RAINY DAYS AND NIGHTS

A MARRIAGE OF TWO MINDS AND ONE HEART

THE ROSE IN ENGLAND'S LAPEL

The celebratory marriage of William and Catherine was perfection in
every minute detail. The ceremony had Catherine written all over it.
She was luminescent, regal, elegant, breathtaking. William beside himself,
clearly besotted with his love of her. This was the most private of public
weddings, which was no mean feat. It was magical!

Two billion people the world over joined them in their joy and happiness
and for a few hours and we could forget all of our troubles and weariness.

We can do no less than wish the Prince and the Duchess of Cambridge a very
long, healthy, blessed and happy life together.

VISITORS

How very lovely that I had a visitor today from P. J. Hammer.
This came as a complete surprise. A nice one. The kind of
surprises I like. Makes this old soul feel good.

Hammer is a Photographer par excellence. He is also a generous
and kindly soul with his time. Thank you P.J.

For the moment, I digress.

So, what is up today? Keeping in mind that this is not Twitter,
and that I am not a Diarist, it is still worth noting that Canada
voted on May 2nd and changed the Federal landscape rather considerably.
The Conservatives swept into a majority Parliament which will at least
for the next four years we should have some stability and continuity
which was badly needed.

Even more extraordinary is that the New Democratic Party, the dark
horse in the race, came up the back of the track and did something no
one could have predicted a year ago, never mind six weeks ago, and
swept into power as Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in what has been
dubbed the "Orange Crush" - a reference to the NDP's colour being
orange - mostly on the force of one man, namely Jack Layton, who was
probably more shocked than anybody.

What this election managed to was to obliterate completely what had
always been since Confederation the Liberal Party of Canada the "natural"
party of the peoples. That is amazing! The writing was on the wall for
the Party but the swiftness of its demise is breathtaking.

They came undone.

Even more astounding is the demolition in totality of what had
always been a quirky aberration of the Bloc Quebecois in Ottawa
whose sole raison d'etre was the dissolution of Canada into two
separate Countries: Canada and Quebec. Quebec blinked. It turned its
back on the Bloc en masse and sent them packing back to "Occupied
France" - Quebec.

Thus ends twenty years of non-sense on the Federal scene. It never
made sense to begin with, despite the Separatists false belief that
"Only the Bloc Quebecois could represent Quebeckers interest in the
Canadian Federation." If that wasn't hubris, I don't what the meaning
of the word is. Quebeckers voted for the Orange Crush en masse.

So now what we are left with are two Parties: Conservatives (to the
right) and a clear left, social democrat party, the New Democratic
Party. They couldn't be further apart. But at least it is clear.

Personally, I am quite satisfied with the results. It will be most
interesting to see how things play out in the coming years.
Polarized? Yes. I can live with it. We are, at present, stable and
the envy of many democratic Countries in the world and in pretty good
shape on most levels.

The people have spoken and expressed their democratic wishes.

So be it.

CHANGES

I have no idea how this is going to work.
I am confused.

SLOW DAYS

It was a dark and gloomy day. It is.

Spring has sprung a leak. Still winter here, except that instead of snow,
we have rain and gale force winds and, and, and...we were doing so well.
Long walks. Shaking off the winter blahs. Getting summerized.

Oh, we were doing well.

Which means:

Wait. We will do well again.

In the meanwhile, working inside. Shaking out the dust bunnies.
The usual.

When I have nothing much to want to say.
Well...this is what happens.

Nothing.

THINK POSITIVE

A good friend sent this to me.

BLUES AND BLAHS!

I am praying hard that we have a decent Summer because this
past Winter has been the worst I've been through in years.
Any more Winters like that and I may not be long for this
world.

It didn't help at all that I had an accident that cracked
open my head, giving me a shiner to beat all shiners. I passed
out cold and on the way down hit my head against the edge of
the small desk in the hallway and shattered my eyeglasses as
they flew off my face, suffered a concussion that took me a
week to figure out what in hang happened. If it weren't for
Laddie, my dog, I may well have been lying there on the floor
for a lot longer, but he was all over me like a bad rash. He
saved my sorry asp and woke me up and helped me to stand up
so I could go see in the mirror what was hurting so badly.
From the top of my forehead all the way down to my cheek bone,
it was not a pretty sight.

Worse was that I do not have a second pair of prescription
glasses and had not exactly budgeted for a new pair which ended
up costing me five hundred and twenty-five dollars cold hard cash,
which took an entire month and then some before I could get new
ones.

For a month I kept seeing everything in threes, feeling totally
helpless and swooning without any memory at all as to why I
fainted dead away. I'm not the fainting kind. When I was finally
able to safely make my way to the local Clinic, without losing
my balance in the process, as I negotiated piles upon piles of
snowbanks like some kind of mountain goat, the doctor was
properly concerned but could do nothing about concussions other
than to tell me to put ice packs on my face. For this they get
paid?

