An almost-birthday adventure for two
Taking the train to Toronto, yesterday morning. “We’re going in fast-forward!”
“I am going to the aquarium with only mom.” – Fooey, age eight, almost nine, recording the event for posterity on her train ticket.
Observation: it’s really hard to get good photos at an aquarium. This stops no one from trying repeatedly, including me. There must be thousands of terrible shark photos now in existence that were directly spawned by those who squeezed, squawled, and wandered with giant strollers around the aquarium in Toronto yesterday afternoon. Here are mine.
Good selfies are even harder than good shark photos. “This one looks eerie.” “What’s that mean?” “Like this.” “Oh.”
It was a very special day, with only us.
From Alice Munro country
There is so much in this interview with Alice Munro, from 1994 in The Paris Review, that I want to go on quoting and quoting from it. Here is a sample. I urge you to read the whole thing (pour yourself a cup of tea and enjoy the length, depth, and breadth of the conversation). And one final anecdote, from the interviewers’ introduction.
MUNRO
I was like a Victorian daughter—the pressure to marry was so great, one felt it was something to get out of the way: Well, I’ll get that done, and they can’t bug me about it, and then I’ll be a real person and my life will begin. I think I married to be able to write, to settle down and give my attention back to the important thing. Sometimes now when I look back at those early years I think, This was a hard-hearted young woman. I’m a far more conventional woman now than I was then.INTERVIEWER
Doesn’t any young artist, on some level, have to be hard-hearted?MUNRO
It’s worse if you’re a woman. I want to keep ringing up my children and saying, Are you sure you’re all right? I didn’t mean to be such a . . . Which of course would make them furious because it implies that they’re some kind of damaged goods. Some part of me was absent for those children, and children detect things like that. Not that I neglected them, but I wasn’t wholly absorbed. When my oldest daughter was about two, she’d come to where I was sitting at the typewriter, and I would bat her away with one hand and type with the other. I’ve told her that. This was bad because it made her the adversary to what was most important to me. I feel I’ve done everything backwards: this totally driven writer at the time when the kids were little and desperately needed me. And now, when they don’t need me at all, I love them so much. I moon around the house and think, There used to be a lot more family dinners.And one final anecdote, from the interviewers’ introduction.
After a while, Munro took us to Goderich, a bigger town, the county seat, where she installed us in the Bedford Hotel on the square across from the courthouse. The hotel is a nineteenth-century building with comfortable rooms (twin beds and no air-conditioning) that would seem to lodge a librarian or a frontier schoolteacher in one of Munro’s stories. Over the next three days, we talked in her home, but never with the tape recorder on. We conducted the interview in our small room at the hotel, as Munro wanted to keep “the business out of the house.” Both Munro and her husband grew up within twenty miles of where they now live; they knew the history of almost every building we passed, admired, or ate inside. We asked what sort of literary community was available in the immediate area. Although there is a library in Goderich, we were told the nearest good bookstore was in Stratford, some thirty miles away. When we asked whether there were any other local writers, she drove us past a ramshackle house where a man sat bare chested on the back stoop, crouched over a typewriter, surrounded by cats. “He’s out there every day,” she said. “Rain or shine. I don’t know him, but I’m dying of curiosity to find out what he’s up to.”
And then we rented a dumpster
I seem to be happiest when in motion. I can’t say why this is, but contentment seems to derive from a sense of continuing, a stream of mostly humble activities rolling one in the next into the next, overlapping, flowing always forward and pulling me along.
I’m wary of inertia.
I ward it off with projects and lists, with the demands of parenting, and the urgency of getting to the right place at the right time.
This sense of urgency can make me feel drawn, tense, running on pure adrenalin. Or, oddly, it can make me feel calm, serene, like I’m being swept along rather than having to propel myself. This summer feels like a bit of both, but mostly, I’ve been feeling calm about where I’m at. I’ve been feeling buoyed and buoyant and not overwhelmed, even as I’m whirled from task to task.
