Exit: Ken Campbell

I learned just this morning that the British actor/writer/comedian Ken Campbell passed away on August 31. His death didn’t make the news here; he wasn’t well known in Canada. In England, however, he was a bit of an icon. You can read his obit here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2008/sep/01/obituary.ken.campbell

To say he was “one of the strangest people in Britain” is to damn Ken with faint praise. The man was…well, he was far and away the most original, fantastical person you could ever meet. I know, because many years ago I was lucky enough to spend some time in his endlessly entertaining and bizarre company.

It would have been in1997, back in Halifax, when I was living in a two-bedroom flat on South Street. One July evening I got a phone call from my friend Frances Knickle, who lives in St. John’s. She and husband Ed Riche had these three Brits staying with them during the Sound Symposium. They were wanting to visit Halifax afterwards. Could I put them up for a couple of days? She assured me I’d find them good company, and added that they probably wouldn’t be around much since their primary intention in visiting Nova Scotia was to pop down to Oak Island to see about the Holy Grail.

Well, who wouldn’t bite at that curious bait? I said yes, and they showed up a couple of days later.

My guests turned out to be Ken, his friend the writer Jeff Merrifield, and a young composer whose name I am sorry to have forgotten. They were three animated, friendly oddballs, and I quickly found myself breaking out a large bottle of bourbon. That night, we sat in my tiny living room while Ken told story after story from his weird and wonderful life. I wish I could remember it all. Some things stuck with me, like his tale of visiting South Pacific islands where cargo cults still worshipped a “holy biscuit tin” that had been left generations before by some errant sea captain. Ken learned to speak Pidgin – a most ingenious and amusing language – and the year after we met, he mounted a production of MacBeth, entirely in Pidgin, titled Makbed blong Willum Sekspia. I remember him telling me the Pidgin word for “piano”: phonetically, “big blocka white one black one you kill’em e cry out”. (“You kill’em” or perhaps “ukillim” is the verb “to strike”. “E cry out” is to make a noise.)

Ken also told me about Damunhur, a secret community of artisans who follow an ancient wisdom-magic spiritualism in their village of caves carved out of the Italian alps. He had been there. You can look it up; it’s almost too exotic to be true.

Eventually we got around to the Holy Grail. Years before Dan Brown and all that Da Vinci Code business, Ken and Jeff had become fascinated with the history of the Cathar heretics of southern France and they told me all about it. (Jeff’s book, The Perfect Heretics, is a great read if you’re interested.) The Cathars were a Christian sect established in about the 11th century and flourishing in the 12th and 13th centuries in Languedoc. Cathars believed that all people were “perfect” in that each of us was made of God-material, and thus that God was each of us. They didn’t believe in the hierarchy of the Church, and allowed woman and men both to conduct religious services. Needless to say, the Catholic Church eventually wiped them out in a long and bloody campaign culminating in the Albigensian Crusade” of the early 13th century.

The final battle, the siege of Montségur, gave rise to the story told by Dan Brown and others before him: that the Cathars were in fact the protectors of the Sang Real – the royal bloodline of Christ and Mary Magdalene. The story goes that at Montségur, a Temple Knight managed to escape the siege, bearing with him something of incalculable value – the Holy Grail – a.k.a. the living descendant of Jesus Christ.

Of course I found all this fascinating, Ken being the absolute best storyteller I had ever met. I also had a connection to the story, in that I visited Montségur as a teenager and I knew something of the history. I had spent the last month of my European adolescence vacationing with friends in a tiny village near Carcassonne, and I remember the visit to the ruins of Montségur well. It’s a spooky place, a crumbling tower and ramparts atop a steep rock in the middle of a deep ravine. The day we visited, hawks were circling the ramparts, which was almost too romantic for my 17-year-old self to deal with.

Back to my living room, where most of the bourbon has now been guzzled: the great story got even greater as my guests told me of how the thing of incalculable value (The Holy Grail) eventually wound up at Rosslyn Chapel in the Orkneys, and thence, they say, in 1398 it (or he, or she) landed in Nova Scotia on a ship captained by Henry Sinclair. (This has all been written about in Michael Anderson Bradley’s book The Holy Grail Across the Atlantic. Hell of a read.) Clues to the whereabouts of the Grail were said to have been buried down the Money Pit at Oak Island, and my visiting trio were going off to have a look. They weren’t able to, of course, because Oak Island is privately owned and no one goes near the sinkhole without gazillions of dollars in excavating and film equipment.

