There is a picture of her

There is a picture of her

I am trying to find,

sifting through all of them here

and unable to come across the one 

which needs finding.

"There are so few of them of me,"

she says,

"because I am the only one

who takes pictures."

This is true,

the rest of us have missed

what needs preserving the most;

our daily moments, our

occasional celebrations and

mad foolishness.

She is occasionally there,

with a boy, or a snake, or a cat

because it seemed like

a good picture at the time

so she'd have one of us

take it.

This is good

and somehow all wrong

at the same time.

We should be able to see her

in every incredible moment

of her day and night,

from the simplest ministration

to the most joyous transformation.

In full flight

and at contemplative rest.

There should be a camera

in every room. We should

learn to recognize what

really needs to be

remembered here.

Knowing this, we should capture her at every

possible moment and,

if there is an elusive smile,

we must snatch that,

as well!

An album of her,

(smothered in boys,

wrapped around satin pillows),

should rest on shelves

in every room. It should be

that easy to find her,

she should be

on every page.

Okay,

I have finally found

the picture of her

I was looking for.

It is a picture like all the pictures

just described to you.

She did not know,

there is no posing in it.

She is asleep

on my lap.

Her hair

is a veil.

　

　

　

　


　

Where The Heck Have I Been?

   I have been strangely absent from "Neanderings" for the better part of two months now.
   I found this rather astonishing when I actually checked. It's not like I haven't been busy blogging but it's all been over on "Strides" as the whole running thing seems to have pre-occupied me.
   Part of the problem, though, is that I just haven't found a topic which inspired me. I actually started a few posts which might have been "Neanderings"-appropriate but then they died on the drawing board. Here are a few of them.

Jolie

   One concerned Angelina Jolie. It was difficult to hear about her decision to undergo a double mastectomy and not want to write about not only her bravery but also how this decision would ultimately affect her physical desirability. It is clear from seeing pictures of her, post-surgery, that she is still an extremely beautiful woman. How many of us, though, and more particularly men, look at her now and wonder what is underneath. From here, it's not a huge leap to go right straight to the superficiality of beauty. For years, Jolie has been near the top of the list of the most physically attractive women in the world. Does her ranking now drop, simply because of reconstructive surgery? I've made the point before that once you take many of the most beautiful women in the world and strip away the make-up, the hair styling, the expensive clothes, the cosmetic surgery and the airbrushing what you have left are pretty ordinary women. You take those same ordinary women and apply all of the aforementioned techniques and procedures and what you get is beauty. But how do we value that? And should we? So that was one idea for a blog post.
  

Wallenda crossing.

I'd already written a blog post last year about Nik Wallenda's crossing of Niagara Falls. The post was called "Tether" and centred on the use of a harness as a safety precaution. Wallenda was against its use at the time but the network televising the stunt insisted and so it was used. Just recently, Wallenda walked across a portion of the Grand Canyon without the offending tether. In the televised buildup to the event, much was made of the obvious life-threatening danger involved. Wallenda didn't seem nearly as concerned as I suspect some of the rest of us were. We watched the whole thing and I actually found it rather nerve-wracking as my fear of heights kicked in almost constantly. As I watched, it was hard to wonder what if? What if he does fall? How will the Discovery Network handle this? Knowing that this was a possibility, there had to have been a plan for dealing with it. I also couldn't help but wonder how many viewers wanted him to fall. As disturbing as that is, millions of people watched and you just know that some percentage of them wanted it to end badly. Yet again another topic for a post.


Fairly representative.

   Grade Eight graduation. For one reason or another, we and many of our friends and acquaintances had kids graduate from Grade Eight this year. Facebook was awash with pics from almost all of these. Of course, one of the amazing things you see are kids who seem to have grown up, almost literally, overnight. It always seems that, at this stage in their lives, the girls have grown up just a little faster than the boys, however. The boys, in spite of their suits and tuxes, could not hide their underlying goofiness/gawkiness. The girls, suddenly, were awash with beauty. What I found disconcerting more than once, though, was that the beauty often was infused with sexuality. The trappings of sexuality were all there--make-up, high heels, cleavage, stockings, you name it. I'm sure that for many of the girls this was a first-time experience (as much of the teeter-tottering on heels indicated) and you wondered just how much of it might actually be embraced as they continue on into womanhood. As a man, however, it was discomforting to be sitting there in a public school auditorium or browsing through Facebook and coming to grips with how you were actually supposed to be looking at girls who were only kids last week. I'm glad we had boys!

