16 years old: Dad, Camp Stevens, poetry, guitar. 12 inches

16 years old was a very big year.  The line between 15 and 16 years old blurs because Camp Stevens fell between Gr. 8 and 9 or Gr. 9 and 10.  These times blur.  Somewhere later in storage I might find the reminders that would tighten the date line up.  I kept a journal all these years.  The trouble was that with one of my divorces the ex destroyed years of writing and disrupted my whole organizational system. She was high on spite and cocaine and at the time didn’t consider husbands as higher than slugs. I was escaping with my life from years of chaos, passive aggressiveness, covert aggression, drugs, negligence and arrogance.  I’d met my match and I was lucky to get out alive. My friends believed she really was trying to kill me and more than once had almost killed us and others with her.  Crazy lady.  I married her and I loved her for what it was better or worse. But I wasn’t going to an early death with her and her drugs and lies.  I surrendered. It got too crazy even for me. And I’d been arrogant to think I could help her and that love conquered all. Well it didn’t.    

  I began writing this in part because I’m planning on tackling the storage locker and going through these old journals and some of the files I’ve kept for years.  Starting at 12 I’d produce a couple of binders of hand written journals or poetry and even some scrapbooks.  It’s sad so much was destroyed. Like ISIS wiping out the temples of the Zoroastrian, Christians, and Jews.  My personal shrines destroyed. There will be no other religion but one.  A divorce is like a war. There’s a lot of scorched earth.  Both people come away scarred but little do we remember the wounds we inflicted. But boy or boy do we dwell on the wounds we received.  I’m still working on forgiveness.

My first big work  began with Camp Stevens.  I took a paying job there for 6 weeks or more.  It’s a camp job. For people who have never worked in ‘camps’ in the north they usually don’t have a clue as to what this is.  I’d get my first experience and later admire the men and women who went off to the out of the way places, mostly in the north and work while the sun shined where the work was.

I’d been working for my Dad now for a couple of years. Before that I cut lawns. Tried a paper route one yard. Always worked in addition to school and everything else. Dadhelped me get my millwright helper ticket. I’d begin to work on job sites with him. That’s when I really appreciated how others saw him.  He was really smart and a hard worker and problem solver. My brother was annoyed that he didn’t wear a suit. He always wore work clothes and got his hands dirty.  My brother felt that he didn’t show his status and consequently wasn’t respected as much as he should have been. He was high status but did portray this. He didn’t even have his engineering diploma displayed on the wall.  That was my dad, a humble man. A shirt and tie didn’t make the man for me.  What I saw working with Dad was that all the men followed his direction and sought his advice.  He was given the authority over hundreds of men and managed it. That’s no small feat. Business owners and employees all admired him.  I didn’t know that till I worked on big job sites with him. The men all spoke highly of him too.  Sure took the wind out of this adolescents sails, considering I by contrast was a ‘know it all’ as teens can be. 

I’d only work on weekends or in the summer or evenings like this. Dad would get these industrial painting contracts or roofing contracts and we’d work as a family evenings in the spring summer and fall getting the work done. My brother was a worker too. I was spoiled as a kid working with these great men. It was rare for me the rest of my life to be surrounded by people set on working their best with a view to completing the task its best as quickly as excellence permitted.  Being an owner operator Dad took pride in his work knowing that would bring in contracts word of mouth.  As his sons he’d trained us since childhood to meet challenges and to be conscientious.  We had fun too.  Working as a family doing physical construction type work is rewarding.  Later he’d leave me to do jobs like painting the apartment building. If I needed money he’d find work for me.  I think people and governments that give out money for free are doing a disservice to people and really don’t respect them. I’m personally not as wise or accomplished as my brother or father with money. I give out charity but I think often it’s from a place of fear.  Dad loved me and showed his love by finding me work that paid. My brother carried that on with his children.  

Camp Stevens was my first actual ‘longer term job’.   6 weeks away from home working and living in the camp.  As a “cookie” , the job title for camp kitchen help,we were in a nebulous position in the camp. We bunked with the camp leaders but we were actual employees.  