Being around Ken was a dizzying experience, and not just because of the Wild Turkey. His stories leapt from marvel to marvel. He had famously bushy eyebrows that seemed also to leap from his face. He could make you laugh so hard you’d wet yourself one moment, and the next you’d be holding your breath in awe at the telling of some great mystery. When speaking, he crackled and cackled like a cartoon magician stirring some great fizzy cauldron.

Most of all, he was the most alive human I had ever met. After they’d gone, it occurred to me, what’s this 55-year-old semi-famous man doing, rambling around, crashing on strangers’ couches? Well, I think he was just following the expanses of his mind, which just reached out everywhere in all directions at once. Having caught the twitch of a tale, Ken would excitedly follow. Yet he never lost his way: he had a genius for being able to connect ideas, stories, places, people. He lived in a multidimensional map. A big picture, a great, spiraling story that got bigger the more of it he told.

Ken connected me to his picture when he saw the tattoo on my forearm. He’s probably the only person I’ve ever met who didn’t ask me what it meant. He told me. The egg, the spiral, the number five, and the triangle are all symbols of life energy, connectedness with the earth, knowledge, mystery… All the things I was trying intuitively to convey when I designed it. By coincidence (or not…), my prototype was an ancient, battered silver pendant I found that long-ago summer in the dirt outside Carcassonne; it’s in my wallet as I write.

Well, heaven knows I learned a lot of useless but quite entertaining gack that day – like how to say “piano” in Pidgin – but the real gifts that I got from the visit of Ken and his mates are harder to describe, though the impact has stayed with me these 11 years and I believe has helped shape the person I try to practice being. Ken would put it much better, and much funnier, but the upshot is this: Always open your door to strangers. If they don’t kill you with a pig-bonking stick (always a grim possibility!), you will at least be rewarded with a good yarn, and at best a moment of connection with the great, crackling mystery that binds all things in this life.

And perhaps, as Ken would suggest with that mad grin of his, beyond.

Nicaragua, Part Dos

We’re back home now, and I never did get a chance to write the next installment of our Nicaraguan journey. There is more to tell! I’ve just re-read what I sent out and realize that it sounded pretty negative. We did have a great time, in the end.

What I wrote before sounded exactly like me coming to grips, not very gracefully, with the contrast between my life of privilege and the difficulty of life in a very poor country. The phrase “grinding poverty” is ultimately very apt. It wears one down; life is a terrible hard road, strewn with baffling obstacles and not at all the smooth drive I have obviously become innately accustomed to. I could say, “I don’t know how people live like that”, but in fact I know better now: they scrape along however they can. Sometimes this means grabbing what little they can, however they can. Whether this offends my well-fed sense of fair play is totally irrelevant. I can afford to take the high road, in both literal and metaphoric senses. What I can’t do is pass judgment; it ain’t my jurisdiction.

Apologia aside, on to the continued story.

As you all know, I am no big fan of the Catholic church, but it is an important community institution in Nicaragua as throughout Central America. During our time there, we witnessed a lot of Christmas-related goings on. The celebration is a mishmash of North American and local traditions, so that you’ve got Christmas trees in the plazas, and plastic reindeer on the occasional roof, while various (suspiciously animistic) saints’ days are celebrated, and the big star of the show is the Blessed Virgin who gets a whole week to herself in early December (“La Purissima”) as well as a number of loud shout-outs during Christmas week. (JC himself is very much in the back seat.)

On our second night in Granada, we were woken up at three a.m. by what seemed, improbably, to be a passing marching band, with tubas, trumpets, drums and the works. We wrote it off as an anomaly. But the next night, the same thing happened, this time the march being preceded by an advance artillery of firecrackers and a cacophony of tooting. We guessed it was a wedding party, or maybe a quinceanera… Moving on to Ometepe, again we were blasted awake by trucks passing down the road with their loudspeakers blaring marchy mariachi music. And again, in Moyagalpa, bottle rockets, accordions, cymbals, hoots and hollers.