I figured that as long as I was not pooning, I hadn't had a
stroke, so as much as my brain was rattled, I was at least in
one piece.

I finally figured out all by myself why I passed out but not
what I could do about it. I spent most of the winter passing
out several times and hurting myself. Not fun.

What caused it? Heat! Yes, heat! The inside temperature, which
is entirely out of my control, rises to 85-90 degrees Farenheit.
I can't take the heat in the Summer, let alone that kind of
temperature in the middle of Winter. It's dangerous! My homeostasis
can no longer make quick adjustments when the temperature rises
and falls from 70F to 85F within hours. It fluctuates that badly.

I'm either freezing or boiling, or both at the same time. It's crazy,
I know, but I don't control the furnace and there are no thermostats
in here. To complicate things, I broke out into a severe allergic
reaction to the heat that has left me with sores all over my body.
Itches like crazy and, even with a prescription from the doctor, the
sores have still not healed. Even the dog pants and drinks so much
water that he has to go pee every half hour. It's ridiculous.

Not looking foward to Summer at all. Just praying that it will be
a kind one.

Time to move. Easier said than done. And that's the short of it.

It never does quite end there, does it? Here we are again back in election
mode. An election nobody wanted, with an end result that I have a sneaky
hunch is going to look something like a hung jury. Another minority Parliament
with the Conservatives back right where they started. Stupid is as stupid does
and Stupid is going to do it again.

I think I'll vote for my dog. At least he makes all kinds of good sense,
isn't a spendthrift, and knows how to make a point without argument.
Not only that but he never breaks a promise because he doesn't promise
anything that he can't possibly keep. He doesn't lie, cheat, or steal.
He works hard at his job, is hugely popular with adults and children,
loves everybody and everything and trees!

Pox on all their houses!

That reminds me of Canadian author, the late Timothy Findley's book
Not Wanted On The Voyage which is the re-telling of the Noah's
Ark story, a poignant, humourous, sometimes heartbreaking tale that
is one of the best summer reads ever. If you love animals, or even
if you don't, it is a page turner that will leave you wishing there
had been a follow-up.

Findley was a master storyteller the likes of which do not come
around but in a decade.

That is my recommendation to take on vacation with you this summer.
If, after you've read it, you don't like it, I'll be glad to refund
your money to you. It won't be necessary, but I'll take my chances.

STUFFIT BOOKS

Oh no! Sarah really knows how to hurt a person.

After asking me what to do about Spring Housekeeping
and STUFF, she just had to come back with what to do
about books. All those books we collect over the years.

I almost cried. My Hives suddenly all popped out. My
heart almost came to standstill. She never said anything
about books.

Ohhhh...be still my heart.

Books, I replied, are STUFF. We love them, we treasure
them, they become a lot of who we are as human beings.
They form a large part of our personality: they make an
immediate statement about who we are.

Yes, I had 10,00+ books. They were everywhere. On shelves,
on tables, on chairs, on floors, I was drowning in books!
I had lovingly collected every book I'd ever owned, from
childhood onwards. Hardcover books. Expensive books. My
libarary of memories. I loved those books. Every single one
of them.

Get rid of them? May as well ask me to cut off my right arm.
Or worse, go running naked through the streets in my birthday
suit. Exposed! What can be more vulnerable than that? Oye.

Came the day I was seriously contemplating moving far, far
away. With my precious library all intact. I called the movers
to come in and give me an estimate. That was sobering.

The left me with their Estimate. I read it, carefully. The
bottom line? Cost just to move the library: four-thousand dolars.
($4,000.00)

Do I look like Donald Trump's wife?

Let him move all my books.

I sat down hard, gulped, choking back tears, I started dialing
phone numbers. "Where could I send all my books so that they all
ended up being together, keeping each other company as they had
me all those years." I didn't want a single one of them alone.
They either had to go all together or not at all.

Sounds easy enough, after a week of conversations with schools,
libraries, universities, anybody who had libraries and who would
benefit most from getting 10,000+ hardcover books, not just any
ole books either.

I had First Edition books, books signed by their authors, a first
edition of Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin in mint condition,
antiquarian books, books on just about every subject from aardvark
to zoology, all in excellent condition.

I grew weaker with each exercize. So many phone calls. It grew
more complicated each and every phone call. So many questions being
asked. I'm not a librarian I kept saying. Either you want them, or
you don't.

It was painful.

Not wanting to keep you in suspence, the end of the story is nigh.

Nobody, but nobody, wanted my old books. And the things I'd have to
do was unspeakable. In a moment of inspiration I called the last
number on my list: The Montreal Institute for the Blind. I knew
that the school was for children from kindergarten all the way
through university. Perfect. I spoke with the Director. He was
thrilled. He'd send somebody to pick up the books as soon as
possible.

