*Monday Nov 9/09

Running out of Time, originally uploaded by Dan Barron.

*Catherine Cookson

I read her autobiography first: Our Kate, originally published in the late 60’s and reprinted 25 years later. It was an interesting memoir of a woman born illegitimately in 1906 to a working class family in Northern England, whose early life was coloured by strikes, illness, alcoholism, and most of all the stigma of being a “bastard.”

With no education (she left school in her early teens), opportunities were few and as a young woman she worked hard at a series of miserable jobs, including an industrial laundry. Finally life turned: she married a nice guy. Everything was supposed to change. Except that she had a series of miscarriages and, due to a rare medical condition, discovered she couldn’t have a baby.

So far an ordinary life, difficult and sad, yes, the story of many. But in her forties, to deal with her depression, she took up writing and subsequently became the successful and beloved author of nearly 100 books, translated into 20 languages, selling 123 million copies. This success continued in other media. TV adaptations had 18 million viewers.

Though I read her memoir years ago, it still stands out in my mind: her writing vivid, her spirit evident.

I admire this woman, this author, who came from a hard life and went on to not only achieve success but to provide pleasure to millions. And even though she was a late starter, she made up for it in the stretch, a prolific writer, living to over 90.

I’ve tried to read a couple of her novels and found they contrasted unfortunately with her autobiography, rather more like the fantasies of her childhood (bastard girl rescued by nobleman, goes to live in castle; bastard girl is really abducted princess), the writing cliched and pedestrian, unlike her memoir. But it doesn’t matter because so many other people have enjoyed her books. She enjoyed writing them. And I still admire her for that.

She was stingy with money (though she did engage in carefully chosen philanthropy) but generous with her imagination, turning out book after book, heedlessly willing to provide pleasure and make a fabulous living at it. I think there is a lesson in that for us literary writers as much as in the writers who spend many years to bring their vision to fruition.

Don’t get me wrong–I’m not saying we should turn to writing pulp fiction. We have to do what we are given to do; some of us to provide entertainment, some of us art. But there is a generosity in prolific work that speaks to a certain stinginess I see in myself when it comes to writing. It is the flip side of serious motivation for a particular book, a reserve that is the other side of dedication. Sometimes I wish I could just throw myself heedlessly into having fun with writing, or do something silly and unexpected.

The queen made Catherine Cookson a dame (the female equivalent of sir) and rightfully so. Her novels continued to be published posthumously for four years after her death.

Catherine Cookson, wherever you are, know that I salute you.

*More Elephants

h/t Sue Steiner

*This Is About Bras

Let’s start with the word. It comes from French for “arm protector,” referring to military uniforms that morphed into breast plates. Hence the mighty brassiere that I remember from my childhood: steely, pointy, sometimes lengthy undergarments which extended into a girdle, stuffing everything in and keeping it rigid.

As an aside, the current French term for a bra means throat support (throat being a euphemism for boobs in the land of France, which rhymes with pants, which the ladies spurned, at least according to the wisdom of my childhood peers).

In ancient Egypt, women owned land and their breasts flew free. The history of bras ostensibly begins in ancient Greece, where women’s movements were restrained and, hence, presumably, so were their breasts. Over the centuries, there were cloth binders (with cups in China which has always been more advanced), in the renaissance evolving into corsets made with stiffened linen and iron. This was a time of rebirth for men, but increasing legal restrictions for women. Do I detect a theme here?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century:

The evolution of the bra from the corset was driven by two parallel movements: health professionals’ concerns about the cruelly constraining effects of the corset, and the clothing-reform movement of feminists, who saw that greater participation of women in society would require emancipation from corsetry.

However many people, including doctors, believed that women were naturally fragile, and that pallor and shallow breath were feminine, ignoring the obvious: their chests were squished by corsets.

The bra as we know it today was invented in 1910 by Mary Phelps Jacob (who was also a poet, publisher and peace activist). At the age of 19 she got a new evening gown that was sheer and the whalebones of her corset poked through. So she asked her lady’s maid to sew a couple of silk handkerchiefs together with ribbon and cord. Voila–the bra. Her friends all wanted one. She was in business.

But, dear readers, that lovely soft silken bra of the original has been displaced by straps and hooks and underwire that, in all honesty, I detest.

In the late 1960s, some of the emblems of femininity became targets of feminist activism. Feminists charged that these objects, typified as patriarchal, reduced women to the status of sex objects. Some women publicly disavowed bras in an anti-sexist act of female liberation.

When Germaine Greer stated that “Bras are a ludicrous invention,” her statement resonated with many women who had been questioning the role of the bra.

Interesting that this began a time of expansiveness for women in the public sphere and for the freedom of their breasts. You see, I don’t think that bras are about making women into sexual objects. I think it is a symbol of restraint. That, somehow, movable breasts aren’t nice. Being a woman isn’t completely nice. Well, duh.

Here is my complaint. If boobs are heavy enough to swing and sway and flop, then anything that will hold them up and restrain them must press against the skin. That is uncomfortable, my friends. And if boobies are small enough to be flopless and swayless, then why wear a bra at all?