When we landed in San Juan del Sur, James and I ended up in a hotel in the middle of town. Again at three a.m., we were knocked awake by approaching explosions. There was a brief silence, then a countdown of cymbals and a full-on marching band started up right outside our window. All we could do was laugh. Honestly, by this time we were semi-convinced it was a national conspiracy to rid the country of gringos by preventing them ever getting any sleep. Thus, still giggling, we dubbed it the Fuck Off Gringo Marching Band.

The next day we found out that the tradition is to take up a statue of the saint and march it around town, waking the townspeople, to remind them to attend Mass at five. I am sure it is a very effective method, as absolutely no one, gringo or not, can sleep through that ruckus!

(I should take a moment to explain that “gringo” is not used or taken as a derogatory term by Nicas or local ex-pats. It just means foreigners.)

You’ll recall that we did end up finding a cute little cabaña to rent, only about 10 minutes walk from the lovely and oft-deserted Marsella beach. Aidan, Jen, James and I spent ten days there, cooking great meals on our little outdoor kitchen burners, playing cards and drinking 7-year-old Flor de Caña rum, which is absolutely the best rum I’ve ever run across, so dark and delicious! Jen makes an expert but deadly rum punch which tended to put us to bed by 9:30. (At 2-3 oz per glass, no surprise.) In the result, our New Year’s Eve went without bang or whimper. We were all in bed. Which is just as well, given that according to everybody, New Year’s Eve is the biggest night of the year for robberies, hold-ups, muggings, break-ins, road accidents, cattle-rustling, fist fights, knife fights, cock fights, dog fights, shootings both purposeful and accidental, and the usual host of regrets including fingers being blown off by jerry-rigged bottle rockets, plenty of occasions to vomit, and of course the rash of unplanned pregnancies, the tears and recriminations, all of which, I guess, make the night not dissimilar from the good times at home.

A Nica tradition we enjoyed was the making and unmaking of “el Viejo” – the Old Man. El Viejo is made from old clothes; he’s stuffed and propped up on a lawn chair (or hammock, or car hood) with a bottle of rum and a pack of smokes in his lap. On New Year’s Eve, the moment is celebrated by hauling El Viejo out into the back forty where he is soaked in chicha fuerte (the local corn-based firewater; I believe we call it “ethanol”), or gasoline (if the chicha’s wanted for last call) and torched. Or he’s stuffed full of fireworks and blown up. Sometimes they shoot him full of shotgun pellets first, then blow him up, and then burn the remaining blown-up bits.

Nicas are plenty fond of fireworks. On the chicken bus from Granada to Masaya, we detoured along a lane cramped with shacks packed from the dirt floor to the tin roof with explosives of all sorts. Instead of our classic “burning schoolhouse”, there you can buy “bag of gunpowder on a stick”, made extra festive by the addition of a long red ribbon, which presumably doubles as a fuse. On each shack there was tacked this thoughtful hand-written notice: “¡peligro de fumar!” As we drove by, I was thinking that perhaps someone should show this “danger, no smoking” sign to the old guy burning garbage out back. Oh, I’m sure he only burns when the wind is gusting away from the shacks.

So, even in our rum-induced stupor we heard every Viejo in the neighbourhood being gleefully incinerated. Down on the beach, the local ex-pats built a giant bonfire into which some sodden wag chucked El Viejo, who was packed with those whizzy, twirly rockets which then shot out horizontally in every direction at the celebrants. We heard all about it from our cabaña neighbour Chuck, who had some quite funny video footage of drunk-ass gringos diving frantically out of the way, whiz! ha ha! “Aargh, my eye!”

On that note, we did meet a few interesting local gringos. The aforementioned Chuck was an affable guy who gave us a few lifts in his truck and showed us the amazing house he is building on top of a hill overlooking the beach, three stories and all off the grid. Like many ex-pats, Chuck’s the kind of guy who doesn’t want to be bothered with “conventions” and “rules” and “laws” and such pesky things. A Texan from the Gulf, he’s been a surfer since 1960, through the Beach Boys era, and later he branched into catamaran racing, deep-sea fishing and other hazardous water-sports. At nearly 60, he is leathery and tough as a sea turtle, but a great storyteller and free with his rum. The cabaña we rented from Chuck’s buddy, a fellow named Vince, another iconoclastic refugee from the States. Vince was a union roofer for 28 years in Philadelphia. He’s got grey hair in a pony-tail, a thick moustache, smokes three packs a day, keeps two giant boxer-pit bulls at his heels. He’s one of those gruff, hard-living types who seems kind of intimidating until it is revealed that he is a renowned amateur entomologist with an extensive butterfly collection. (!)