The camp cook was a crazy lady.  An emotional angry efficient Nazi of a leader. She was loveable too in that blustery middle aged lost way some women are.  She took no ‘guff’.  She was a worker and she got the job done. We were her slaves and we did as we were told. There were three of us ‘cookies’ , an assistant cook and a cook That was the kitchen. We were up at 5. We had to get the breakfast made for 150 kids.  The cook had an elaborate healthy menu with scrambled eggs, pan cakes and hash browns, bacon and toast and jam for breakfast.  Sandwiches and salads or soups for lunch. Then dinners were a variety of roasts and stews and soups.  She really had a good taste sense and made great meals which the kids and staff enjoyed. There were recipes that had developed over the many years of the camp. I thought they were hers but no they were just one thing more the YMCA ensured worked well with excellence.  The YMCA was and is an amazing organization of excellence and yet modest cost. Camp Stevens was and remains one of the great camps for boys.  I don’t know if girls are going there now.  YWCA at the time had another camp on the other side of the same lake.  I found this out because the leaders had a panty raid with a retaliation by the girl leaders stealing the guys underwear another night.

Because we bunked with the leaders who were mostly there for fun and a small honarium we had a lot of the experience of the camp albeit as the ‘hired help’.

The one other woman in the camp was the gorgeous nurse.  I believe that nurse at Camp Stevens caused me forever to love nurses. She was the source of all the erotic fantasies of all the boys of Camp Stevens for years to come.  I was especially traumatized by her godliness because as camp help we got to share her shower on occasion. She had the only hot shower.  “Her’ shower smelt heavenly, lilac and other sweet feminine fragrances.  Each of us talked about being in there after our shower.  Guys masturbated in the bunks trying to be discrete.  Some less so than others.  There wasn’t any porn so memory sufficed. The nurse really was gorgeous. We’d imagine her naked there washing off with any of the vast collection of shampoos and lotions she kept.  She dated a couple of the older leaders that summer. She wore white short shorts and mini skirts. 

Once  we made the breakfast we had to do the clean up. I found out I loved working a dish washing machine. I liked spraying off the left over food stacking and then getting that soul gratification of closing the door locking the mechanism and pushing the button to begin the cycle. Then it was the unstacking and storing. I competed against myself and got incredibly fast. It was a ‘skill’ and I liked acquiring ‘skills’ and having ‘competence’ with them. This was an important part of the ethics of Boy Scouts , the YMCA and frankly ‘manliness’ of the day.   Competence was such an important word.  It was the height of praise to be called ‘competent’.  I would become ‘competent’ in a lot of things over my life arriving at that point where I could accomplish a task well, reliably and on my own.  I really miss ‘competence’ when I see it lacking.  It’s not perfection but a level of ‘good enough’, a kind of B or A standard, not A plus but certainly more than C. It was the basis of professionalism in earlier days.  

The afternoon was peeling potatoes.  We had potatoes for breakfast and evening many days a week so had to peel hundreds of potatoes, hundreds. We’d shuck pees too and peel carrots. Hours of this.  One of the cookies wasn’t  very good. A funny guy. Not fast and not very competent.  Still two hands is better than one.  The other cookie who’d been there the year before was great. We’d become friends too. We all hung out together but this other guy and I had more in common. We both had hunting and fishing back grounds whereas the whining kid was purely city spawn.  He was all tv , hollywood and talk.  Not very competent.

Jon Cowtan was the assistant camp cook. Jon would become my lasting friend and sometime mentor.  He was president of the North American Unitarian Youth Groups at the time.  A year or two later I’d storm out of my parents home and move in with him. He played guitar. We became fast friends at Camp Stevens talking ethics and philosophy and religion.  We both canoed evenings when we had a little free time.  We’d be canoeing on the moon lit lake just enjoying the call the loon or the hoot of the owl. Often I’d paddle at the back and Jon would bring his guitar and play. He was into jazz and fingering styles ahead of his time.  He’d sing too at other times  but playing guitar was his passion.

He taught me my early chords. The first song I learned was “Draft Dodger Rag”We’d talk politics and war. I can’t explain how much we all feared that the Vietnam War would expand into a global conflict. As guys we discussed volunteering to ‘fight commies’.  We worried we’d be conscripted if the Russians got in. We met draft dodgers.  They talked a lot. They were usually stoned.  The soldiers didn’t talk. They often had the thousand mile stare.