This is why I confess that I never wear one at home or under a coat unless I am going to take off said coat in company, though I admit a bra is useful when running.

However, friends of mine have said that a good bra, one that is properly measured and purchased from a boutique, not Sears, can be so comfortable one forgets it’s on.

Okey dokey. So last week when I left the library, having forgotten it opened late on Thursdays, I meandered down Bloor Street and came to Secrets of Your Sister, just such a store, of which I’d heard many good things.

I went in. I got measured. I last had that experience when I was 15 or 16 and the measurer brought out a bra called “the minimizer” as if my boobies needed extra flattening and restraint. The very idea!

But no such condescension from Secrets of Your Sister. I stood in a curtained sanctuary, with 3 mirrors so that I could see myself front and side. You know, because a single view of my boobs is not enough. Measured, I awaited the bras. Plain and frothy, I tried them on, then donned a tight white tank top provided for me to see the effect. My breasts poked out, they rounded out, they bulged. I studied them shamelessly.

The young woman who brought the bras, dark haired and dark eyed, was efficient, nurse-like in her clinical attitude as she spoke in a rapid-fire patter, pointing out each bra’s features and flaws. Yes, flaws were admitted, at least insofar as the fit, and she recognized when I was about done with trying them on. Consequently, I bought one, a bra that cost over twice as much as I usually spend for one, but was at the low end of the range I tried on.

Indeed it is the most comfortable bra I’ve ever owned.

However, it is not as comfortable as none. It presses against my chest. It leaves marks on the skin. How could it not, holding in and up weight?

And so, after a couple of days of trying it out at home, I’m back to sitting at my computer, in my jeans and a comfortable old shirt, with my boobs unrestrained, my breathing full and free, my brain unimpeded, for, my friends, free flowing boobs mean a free flowing spirit.

*Monday Nov 2/09

The Elephant’s Child, originally uploaded by B℮n.

Click on the link above for more info on elephants in Laos.

*Yesterday’s Post in Song

*Today: Go Forth

For most people in our culture October 31 is a day of fun, a day to mock traditional icons of evil, spurn death, costume oneself in an alternative identity. It is a day of acquiring masses of goodies, which is more than gold to children.

For some people, this is a day of fear. There are people who believe that it is a night when evil spirits walk and they fear for their souls. And that is sad for their children. But worse, it is a day when abusers take advantage of children’s fear of monsters to abuse them more easily and thoroughly, the festivities of the day creating an atmosphere of magic and monsters that they can play into.

That makes this a day when I think about the healing journey and the valour of all those who create better memories for their children, raising them with the innocent excitement that all children deserve, which they were denied, and yet all the more cherish for their children.

Although I haven’t been to synagogue for ages, I looked up the date on the Hebrew calendar and the portion that is read today in synagogues, named after the first important words that appear, is: Lech Lecha.

Usually translated as “go forth,” the literal meaning of this phrase is, “Go for yourself.”

“And God said to Abraham, Go for yourself from your land, from your birthplace, and from your father’s house to the land that I will show you.”

This speaks volumes to me about finding one’s own truth and it being the basis for a new life in a new place. It also happens to be the passage that I chanted at my adult bat-mitzvah. I was in my mid-thirties, before husband, before kids, but I wasn’t alone. There was a group of us, women who had not had a bat-mitzvah at the usual age, 12 in more traditional circles or 13 in reform ones, celebrating it that day as young, middle-aged and older adults.

For all of us this passage, with its meaning of going out into the unknown and building a new life, resonated. Each of us, for different reasons, had struggled to find a place where we belonged. The journey to it required leaps of faith, going forth despite fear, leaving behind places, people, baggage until we came, with hands open and hearts beating hard, to the place that was truly ours because it was true for us and ours.

And though each human being is alone in birth and death and in the pain of our heart, we are not alone in this journey. Love connects us at the touch of a hand, love connects us through virtual space, love connects us in the light that lies below despair and above exaltation, threading itself before the beginning and after the end. And in every moment we are still going for ourselves, journeying on, walking forth.

Holy, holy, holy say the angels.

St Matthew and the Angel by Caravaggio 1602

* Piggie Update and Books

Children are doing well, bouncing off the walls because they feel healthy and have to stay home today. We’ll be having a couple more of same. We played 2 games of Clue, whereupon I bailed due to the extreme giddiness of said children and the poking of my bottom with a pen every time I turned my back to tick off a weapon or suspect on my clue sheet.

I intended to get the flu shot today, but the clinics here are overwhelmed. After A got home from teaching, I checked the news online and there were over a 1000 people in line. That is about where the clinics were shut off for the day yesterday, so I figured no point in trekking out in the rain.

Yesterday I went to the library to replenish the kids’ stock and return the 50+ they had from our last couple of library ventures. I had forgotten that the library opens late on Thursdays, so I had to amuse myself for a while. I ended up with a pair of running shoes and a bra–which will require a whole new post.

I’m also behind in book reviews (what else is new!). I have The Uncommon Reader, Offshore, and Murder On the Orient Express waiting for my reviews and will have to get to them before I forget what I thought. So for today I’ll say, I liked all three. The first was funny and surprising. The second was evocative and more of a short story than a novel. The third was fun and I wonder if my eleven year old would like it.