Vince, Chuck, and just about every Nica or ex-pat to get behind the wheel regularly drink and drive; there’s no real prohibition against it. If you hit someone’s fence or pig, you’ve got to pay for it, but otherwise it’s an accepted practise. So, Vince tells us, one night he was coming home from town utterly loaded. He has developed a quite sensible practise over the years of only driving with his right arm across the wheel, so that if he falls asleep or passes out, he will pull the wheel, and thus the truck, off the road to the right instead of into oncoming traffic. This one night, Vince made it through the narrow cut and was just coming up on the bridge when he nodded off. The truck pulled right and went over the edge of a ten-foot ditch. It rolled, crushing the roof and throwing Vince across the bench seat. When he woke up, the truck was still running and Vince was lying on the roof. He managed to pull himself out, uninjured except for a badly bruised arm. He then pulled out his Blackberry and sent this immortal text message to everyone in his contact list: “Truck upside-down. Need he ”

After a few moments it occurred to Vince that “he ” may not be immediately forthcoming. So he climbed back in the truck, fetched his weed, climbed out again and went home. A few hours later he was awoken by friends and neighbours who’d found the ditch, found the ruined truck, but not found Vince. He had no memory of getting home and only had this to say: “I think I might need a jump start.”

Jen and Aidan took off on January 2 for a trek across country that would eventually lead them to Bluefields, the largest town on the Atlantic coast. From there, they were planning on taking a boat to the Corn Islands in the Caribbean. I am assuming they got there okay. James and I spent a last day and night on Marsella all by our lonesomes.

Sadly, the food had run out, so we had no choice but to venture out for our lunch. On Chuck’s recommendation, we went down to Maria’s. Maria’s place is a dirt-floored shack, with a tin-roof patio and a couple of plastic tables. Chicks run around under the tables and a couple of dogs laze nearby. It’s very windy in the Marsella valley and gusts of dust blow up onto the tables every few moments. When we got there, Maria was in a bad mood because José, her husband, was as usual drunk as a lord. (He harangued us, in a very friendly, continuous hand-shaking way, throughout the meal.) Anyway, we both ordered fish and then spent the next half hour regretting it and covertly saying the Gordon Ramsay prayer (“Dear Lord, may I not die of food poisoning this day”), given the state of the place, and the drunk proprietor, and so on. But eventually Maria came out of the kitchen with a huge plate on which lay a gorgeous whole snapper, cooked to perfection. We thought, “Oh, this is for us to share” but then Maria came back with a second plate, this time with a massive fish whose head and tail fell over the sides of the plate, it was so big, and this she plunked down in front of James. They were both delicious and we gobbled them all up with no ill effect. (Thus far.)

That night we went all out and ate at the Marsella Beach Hotel, a very swank joint at the top of a hill. It has an award-winning chef and a Jacuzzi overlooking the beach. We had a delicious meal with dessert and several drinks for the princely sum of $35.

Coming home took the better part of three days. We left the cabaña and got a lift into town courtesy of Chuck. We decided to forgo the chicken bus to Managua, which would have meant four or five hours packed in like sardines (which costs $3) in favour of a shuttle straight to the Best Western across from the Managua airport. The shuttle was to leave at 3 p.m., then 3:30, meaning 4:00, and by the time we left at 5:00 we were quite happy to say adios to the dusty, gusty streets of San Juan del Sur. (One of our fellow passengers on the shuttle was a completely insane American woman who had just decided to sell her Florida home and move to a yoga retreat up in the hills; where it is just SO PEACEFUL and SO JOYFUL that you hardly even notice the 24-hour armed security…but that’s another tale.)