   Aging. I turned sixty recently. Numbers are really only just numbers but this particular number has led me to consider a little more pointedly just where I stand in the aging process. Don't get me wrong---I think it's pretty cool that I'm sixty and I think many of the next years of my life are going to be simply awesome. It's hard not to notice the changes though. As a blog topic, several things have popped up which seem to be appropriate things to offer discourse on but I am at the point where there seem to be so many things to talk about that a whole new blog appears to be the way to go. So, at some point in the not-too-distant future, there may be yet another blog for your perusal. Once I think of a name for it...
   Nazi time travel. Okay, I can't even remember just how

this popped up, but somewhere on the internet I found a story about the possible existence of a bell-shaped device  the Nazis were working on during the war which, in turn, might have made time travel possible. There seemed to be credible documentation which suggested that at least they were working on this if, indeed, they hadn't actually manufactured one. Einstein himself had a theory that time travel was possible so it's not difficult to see why the Nazis might have been intrigued by this and willing to commit the resources to it. One of the theories I ran across suggested the possibility that Nazis were able to use this machine to travel into a different dimension, a dimension in which they were (and are) the world leaders. Google it, actually. Pretty intriguing stuff and probably worthy of a blog post.

   Okay, that's about it, those were some of the things I was thinking of making posts about the last couple of months  but didn't. Ironically, as I was sitting here working on this post, Doralyn mentioned that I didn't seem to be posting on "Neanderings" anymore. I kind of laughed and re-assured her that I was doing so at that very moment! Hopefully, I can get back into posting here (as opposed to there) a little more regularly now. Running is kind of cool but it is just running...

Poetry

   In a recent blog, I mentioned that one of my all-time favourite movies is "Four Weddings and a Funeral". I then went on to list some of the qualities about it I liked best. One of the reasons I like it is that it contains poetry.
   In his eulogy to his partner, Gareth (Simon Callow), Matthew (John Hannah) reads a poem to the mourners who are gathered. It was W.H. Auden's "Funeral Blues". I had never heard this poem before and, up to that point in the movie, it was nothing I'd been expecting. It seemed I'd even forgotten the actual title of the movie and was not prepared for either one of its larger-than-life characters to pass away or this poem's recitation to move me the way it did. It took the general tone of the movie and turned it a full one hundred and eighty degrees.
   The following is a clip of the movie wherein John Hannah recites the poem: 

   This is what I love about poetry. It does have the power to at least momentarily grab hold of you and re-arrange the way you view or think about something. In "Funeral Blues", Auden manages to take the demise of one single person and and stop the world with it. It's not one of those "death" poems that's trying to be uplifting either, the last line clearly shows a depth and length of despair which appears to be almost interminable.
   My love of poetry began back in the sixties. As I became interested in popular music, I found myself drifting towards artists such as Simon and Garfunkel and Leonard Cohen. Cohen, in particular, bridged the gap between poet and musical artist demonstratively. We studied Cohen in high school, both his music and his written work. For me, it was the perfect blend of words and music I'd never heard the like of before. I imagine it also appealed to the introspective and analytical part of whoever I thought I was at the time.
   It is tempting to include one of his pieces of music here but I'm saving that for another post somewhere down the road. I would like to include, though, one of his poems that has resonated with me the last forty years or so. It is from a book of poetry entitled "The Spice Box of Earth".

 I wonder how many people in this city 

I wonder how many people in this city
live in furnished rooms.
Late at night when I look out at the buildings
I swear I see a face in every window
looking back at me
and when I turn away
I wonder how many go back to their desks
and write this down.

  

                        
                                             


     
   
   When I went to retrieve the words to this poem, I was amazed at how many other bloggers had taken the time to write about it. It clearly had struck a chord with many other people, not just myself. I think if you are a writer of any kind then you tend to look a little more closely at the things unfolding all around you. Writing is also a bit of a lonely thing to do and nowhere is this demonstrated better than in this poem by Cohen. How much more alone can you be than to be in an apartment by yourself where the furniture is not even your own, looking out over a world of anonymous strangers? But the poet in Cohen has seen through to the universality of this and wondered if maybe we are all in the same boat together. When you realize this, the potential of us all being together in our loneliness arises. This will not stop you from being isolated but once you realize you are not alone in your isolation it's not quite as terrifying. When I read this poem the first time the imagery hit me like a tiny little thunderbolt. This, then, is one of the things I love about poetry.