Kevin and I accomplished something major on the weekend. We rented a dumpster and cleared eleven years of why-are-we-keeping-this junk from our attic, basement, garage, and many closets and cupboards. We filled it to the top. It felt cathartic and it was a ton of labour, squeezed in around three soccer games on Saturday (only we would think a mere three soccer games on a Saturday is an invitation to rent a dumpster), a long run on Sunday morning (me), and a soccer practice on Sunday evening. The resulting purge of possessions was like preparing for a move, without the necessity of actually moving anywhere.
My conclusion: we should do this at least once a decade. I’ll put it on my to-do list for 2024.
And the things we got rid of. I put anything that looked even moderately appealing out on the curb. We may have a hoarder in our neighbourhood because boy, did items go fast. At one point, I set out a miniature crockpot, then realized it was threatening to rain. “I’ll just bring that up on the porch for now,” thought I, heading back out for the rescue — but it was already gone. Vanished. It felt quite remarkable, like discovering a black hole or something, a vacancy down which to toss all those things that still seemed useful, not junk, but no longer wanted by us. I imagine it, now, somewhere nearby, stuffed into the corners of someone else’s life, while our lives are somehow lightened by the space that’s been cleared.
::
On the schedule this week …
one child at musical theatre camp, with performances on Friday
one child at horse camp
several soccer practices + four games
one story contest to help judge (done, this morning!)
one book launch party to plan
many kilometres to run (training for the Run for the Toad in October)
one wedding to celebrate (my little sister Edna is getting married! and I get to call her little because she’s twelve and a half years younger than me)
On, on, on we go. Even when I’m really tired, I feel the tidal pull, carrying me along, and I’m glad for it. I’m glad for being at a stage in my career where I’m being invited to participate. You won’t catch me complaining about being too busy. It means: wealth of experiences. It means: my cup runneth over. It means, for me, a constant source of replenishment.
Amen, Lorrie Moore
INTERVIEWER
Could you talk about the moment you decided to become a writer, if there was one that you can put your finger on? Or was it always obvious?MOORE
It’s never always obvious.INTERVIEWER
Some writers seem to think it was inevitable—they were writing poems when they were five and never stopped.MOORE
Does that mean it’s obvious? I’d like to see some of those poems.INTERVIEWER
So you don’t feel you were destined to it, that you had no other choice but to be a writer?MOORE
Well, that’s all very romantic, and I can be as romantic as the next person. (I swear.) But the more crucial point is the moment you give yourself permission to do it, which is a decision that is both romantic and bloody-minded—it involves desire and foolish hope, but also a deep involvement with one’s art, some sort of useful self-confidence, and some kind of economic plan. One’s life, especially one’s artistic life, is an interplay of many things and the timing of encouragement—from teachers or parents—is also one of the most important elements. Although both my parents are creative people in their way, I was not especially encouraged by them, which might have been good. I certainly don’t blame them. I think they believed you threw things at your children—lessons, books, music—and then let the children sort it out, that if you were too present or too committed to a child’s accomplishment in any area, the child would run away. This, of course, is not really true. Or rather it’s not extremely true. But I received most of my initial encouragement in college, from professors, and by then I was ready to absorb it. I didn’t have the financial freedom to be a writer and have always struggled with that, but I also knew I didn’t want to find myself sixty-five years old and ruing the moment in my youth when I became prematurely practical. I wasn’t at all sure whether I would be able to survive as a writer for the rest of my life. But I decided to keep going for as long as I could and let someone else lock me up for incurable insanity.
Best of summer
Top ten travel locations so far this summer
1. the point at Seeley’s Bay, Ontario
2. soccer field(s), Fooey’s team
3. soccer field(s), Albus’s team
4. soccer field(s), AppleApple’s team
5. Silver Lake camp
6. Kingston, for tournament, with siblings, cousins, aunt and Grandma
7. Swimplex, Nepean, with cousins, aunt and Grandma
8. Ottawa
9. en route, from somewhere to somewhere
10. our house; swim lessons; friends’ houses; backyard
Top five reasons I’m blogging less this summer.
1. I’m out and about with the kids all the time. And I’m swimming at lunchtime.
2. I’m prioritizing writing work in those spare moments not populated by children and their summer activities (and mine).
3. Blog-time is going largely toward building a new web site to house this slightly long-in-the-tooth blog.
4. Summer. Have I mentioned summer?
5. See above. And below.