It was good to talk with Jon. He was a little older and a whole lot wiser.  He’d traveled more too. Met more people. The unitarians were an intellectual lot and had a breadth of consideration.  We didn’t argue.  I didn’t argue religion.  I was curious and interested and learned a lot in my teens and twenties. The only time I’d argue with someone was when I saw they weren’t sure so were trying to get certainty by selling their idea to me.  I thought the best ideas were free so that complicated things. Freedom was a big word then. 

‘What’s that I hear....that’s the sound of freedom coming’ was another song I learned from Jon.  The best one though was “Elusive Butterfly”. Jon played that song beautifully and I’d spend years trying to play it right.

To put this playing guitar and skill thing in perspective. My friend Kirk who played guitar a bit like me told me in his 30’s, ‘you know that rift Danny used to play.’  I finally figured it out and got it down last weekend. I knew because I’d been practicing that same ‘distinctive Donahue rift’ for a decade or more myself and it had taken me just as long to get it. 

Some guys were really talented, natural and obsessed with an instrument. Jon and Danny were like that. Regular George Harrison and Paul Simon types. 

So that was the summer I was peeling potatoes and learning guitar, making friends.

The cook had a nervous breakdown and maybe alcohol was a contributor. I can’t say. Just one day she was shouting then the next she was packing her bags. Jon became the cook then and I became the asssitant cook until we got a replacement.

The camp ran in two week stretches .150 boys at a time. We’d get a day off between the groups leaving and coming. That was the big day in Kenora. Kenora was one of those big towns for folk out on a camp. When you’re weeks in the woods whatever town that’s nearby takes on aspects of a city. It’s got that ‘feel’. It also takes time eventually to adjust back into the noise and rush of bigger cities.  Working years up north I remember first having this experience in Kenora.  

Camp Stevens was a great summer job even if the money was very poor. The experience and friendship were incredible. Just meeting Jon was worth the trip.  Beginning to play guitars and more poetry writing.  Politics, romance, religion and God.  Lots of Christian men and Christian creations but no one talked of Jesus.  We lived like the disciples in many ways and our discussions were becoming more and more high minded despite the occasional lapse into full blown adolescence.

That came when one of the guys said he had the longest dick and bet everyone he did.  These memories are too bizarre to make up. Everyone has $5 dollars riding on the outcome and we’re sitting around the hall on chairs with our backs to the wall. 20 guys all waiting, money in hand, backs to the wall. One guy has a tape measure. This guy then pulled out his pencil thin boa constrictor.It was long, not huge, but really long. More than 12 inches.  It was measured. Not even hard.  No one wanted that thing hard.  No one brought out a competitor.  He collected the the money. We had a feeling he’d collected winnings with that thing before. We had to share a bunkhouse with him so that was a source of jokes too.  It didn’t win him friends. It was a circus thing. He was a bit of a freak now. Already a peculiar kid so he was more a loner.  In time we all forgot he was different.  Differences lapsed for boys really quick when we’re working and playing sports together.  That week we all lost money we thought about this guy as weird but after that he just became another weird kid. Like the guy who could go cross eyed or rather went cross eyed and had to consciously keep his eyes uncrossed. Nobody was ever as weird as the Cub Scout who put ketchup on his corn flakes years earlier.