Bronwen Wallace

   Speaking about thunderbolts, I once read a book called "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace", by Bronwen Wallace. I had attended a reading she did here in London, admired her poetry greatly, and bought this book afterwards. Just a few short months later she was dead of cancer, sadly. My signed copy of her book is now one of my prized possessions.
   Wallace, more than any other poet I'd read up to that time, pointed out the potential for poetry in everyday life. She essentially looked at the everyday goings-on in her life and saw the significance beyond their surfaces. Occasionally, I will read a poem and go holy crap at the end of it. Just about every single poem in "The Stubborn Particulars of Grace" evoked that response and I read the book over and over. It greatly affected the type of poetry I was writing at the time simply because it made me realize that almost anything can be a poem. It was then I really started looking at the world in a new light.
   In a "Fifty Shades of Grey" kind of world, you don't see a lot of people sitting there, reading poetry, anymore. As I remember, back in high school we were more or less forced to read the little bit of poetry we did. I took a little less forcing than most of the rest of us and I'm kind of happy for this. I get back to the books of poetry I still have every now and then. Besides Cohen and Wallace, I could also recommend Al Purdy, Margaret Atwood, Bill Bissett, Lorna Crozier, Colleen Thibaudeau, James Reaney, Anne Michaels and Michael Ondaatje. Canadians, all of them, and a pretty small selection out of all the great Canadian poets there are. In my life, I have gravitated to the Canadian poets but the world is full of marvelous writers of poetry, Auden included.

   So give poetry a try. Go to a reading the next time there is one. Join a poetry group. Download a song but maybe read the lyrics at the same time. Sit with a kid and do rhymes. Take a song you enjoy and give it your own words. Look at the world around you and try to figure out what one thing means to the next. None of this will be nearly as painful as it may seem to you now. Poetry is worth it, in whatever dose you choose!   
                                                                    

              

  

Classical Music

   One evening, as Doralyn and I were making our way east through the mountains on our way back from the west coast, we found ourselves spending the night at a hot springs resort.
   After checking in and having a meal we headed for one of he mineral pools there. The water was about 107 degrees, saturated with minerals and magnificent. With the aid of flotation devices, soon we were drifting on our backs in the warm jet stream.
   Above us, speakers played soft, meditation music. As I was listening to one tune, slowly it began to sound familiar and I absent-mindedly began going through my memory banks. After awhile I realized the tune was "Streets of Laredo", a song I remember from my childhood. I was, however, unable to confirm this with Doralyn as her childhood doesn't quite coincide with mine.
   Now, "Streets of Laredo" is not classical music but it is very old and certainly has ingrained itself on my psyche. As I continued to float there in the hot springs I began to think of the many ways that more traditionally classical music has infused itself into our pop culture.
    I think the most striking example of this is the "William Tell Overture"by Rossini. If the title of this piece doesn't sound familiar, just think "The Lone Ranger". There is probably no more iconic piece of classical music than this. It seems any time you have a hero set off on some kind of mission, all hell-bent-for leather, this particular theme music seems appropriate.
   Probably my personally favourite piece of classical music is Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King". Since I was a kid, it has either given me a bit of the creeps or just seemed a little maniacal. I remember putting on a play in Grade 4 and I was one of a group of huntsmen with axes who were doing this crazy dance around a fire or something to this particular piece of music. I also remember being amazed to hear it sampled in Rick Wakemen's "Journey to the Center of the Earth" and thinking that it fit in perfectly with the netherworldly feeling of that particular opus.
   Until I saw the movie "Ordinary People" I was unfamiliar with Pachelbel's "Canon in D Major". After seeing the movie and being particularly affected by the music in it, I took it upon myself to find out what that particular piece of music was. After this, it seemed as though Pachelbel's piece was every where you went, used in a variety of ways and venues. Whenever I hear it now I get ticked off with Mary Tyler Moore all over again (you really need to see the movie...)
   In much the same way, Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings" crept into the public consciousness as the perfect counterpoint to the death and destruction pictured in Oliver Stone's "Platoon". Put simply, it is a beautiful and haunting piece. Recently, on YouTube, it was used as the background music for videos of people jumping to their deaths from the World Trade Centre towers on 9/11. The music, coupled with the fact that these were actual people in their final moments, brought one to tears.
   Stanley Kubrick's film "2001: A Space Odyssey" opens with "Also Sprach Zarathustra" (Thus Spake Zarathustra), a work by Richard Strauss. It is a visually and emotionally arresting moment in film and the music from it now is used to signify monumental new beginnings.
   Kubrick continued to re-acquaint us with classical music in "A Clockwork Orange". Alex, the hero (villain?) of the movie finds it engaging to commit all sorts of mayhem to the backdrop of some of Beethoven's most well-known pieces. The aforementioned "William Tell Overture" gets a memorable re-working as well.

