Cosmic Prose

Natasha Regehr

Category: Health

A Holiday Sing-Along

April 5, 2021 / / 0 Comments

Twice this year, classes in my school have had to quarantine for the holidays due to positive COVID test results in the building. I wrote this little ditty over the Christmas break, and added a special Easter update today. Feel free to sing along.

 I wore my goggles and my mask: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I sanitized my withered hands: 
   Somebody sneezed on me!
 I don't have plexiglass
 In my cramped, crowded class:
 I stepped sideways, but alas!
   Somebody sneezed on me. 

     Now we're getting COVID for Christmas,
      Students and teachers are mad.
     We're getting COVID for Christmas,
      'Cause Dougie's been nothing but bad.
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Coronaware: A Story of Malaise

May 26, 2020 / / 1 Comment

In the beginning we had Fear.  Fear and Novelty.  And that amounted to a bracing dose of quasi-Solidarity.

The fear was first conceived as mild disinterest in a foreign malady that would never find its way Here.  It gestated in the womb of skepticism (“This will not affect us.  We are different.”) and false reassurance (“We learned from SARS.  We are prepared.”).  And then, suddenly, driving home from a normal day of work, we heard government announcements of a province-wide shut-down.  States of emergency.  Clean out your desk.  Tomorrow will be your last day.

“We heard government announcements of a province-wide shut-down.”

That was when the Fear was birthed, attended by financial panic and the stomach-gutting realization that People Would Die.  Real people.  Our people.  Right here.  Everywhere.  Store shelves emptied as the masses stockpiled toiletries in preparation for Armageddon.  Doors closed.  Everything stopped.  It was Unreality, unfolding in unreal time.  Things changed hour by hour.  We hovered, breathless, over our devices, awaiting the latest statistics.  Following the spread from one network to another, and eventually to Here.  These are “unprecedented times,” said our bewildered advisers.  We slept last night, and woke this morning in a blind Unknown.

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So Long, Drama Queen

March 26, 2016 / / 3 Comments

It’s not every day that your doctor hands you your fibroid in a jar.

And if that’s too much information for you, then you’d better stop reading right now.

My fibroid and I have just ended a long and pretty-much-pointless relationship. She (shall we call her Effie?) has been living and growing inside me for years, or so I’m told, but for some reason chose the moment of my arrival in Morocco to manifest herself. She then proceeded to wreak havoc with my body in all sorts of ways that I will not get into.  Continue reading

Tonique!

November 21, 2015 / / 2 Comments

What do Canadian teachers do when Morocco grants them a Wednesday off to celebrate Independence Day? Why, they go to the spa, of course, to work out all the knots and kinks acquired on Monday and Tuesday.  This knotty exposé (the closest to kinky prose you will ever find on this site) explores one woman’s search for the nonexistent no-man’s-land between “relaxant” (relaxing) and “tonic” (???) massage.  Relax, dear reader, and enjoy the show.

IMG_3582Massage in Canada involves sheets and undergarments.  Not so in Morocco.

I should have been prepared for this.  I discovered at the doctor’s office that those modesty-inducing hospital gowns are nowhere on the Moroccan radar.  I made a similar discovery at the esthetician’s and at the hammam.  Why would I think massage would be any different?

I will not trouble you with an exhaustive narrative of the experience; I will simply provide you with a helpful chart for future reference.  I suggest you print it, laminate it and keep it in your purse; it will be an invaluable aid next time you are considering an afternoon of pampering in Casablanca:

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Chins up!

November 10, 2015 / / 8 Comments

Things for which to be thankful, upon schmucking your chin with great force upon your classroom floor:

  • Just yesterday you dispatched a child to the office for some boxes of tissue: essential in staunching the blood as you dispatched yourself to the nurse’s office…
  • …which is conveniently located just one floor up from your music room…
  • …which no longer looks like a crime scene, because someone came and mopped up all the little pools and trails of blood.

