So what kind Of Christmas will I have, anyway?

This year, I thought I would have the kind of Christmas where I would sit by the tree on Christmas Eve putting the last touches on beautifully-appointed presents, while a turkey roasts slowly in the oven.  I will strum my guitar and sing “Silent Night.” My loyal friends will struggle towards my cabin, through a howling blizzard, laden with gifts and brandy-laced egg nog.

            Whoops, I just remembered that I can’t play guitar. Plus, I have a vocal range of three notes, all of them off-key.

            Okay, so no guitar and singing. Instead, I will put on my Three Tenors Christmas CD while Bill goes out into the boreal forest to find a perfectly-shaped evergreen which he will bring home by dog team while humming “Oh Tannanbaum” in a throaty lumberjack’s voice. I will lovingly hang ornaments, each of which has a symbolic connection to a beatific past Christmas.

            Well, we don’t actually have a tree because we have propane lights and there is no safe place to put one. Plus, I don’t really like decorating. The last time I did it, was in 1991 when I bought a little countertop tree that I put out every year no matter disheveled it got, but that we finally threw out last spring while engaged in an uholy fit of de-clutterization.

            No tree and no guitar, then, but I will lovingly curl the ribbons on the perfect gifts for those I love, imagining their faces of delight on Christmas morning.

            Um, have to jettison the gift idea too. I gave up Christmas shopping and gift-giving a few years ago when I found myself stressed beyond belief, frantically running from store to store, looped tapes of Christmas songs blasting my eardrums, buying presents out of a sense of obligation, not love.

            Okay, no tree, no guitar, no gifts but egg-nog with brandy and Gluhwein to warm the cockles of our hearts and set our souls astir while we raise our glasses and break out into a spontaneous rendition of “God Rest Ye, Merry Gentleman.”

            Ooooooo, that won’t work either. I quit drinking many years ago, not long after the Christmas where we forgot the turkey in the oven and nearly burned the house down.

            So, no tree, no guitar, no presents and no egg-nog, then.

            But there will be friends. I will cook a turkey dinner and invite people into my home. Others will invite me into theirs and we will break bread together many times. Even though I don’t give gifts, I will find ways of letting people know how much I love them and how grateful I am that they are in my life. I will fill up my house with fresh flowers and put out the Christmas tablecloth that my mother embroidered 40 years ago. We will walk the dogs through a landscape covered with snow. We will open our hearts and we will laugh.

            There will be peace.

            Merry Christmas, everybody.

            

The Shackles of Dreams

For most of my life, I've wanted to publish a novel but I've been busy living other lives and it is only in the last few years that I've become serious about it.

Now I am old enough to bump up against the possibility that it may never happen.

Instead of being depressed about this, I find great freedom in this realization.

Dreams can be shackles and to age well is to let go of shackles. The older I get, the more I realize how little control I have. This is forcing me to release my grasp and enjoy the ride of life with all its mountains and valleys. In the end, I will measure my life by how much I've laughed and loved, not by how many books I've published.

That doesn't mean I've given up on the novel. I'm working harder than ever. It means I can do it with a lighter heart.

I'm so sorry, Will & Kate

It has just come to my attention that my book “iceberg tea” has become an international seller. I have sold the first (of many, I’m sure) copy on Amazon UK.

As soon as I heard the news, I began to wonder who in the UK would have ordered my book. Then it dawned on me that it must have been Will & Kate. It now seems obvious that they must have ordered it some time ago and their delight in the stories inspired them to include Yellowknife on their Canadian tour.

They must have been secretly hoping to meet me to get their copy of “iceberg tea” personally signed and dedicated.

Now I feel really bad for not going downtown the day they were here. I didn’t go because I wanted to do some work on my next book and I thought the half-hour drive from Prelude into town, the hassle of finding parking and the wait in the crowd would all take too much time out of my day. Besides, I thought, I could probably see them better of TV.

That was before I knew about they were fans of “iceberg tea.”

So what can I say now except, I’m so sorry, Will and Kate.

But, hey, next time don’t be so shy. Give me call and I’ll be happy to sign the book. Maybe we can even go roast wieners on the sailboat.

Thalidomide Characters

My character Marty who lives in 1980 thinks that he should buy a brand spanking  new red 1981 Ford pick-up truck.

I want him to buy a used 1968 Dodge camper van that was refurbished by an RCMP officer in 1972.

He sees himself bombing up and down the highway in his new truck impressing all his drinking buddies.

I say he could have sex with his girlfriend, Jen, in the bed of the Dodge van.

He says he can have sex with her in the back of his new pick-up which is a crew cab.

I say maybe he should ask her about that first.

He says she’s kinky enough to like it.

I say that if he buys the truck, he will throw a wrench in the story and I will never get it finished and doesn’t he care about my literary career?

He says it’s his story, what he does is none of my business and he never asked to be written in the first place.

I threaten to write all the money out of his bank account.

He says it’s too late, that he already took all the money out and now he’s got a big wad of cash in the front of pocket of his jeans.

So that’s what that bulge in your jeans is, I say.

Don’t be gross, he says. You’re old enough to be my mother.

I ask how he took the money out of his account without my knowing about it.

He says it happened the night I fell asleep without turning the computer off, that as long as the computer’s on and I’m not touching the keyboard, he can do whatever he wants.