We stayed Thursday night at what should more rightly be known as the Worst Western, where the rooms smell of “sorillo” (that’s “skunk”, y’all) and we can guarantee you’ll get a much better meal at the end of a dirt road with dogs and chickens and drunks yammering at you on Marsella beach. Our flight left Managua half an hour late; we were denied duty-free rum because of the effing security restrictions against carrying more than 3 oz of liquid through the Houston airport. Arriving in Houston we spent almost two hours getting through customs and immigration (“Today’s security alert level is ORANGE!”, announces a cheerful voice every 8 seconds over the PA), and thus missed our connection to Toronto by five minutes. (As did about 13 other passengers on the flight; why they didn’t hold it for ten minutes is a mystery.) Continental put us all up at the airport Hilton in Houston, which we can recommend as being very comfortable indeed. We got home, via Cleveland, on Saturday afternoon.

So, here we are. My back is peeling off due to an attack of stupidness on my part – turns out I DO burn! But the dog and cat are alive, as is Linno, and apart from the pile of mail we are right back where we started from. James is cramming in as many sports events as possible on the TV, and I am off to cook dinner. We’re having vegetables! After three weeks of rice and beans, you’d want some too.

Lots of love and a Happy New Year to all.

Las Noticias de Nicaragua

December 26, 2007

James and I have been travelling in Nicaragua for ten days and this is the first chance I´ve had to write anything. Partly it´s been because we´ve been very much on the go, but the more crippling factor has been the general difficulty of life here. I´ll just let you all know right out of the gate that the scales have definitely fallen from my eyes: we will not be moving to Nicaragua any time soon.

As you know, it is a very poor country. We have now begun to understand how, what, a century of poverty and oppression have affected the general character of the country and its people. Although we have of course met several great, friendly Nicas, overall they seem worn out. The relationships of all the Nica Joes and Janes with tourists is uncertain and they are often vengeful against us in small but really frustrating and angering ways, for example, by blatantly charging us double or more for bus fares, groceries and so on. We´ve had a few uncomfortable arguments. It does not feel good to argue with a ticket taker on a public bus that we shouldn´t have to pay a whole dollar more than the locals, when bus fare is insanely cheap to begin with. But the thing is, that guy puts the dollar in his pocket. It doesn´t benefit anyone but himself to cheat us. So I guess, it´s not the overcharging that bothers us, it´s the malicious intent.

Anyhoo. Managua, as promised, is not very nice and we just spent one night there before scarpering off to Granada to meet Aidan and Jen. Granada is like Hollywood compared to the Fort Apache that is Managua. It was founded in 1542, and although it has been burnt to the ground several times over the past 550 years, it retains its gracious colonial architecture. We met A&J as scheduled and spent several days exploring the city and the lakes nearby. In contrast to the wide colonial streets, Granada´s market is a scene of utter chaos: lanes only 4 feet wide, everything everywhere from butchered pigs to clothes to hardware, urchins running through at top speed, laden men who simply shove you aside muttering “Al lado, gringa!¨” (“One side, gringa!”). There are beggars and pickpockets aplenty; as a result, I have zero photos of the market as I was afraid to take my camera out.

We took a day trip to Masaya, a nearby city famous for its artisanal market. That´s where we had the nasty ticket taker try to squeeze us for the extra bucks. But we stood firm and thank goodness I was able to convey to him in Spanish that we weren´t going to get taken. I´m sure all the other bus patrons thought we were crazy for making such a scene. The market at Masaya ended up being pretty touristy, so we made for the workshop of a famous guitar maker I had read about. This guy is famous throughout Nicaragua and indeed elsewhere for his custom built guitars. I was expecting some sort of pro looking atelier – what we found was a shack with a dirt floor, guitars and guitar parts were hung from smokey old beams above. There were kids everywhere – and of course more appeared as I started handing out Spiderman pencils… I ended up buying a small classical guitar. It´s very pretty, made of cedar with a mahogany fretboard. I paid $100 and every Nica we´ve met has since assured me that I overpaid by $50 – but I don´t care. There were quite a lot of kids to feed! The Nicas quite relish the opportunity to tell us gringos what idiots we are for paying X instead of Y, and then they turn around and charge us X themselves!