Abortion and Father's Day

Crossing Liffey River at HaPenny Bridge I realized that my life would have been so different were it not for the ME-DIA.  That information God owned by a few billionaire politicals intent on frightening me and misrepresenting reality for personal gain.
It was Father’s Day and I was grieving abortion.  Remembering begging her in tears not to kill our baby.  All the while she laughed and said ‘it’s my body”.  She’d been concerned that it would affect her appearance. It would interfere with her career.  I begged, cajoled promised and then she was angry. Even more angry when after I didn’t return her calls.   I’ve known no greater Hate Crime in my own life. There’s never been Hague case though.
 I’m not a bad guy. Just one of millions whose world exploded.  I remember finding she’d cut off the tip of the condom.  She told me she was taking birth control. Then there was the marriage and I begged her for children.  Wanted so badly for family. She called me ‘daddy’ and I knew she never wanted to be a woman.  It was so good to be a girl.  The ME-Dia says Women are out and Girls are in.  My mother was like nothing in Sex and the City.  My mother may as well have been a kazoo player too. She was married to my father, and my  family as persecuted as Paraquay.  Unfashionable unmentionables,  
I never showed up in the Media.  I played kazoo when everyone was playing guitar. There was no sexy hot kazoo band where the girls swooned.  The cameras would have been there and even reporters.  But somewhere in the cigar filled rooms where old men and old women wrote the world, kazoo players were out and guitars were in.  I watched my friend’s banjo get sidelined as well.
I'd  listen to  unnamed band and like the music.  Before they were remixed. Street musicians attracted me.  Loners. Outsiders.
Every once in a while I’d cheer because a lacrosse game would be covered.  Maybe the darts scores would make the news.  Something that would change the soccer monopoly. A woman’s game, perhaps.  Sometimes badminton would be covered. I’d envision revolution but it was all so quickly silenced. Basketball would come back on the next night, maybe a hockey game, then more soccer.  They called it football in America.  They called it multicultural, praised diversity and said we had such choice.  A ball is still a ball whether round, oblong or oblique  
It was all about the bets.  Gamblers had their preferences.  Curling wasn’t the scene in Macao or Los Vegas. The ME-Dia men fancied themselves as blood sports sorts.  Extreme combat was more important than spelling bees.
That day on HaPenny Bridge though, I realized they weren’t. Not in the grand scheme of things.  Not where it mattered.  A poetry contest among the Inuit was just as important as France's Napoleon and Englands’ Waterloo.  Regina Saskatoon wasn’t ever in the news not because it was somehow less than but just because it wasn’t where the ME-dia communication gambling cigar smoking whiskey drinking effetes lived.  These cowards didn’t have their own lives. They survived on living through ours.
The most important things about my life had never been shared on the news.  Intimacies and secrets and the sorrow of abortion. They were the tears at a celebration. And I thought of all the men I knew who’d lost their children.  Good sorts of men, more than 50%.  All portrayed as ogres and evil.  Like the Germans who fought in a war with the Allies but stopped one Christmas their Me-dia game of us and them to play instead a game of soccer out in that no man’s land.  ME-Dia kept that moment secret for decades. It only sneaked out one day like a burst of cello at a rock and roll concert.
ME-Dia sorts are just loud.  They’re often drinking and doing drugs and high on their own fallacious success, their killing the stocks and their passing dominance.  Quaint little cowards just like the rest of us but with News Rooms, and Television Studios and Reuters and fixed newspapers and rigged outlets. " There’s no room for original.”  they say,  " We’d rather have another star that looks like our last one so we can gauge in focus groups what the return will be on our financial investment,”  The world has been in a news and entertainment loop for decades.
Education returns less than entertainment.  Give them cake. Give them pot.  Give them large arenas with blood sports.  The bigger the better, the louder the richer.
And days of celebrations.  Where always there are those who cry. Like all those fathers whose sons and daughters have died in all those countless wars and all that needless crime.  Father’s day is the worst day of the year.  I miss my own Dad now dead and remember her proud and haughty look as she told she’d had the abortion and wanted me to be there to ‘support her’ .
And to this day I’ve paid a fortune in taxes to support families and children. I’ve helped countless fathers with their futures knowing I have none of my own. I’ve carried on playing kazoo Today I know I’m not alone.  Today I know that the ME-Dia gods are fallible.  They miss countless stories and long ago stopped getting it right.  They’re spreading the war. They’re creating the destruction. They are the cause.  Not because the people want to know.  But because a few old men and women want to win in casinos and can’t help but let the truth be told.  So information is reduced to sports. And it doesn’t matter how many cowboys are playing quoits, it’s just not going to covered any more than square dancing no matter how many are doing it.
At every celebration there are those crying like I am.  We’re too grey and messy for the black and whites. I’m not so angry with her.  My rage, or sadness, is directed more at them. Like an Amenian or Rwandan who survived a holocaust but finds their number not on the holocaust hit parade this life time.  It’s like South America that’s all but forgotten by the BBC.  It’s like she didn’t know what she was doing.  Following some program she never could be real.  And their are times when I walk among the dead like the only living, feeling like I am the last sentient among the shiny smiling robots.  But I’m not alone.
The ME-dia died long ago and life moved on. The multi faceted diamond in the rough was polished by the light.
It was a fleeting thought. I remember I was crossing Liffey River on HaPenny Bridge.  I’m surprised that I remember it.  The noise of competing programs, they are called programs, we are being programmed, usually drowns out the wee small voice. It was the wee small voice.  That’s what it’s called for a reason.  It’s still there.  Like the idea of you.  A dead baby in a stainless steel sink.

