Growing Versions

Facebook has been a game changer. That is overstating the obvious, I realize. It has brought back people into my life that in previous generations would have been lost to me forever.  Now I get regular updates from friends who live around the world. Some I only knew for a few days in the first place, others I knew for an intense 6 months, many more I knew for a lot longer, but now know in different, more interesting ways.  I have discovered I have more in common with some people than I ever realized when I was a kid. While I enjoy having this tenuous connection with kids I started grade one with by way of knowing what they ate for breakfast, one or two real life friends have escaped my grasp.  They have drifted from me.  They don't use Facebook, they likely have more scrupulous adherence to privacy than I.  I only have a tiny fragment of information to go on about their whereabouts.  I have made a few half-hearted attempts to reach out, but in the fi...

Sometimes I  just need to stare for a while to get back on track. I need to re-set by staring vacantly;  it is the equivalent of turning off a computer and turning it back on. Today was a staring day.

Is the pilot light lit? Or has it gone out?

Every once in a while, one should stay up late and look at stars if you are a morning person. Or get up early if you are night person.

We have art in order not to die of truth.-Friedrich Nietzsche

Last year on my birthday, a young friend gave me the jar on top (it contains  glitter, and lots of it, food colouring and eye shadow).  I was instructed to shake it whenever I felt stressed.  I keep it on my desk and I have shaken it a lot this past year and it has really helped. When I came home from work the other day, my son presented me with a jar full of beach stones. It is meant to help me calm down and remember the beach.  It works! I intend on building my collection.  What could be next?

It is still winter coat weather some days, despite what the calendar says. When the sunny days come, we convert that sunshine immediately (greedily) and store it deep inside for use later on the less sunny ones. Now that I am in my 40s, when summer comes, I  just drop everything.  My need for food/eating goes down, my tolerance for drama expires and as long as I have toast or bananas every once in a while, the summer light and heat is enough to keep me going.  It boils down to needing less when there is heat.  I need less all year round, I realize, but the winter has me confused since I still need heating oil and insulation. Sitting on a beach eating an apple and emptying my mind.  Playing a board game until I cannot play it anymore. Chatting by a fire. That's it.

I was reading the book What Makes a Baby by Cory Silverberg  with my son recently.  It tells kids about the nuts and bolts, sperm and eggs make babies, but it intentionally leaves out how the sperm and the egg meet to open the conversation for each kid to discuss the facts in the context of their own lives. If they were adopted or conceived by IVF or through their parents, the story will naturally be different.  It impressed me because it didn't shy away from terminology but also left some space for different stories about how babies come into the world into the loving arms of different kinds of families. Afterwards, I thought about the literary device you encounter in some books that involves leaving some stuff out, letting the reader fill in the blanks. Instead of applying themselves to detailing every piece of glitter on the emperor's new clothes, a writer chooses to focus on characters and plot and leaves details roughly sketched, letting me do that work. I mi...

I came home last night and my son insisted I sit down with him that very minute to label the pictures from the "baby to 2" photo book, containing pictures of him. It was half-heartedly put together in the half light, half conscious days of his early life and it is the last of "the printed from a camera" pictures that I put together. He did not care about the quality or lack thereof of the photos. He just had lots of questions about what kind of baby he was (my answer, an always awake one ) He was born just around the time early adopters were acquiring smart phones. If he had been born even one year later, I might have had his baby hood photoshopped and stored (not printed) on my desk top. The likelihood that those images would have made it into a book like this, sitting on the shelf, eagerly pulled down and scrutinized would have been very low. I have photographed every square inch of their walk to and from school. My parents did not even walk with me to...

 This weekend, my dad showed me one of my grandmother's paintings.  My grandmother was famous for a lot of things in our family and one of them were her handpainted cards and framed pictures. Each of the grandkids has one, as far as I know.  Long after she has passed away, the paintings are still here. This one, as far as I can tell, is of the second to last house she lived in.  I would recognize it anywhere because that house shows up when I am picturing a place when I read novels sometimes. The memory is sketchy and not necessarily accurate, it stretches to fit the new stories I am reading and the same goes for this painting.  Off in the distance, you can see a row of little houses that were never there in the first place. She leaves part document, part fancy for us to remember her, but also her imagination. That is what I want my pictures to be for my kids.  Part documentation of what our lives are like right now, part artistic li...

Short paragraphs put air around what you write and make it look inviting, whereas one long chunk of type can discourage the reader from even starting to read. -William Zinsser