From Granada we steamed by rickety car ferry to the Isla de Ometepe. This is an amazing figure-eight shaped island with an active volcano (Concepcion) on one end and a dormant volcano (Maderas) on the other. The whole island is perhaps 40 kms long, it´s apparently the largest freshwater island in the Americas. Like many islands it has a distinct culture, which I am happy to say is much friendlier than the mainland´s. We spend a couple of nights at the feet of Concepcion, whose last major eruption was in 1957. It is very active and in fact the day we arrived had let out a big belch of steam and lava. It is always ringed by a hump of smooth white smoke. I was a little afraid of it. But don´t worry, we had an evacuation plan, which was to first panic and poke people in the eyes (I´m not sure why) and then strap some plastic lawnchairs together and head out to sea. Hoping, of course, the bull sharks in the middle of Lake Nicaragua don´t decide to snack on us. Oh wait – the eye poking was for if we were eaten by bull sharks. Poke them in the eye, that´s how you get them to let go.

We split up one day on Ometepe: Jen and Aidan went off to hike up the volcano (because they are nuts) while James and I, along with a really nice American guy we met, hired a cute young guide and a driver for the day. Javier, our guide, is not quite 20 and is the sort of Nica who, with luck, will help pull the country forward into a better state. He´s earnest, funny, hardworking and enterprising. He took us for a hike part way up the dormant volcano to have a look at a high waterfall called San Ramon. It was a great hike and thanks to my trekking poles, I didn´t kill my back. From there we had lunch and then swam at the Ojo de Agua – the eye of the water – a beautifully clean clear spring pool. Along the way we ran into Aidan and Jen who as it turns out had rented a motorcycle and were tooling around the island having a great time instead of being boiled in hot lava. A good day was had by all.

After Ometepe, we came here to San Juan del Sur. We arrived on Dec. 23 with no reservation, which was not so smart given that it is the number one gringo beach town in the country. We hoped to find a cabana for a week but struck out the first night (Partly because the phone lines were all down) and instead stayed at separate hostels. But as luck and the kindness of strangers would have it, the American owner of the Gato Negro café got in touch with some friends and ended up finding us a great little spot a little bit off the beach about 15 minutes outside of town.

We spend Xmas eve on the beach and yesterday had a nice long, lazy Xmas day, drinking rum and cooking improbably good meals on our two-burner outside stove.

I have more stories to tell, but I have to get a move on here: we cadged a ride with a neighbour and I have to get the groceries before meeting for the return trip. But just to pique your interest, next time I write I will tell you about the Christmas traditions of Nicaragua featuring what we lovingly refer to as the Fuck Off Gringo Marching Band.

Nobody's Going Anywhere

Picture, if you will, the immense bedsheet of the universe. Give yourself a bird’s eye view and see it stretching out in all directions of horizon. In your mind’s eye, it’s a dark expanse dotted with erratic clusters of light. All is still and unmoving, for you have the cosmic view outside of space and time.

Now, pick one of those clusters of light and stare at it for a moment. Come in closer and see that it is a spiral galaxy whose arms throw out stardust as it wheels through the black like a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee. It is rotating and blinking and bouncing along.

Zero in on one of the arms. Get right inside it. All sorts of activity now looms into view: asteroids trundle gravely along on gravity belts; meteors whip past. Stars cough and throb, while planets glide around pools of starlight with their duckling moons dodging and circling in their wakes.

One of those planets is Earth, and I now invite you to gaze on the old girl as she turns and tilts on her habitual rounds. She’s got the spins, so you’ve got to get in closer to slow her down. Oh Earth! The fat Asian continent spreads over the top half, and there she has two legs, Africa thicker through the hip and South America dwindling to a dainty ankle. At the western Atlantic, hurricanes plow into the coast. The Gulf Stream is a plume. The polar caps grate with cold.

Come around to America. Cloud covers the east, but the west it is clear. Look to the dangling Baja peninsula and then north: you might see a faint haze of smoke where California’s been burning. Los Angeles is down there.

So come down through the haze. You pop out into a bowl formed by mountains to the east and south, and the Pacific on the west. LA is crammed in there with its neighbours, Santa Monica and Pasadena and Anaheim and all, sprawling and creeping out over the edges. The famous Hollywood sign hems a piece in, and if you zoom in to the south-south-west, there’s downtown Los Angeles, a predictable stand of bank buildings looking like a concrete and glass edition of those magic rocks you order from a comic book to grow in a clear plastic “garden”.