What happens when I turn the computer off? I ask.

He says a big weight comes down in the middle of his chest that holds him in whatever place I left him until I come back.

           

Now you’ve brought it up, he says, maybe you could be a little more considerate about where you leave me. He says he didn’t appreciate being left down at the Old Town docks waiting for a cab for eight months.

Eight months? I say.

Yeah, eight months, he says. It was fucking cold and you shut it down before I had a chance to put on my toque. I got frostbite on my ears over that.

Oh, I say. That must have been when I got my new computer and I wanted to let your story rest while I worked with some other characters in another story.

Other characters, he says. I’m standing there at the docks freezing my goddamn ears off and you’re out whooping it up with other characters.

Suddenly I feel like the worst kind of uncaring author, the kind of author who spawns half-baked, malformed characters with gimps, brain tumours or missing legs who are then left to fend for themselves. Thalidomide characters.

I sit and look at the screen.

Marty lights a smoke, turns his back and walks toward Jackfish Ford. 

My Continuing Love Story

We went rowing in the rain today, the lake shrouded in mist, the air fresh as a new dawn. My pants were only slightly waterproof and as the downpour increased, I got soaked to the skin. I didn’t care because the loons were calling and the rain pelted bubbles in the water and the slick black rocks of the islands rose into the mist.

I have always loved rain, ever since I was a little girl, and today there were no bugs, the rain was warm and the lake calm.

We took a break and I looked at Bill, wet dripping off his blue hat, Princess sitting in the stern behind him looking drowned and miserable and wondering why these people didn’t have the sense to get in out of the rain.

Words bubbled from my lips unplanned. “I love you,” I said to Bill. “I love you because if I hadn’t met you, I would never have done anything like this and I wouldn’t want to have to missed it for the world.”

Bill said nothing but I could see a twitch in the corner of his mouth.

“I love rain,” I said. “I married you because you’re from Prince Rupert where it rains every day.  I could see the rain in your soul.”

He smiled his quiet smile. More rain came down and he picked up his oars.

“This is a great hat,” he said.

“Oh, that’s the hat Richard gave you,” I said. “Richard likes to give gifts.”

“Yes, he’s a very generous fellow,” Bill said.

We said nothing further then, just rowed through the rain in tandem and I reflected how, over the years of a marriage, love keeps renewing at the oddest of times. I would never have learned this if I had been too afraid to risk my heart.

On burning my journals

I started to burn thirty years worth of journals on Tuesday. It was a brilliant spring day when meltwater dripped, whiskeyjacks chirruped and winter’s back was broken. As I fed the pages into the bonfire, I realized that I was engaged in the ancient ritual of shedding old skin in order to expose the new.

Many people have questioned the wisdom of burning these journals.

The journals I burnt were not memories, reflections or stories. Rather they were a spewing forth of raw emotion, of anger, of jealousy, obsession, heartbreak. I have been on a healing journey these last thirty years, and the journals represent a purging of my inner poison. They are rambling, repetitive, disjointed and embarrassing. They are intensely personal. I shudder at the thought that anybody else should read them.

Nonetheless, I kept them for many years because I thought I might use them as material for the inner workings of fictional characters. This was not the case. I would fill up a notebook, throw it into a box and never look at it again. In time, I began to understand that the art of these journals was in the process, not the result.

The process of journaling has been, and continues to be, a ritual and prayer for me. It is a  process of becoming and it has influenced everything else I’ve written. Its power comes from its utter privacy. All that is good and true in the journals has been carved in my heart, the rest has no value.

I decided to burn them last year when I was on an turbulent airplane. I have a fear of flying and whenever a plane starts to bump and shake, I think I’m going to die. As the plane rollicked through the clouds, I panicked that people would read my journals.

When I fed the pages into the bonfire last Tuesday, I felt cleansed of the turmoil of the past. As writing them had been a process of becoming, so was the burning of them. A story of death and renewal, of a spring day when snow drips and whiskyjacks chirrup as winter’s back is broken.

Facebook Status Angst

One day several people tell me they like the things I post on my Facebook status.

At first I am delighted.

Then my delight morphs into a serious case of Facebook Status Angst.

I begin to imagine that the Facebook world waits in breathless anticipation of my daily status report and I feel pressured to live up to the expectations of my fans. I feel I have post something diabolically brilliant every day.

My mind goes blank. The only post I can think of is “I want a sandwich.”

It reminds me of the birthday card signing trauma where I get into thinking that because I am a writer, something more, something heart-warming, inspiring and original is expected of me. All I can ever think of  writing is “happy birthday.”

As I look at my blank Facebook status box, I began to wish I were cause person.” People who are passionately devoted to a cause never have a problem coming up with a Facebook status.  They just post links and comments about their cause, or causes.

While I admire people who are called to better the world through activism in various causes, I have never been a cause person. My contribution is to try to remember that everybody is part of our common humanity and to view them with respect and an open heart, regardless of whether I agree with what they’re doing or saying. I’ve managed to actually do this for moments at a time and maybe those moments reverberate throughout the world.

But I digress. This isn’t about my philosophy of life but about Facebook where I am still looking at a blank status box while my status fans wait breathlessly in the wings for another brilliant witticism.

Or so I imagine.

It occurs to me that I am being absolutely ridiculous. I laugh and post “human beings are most ridiculous species on the face of the earth.”