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I Feel a Hammam Coming On

August 29, 2015 / / 1 Comment

IMG_3359It wasn’t until I moved to a hot, dusty country that I understood the significance of footwashing in ancient civilizations. Unlike the symbolic ceremonies sometimes observed today, this was no delicate ritual; it was a yucky, gritty, never-ending necessity.

I know this because occasionally my soft, Western feet leave the smooth asphalt of my campus paradise and venture to the little hanout in the village on the other side of the wall. Within ten steps, my feet are filthy – so filthy that I now own special dirt shoes (fake crocs, to be precise), which I reserve solely for dirty walks in dirty places. When I get home, I head straight to the bathtub and hose my feet down, shoes and all. That is why there is pretty much always a set of plastic footwear drying in my washroom.

Oh, but I wish someone had advised me to buy dirt shoes before my first trip to the Hay Hassani souk, which was such a smorgasbord for the eyes that it never once occurred to me to direct my gaze downward – until I found that I had stepped in a puddle of – something – and that the contents of said puddle (“puddle” being a generous descriptor of the many animal and vegetable liquids potentially decomposing on the premises) would squish and squirt out of my sticky sandals for the next six hours.

Yes. I went home and washed my feet. Thrice. And I felt terribly, terribly sorry for anyone who might possibly have the morbid task of washing the feet of others in similar conditions. No wonder it was a servant’s job.

Now, we as Westerners pride ourselves on our fetish for personal hygiene. We live ultra-purified lives and equate uncleanliness with poverty, misfortune, and destitution. We sidestep anyone and anything that we consider soiled, and wonder how they can stand to live in their own filth. But today I had an experience that takes our sanitized self-image and turns it on its head. I went to a hammam.

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Bucket List

August 24, 2014 / / 2 Comments

I am angry with this thing called Cancer. Most of us are. We often hear it said that Cancer has “touched everyone’s lives” in some way. This is true. And it’s natural to hate the thing that causes loss.

But that’s not why I’m angry with Cancer. I’m angry with Cancer because I’m jealous of it. I have been for years. It’s infantile, I know, but I have wished it upon my family. “Cancer,” I have thought, “would be better than this.”

Let me tell you why.

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Two Questions

August 22, 2014 / / 0 Comments

I asked my dad two questions today, as I stood beside his grave.

I, who walk upon this earth that covers him, have before me an uncertain future (as do we all). I have decisions to make that will steer me upon this earth in any number of unspecified directions, in circles or meandering lines, with a maddeningly undetermined end point.

“What would you say, Dad, if you were still alive? What should I do? How should I choose? What would matter to you?”

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Yoga Prose II: A Hoop-Dee-Doo!

August 18, 2014 / / 2 Comments

A revealing exposé of my secret grad school romance with a hoop:

I am a yoga experimentalist. Or perhaps merely the subject of a greater mega-yoga conspiracy, designed explicitly to stretch my tendons and my temperament in various hypothetically-possible ways. It’s okay. You needn’t worry. Yoga and I have a history.

It began at a weekend synchronized swimming meet in the late eighties, when, as a virgin yoga-attemptee, I worried that I might be doing something dangerously evil by lying on my back and thinking about my breathing when I should have been in church. My spirit emerged intact, however, until my next wobbly attempt, a decade and a half later, in the much safer environs of my local gym. I’ve tried power yoga, yoga fit, hatha yoga, and, in a more audacious experiment, Tai Chi (which I realize is not yoga at all, but I include to convince you of the scope of my yoga-quest). I like to think I have become rather good at it. I can twist myself in all sorts of unprecedented directions. I am beginning to think that Yoga and I are becoming too familiar with each other.

It was with a sort of giddy delight, therefore, that I discovered Hoop Yoga. “What can it be?” I wondered. “What does one do?” I rubbed my palms together in greedy anticipation. There’s nothing I like better than an adventure.

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