The “Incorrigible Lady” Gene Returneth

 
In regards to my daughter Ava, I never thought I would ask my wife the question “where does she get it from?”, especially when my daughter is nine months old. However, we are generally a reserved kind of people, my wife and I, and in a matter of months Ava has gone from being a cute wallflower to an adorable little bulldozer. Lisa has gone from having to explain our daughter’s shyness to loved ones, to having to apologize to another mother for Ava’s sudden desire to pull her son’s hair.

Now, in Ava’s defence, according to my wife, she was just very excited to meet the young chap who had managed to impress her with his ability to walk. Ava is almost there herself and has made remarkable progress. Her balancing act against our coffee table has gone from resembling a delicate and slippy-footed ballerina to a sauced and swaggering bar-thug, pounding the table and looking for a fight.

Ava has lost her fear of people. She now shouts, coos and flails to get the attention of fellow TTC patrons. She is also learning the art of the temper tantrum. I mentioned this to my mother on our last visit.Upon hearing this, my mother proceeded to recount stories of the misbehaving women in my family.

My great grandmother, as a child, was sent to France – literally exiled from England – because of her classroom behaviour. My grandmother was also expelled from her school as a child. My aunt – on my mother’s side, of course – once climbed a classroom bookshelf and commenced to throw books at the other students while shouting, “I hate this place!”

This is the curveball. As a frugal artist, I always thought that I’d somehow accidently raise an ambitious money-loving Alex P. Keaton type. Who would have thought that instead I’d have a Scarlett O’Hara on my hands?

It looks as though I’m going to have to spend the rest of my life keeping an eye out for any swarthy and moustachioed card sharks.
 
 

Other People’s Poetry

 Two Meditations

I

Consider my soul, this texture
harsh to the touch, which is called life.
Notice so many threads wisely joined
together, and the color, dark, noble firm
where read has suffused its splendor.

Think about the Weaver: her patience
in starting again an always
unfinished task.

And hate afterwards, if you can.

II

Little man, what would you do with your reason?
bind up the world, the mad and furious world?
Castrate the colt called God?

But God breaks out of his tethers
and keeps engineering magnificent creatures,
wild beings whose shrieks
shatter this bell jar.

 
Rosario Castellanos (1925- 1974)

 
 
Translation from Spanish by Julian Pulley

My Five AM Blues

Five AM has always been a very worrisome time for me. For instance, there was a time in my life when I avoided the dentist like the plague, and in the wee hours of the morning I would find myself staring at the ceiling – or into the red of my digital alarm clock – worrying about my teeth falling out of my head. Whenever money was tight, I would worry about losing the house. When I drank and smoked regularly, five AM was a good time to worry about becoming a cancer-ridden cautionary tale to the friends who shared my habits. I would worry about the condition most of my organs, brain, kidneys, liver and stomach. I would worry about my memory and whether or not I had a case of early onset Alzheimer’s. If I had a twitchy muscle I would worry that it was Parkinson’s. In other words, saying I’m a little bit anxious is like saying the Niagara Falls boat ride, The Maid of the Mist, is a little bit moist.

Interesting thing about these pesky worries was that they would always evaporate within half hour of getting out of bed. One minute I would making toast, brooding over the inedible loss of my front teeth, and the next I would be as right as a sunny day. I had spent a more than I decade compartmentalizing my bad habits – drinking and smoking once a week, usually Fridays – and somehow I inadvertently managed to do the same for my anxieties.

But thanks to regular visits to the dentist, better money-management skills, and NOT being allowed near Ava (my nine-month old) after having a cigarette, most of these worries, and their causes have since receded.

Except for one that I can’t seem to shake.

It’s about time, and my inability to control it.

More specifically, it’s about having less and less time to achieve what I need to do.

OK, if you must know, it’s about being ever-closer to middle-age and thinking, every morning at – you guessed it – five AM: I’m thirty-eight and only a poet or I’m thirty-eight only a ESL instructor. If I’m feeling particularly cruel that morning, I think to myself I’m thirty-eight and only a daytime supply ESL instructor with a permanent night-time gig, but that one does take a lot of effort at the crack of dawn.

Of course, I do try to defend my career choice by telling myself that I’ve always needed something to pay the bills while allowing me to write, and as luck would have it, I’ve fallen into a career which I find very fulfilling, take pride in, enjoy thoroughly and – if I may toot my own horn – do very well at.

It then comes back to my writing. More specifically, my poetry. How much am I willing to gamble on even a moderate level of success/recognition? If you have a look at the bios in any anthology, quite a large number contain the phrase discovered posthumously. Now, I just want to stop right here and address the people who routinely say: Who cares about recognition? Just enjoy the act of creation!

To those people I would like propose that they burn all of their finished works right now. After all, if it’s just about the agony and ecstasy of artistic creation, then they should have no trouble putting a match to all of their finished artwork. Most would balk at the suggestion, demonstrating that in even the most idealistic of artists, there’s still a part of them that wants a little recognition for their effort, something that says I was here. I just happen to embrace that part more openly than others.

Of course, one of the drawbacks to embracing a demon is that tends to whisper in your ear at five AM. Which you can’t help but respond to. And in the end you have the equivalent of Gollum’s monologue going on in your head and you haven’t even gotten out of bed yet.

Or maybe that’s just me.

When you right down to it, this last remaining anxiety of mine is simply a matter of me not reaching the level of success I thought I would have reached by this time. I guess one way of looking at my predicament is that it’s a good thing to always expect better of yourself. Or at least that is what my online cognitive therapy avatar would tell me. But you know, I never cared much for those Pollyanna types anyways.

I have no choice. It looks as though, despite this last remaining persistent worry, I’ll just have to keep plugging away until my number comes up, or until 100 years from now, some crusty old critic discovers one of my poems in yellowed magazine, and thinks: meh, not bad, but what’s with all the kvetching?