Today in my primary music classes we talked about music as a force for peace. In broad, simplified strokes we talked about The Singing Revolution in Estonia and the Prayer of the Mothers associated with the Women Wage Peace movement in the Middle East. We talked about how war is sometimes a function of greed, where one country wants what another country has. And I saw before me a sea of confused and inquisitive faces, posing the most innocent, most poignant questions:
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There is something fragile about the first days of school. There are butterflies everywhere. Butterflies in backpacks, butterflies in lunch boxes, butterflies in the feet of displaced newcomers, butterflies in the eyes of those scanning the schoolyard for familiar faces on that very first fresh morning in the uncharted terrain of new teachers, new classrooms, and new aspirations.
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I did not wear a poppy last year on Remembrance Day. It wasn’t a statement: I simply forgot.
But as I learned today on the shores of Dieppe, forgetting is a statement.
Yesterday I visited the famed Flanders Fields of John McCrae’s poem. Rows of crosses, row on row. Thousands and thousands of them. Each representing a boy-child, son, husband, father, lost on the Ypres Salient in World War I, gaining a mere eight kilometres for the Allies through the many months of brutal attacks. Stones marked “A soldier of the Great War, known unto God” because their bodies could not be identified in the carnage. Men lost to the first crippling gas attacks, in the days before gas masks. Men whose body parts could not be sorted from the others and reassembled for a proper burial. Men who died, and died, and died again, not knowing the outcome of the war that was supposed to end all wars.
It’s a few days late, but here is my annual Gratitude List — 365 days’ worth of small things noticed and appreciated. I now have 12 of these lists inhabiting my hard drive, and each one gives a snapshot of a year that is unlike those that came before. This year’s seems to be dominated by work, as I started yet another new job, and then another. There is always much to learn, much to celebrate, and much to leave behind as a fresh, new year unfolds. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
- the lost, found
- the smell of leaves under the tires of my bike, the weight of the handlebars, the whir of the wheels
- pedalling, noticing, breathing
- all of the things that are better than they were
- I, who am competent…
- I, who rocked that lesson
- and she who left it before it fell apart
- when the magic letters come together to make words
- report cards done five days early
- a down duvet
- zoom friends
- deliverance
- the paperwork
- a long prep period to rewrite my report card comments
- when they learn things
- the rain put a quick end to a very painful outdoor math lesson
- I caught S prancing to the office for a banana
- I kept last year’s sketchbooks
- I caught the last half of my French class
- tag is fun
- L had a good day
- The yellow water on the floor was largely ignored
- extra quizzes
- schoolyard coding
- hamburger soup
- a hair shuttle
- an autumn walk to the Value Mart
- getting some planning done
- approval
- they’re always good for no good reason
- the explosion happened on someone else’s watch
- I slept a long sleep
- I’ve been other places, done other things, lived other lives
- there is more to come
Work. All my life, I have allowed it to define me.
As a student (even as a very young student), my work was to try to be the smartest kid in class. Let’s face it. I was a clumsy, homely child with thick glasses and a lazy eye. But school, I could do. And I did it well. It became my “thing” — so much so, that I decided never to leave.
And so now, decades later, I get in my car every morning and drive 45 minutes to another school, where I pour all my energy into the young lives and minds before me. I just want them to learn, so badly. To light up with new words, new ideas, new ways of thinking.
But today, I went too far. Snow had been falling all night. It was due to continue for hours. School buses were cancelled. Other teachers headed onto the streets and turned back because of the weather. And I kept going.
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“Are you going to give me instructions?” I asked.
“Yes, of course! But the less you know, the better!” he replied.
I suppose there is some truth in that. It’s best not to think about all the things that could go wrong when you leap from an airplane with 4000 metres of nothingness between you and planet Earth.
Here are the things no one told me before I signed the 14 waivers required to make the jump:
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I love the idea of Places.
There are just so very many of them. Inner Places, outer Places, upper Places, lower Places. Even those of us who collect Places can never hope to find them all.
You think you know a Place, until you see it from the sky. And then you think you know the sky, until you’re falling through it. How the sky feels in an airplane, in a free-fall, in the cushion of a parachute; how the river feels beneath a bridge, beneath a raft, above your head; how a mountain feels, within, without, above, below; there are oh so many Places. Did you know that every Place has a verticality?
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Natasha here, reporting in on the aftermath of the infamous DELF B2.
I was worried. Let’s find some better descriptors, now that I’m functioning in my mother tongue. Words like chagrined, nausea-ridden, paralyzed. I dreaded that exam. My entire body was stiff with tension for eight solid weeks, from the moment I walked into my first class to the day after the inquisition. My long-awaited summer in France turned out to be, in many ways, a summer of travail and trepidation.
And then, just like that, I passed. Not just by the skin of my teeth. Not just with a satisfactory margin of breathing room. Not quite with the flying colours I secretly dreamed of. But almost. Almost.
At one point, I re-coined the DELF acronym (“Diplome d’Etudes en Langue Française”) as “Dumb, Enigmatic Lists of Faults.” I still kind of think that. The test-makers are simply méchants, in my well-studied opinion. They rub their hands in delight as they formulate one trick question after another, in a sinister attempt to separate the dumb from the dumber. I know. I met one of them. And she was mean.
But do you know what it was that bumped my score down two points from the 80% I’d hoped for? Continue reading
I have been stressing out about French. Have you noticed? Likely not, because you think I’m still obsessing about the Royal Wedding. Forget that. I’m over it.
No, French is my ongoing obsession, more than ever now, as the stakes creep higher in equal proportion to my rising self-doubt.
What if I can’t do it? What if, no matter how much I study and how long I persist, I never pass beyond the blundering idiot phase of language learning? Oh, sure, I’m less of a blundering idiot than I was three years ago, when I couldn’t say, “I want to walk up the hill.” But the subjunctive has its own mode of blunder induction (did you catch that, French-speakers? Its own mode?). The more I learn, the more I blunder.
Now, these rising stakes of which I speak so melodramatically. What are they? Well, you know. Employment. That about sums it up. You see, I miss Canada. Continue reading
True story: I posted my Royal Wedding Rant in the wee hours of the night, and then hastily took it down the next morning, when, in the cold light of day, I realized that I had typified myself as a bitter old woman with no hope – but not before a robust 39 people had had the opportunity to read it and form opinions about my perceived state of ongoing misery.
Therefore I feel I must further unpack my comments, and perhaps qualify them with a few points that, in my state of royal grumpiness, I had overlooked.
First: I stand by my suggestion that perhaps there was a touch too much money poured into this particular matrimonial event. No woman, princess or not, needs a $600,000 wedding dress. I also feel duly entitled to my opinion that all of the media hoop-la was a little excessive. But then again, I feel the same way about the idolization of rich and famous people in general. I simply have no interest in pop culture and its dull derivatives. I prefer dead baroque musicians. Call me quirky.
So there we go. The royal wedding phenomenon, as a newsworthy event, struck me as a rather silly over-investment of time and money, when there are so many more interesting things in the world with which to occupy oneself. French grammar, for instance. I truly do get a kick out of French grammar.
Yes, I’ll concede that I’m an anomaly when it comes to entertainment.
But that does not make me a bitter old woman with no hope. For that, we must address my feelings about weddings, and marriage, in general. And that is a stickier topic indeed. Continue reading