*Pig Has Landed

Yup. Yesterday after school, both my daughters came down with a high fever and cough. One of them headachey, the other with sore leg muscles. Sore tummy. Fatigued. Today we took them to the pediatrician. She confirmed what I suspected. Though she can’t say 100% sure (because in our fair province only hospitals are allowed to test for h1n1), the clinical dx is H1N1. The kids have started on tamiflu. I’m wondering whether, if I get vaccinated on Friday, it will protect me. In the alternative, I’m hoping that I already had it in August.

*Reunion

This weekend we had a reunion. It was the best kind, where nobody was showing off, and nobody dreaded being seen as a loser, the very thought of such a thing, in the context, being preposterous. It was the kind of reunion that makes people wish they saw each other more often, and regret having missed other reunions.

It has been ten years since the event that brought us together: adopting our babies together in China. I wrote about my personal memories of that here.

This weekend we met in a small town about an hour away from where we live, further for some of the families that came. All weren’t able to make it, but for the five families that did, it was a joyful weekend.

I have to confess here that though I travel for various worthy purposes, some work related and some personal, I’m not much of a traveler. It isn’t that I don’t enjoy seeing new places; I do. Especially in retrospect.

The highway is a scary place for me, and I white knuckle every time we have to merge, change lanes or a truck passes by. So you can imagine that my knuckles are pale a lot.

So let’s just skip over that part and go right to a B&B rollicking with five families and nine kids chasing each other, laughing, using a carpeted staircase as a slide, romping, frolicking, surrounded by love, by parents comparing notes, hardly reminiscing at all because the present is so present with our children.

When we first met the others in our traveling group, we had so little in common that I felt like an alien on an alien planet. Going to China was less culture shock. But over time, something unexpected happened.

If you look at each of these children running up and down the stairs of the B&B, you’ll see their spirit shining so bright, the light shines right through the exterior of the parents, making a thin shade of all those things we usually look for to separate into us and them: geography, religion, education, style, politics, class.

Instead what we see are the hands that wipe a table after a meal, the heart that speaks of night time with a scared child. In this light we hear each other in a way that ought to happen more often, goodwill passing over all those things that are essentially superficial, allowing us to appreciate each other, laugh together, share food, share stories, sympathize, have fun like our kids in the other room, running through to crash into us from time to time.

We met through a longing to have kids, we come together again and again to share the experience of love and the hard work of rearing our children. There aren’t any Nobel prizes for that. But I know that there ought to be medals, however a family forms, for that plain and honest work.

Those of us who didn’t start out in our own lives with the love that every child deserves know what precious and important work that is. And those of us who had to reach beyond our own biology to find the children of our heart know, too, what precious and important work that is.

We didn’t take life to be famous or rich or noteworthy. That’s what we are reminded in the blasting light of our children’s spirits. This is why we are here: to love. And to see each other as loving beings.

*Monday Oct 26/09

Got a quarter?, originally uploaded by Zeb Andrews.

This photo immediately struck me and I smiled. We were away this weekend (more about that tomorrow) and this reminded me of our drive. And today is my 12th wedding anniversary. This photo makes me think of our journey together.

So a special shout out to A: happy anniversary sweetheart.

*For everyone who has to revise…again

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao: it won the Pulitzer prize for 2007, today number 544 on Amazon more than a year after being published in paperback. That is the kind of success that authors crave. And how did it come? Fast, easy, cranking out book after book, as authors also crave?

Five years after writing eight hours a day, he had seventy-five good pages and a lot of crap.

It was like I had somehow slipped into a No-Writing Twilight Zone and I couldn’t find an exit. Like I’d been chained to the sinking ship of those 75 pages and there was no key and no patching the hole in the hull. I wrote and I wrote and I wrote, but nothing I produced was worth a damn.

He failed every day for five years. He despaired. He put the book away. He tried to think of anything else he could do instead of writing. He wept. He didn’t even care anymore about writing a great book, just a readable one. One night he dug out the manuscript, deciding that if he could find one good thing in it, he would keep going. This is where he finds the golden line and it inspires him, right? No–he found nothing of worth in it other than the above mentioned seventy-five pages.

But he went back to it anyway. For two more years it was a futile task. But then something started to take shape, seven years from when he’d started, and in another three years, the book was finished. Something beautiful. A beauty that was recognized.

And he says:

Junot Diaz, photo by Christopher Peterson, Wikipedia Commons

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway. Wasn’t until that night when I was faced with all those lousy pages that I realized, really realized, what it was exactly that I am.

(Full story here.)

Someone might find this story discouraging–after all, the prospect of ten years of labour! But not me. I’ve already been there, as you know if you follow my blog. Instead I’m heartened because a fellow writer says it’s worth it, not only for the success which he couldn’t know that he would find, nor can I or any other writer, but for the thing in itself: “you keep writing anyway.”

Thank you Junot. You wrote honestly from the heart, and in doing so, put your hand out to me and every other writer who despairs at midnight.

h/t Sandra Gulland