Gone awry

Carl Linnaeus classified organisms; Jann Arden corrals emotions into lyrics.

Ordering chaos is a very human compulsion and when we succeed (or think we do) we have an equally strong urge to share. We call it communication.

On my way to visit a friend with a broken hip recently, signs and arrows guided me through the labyrinth of hospital hallways until I came upon this notice:

For a fraction of a second I thought it was both informative and welcoming.

The problem with communication, though, is that the message doesn’t exist in solitary, meaningful splendor.

First of all there’s the sender, who composes the message and chooses a medium to transmit it. Does she use words? Are they written, spoken, or sung? On paper or YouTube?

Or does she use a picture? Is it moving or still? A painting or photograph?

All the while, the sender’s history colours how she or he composes that message.

The recipient has at least as much baggage and it affects how he or she perceives the message when it arrives.

While I stood outside Nuclear Medicine, grinning and taking the lens cap off my camera (and I realize that says a lot about me, although I'm not even going to guess what), the first person who came along was a man wearing green hospital scrubs. He spotted the camera and quickly struck a campy pose beside the sign before striding away. Then came a couple more employees who stopped politely until I smiled and waved them past, then they were gone.

The last person to notice me was a woman wearing street clothes and a staff ID tag.

“What are you taking a picture of?” she asked, turning to look.

Before I could answer, she said, “Oh, the wall.” She looked at me like I was maybe a little crazy (okay, I know what the camera told her), then walked away.

All five of us had the same visual cues, but we all got different messages. At least, I was the only one laughing.

While my companions-of-the-corridor saw a camera, a wall or a sign, this is what I noticed:

And much as I appreciate the cheery invitation, I suspect it's not what the senders intended.

It always comes back to food

As newlyweds in the Depression, my great-aunt Mary and her husband packed supplies along what is now the West Coast Trail to her new brother-in-law’s gold-mining claim, sleeping on fir and cedar boughs, wrapped in quilts.

During the Dirty Thirties, my grandfather used to load his truck with the produce of his fields and rumble around the Fraser River delta, visiting friends and relatives and dropping off sacks of vegetables at each stop.

I grew up listening to dozens of these tales as my elders reminisced over Nabob tea or Canadian Club and ginger ale. None of them were money-rich but they were loaded with stories, generosity and adventurous spirits.

Almost all of those old storytellers are gone now but we still nurture those roots, me and my cousins and their children and grandchildren. Every year (like salmon but without the imminent mortality), my family is drawn back to the delta. For a while our numbers were down, but they’ve crept back up again to seventy or eighty: there’s been a steady decade and a half of marriages and babies; people move away and others move closer; teenagers drift off for a while and reappear with new girlfriends – or without the old ones. And if we’re lucky, we hear about it over tea or rye, lasagne or ham.

Oh who am I kidding? Lasagne and ham.

I honed my all-too-tame tales and made Auntie Mary’s No-Cook Brownies as my contribution to the potluck meal this year. I do love a recipe that begins “Melt chocolate chips in cream…”

4 cups graham crumbs

1 cup half & half or light cream

1 cup chopped walnuts

½ cup icing sugar

2 cups chocolate chips

1 teaspoon vanilla

Melt chocolate chips in cream over low heat, stirring to blend. When melted, stir in vanilla. Reserve 2/3 cup of the mixture.

Mix remainder with crumbs, sugar and walnuts in a big bowl. Pat into an eight- or nine-inch square pan and frost with the reserved 2/3 cup.

Straightforward, travels well, and rich in all the right ways. Just like Auntie Mary.

You know what they say about good intentions…

Yesterday was Saturday, November 28, Buy-Nothing Day.

I had decided to stay away from my computer, out of my car, to buy nothing.

I managed one out of three. Me! Who sometimes doesn't get in a car for a week at a time, relying instead on two feet or two pedals. Me, who is still wearing a t-shirt I bought in 1994.

By 8:13 yesterday morning, I was on the phone with my father, arranging to go to his (unpowered and unplumbed) cabin for the day – with a stop at a favourite restaurant for breakfast on the way.

Eight thirteen. Oy. 

I'm trying really hard not to feel like a failure about it, and I'm helped greatly by the success of the day in every other way. I read most of a really good (entertaining and informative and thought-provoking) book – Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Had a great time with my dad, reading him bits that made me laugh out loud while he read me bits from his newspaper. Listened to the kingfisher working the bay and the eagle trilling from its treetop perch and the rain on the cabin roof. I came home refreshed (and slightly damp).

And hell, Dad bought breakfast. 

Little House in the Big Woods has been one of my favourite books for more than 40 years. The author, Laura Ingalls, was the middle child in a family that lived quite a self-sufficient life in the wilderness of Wisconsin in the 19^th century. They grew or hunted their food, sewed their own clothes, chopped wood, hauled water…but every Sunday they stopped. The Sabbath was a day of rest – and sometimes a day of boredom for little Laura, if I remember correctly – but the principle is interesting. Once a week, you don’t cook or clean or fix cars or whatever you usually do. Once a week, you take a break.

