Grandma R.

When she went - suffocated, finally, by the miracle of modern medicine, she left behind: $25 unpaid credit (not late, you know, just not yet paid); a complicated lifting chair; and so much unsaid.

(Not said by her and  not said to her: "I remember it differently, that time - you don't remember because you weren't there." Why did she go, what did she feel? Now no one can remind her where she was, where the children were or with whom. Not that they ever did remind her; fairly or unfairly they blamed her but outwardly held their peace. We are all English, after all.)

There was also the small matter of her body - and it was a good deal smaller by the time they finished cutting her up in surgery, looking for the tumour and all its many children. Her body ended up in a cemetary in Prince George, BC, the same place her mother lies, unmarked, unvisited, beneath the grass. We're not cemetary visitors, us - something to do with with religiously despising the material body, or just an inability to confront death.

Her children sorted through her things - her books, her clothes, the vast numbers of cheap and useful household things she could not resist buying, from the Clapper to a screwdriver with every type of head invented. I was given a book of Tennyson's poems, barely held together with plastic tape on its leather cover and inscribed to my biological Grandfather from his mother. That was how I learned his given name - Gilbert - which I had never heard before. I still don't know his mother's name and I all I know about him are contradictory stories - he's either the abandoned ex-husband of a wandering woman or the indifferent or perhaps even cruel but certainly absent husband whose involvement with his children ended with conception. I treasure the book (in storage) as a connection to the past, whatever it was. Grandma thought the book was important enough to drag over from England and keep until her death - maybe she planned to give it back some day?

She left my parents the clock they despised. They are the generation that turns the hated key, hearing in the grinding of complex innards:

Ask not for whom they toll
(those blasted chimes -
those noisome, trite, Big Ben imitations
their incessant, infernal ringing, day and night,
but particularly at night)
their ringing, it is for thee...

She came from England (west midlands, small towns, birmingham, WWII, marriage, children, ballroom dance, romance, divorce court, gretna green, RAF mechanic, her father's name, her husband's name, her second husband's name - the one that stuck though he did not - parental forgiveness and a return to their religion, deaths of husbands, feuds with siblings, children moved abroad, children fervent with apocalyptic prophecy and children married young, a child divorced, a child abroad, a family abroad, a child in jail, and all the children breeding a host of grandchildren, a child fostered and adopted and a mother shrunken with age, senility turning her into a child...) to Canada, fleeing Thatcher and the winds of change in the motherland.

The whole family came (jumpers and sweets, beano and dandy, even dampness and distrust crossed the pond) and finally buried her in a hole in Pince Goerge, B.C. next to her mother (her mother, who came but might not have known where she was) (her mother, who raised her children for a while) (her mother, who was the convert and enforcer of the family's conversion).

And what I thought at the time she died was what a pity to end up there, where I started, the place I fled, the last place I'd want to end up - but then maybe she was fleeing the mirror of the familiar, as I have.

Stealing Beauty: another movie review, with notes, plus a random comment

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Read that first, and then, here's some additional comments I had noted elsewhere, plus a random comment.

I think what I love about this film is that the central mystery, the excuse for the story, the macguffin, isn't really important. There is no great secret to be revealed... except for one, and we find that it doesn't really matter compared to the journey it took to find out. All there is is the place, the journey, the people, the moment.... and the light, which comes in different colours, at different angles, and in different intensities.

The lack of mystery might be a problem for some people.... I imagine they lose interest. That lack of tension is exactly what intrigues me. We know that by introducing Lucy's state of virginity, that it will be 'solved', and the rest is the journey, just as it was for all of us. There we are on the edge of forever, and the view from the brink bears contemplation. All those moments from which we do not return - we don't return from any of them, really. - and then there are those moments which we feel passing, knowing even as they exist, that they will never exist again: weddings, funerals, orgasms...

RANDOM COMMENT... noted earlier today... what is it about N. American men (or is it men in general?) and their need to tell everyone about how they got the better of someone else? "So I said to him, 'Over my dead body!' Hahahahahah...." It's like lions or wolves pissing on their territory. Why don't they just take out their dicks and swing them around to impress everyone? Perhaps that will be my next response to boasting... or how I'll respond to my own urge to brag...

Savigny-sur-Orge, 27 June 2006

I walk outside; the light is dim, green, the light of dreams. Overhead, a rag-bottomed cloud blocks the sun. It must be a mile deep to cut the midsummer glare so completely. I can feel the weight of all that rain above me. Puffs of wind whisk through dust and gutter-litter, and all is filled with a sense of waiting.

The merchants in the square feel the weight of impending rain, too, and they scramble to cover their luggage and their racks of polyester blouses. A few fat drops smack into the paving stones, so few that I only hear their impacts but cannot see their spots. The plops become patter and a single drop strikes my neck and slips under my collar. Dots appear on the hot cobbles, and begin to fade, evaporating back from whence they came.

I duck into a café and await the show, relishing the idea of a refreshing summer storm seen over the rim of a coffee cup, from the safety of a familiar haunt; but first a ray, and then a beam of sunlight appear, and finally, the full face of the sun is revealed. The cloud moves on to clean up another town, perhaps, leaving us with our dust, our worries, and the rest of our hot summer day.