Throughout Los Angeles, there are arteries clogged with traffic. A hundred thousand people are plodding north on the Pasadena Freeway, and a hundred thousand more are plodding south. A hundred thousand go east to Pomona, and a hundred thousand are going west to the beaches. Bouncing for a moment off the freeway, you’ll see it’s no better on the city streets. La Cienaga, and Sunset, and Wilshire, and every last street is packed with cars and vans and trucks and motorcycles roaring around, changing lanes, entering and exiting and making u-turns.

There’s a sort of triangle where the 5 and the 10 and the 110 cross, just a hair northeast of the downtown stand, by Dodger Stadium. If you run your eyes down there, you’ll see it’s Chinatown. You can’t miss the standard-issue carved red and gold gates, and all those crumbling pagoda roofs. The traffic is somewhat diminished here, except for the fish delivery trucks and pickups full of Mexicans coming up from the Pueblo district with their flatbeds stacked with office chairs and wrought iron fencing. Zoom right in on North Hill Street, where a few Asian people are clipping along with their shopping bags. There is an ancient fellow with a cane, and two grouchy old Chinese ladies dragging their screaming grandchildren by the sleeves.

Right on the corner of North Hill and Alpine, there is me. (I’m wearing an orange shirt. Oh, and I have the only blond hair for blocks.) Cars and trucks are to-ing and fro-ing, and some of them are honking at each other and maybe at me as I stand on the corner deciding whether to go up or down. I left the hotel a moment ago and have been tacking from one side to the other. Eventually, I go around in a loop.

We’re striving, the universe, the galaxy, the planet, Los Angeles and I, to get somewhere. I’m trying to find a liquor store. Los Angeles is trying to get there (or back), the planet is reaching for a new season, the galaxy wants to break apart, and the universe is, at every moment of every moment, carving itself out of nothing. All this requires an enormous amount of energy. Each centimeter of space claimed from the void stretches the universe a little thinner, and it’s likely that the galaxy will eventually meet a chunk of gravity big enough to knock it off its pinwheel axis. (Then where will it go? Apart!)

The Earth dogs on, around and around the sun, minute after minute and eon after eon. Los Angeles is on its way home. I finally find a grocer who sells bourbon, and that’s me turning for the hotel where I intend, for a short time anyway, to take myself clean out of orbit.

It Is Not My First Time in the Rodeo

Here is my unwinning (unrunning-up, unplacing!) offering for this year's Toronto Star short story contest. They didn't like it, but maybe YOU will, or at least you will say you did, because who am I kidding, the only people who read my blog are related to me, or might as well be.
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It Is Not My First Time in the Rodeo

Surender felt at ease in the witness box. The bench was at a good height; its seat had uncommonly decent padding. The microphone tilted toward him at a close but not intrusive distance. It had worked well all morning, with no feedback or irritating tappings on the grille, no testing-testing from the court clerk. The chamber itself was a manageable size, capable of seating perhaps forty people in four rows installed in a wide semi-circle around the central bench.

Not so many people had turned out: perhaps six or seven for the convicted man; for Surender, his wife and two young daughters. Two reporters and a couple of court staff chatted amiably at the back of the room. Surender felt that he should have a comfortable enough time of it and began to think about lamb and okra for supper.

The judge returned from recess. Everyone stood, and once the docket had been read out, she ordered the proceedings to commence. Surender was invited by the clerk to state his name and address for the record. He did so, making a point to not lean forward into the microphone like the novices always did. It was the leaning that caused the feedback, Surender had learned. Feedback was unpleasant and put everyone on edge.

“Surender Kumar, six-oh-nine Laurier Court, number four, Scarborough, Ontario.”

“And what is your occupation, Mr. Kumar?”

“I drive a taxicab.” Surender glanced at his wife and daughters. “Also, I am a doctor of clinical psychiatry.”

As he made his replies, Surender appreciated the formality and thoroughness of the questioning. He understood its design, to adduce the court’s objectivity in every element of the proceedings. Like diagnosing a sickness, Surender thought. You may assume that what looks like a head cold will turn out to be a head cold, and most often that is the case, but also you must keep your mind open to the possibility of an altogether different outcome. An allergy, perhaps, or the early manifestation of a rather more serious virus. Doctors and judges are much alike, Surender concluded. Each must bring his judgment to bear on the circumstances precisely at hand. Surender felt pleased to have discovered this parallel. He leaned into the seat back and nearly put his arms behind his head, but stopped as he realized the inappropriateness of such a posture.