Young love, Bacon, Shoes and Air Conditioning

Another perfect day in the universe.  I’m here in my underwear, unwashed, unshaved, working on the second coffee. I’ve done an hour of writing for another book.
I’ve had a long fitful night sleep's beside a gorgeous young blond.  She cares for me because I have  air conditioning in my place. It counteracts the effects of her menopausal hot flashes.
All my life I’ve wanted to be loved by women for who I am but instead have settled for being loved for what I had.   I think my first girlfriend liked me for my guitar.  Not because I could play it but because with the guitar I accessorized her image of herself as an artist.  It helped that I had blue jeans, an Army Navy turtle neck sweater and Montreal Beret.  The Army Navy sweater was digested by moths decades past.
The girl I’m with today doesn’t care so much for what I wear.  She’s the kind of gal that would say, “you can leave your hat on.”  I lost the original beret but replaced it with a Canadian Boy Scout one.   When I’m fully clothed she sometimes  says affectionately,  "you clean up nice.”  
I remember the meaning and purpose of life, my relationship with God, finding the “answer", ‘getting ahead’, ‘fighting the good fight’, “learning”, ‘solving the puzzle’, ‘running the rat race’, all being more important.  I remember ‘having to have her’.  I remember ‘needing desperately’.  I don’t know I feel this way today.  Everything is tempered by time.  I’ve fought so many good fights, found so many answers, won so many races that each day seems sufficient unto itself.
She’s in the bath now.
The dog is asleep at my feet.  He picks this place so if I move he can be right there.  Ready for adventure.
I’ve had so many adventures and frankly look forward to the next.  Several are muddling along in my brain like the book I’m working on.  I’m meandering forward.  All the straight lines have been taken and discarded. There’s been too many mazes, too many mountains. I’m content with the valleys.  Today.
I know I’ll impress her soon by making her a bacon and croissant breakfast.  I wasn’t planning on being particularly attractive when I bought the croissants yesterday in the East Vancouver Bakery.  I just know she finds me sexy when I make her breakfast.  I got her coffee already.  She’s the kind of girl that likes a man with a job who pays his taxes.
I dreamed of riding the Harley last night.  I’m thinking I might go for a spin later.  Pick up my laundry.  Apparently women find clean clothes sexy?  The girls I used to date said all kinds of bullshit which I only knew was false when I tried it out on the next woman I dated.
“What makes you think women like men who don’t wash each day.”
“My last girlfriend said women  like that in a man.’
"She was an idiot.  Do you like dirty women. Don’t answer that, I mean, do you like women who stink of sweat. Don’t answer that either, men are pigs.  Just remember women aren’t.  More women will like a man that showers daily than one who showers once a month."
I’m glad women got more honest over the years.  I like to shower. After she’s finished with her bath, I’ll probably lather up. The only dirty dog in this relationship is Gilbert the cockapoo, He hates baths.  Probably his girlfriends like the animal smell.  I figure if I’m missing it, i can stuff my face in an ass or crotch just like he does and get the full fragrance. It’s just a thought.  I like those smells at night, in the moonlight, in the heat of passion.
But coffee and bacon smells, that’s on my mind right now.  I don’t know what I’m going to do after that.
I’ve got so much work to do. I could work around the clock seven days a week and not make a dint in what I ‘should” be doing.  But yesterday, friday,  I couldn’t even think straight. I’m utterly exhausted each day by 6. My mind literally weeps. I feel like my brain today acts like my body did when I did construction. I’d put in a 10 hour day, come home, eat and sleep. That’s all i’ve been able to do with thinking and office work now.  I crash each night in front of the tv, utterly overwhelmed by all the demands and desperation and anger in my work.  There’s a constant crisis and emergency.