He did, true to his word. A little old man showed up in a van.
He knocked on the door and said he was there to collect books.

When he saw all those boxes, he nearly fainted. "They said that
I was going to pick some books. They didn't say that there are
a hundred boxes of books."

"Oh, so sorry."

He said that he'd have to come back with a moving truck.

STUFF AND WHAT TO DO WITH IT

The Ole Junk Pile and what to do with it all.
It can be overwhelming.

Here's a little trick I learned years ago:

Touch something twice, throw it out. It's simple.
Don't think about it or you'll never be able to do it.

You have to HEARTLESS.
Not easy to do.

Anything that you touch every day, you keep.

Anything that you've touched twice means you never really NEEDED it.

Yes, getting rid of STUFF we treasure will cause heart palpitations
and darn near fainting.
But it will be worth the trip. You will feel LIGHTER. Travel FASTER.
Be less nailed down to your STUFF.

You know what houses are for?

STUFF.

And when we have too much STUFF we all need BIGGER houses to keep
more STUFF.

It never ends.

I have STUFF.
I throw STUFF out.
Get more STUFF.

It is painful all that STUFF.
We love our STUFF.
Save yourself from STUFF.

Now go get rid of your STUFF.
More STUFF is coming.

Get STUFFED.

*******

Thanks to my friend Sarah for the inspiration
about STUFF. Wouldn't have thought about it
right now. Now I do.

THE TIMES WE ARE IN

What has been happening in Japan is tragic,
horrific, sad and we are profoundly moved to
offering our deepest condolences and prayers
to all the people there who have lost so much
in such cruel ways.

Having said that --

One of the problems with instant everything,
in real time at that, is that we get to know
what happens in Japan (terrifying enough) is
more than we know about our own next door
neighbours in our own cities.

We are shaken off our foundations and tossed
into a kind of reality check that is impossible
to escape. Our anxieties develop anxiety in this
relentless pursuit of being informed.

Canadians are the most connected people on the map
having more ways of communicating with each other
than anywhere else on earth. We tweet and twitter
on all the electronic gadgets everybody owns, and
we do it with each other endlessly.

All this communicating is unhealthy. It throws
perspective out the window. It has become a disease
that is qualitative and classifiable. We are
dis-eased.

All shook up.

SARAH

Sarah is my Muse.
She makes me smile,
She nudges me on,
With a wink and blink,
She keeps her eye on the ball.

Sarah is smart, Sarah is bright,
Sarah is a friend who also delights.
And poets are made of fools like me,
But only God can make a She.

Thanks, Sarah. :D

No comments:

EATING LIFE

EATING LIFE


Lover's play games of Yes and No
A quick caress, a sigh...goodbye
And why?

Lovers play games of Yes and No
Of Stop and Go
Of Wait and Fate
Too late

They laugh when they want to cry
Leave when they'd rather stay
They quit when they need to try
And lie...when they walk away

Lovers play games to save face
So I will tell you what we'll do:
We'll play Monopoly, you and I
Just for a change of pace

You grab the Railroads
And buy up Boardwalk
And I'll hang onto Park Place


(c) Gwen Beauregard - 1969 - All Rights Reserved

----------------------------------------------

It's easier to believe that you are in love
than to accept that you are alone.

ARPEGGIO

"Arpege", CDX
11.01.1982 - 04.17.1995

Let her epitaph read dear:
That from this day onward
A gentle light burns less brightly
For all those that she's now left here.

Goodnight sweet friend
What precious times we've spent.
Your smiling, liquid eyes -
Such trust and deep affection -
A vision in white, your jaunty gait
And swift obedience made of you
One neverending heartpride.

You had so many friends, so few enemies,
(not worthy of the count) of Joyousness,
Intelligence and Courage unflagging,
And now you lie in your starlit cradle in the sky
Lying cold while your loving spirit sleeps.

Goodnight, goodnight sweet friend, goodnight
My heart's delight, we'll met again one day,
We'll walk along the river's edge
As we always did, and thank God for
Our four-footed friends that kept us company.

(c) Gwen Beauregard - 1995

~*~*~*~

Arpege was a Maltese Terrier who was for many
years my tiny "Super Dog" who never ceased to
amaze and delight everyone who knew her as she
titled in every obedience competition we entered.

TO FACEBOOK OR NOT TO FACE BOOK

Monday was my sister's birthday. As I have done every year for decades,
I phoned her. We had our usual good time together, albeit s-mile-s
apart, like a couple thousand s-mile-s apart.

Eventually, we should both know after all these decades that we are
going to get onto the subject of computers and all things computing.
Sigmund would have had a lot to say about people who keep repeating
the same mistakes hoping for a different outcome. The subject of
Facebook arose for a lot of different reasons that I won't
tire you with.