This year, organizers have proposed an expanded Buy-Nothing Day on November 28. Not only do they want us to refrain from shopping, they want us to abstain from any kind of consumption, including a “Ramadan-like fast.”

Uh, no.

I won’t be giving up food any time soon, even for one of the shortest days of the year, especially since I don’t understand the organizers’ goal for that particular suggestion.

However, I’ll give some of the other ideas my best shot. I’m not a big shopper, so my absence is not going to cause a blip at Wal-Mart or even my local craft fairs, but it might teach me something.

My intention next Saturday is to do no shopping (easy), stay out of the car (easy), and use no electricity (no email? That’s harder). I’ll walk, ride my bike, read near a window. Try to coerce my husband into a game of backgammon. I will use my stove (gas, though electric sparker) and if it’s cold I’ll turn on my gas fireplace (ditto).

This looks like very do-able. After all, I don’t shop much anyway and I can do without my computer for one day.

Just one day.

Surely…

I ate Kauai

On my recent expedition on the sailboat Maple Leaf, I became a foodie. Those of you who know me can stop laughing now. I mean it; I haven’t had a Dorito since.
Chef Lila Ruzicka served three meals a day (and snacks) that looked, smelled, and tasted beautiful. She made butternut squash and roasted apple soup with fruit we intrepid explorers collected in an old orchard on Portland Island. (By we I mean the captain, first mate and deckhand, not actually moi.) She served Chinook salmon and fresh-caught (again, not by me) prawns on quinoa with broccoli and spinach. And poached pears with vanilla-bean ice cream and Belgian chocolate sauce…. Every meal was a revelation, four courses of good reasons to step lively on our shore expeditions.
Then I came home to a chef-less kitchen and exhausted my cooking skills with local beets and potatoes, free-range eggs and herbes de Provence for a week before I headed to Hawaii for a family vacation.

Kauai is called the Garden Isle and it certainly is an eruption of green – sugar cane, coffee, palm trees of all descriptions, cactus gardens on the dry side, taro fields on the wet…. 

We scored a bagful of starfruit, papaya, limes, and avocado at a farmer’s market in Kapa’a on the east coast. We picked up locally baked sourdough bread and fantastic island honey in Sueoka’s market in Koloa in the south, and coffee on the plantation a little further west.

I had a slice of coconut pie in the central mountains that makes me salivate still. The pre-foodie me would have wangled an entire pie to go, and devoured it all, too. Instead, after I enjoyed my slice I put down my fork; that’s when I figured this foodie thing might be more than a flash in the pan.

Now that I’m home, though, I want to make sure. I’m on the hunt for coconut pie.

Looking forward

In the opening of her book The Curve of Time, Muriel Wylie Blanchet paraphrases John Donne and Maurice Maeterlinck as they describe time. A person can stand at the top of a curve, she wrote, and look back to the past and ahead to the future at the same time.
That’s how I feel about Remembrance Day.
During the first World War, three of my great-uncles left their farms in what is now Tsawwassen, BC, for army service in France. Their younger brother, my grandfather, delivered supplies to a prisoner-of-war camp in the Monashee Mountains. They all returned to their farms and picked up their lives – they got married, raised crops and children, and argued happily and constantly with each other for another four decades.
During World War Two, the young woman who would be my mother-in-law left her home in Detroit to work in Codes and Cyphers for the Canadian Air Force. There, she met the man she loved and bickered with for fifty years.
As I think about my relatives this week, long gone from old age and natural causes, I also focus on my friend’s daughter in Afghanistan. I look into the future, when she comes home and argues with her loved ones for a long, long time.

love them birdies

When I was a kid, I loved the book My Family and Other Animals by Gerald Durrell, so I was delighted to find a copy of a BBC film version at the library and renew my acquaintance. The boy Gerry was passionately absorbed by his interest in zoology and only mildly inconvenienced by the efforts of his mother (played by the marvelous Imelda Staunton) to keep tabs on him during their stay on Corfu, and the quirks and (loud) complaints of his sister and brothers.
As I watched the movie, the leaves were dropping from the trees outside my windows but the birds had not yet moved to greener shrubberies.
So many chickadees picked at the bark and winkled seeds from the cones in the little fir that it looked like a vibrating Christmas tree decorated with songbirds. Juncoes, a Wilson’s warbler or two and a flock of something tiny and grey-brown swarmed in and out of the black hawthorn, coming and going like a houseful of adolescents on Red Bull. A hummingbird perched on a branch amongst them like a very small Imelda Staunton.
The Durrells were overtaken by global events and had to leave their Corfu paradise, but I’m keeping the wider world out of my garden, hoping that its selection of bugs, berries and seeds will be enough to entice my flighty neighbours to hang around. At least until Christmas; the chickadees are cuter than any decorations I could dream up.