Prompt # 56 - Groups

Prompt # 56 – Groups

My group participation has dwindled to two groups, both informal. Every Wednesday several of us meet at a local coffee shop called the Blue Moose and talk. Originally, we were an off-shoot of the defunct Philosopher's Cafe. We joke that the ticket to admission is that you have to use the word “art” at least once in your conversation. As we are all rather “artsie” – writers, painters, sculptors – this is not a hardship, and allows us to delude ourselves that what we are doing is more than gossip.

Every Thursday, a group of us meet to play Scrabble. We used to go to Molly's house because she could not get out. Now that she is in extended care, we go to the Lodge and play there. If we have more than four players, we set up two boards.

I have belonged to other groups. Our photography club and our genealogy club both folded. At one time, I was a member of the local art guild which runs the art gallery. I quit mainly because I hate going to meetings, especially at night. I also used to attend the local book club at the library. I love books and reading and I confess that I find the excess of negativity in such groups really offensive. There is too much focus on 'I don't like' and 'the writer should have . . . ' whereas I feel that when I read I am trying to figure out the writer's purpose, goal, and the choices made to achieve those goals. Rather than sit there feeling angry or letting the negativity of others darken my own experience of the book, I decided to not go. I recently read an account of a writer's experience when being attacked by a reader and I recognized that she was describing exactly how I used to feel at book club. http://brocktonwritersseries.wordpress.com/2014/02/19/bws-05-03-14-angie-abdou/ Thanks to Lauren Carter for this link to Angie Abdou's article.

Recently since I've had the luxury of more time, I manage to read about one book a week, which I report on Twitter @earthabridge instead of posting photos of my latest lunch. Although when I'm writing I find I don't read much. I do not want to switch from one world to another. 

Prompt # 55 - Movies

Prompt # 55 – Movies

The first movie I remember seeing was a western. My parents left my brother and me near the front of the theatre and they went to sit farther back. A horse and rider came full on the screen and the horse reared, seeming to fill the room and coming right for us. The noise I made, not sure whether it was screams or sobs, brought my parents running. I'm still afraid of any horses without a fence between me and them. This theatre burned down when I was six but I think this event was a couple of years before that.

The worst experience I remember was when as a young teen, my mother took me to a show called Mom and Dad. Parents were rooked by advertising to take their teen-age children. The show was sold as the answer to “the talk” on sex education which neither parents nor schools ever really had with young people. I think the movie was an old military health education film from the previous war that stressed avoiding sexually transmitted diseases by instilling fear in everyone. People were puking in the aisles. Although my memory appears to differ from what IMDB says.

I've never been a big fan of science fiction but because John Wyndham was a famous writer and his novel The Midwich Cuckoos, which is often taught in schools, had been made into a movie called The Village of the Damned starring Hayley Mills' father, I went to see it. Several small villages around the world are “visited” by an alien force. Nine months later every female in every village gives birth to a blond child. The children all have ESP. They can communicate with each other telepathically and they can read other peoples' minds. In order to save the world, John Mills, a teacher, has to rig a briefcase with a bomb, build a brick wall across his mind so the special children cannot read him, and enter the classroom on a kamikaze mission. A suicide bomber hero. The first day of my teaching career, in a Manitoba community where the majority of families were of Icelandic heritage, I walked into a classroom of white-blond children. I freaked. I had no briefcase, and no brick wall.

Once, after my marriage ended and I was living alone in the city, I decided I had to force myself to do things I wanted to do without waiting to meet someone to escort me. I picked an afternoon matinee and, because I was an English major, decided to check out the new version of D.H. Lawrence's classic Lady Chatterley's Lover. What I learned is that a lot of single men go to matinees and sit there watching with overcoats or felt hats covering their laps.

One recent movie that really made me angry was The Notebook. The young couple, Rachel McAdam and Ryan Gosling, were beautiful, and I've always loved James Garner. But the plot, the romanticization, the emotional manipulation, was really upsetting. Haven't we matured beyond fairy tales for adult children?

I was a relatively young adult during the Vietnam War. Three of my favourites are set in this era. I love Apocalypse Now, starring Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando, the updated revisioning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. I love Coming Home. I've always loved Jane Fonda's work. And I like Rambo First Blood which was one of the first stories about post traumatic stress. Because it was filmed in the town where I now live, Hope, BC, I have written about it on my Earthabridge blog, pieces called "Cult Fiction," when we celebrated the 25^th anniversary around 2007.

My favourite fluff film is Dirty Dancing. Love Jerry Orbach and Patrick Swayze. I recently really enjoyed re-watching Shakespeare In Love, although I usually refuse to watch any movies interrupted by advertisements on television. And I still don't watch scary movies. I don't watch many movies at all, because of where I live and lack of disposable income. And because I learned that lesson the hard way, not to go alone.