I'll tire you with the pathetic admission that despite all my ranting
and railing against this site, yours truly ended up signing onto it
for the second time around. The first time I got out of there faster
than the weather changes here.

I should have stayed in bed, which is where I was, when my sister
phoned me back after I was unable to reach her. Never you mind, there
I was on Facelessbook, connected more or less with a few people I've
known in bygone days and spent most of the night and the next day
trying to figure the madness that is Facebook. It makes my StumbleUpon
WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr and TweetTweet look like a Montessori
school for pre-schoolers. It took about five minutes for a thousand
people to show up for my party. And Nero fiddled.

Oddly, both my sister and I have always agreed, for precisely the
same reasons, that we were not candidates for Facebook. All that I
can think of into day three are platitudes. Day three and I'm ready
to shut the whole operation down. Again! I would beg, on both knees,
that should I ever make that foray again that somebody would please
use a silver bullet and put me out my miseries.

I can see, as I always did, that there is a good use for Facebook
for some people. Just not this people. All it's done is give me a
very bad case of hives, a sudden desire for a copious quantity of
Prozac and an even greater desire to take this computer of mine
and park it on the sidewalk with a sign on it: "Take this computer
and vamoose!" Or maybe I could convince someone to take it over to
the railroad tracks and let a freight train roll over it. My that
sounds good.

I have reached terminal Blogitis and that's a fatal desease for
which there is no cure except to go into Computeritis Rehab for
a whole year. I hated Facebook the first time around. Want to
hear me scream? You don't need either a computer or a telephone
to hear me roar.

The only thing I'm enjoying doing now is right here. It's just
the right speed for me. I can ramble on about nothing and nobody
is there to talk back to me. Keeps my finger bones loose and my
mind focused, and it is sufficiently challenging to keep the
brain cells from dying faster than they need to.

So, hello Cold Press and goodbye Facebook.

Both my sister and I were correct. As far as we are concerned.

Now, how do I get back into Facebook to delete that account?

Right away. Done!

PICTURES IN THE SNOW

What? You don't like fish?
Fish are good for you.

You can even go fishing in my little aquarium,
down there, at the bottom of this thing. I just
added them, for heck of it.

Pictures..photographs...images...call them what
you may...why do some people seem to like pictures
so much embedded within their blogs? I've often
wondered.

Are weblogs supposed to look like magazines? Or
comic books? Or newspapers? Or television? Or..
or...or...is it style over content? That is the
impression I've always gotten out of them. I call
it "flash and dash". glitz.

Usually these blogs that contain hundreds of pictures,
are also accompanied by hundreds of quotations, as if
by adding a picture to the quote is going to strengthen
the quotation. Serves no useful purpose, and might
even serve to diminish the orginal author of the
quotation's orginal meaning and intent, and too often
the quote is so out of context, it serves neither
blogger, nor orginator.

Sometimes I can't help but thinking that a lot of
bloggers were raised reading comic books and never
read a solid book in their entire lives.

Or just maybe they don't have an original thought of
their own and wouldn't know how to express it if they
did. So they lean on other's thoughts, whether it's
worth quoting or not.

There are only four subjects in the world worthy of
writing about: birth, life, love, death. All the rest
are variations on the same themes, stated with any
luck at all, in a different way. That is the trick,
isn't it? How to say something that has been said
a hundred million times before in a different way.

A picture should support a thought, not the other
way around. It should be illustrative of something
the author was attempting to convey by adding a
sub-text to it. But if the text is not orginal, but
something borrowed, and the picture isn't original
but something borrowed, why bother?

Maybe it would be better to go spend some quality
time reading all 52 of the Great Books of the World.

I wasn't raised on comic books, or even illustrated
children's books, so I have a natural disinclination
to pepper my weblog with an endless supply of pictures
with my text which didn't even come out of my own
little camera.

Can you imagine a Normal Mailer, a Tom Wolf, an Ernest
Hemingway, Sigmund Freud - all of his works - a Virginia
Woolf, William Shakespeare, Francoise Sagan, Marcel Proust,
Socrates, Irving Layton, my mind is swimming with names
of authors/poets/playrights/journalists free-floating
around, can't think of a one who illustrated their musings
dotted with pictures in their work. Not a one. Wonder what
they would do today had they had weblogs?

Never mind. I'll get over myself. And probably you.

WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHEN, WHY?

Wherein Beauregard experiments like crazy
trying different things, seeing what works,
what doesn't, what can safely be pitched out,
who goes there, and finally:

Why do I need this?

And, if I don't?

Well, there it goes.

Where does it all lead to?

Will find out soon enough, eh?

Rome wasn't built in a day.
But when it burned, it burned fast!

Sure did. And I might go down in flames.