Now in my new office, the sirens are gone. For 5 years I’ve heard sirens and screaming all day long outside my window and the quiet is the first thing I noticed in my new office.  And no one accosting me on the street, wanting me to give them money, shouting at me because they think I’m someone else or wanting me to buy drugs. I feel like I’ve done a five year tour in a war zone and by moving a few blocks I’m no longer at ground zero.  I’d begun thinking everyone was looking for an angle.  It’s been too long that I’m triple locking my world.
People on drugs simply don’t realize how loud, insensitive and assaultive, they are.  They’re baby bubble boys and girls in adult bodies,  their emotions protected by layers of cotton candy anti feeling agents so they can assault everyone verbally around them with impunity. The drug addict lives in a flack jacket.  I’m bruised everywhere today.  And the ignorance off the front lines is appalling.  The people ‘back home’ are living in their own ‘bubble boy and bubble girl’ worlds.  The law makers and judges are so distant from reality that they may as well be living on space stations. They don’t know they don’t know and their arrogance and ignorance are even more painful than those who are suffering the disease.
I’m recouping. She says, to me, it's okay to do nothing.  It’s okay.  You can relax. You need to have a break.  I’ve got files and work.I’ve taken home work every night and weekend for thirty years. I’ve a dozen books to read. I’ve read a thousands of books related to my work, thousands of documentaries and movies related directly to my work. I’m always working. But today I’m reading a book about an English privateer in the 19th century  New Orleans harbour. I’ve got a cowboy novel nearby that looks equally appealing. That’s my plan for today’s agenda. Maybe sit outside in the sun, maybe go for a swim in the pool.  Maybe ride the Harley for the laundry.
I’ve just read two theological philosophical texts this last two weeks. I’m off to ireland, a conference on autism, so I’ve read a half dozen papers on the subject and am slowly progressing on a new text on neurotransmitters. “I should be ‘finishing’ it but I preferred reading the Kindle version of ‘celtic myths’, enjoyed learning my forebears were the ‘barbarians’ that first invaded Rome.  I’ve loved learning about the history of my grandfather’s people. I’ve talked with my brother about his trip to Ireland. He’s reassured me about driving the stick shift I’ll be renting.  I’m always learning. Everything new frightens me, then I face it and move on.
I’m still thinking about bacon.
The young girl just walked past smelling of lilac and bath water.  She was happy yesterday when I got her Keens walking shoes at Mountain Equipment Coop.  If I could talk to myself as a young man wanting to get laid, I’d tell myself, forget about the poetry, save your money and take the girl to a shoe store and buy her shoes.  I wouldn’t tell my younger self about bacon. Somethings are best kept a secret.  It takes a life time for a guy to learn about bacon and shoes.  Young men are slow. But I think the women like that.  The mystery.  Listening dreamily to the young guys playing guitar and reciting poems, knowing that if you play your cards right as a girl, you’ll one day get shoes and bacon from a guy with a job who pays his taxes.  The dogs left me and followed her into the other room.  The dirty dog wants my girl. I think I’d better get in the shower.  Then I'll get started on the bacon.  She really is hot. I never thought as a young man I’d be thankful to have air conditioning to cool my girl down.  