    Ravel's "Bolero", mesmerizing in its sinewy length and driving repetition, is perfect "make-out" music but possibly none of us realized this until it was so prominently featured in the movie "10". It then became both the inspiration and namesake for Torvill and Dean's ice dancing tour de force, becoming one of the  most memorable skating routines of all time. I remember hearing "Bolero" as a child but it took on a whole new meaning hearing it again as an adult.
   Once again, as a child, I have a vague recollection of one of those afternoon T.V. serials (back in the fifties) that had a couple of World War 1 pilots flying around having adventures to the tune of Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries". It is a stratospheric piece of music, full of power and a little bit of dread, and Francis Ford Coppola used it perfectly in "Apocalypse Now" as hordes of gunship helicopters swooped down on the hapless Vietcong.
   Hard to talk about classical music and not talk about Saturday morning cartoons. Without even realizing it, we, as children, were indoctrinated to the world of classical music as we sat there and watched Bugs and Elmer and Mickey and Daffy and listened to much of the above music plus the like of Rossini's "The Barber of Seville", Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata" and Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody, plus more. I remember discovering one by one that music I'd heard as a kid was classical, that it was maybe 150-200 years old and had been written by someone!
   There will always be classical music inspiring new generations of creators, whether they might be authors, filmmakers, composers, choreographers and so on. What's a little more difficult to say is what will be the classical music of the future. Something by the Beatles, Michael Jackson or Simon and Garfunkel? Or will it be more like Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire" or Randy Newman's title theme from "The Natural", both pieces of music which have taken on more significance than that for which they were intended, much the same as many of the older pieces above.
   My playlists have classical music in them, alongside many well-known contemporary songs and many of the lesser-known ones as well. I'm not shy about demostrating my love for the classics but have no interest in converting anyone. I'm also not shy about letting people know I enjoy opera and choir music. Classical music has lasted because it has touched peoples' nerves. In many ways it has been part of the fabric of our daily lives, perhaps without us even being aware of it. At times, it might have been our first introduction to the world of music and, whether we knew it or not, all else sprung from it.   
  
  
     
  

On "amazongs" and other things...

   I have about an hour before the turkey needs to go in. Hmmmm, what to talk about...? It is very quiet here and now, Doralyn's still upstairs, asleep, hopefully getting caught up on that precious commodity. A pretty busy day ahead of us, Bryant, Ben, Adrienne and Grandpa coming over for Christmas dinner a little bit later on this aft. The Dafoe boys will be rejoining us as well, so it will be a full and busy house!

How my day begins...

   Had a wonderful Christmas Day yesterday, pretty excited kids in the morning, lots of surprises and goodies. The boys headed to their dad's in the afternoon, D. and I spent a little recuperation time and then headed to Oma Buren's, after picking up my Dad. Had a wonderful meal there, Oma really outdid herself, and after supper spent some time sampling grand marnier and a couple of different kinds of brandies. Lots of flirting going on (for a bunch of "oldies", and with apologies to D.) but I am simply going to pretend it was the dinner "glow"!
   I guess this was the first time Oma had really "entertained" since the death of her husband, Cays, some years ago. She came through with flying colours and we all truly enjoyed ourselves. Now if I could just get Grandpa doing the same thing... Well, we'll work on it!
   I have an amazong wife! Okay, that was a typo but when I looked at it, it seemed like an amalgam of "amazing" and "amazon" so it is really a better term to use in describing her! She has been relentlessly busy for over a month now, working on presents for all the kids and many of our friends. On top of which we are also looking at needing to downsize the house, so lots of things to go through and sort. And she has been relentless and amazing to watch. Just one of the many reasons why I love her so damn much!!
    Grandpa just called, wanting to know what time we were picking him up this aft. This would be probably the fifth time in the last 12 hours that he's asked this same question. His memory's going but no problem, it's not hard to say "4 o'clock" one more time! At dinner last night, he asked me how long D. and I had been "going together". Had a bit of a chuckle over that one as D. and I have been married over a year and a half now, and Grandpa was at the wedding! But he seemed quite happy that we were now married!

...and, wonderfully, how it ends

   Anyway, it's about time to get started on the turkey. Gotta head out to the cold garage and try and find the roasting pan we use once a year. Then find a recipe for sweet potatoes. Make sure everything else is all set to go so that D. can just sit and knit as much as possible today--if she's not busy amazong us!