them. Here's the first.

Doyle and I go way back

Roddy Doyle is a living legend, and yet under-recognized, at least in Canada.

His debut novel, The Commitments, from 1987, was made into a popular movie, and eventually became the start of the hilarious and poignant Barrytown Trilogy. Like many non-Irish readers, I discovered Doyle when his fourth book, 1993's Paddy Clark Ha Ha Ha, won the Booker Prize. He's been on my must-read list ever since.

Somewhere along the way, the fact of another new Roddy Doyle novel became commonplace. Now when I see lists of the best contemporary Irish writers, I'm sad to see his name no longer included. 

In The Women Behind the Door, Doyle returns to one of his recurring characters, Paula Spencer. Paula is the title character in 1994's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. She's in an abusive marriage, a fact that she and everyone around her ignores and rationalizes. It's a deeply moving story -- harrowing and triumphant -- and was groundbreaking in its day.

Twelve years and many books later, Doyle published Paula Spencer, which picks up the action exactly where Woman Who Walked leaves off. Paula is now 40, single, and a recovering alcoholic, trying to build a life from scratch. 

Almost 20 years later, Doyle gives us The Women Behind the Door. These books are now known as the Paula Spencer Series, which I find a bit odd, since they were published many years apart, and were not a planned trilogy. But whatever helps more people read more Roddy Doyle is great.

First he lulls you in, then... the emotional mic drop

The Women Behind the Door is vintage Roddy Doyle. It begins with what he is best known for: witty, bantering dialogue that is hilarious, authentic, and dead-on perfect. This banter often occurs between men at a pub. In this book, the banter is among women. It's fun, it's light, it's easy, and it always rings true.

I was immediately drawn in -- it's impossible not to be. But I thought, so this is where he is now, eh? Just writing the easy dialogue? Did he bring back Paula Spencer just to have her banter with a new friend, and some internal reminiscence of the bad old days? That doesn't seem worthy of--- and boom. You fall off an emotional cliff. 

And then I remember, oh yeah, this is Doyle does best. It's not just the banter. It's the banter that begins to reveal. And it reveals deeply, truly, painfully, joyously. One minute you're laughing, then you're struck dead, then you're weeping, from both joy and heartache. You can't put the book down -- not because of action, because of the emotional suspense.

This book is an absolute triumph. I do think to understand it, to mine the full emotional depth, you need to read the three books in order. However, I would recommend reading other books in between, rather than all three consecutively. 

Doyle appeared at the Vancouver Writers Fest, just last year. I was so pleased to see him recognized in this area, and so annoyed not to have been there. So close! And yet, impossible.

Long ago, we did see him read in a bookstore in New York, and I'm pretty sure I also saw him at the famous 92 Street Y writer series around the same time. He's a treasure, and so is Paula Spencer.