enfinblue's Bluey (credit to Fifi for the nickname!) Diaryland Diary

"I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart." -Vinc3nt V@n Gogh

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Bulgur should be a national food. Heck, it should be an entire food group.

I've just come to the realization that I have a bulgur addiction going on at the moment. This came to me as I was checking my stash before heading to the market to pick up a few things, with the little quantity remaining leading me to believe that I have consumed a kg of the stuff in the last week or so.

Hmmmm.

This morning was DELIGHTFUL. I listened to three hours of the Sund@y edition and it was all engrossing. The terrorism panel was balanced and informative. There was a piece on a new book about the anti-slavery movement in England that was excellent. There was also a piece on revelations about the early years of Trud3au that have been revealed in a new book. The piece touched on all sorts of interesting issues in Quebec society in the 1930s and 1940s, which provided answers to questions that frequently crossed my mind when I lived in Montreal. My favourite though was an interview with an elderly sculptor named Franc3s Gage. I'll confess to knowing only a little of her work. I'll also confess that I was captivated by the interview in part because of references to heroines of mine: "the girls." The girls were actually American sculptors who moved to Canada in the 1920s or 30s or something---I can't for the life of me remember why--and who I first read about, ironically, in a series of books that I inhaled when I was a girl, The Canadians.

These women sculptors captured my imagination when I was a girl because you could actually see their stuff on Parliament Hill. I thought this was utterly marvelous. One of them sculpted the lions that sit as one of the entrances to the QEW highway (the Queen Elizabeth Way, of course), one of the few signs of beauty in the ugly GTA (Gre@ter Toronto Region). I grew up in the GTA and I spent my childhood and youth in despair with respect to its ugliness (some downtown neighbourhoods excepted). It always seemed criminal to me that people raped the beautiful landcape and the lake in order to live in high rises and identical big box houses on treeless streets.

But I digress. That opinion is hardly surprising coming from me. I think that's why I like Jane J@cobs so much---because I was forced to spend a good part of my youth in the suburbs. I still marvel, to this day, that I lived next to a huge enclave of those treeless-lot big box houses--each with swimming pools and four car garages-- and yet there was no damn bookstore in the entire 'city' that was our designated living area. Everything that one needed to buy was accessed by car. I think that's perhaps why I have no desire to own a car and I walk or bike everywhere. Even as a teenager I knew that that was no way to live.

Incidentally, I realize of course that this is the reason that my year with my grandparents in that little town on Georgian Bay is the best memory that I have of my childhood. I would meander home from school, poking around in streams for muskrat. I would build my own skating rink on a creek on the back of the farm in winter, and hunt for wild strawberries and wild plums in summer. I'd often walk to the main street of town to browse the shops or attend the local playhouse. I'd sit on the breakwall watching the boats, or go to one of the beaches to look for shells and driftwood. May and June were exciting because fishing season would start and there would be fishermen and fishing gear everywhere. In the fall the town was full of apple everything, on account of the belt of apple orchards that swaddles the southern shoreline of GB.

My favourite place in that town, however, was the library. It was an old-fashioned library in its original town building (1830s, I think). The librarian was my friend. She navigated me through classics like Jane Eyre, A Tale of Two Cities and P&P, but also through The Canadians series. My particular love from that year (I was twelve) was the sixteen-book series known as the Jalna books (dating from the 1920s or 30s, I think). I learned later that there was a bad (read: emphasizing the salacious) miniseries made from the books in the 1970s so many people are familiar with them, but they seemed at that time to be my own private discovery. I remember that I felt ownership of the characters in them, a bit like the way that many of us feel ownership of both her characters and of Jane Aust3n herself.

The Jalna books were not great literature, but I immersed myself in that world, nevertheless. It was the world of privileged British immigrants to the "wilds" of Canada--via India--and the the life that they carved out of the woods here. I knew by heart the exact landscapes in southwestern Ontario that they inhabited-- the landscapes of 1812 skirmishes with the American invaders and of Niagara daredevils and vineyards and apple orchards.

OK. Enough of the trip down memory lane.

I've forgotten what I was on about. Oh yes. I was writing about "the girls." They were revolutionary in art in the provincial backwater that was Canada in the middle of the twentieth century, since they refused to accept the--then still current--notion here that "women couldn't paint." And I liked terribly what Frances Gage had to say about them as people. Basically, she said something to the effect that they were honest. She said she'd always liked people who were honest and true, for if you aren't those things you don't have anything.

So I dedicate this entry to "the girls," two Americans who generously made Canada a better place in which to live. It sounds very corny to say this but I feel inspired to be truer to myself in thinking about them. I put on kind of a crazy outfit and looped my hair up in back into a weird kind of late Victorian swoop and I feel lighthearted. I'm going to start sewing and knitting some projects this afternoon-- a bag with butterflies and interesting cutouts, and then maybe a small evening bag and matching shrug to go with the pleated sheer silk sleeveless top and dancer's skirt that I have decided to wear to the birthday party next week. I am feeling a surge of creativity that I have to make the conscious decision to allow to sustain itself. There is no point in thinking of oneself as old and unable to change one's patterns. It is not too late to be true :).

***

For some reason, an old Tr@gically H!p song lyric has been rolling around in my head lately: I think G0d's left the mus3um for good. I'm currently listening to Kathleen Edw@rds' cd B@ck to me, over and over again, however. I like to listen to her as I walk and shop, and also with only one headphone in as I bike through my quiet neighbourhood (though don't tell C., because he gets terribly upset with me when he hears that I am listening to music whilst on my bike, even if it is only in one ear :)). I'm also listening to W!lco, since they are coming here in early July and I've been pursuaded to go to see them. I love music but I'll confess that I have never been particularly comfortable with concerts or concert crowds, except of the classical kind. When I was a kid we were at the symphony every Saturday. All other kinds of music seemed frighteningly free and wild and, well, loud.

12:49 p.m. - 2006-06-04

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