My favourite DVDs are actually two masterful documentaries. Martin Scorsese's The Last Waltz about the Band with Robbie Robertson and including Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton and more. And an Australian homage to my favourite Canadian, Leonard Cohen, called I'm Your Man.

 I wish.

Prompt # 53 - Home Town

Prompt # 53 – Home Town

I grew up on a farm 4.5 miles south of a small prairie town called Oak River, about 50 miles north of Brandon, Manitoba. The town is so small that Facebook will not accept it as a place, so I have to list my hometown as Rivers where I was born, which was about 10 miles south east of the farm. I went to school in Oak River for all twelve years before leaving to go to university in Winnipeg.

                                                            A little town on the prairie.

Oak River is still on the map. At least one hundred people live there, about half what it was fifty years ago. It is a victim of technology. Bigger machines mean bigger farms worked by fewer people. It exists still mainly to service the farms which surround it. Groceries, quick freeze, gasoline, mail, coffee shops, pub, farm equipment, hardware. There used to be a drug store, liquour store, and in the earlier years, the 1950s, a telephone exchange, an egg grading station, a blacksmith shop, general goods store including clothing, a railway station. Even the grain elevators are gone now, and the tracks have been pulled up.

                                                     Main Street in winter in the 1950s.

Grain is now trucked to a modern elevator about ten miles away. The high school kids (grades 7 to 12) are bussed to Rivers. The bank is now a credit union. I believe there is still an active curling and skating rink and that golf has joined baseball as the summer recreation. There is a seniors complex now. The old school has been torn down, and the elementary school uses the building that was built as a high school for us. It had four classrooms, a hallway lined with lockers, a gym, a science lab, but no library.

                                          This old elementary school has been torn down.

I never lived in town but for a few years my grandparents were retired there, and many school friends were town kids, if their parents worked as teachers, or in other service industries such as butcher shop, mechanics, retail, etc. In high school, kids from the neighbouring smaller town of Cardale were bussed to Oak River, which provided an opportunity to make new friends. I am still in touch with my best friend from Grade Nine, Leona, who lives near Calgary. I no longer have any aunts, uncles, or cousins living in my old hometown. I don't think anyone from my grade still lives in the area. We all had to leave for higher education and for employment. 

Prompt # 52 - Inheritance

Prompt # 52 - Inheritance

Somehow I have become the keeper of several family treasures. From my paternal grandmother, her old geography school textbook, complete with some fold-out maps. Although Grandma would have used it in Ilminster, Somerset, in the first decade of the 20^th century, before she emigrated to Manitoba around 1912, the maps and political information contained within suggest that it was written before the 1830s. The map of North America is barely an outline of coastlines.

From my maternal grandmother, who was born in Portsmouth and went to school in Twickenham before she emigrated to Canada in 1913, a brass Buddha, wearing coral and carved wooden beads, sitting in a brass bowl on a carved wooden stand, a brass tray, a Tibetan prayer wheel, a silver hand mirror, silver button hooks, silver and ebony glove stretchers, a silver plate mustard pot with blue glass liner, a silver plate toast rack, a Belleek cake plate, a Wedgwood milk jug with hunting dog handle, her coral christening necklace, a hand-wrought gold necklace with amethyst and aquamarine stones, a gold cocktail ring set with seven diamonds, and a book – The Parents Book, Answers to Children's Questions. I think her mother, grandmother, and aunts used to send her things from England.

And from my maternal grandfather's family, who lived in Maine/New Brunswick before the border was drawn, and moved to Red River for ten years before moving farther west to British Columbia in 1891 - wedding china from 1870, a ceinture fleche, a Metis sash from Red River, circa 1870, a Hudson River Valley landscape painting, and oak-framed photographs of their ranch in BC taken before 1910.

From my cousin Carol who received them through her mother or aunt, a Dead Man's Penny with our grandmother's brother's name engraved, a medal awarded to the next of kin of every British or Commonwealth soldier who was killed during WW I. And pieces of ephemera – including a postcard sent from our great-great-grandmother (who died in 1920) to our grandmother in Canada before she was married.

I also have from my mother - an oil painting on wood from around Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, where she spent her wedding night. A blue lustre cream and sugar set, a green oval casserole, wool blankets, a Eugene Veder print - all wedding gifts. A statue of a horse. A jewel box with jewelery. An unusual necklace with pastel glass globes like mini light bulbs. Her silverware chest. A trunkful of photo albums. Table cloths. Her wedding dress. Lord, I even have an ancient wooden wagon wheel, moved from the Manitoba farm to BC when my parents retired to Vernon. The wheel was from an old grain-hauling wagon which probably came with the farm when my father bought it with veterans' assistance after WW II. It was also the wagon which brought me home to the farm when I was born, because the lane had not been built yet and cars could not get through from road to house during winter. Horses and wagon to the rescue. I love the symbolism of this old thing, a sun image you can find in ancient art. I found it once on the base of a High Cross in Ireland. I can't believe my parents saved it and brought it to BC as by then fifty years later, it was purely decorative. It leans on my deck.