Canadian Authors Association - West Coast Branch - Poetry

Jean Kay, our inspirational poet,  greeted everyone at the door.  Our president Margot Bates introduced Dennis E. Bolen our Poet and MC for the night. Kevin Spence began the reading with his Surrey Poems and told us stories of his recitals across country in a variety of usual and unusual venues.  Kevin is a one man performance art.  Next, Mariner James, whose book is the Monument Cycles recited deeply moving poems of vast dimension.  Bernice Lever, recent recipient of several major awards for poetry and our CAA resident poet, recited from her latest book, Generations.  She read intimate and timely poems that touched the heart and challenged the mind to wonder. I’m sorry I’d not heard Christopher Leven’s poems before because I so enjoyed them and felt something missing had suddenly been found. His latest Night Visions book has been nominated for the most distinguished awards.  After the recitals Dennis asked questions of the poets about meaning and form. The audience joined in and soon there occurred those moments of profundity when poets speak together in rather lame English about their magical verse.   It was truly a writer’s night and I was glad to be there.

Canadian Authors Association, West Coast Branch, Open Mike, Feb. 2015

I loved the Canadian Authors Association. It’s truly ‘writers helping writers’.  So many of us benefit so much from those who go before us.  Jean Kay and Bernice Lever, our much loved poets were so uplifting with Valentine’s appropriate reads of love and laughter.  Robert Mackie, author of Terror on the Alert (really one of my all time favourite reads) filled in for Margot Baits who was attacked by the germ warfare nanobot virus that the government is calling this year’s flu.  There is some suspicion that the Chinese developed this particular virus just to slow down Margot whose a whirling dervish in the CAA.   Margaret Hume was also struck down by air born agents of mass destruction.  We pray for their quick recovery.  Dennis Bolen, author of Black Liquor, announced the upcoming CAA events.  Enrico came with Lilija and accompanied her poetry on guitar giving the CAA night a truly avante garde element of  ‘performance art’ .  Roxanne was an amazing time keeper.  It helped that she wore a flak jacket, military helmut and Glock 9mm.
I loved all the readings amazed at the talent and diversity. Nothing gets one’s own creative juices flowing than being amongst creative giants.

 

Robert Burns Dinner, Simon Frazer Pipe Band Gala

Robbie Burns Dinner is a grand occasion. Not only a celebration to gastronomical divine delight, the immortal haggis,  but this night is also  the anniversary of Scotland’s greatest poet, whose genius immortalized the humble haggis.
The Simon Frazer Pipe Band is by far the greatest pipe band in the world by my own humble opinion.  My friend Lorne and I have enjoyed the occasion richly in previous years.  Manly attired in kilts we brought our wee lassies, Judith and Laura,  along to this illustrious occasion.  They loved the agile dancers and amazing pipers and drummers. The ode to the haggis was superbly delivered.  The food was fabulous. The band was as usual unsurpassed.  The junior bands were represented and they’d just won awards around the world.
It’s a fund raiser and the silent auction was great.  I got a Cuisinart grill which I gave to Laura along with a lovely silver necklace.  All the funds go to the pipe band scholarships.  It was a perfect night.
 

Canadian Authors Association - West Coast Branch - Annual Summer Dinner

The Canadian Authors Association - Writers Helping Writers- held their annual summer dinner at the Fire fighter’s Public House.  Great idea, Margot Bates!  Margot, president, arranged a tribute to the service of Bernice Lever.  Bernice Lever, writer in residence, was stepping down from her many other organizational positions in CAA.  Her knowledge and guidance has been so appreciated by each successive board member given her wealth of organizational knowledge, her wit and charm and her personal accomplishments as a poet, editor and writer.  Together we’d all contributed a comment on how much Bernice had helped each of us.  Jean Kay  provided orchids to accompany the booklet of praise presented by Robert Mackay.
Next, Children of Air India award winning author Renee Salikhar read from her book based on that tragic bombing of the Canadian flight in which more than 80 children died. After she spoke of the role of artists in history and tragedy. In her poem, the word ‘redacted’ sounds like the chorus of a Greek tragedy, accusing the terrorists and all who conspired through action or silence to kill these innocent children.
Later as writers we talked together of craft and subject, process and characterization.  But mostly we spoke of summer holidays, children and grandchildren, books being published, books being written.  Margaret told me of her latest family reunion, speaking of  generations and survivors.
I sat with Lilija and she, like Dennis, who joined us, have been have been joyfully experimenting with various forms of live and recorded musical back up to their poetry readings. . Lila’s autobiography is at the publishers and she promised she really had included the kangaroo.
Robert Mackay’s , latest novel, Terror on the Alert has just been released.   There were dozens there and I’d no chance to speak to all. Joyce had just returned from touring the art galleries of Europe.  It was great to see Russ who does so much for the CAA website. As he lives in Victoria we rarely see him..
I really enjoyed the group.  Writers, not surprisingly are fine raconteurs.  In person, they’re interesting, not terribly judgemental, because if anything they’re ‘collecting’ material for their books.  If they don’t particularly like you, you might end up a corpse in a detective novel.If you’re adorable you might well become a pet rabbit in a children’s fairytale.  In person, though,  they really do appreciate and celebrate character.  They’re not even averse to conflict if it moves the story.   Among writers there’s always depth.  One knows the wheels are turning when you’re talking with a writer. It might just be a hamster in a cage but it might well be the wheels of history.