Mostly I feel honoured to be the keeper of these “things” which by their connections to people, places, and times past, the stories they hold, I am keeping alive. Sometimes I feel the burden of “things” - the weight of responsibility. These things reduce my options. I need space to accommodate them. I have to figure out what to do with them. Not to mention the $40 x 20 years = $800 I've paid already to keep some things in a safety deposit box.

Of course, other than things, from each family and each ancestor I also inherited physical, intellectual, emotional traits, for better or for worse. I look like my father's family. I seem to have inherited my maternal grandmother's love of books, reading, and writing. When I used to visit her about every two years after she retired into town, I would volunteer to dust the books in her library. I hope I've also inherited her sense of humour. From all my ancestors, I proudly celebrate a questioning mind and a fair bit of contrariness. 

Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Prompt # 54 - School Trips

Trips were not part of our school culture. We didn't have any school teams or drama clubs. If you were in the choir, you would go to the nearest music festival once a year. I remember only one, in Hamiota, the next town to the north-west, about ten miles from our school. The two songs I remember most are “The Skye Boat Song” (speed bonny boat like a bird on the wing over the sea to Skye) and “The Little Drummer Boy” (come they told me pa rum pa pum pum). I wasn't in the choir. Or, shall I confess, I got booted out of the choir, for mouthing. Honestly, I thought I was doing everyone a favour. I have no voice. But one time, I skipped school with an accomplice and rode on the bus with the choir and then ran wild around Hamiota while the others were singing in the competition. I think we missed the bus, or maybe someone called our parents and informed on us. I know I ran into my parents downtown and went home with them. This could have been just pure luck as otherwise there was no way to get home except to hitchhike.

In Grade Twelve we did go on one trip to Winnipeg, the provincial capital, about two hundred miles east of Oak River (this was before metrification). We toured the university and the general hospital, where some of us planned to go for further education or training. There were about five or six of us in one car driven by Mr Hall, the science teacher. We stayed in a hotel. I think that would have been the time we went to a play at the Manitoba Theatre Centre. It was The Fantasticks, with the song “Try to Remember the Kind of September.” I do wonder whether it was a travelling troupe, and if so, whether Jerry Orbach played one of the young men. I think this was also the time that my best friend Leona and I went to see the movie Dr Zhivago. We both loved it, especially the Ukrainian symbolism in many of the scenes including the opening funeral, which were so similar to our own experiences in rural Manitoba.

I was honoured to be chosen for one special trip, the summer between Grade Eleven and Grade Twelve. The school named me as a Centennial Traveller, a special federal program to celebrate the upcoming centennial of Canadian Confederation. I went to Winnipeg and joined a group of 23 others of my age from all over the province, along with two chaperones. We travelled by train, two nights, to Montreal and were then billetted with a Quebecois family, going on group tours along with 24 Quebec students during the day. To Old Montreal. The Botanic Gardens. Ile St Helene which was being built for Expo '67. Private parties. Outings with the host family to Sorel and to the mountains. A bus trip to Quebec City including tours of Old Quebec, the aquarium, the Plains of Abraham, where the English defeated the French during the Seven Years War, and Canada became British. In Quebec City we girls stayed in a nunnery and the boys in a monastery, miles away. On our way home to Winnipeg, we stopped in Ottawa and toured the Parliament Buildings.

This trip was one of the highlights of my life. It helped expand my love of Canada. At a folk club our group had met students from McGill and the University of Montreal. I remember one was an engineer and he asked simply: Why do I have to learn English and study and work in a language not my own? Thus, when the Quiet Revolution happened in Quebec, followed by the October Crisis in 1970, I felt I had some personal understanding of some of the issues, from these meetings, and from the pen pal relationships I maintained with students from the host group.

This visit also made all the Montreal references seem real once I became a passionate fan of Leonard Cohen. Because I'd already been down to that place by the river. And to Our Lady of the Harbour, the Notre Dame de Bon Secours Church in Old Montreal, which is still one of my sacred places. When you walk in, your eyes immediately go up, towards heaven, to see a navy of miniature sailing ships floating in the sky, carved by sailors and given to the church as votive offerings as their boats were leaving the safety of the seaway and the harbour and setting off back out over the sea to who knows where.