The judge was cutting to the meat of the matter.

“Mr. Kumar, in light of the conviction of the accused, we are here to determine sentencing. There are many factors that I must consider in determining an appropriate sentence, including the nature of the crime, and how you as the victim have been affected by it. You have already testified as to the events of the night of January 13 and your description of those events has become part of the court’s record of fact leading to Mr. Logan’s conviction. Now we are interested in you, and how all of this has made you feel.” She said this with what Surender felt was a perfunctory smile. “Do you understand?”

“Yes, certainly.” Surender returned the perfunctory smile. “You may count on me to do my best, Your Honour.” He straightened somewhat in the box. He had readied a new piece of vernacular; here was the perfect occasion to try it out. “It is not my first time in the rodeo.”

“How so, Mr. Kumar?”

Surender was pleased to detect a note of amusement. He continued.

“This is my third time for being mugged. From which there have been three convictions, Your Honour,” he added. “As in the sports, I am three for three.”

“Indeed. So: the accused got into your cab and held a gun to your head. Tell us about that.”

“The gun was held to my neck, to be precise, Your Honour. It feels very cold. It makes you shiver a little bit.”

“I see. And what were your thoughts at that moment?”

“I was thinking, I must drive this fellow where he says, or he will shoot me in the neck.”

“And what was the demeanor – the behaviour, I should say – of the accused. How was he acting?”

Surender felt a slight irritation toward the judge, that she should feel the need to simplify her questions. He was a doctor, not a schoolboy.

“His demeanor, Your Honour, was aggressive. He seemed in a state of agitation. Indeed, my professional diagnosis,” (here he leaned on professional), “was that he was experiencing a dramatic delusional episode typical of an emergent BPD; that is, a borderline personality disorder.”

“Objection!” This came from the defense table. “Mr. Kumar is not an expert witness.”

“Not an expert! With a PhD in clinical psychiatry from…” Surender jumped in. But the judge cut him off with a hand.

“Sustained. Mr. Kumar, you will have to limit your replies to your personal experience on the night of. Okay?”

“Yes. Fine.” Surender gave a tiny shrug of annoyance. He leaned back in the box, finding the oak backrest now rather stiff.

“Now. After he put the gun to your neck, what did you do?”

“I continued to drive to the destination he requested; that is, Victoria Park. Also, I told him how much money I had in the taxicab, which was fifty-seven dollars only.”

“And did he take the money?”

“I gave it to him, yes.”

“And how did that happen? Did he hit you or threaten you further?”

“Oh, no, Your Honour. I assure you that I was sufficiently threatened to feel a gun on my neck. I reached into my jacket, took out the bills, and handed them to Mr. Logan.”

“I see. And what happened when you arrived at Victoria Park?”

“I pulled over and he got out.”

“And?”

“And he walked quite briskly away.”

“What did you do then?”

“I watched him leave. I then proceeded to the end of the street and turned onto the boulevard where I thought he could not see me. Then I telephoned the police from my mobile. But do not worry,” Surender added, “I pulled over first. I do not risk driving and talking at the same time.”

“Very good, Mr. Kumar. Now, how have things been since the incident?”

“Anita, my wife,” Surender nodded toward his family. “She wished me to take several days off. But I am telling her, who will pay the mortgage in that case? It does not, as Your Honour knows, pay itself.”

“So you kept working?”

“Yes, of course. I find I do not mind to do a double-shift, and the extra income is coming in handy.”

“Alright. And how do you feel, looking at the defendant now?”

“He is now the guilty party, is he not? Not the defendant.”

Surender winced inwardly to see the judge bristle somewhat at this comment.

“I use the term for convenience, Mr. Kumar. Would you kindly answer the question?”

“I beg your pardon, Your Honour. I only meant that having been convicted, the fellow can no longer defend. He is in that sense…” Surender felt a spark of inspiration. “…defenceless.” He smiled at the judge.

She did not smile back. “So you’ve not felt the need to take time off. And there were no reported injuries. What about loss of income?”

“As I said, Your Honour, it was fifty-seven dollars that was taken.”

“Any other losses or damage that the court should be aware of?”

“No, Your Honour.” Surender looked again toward his family. Anjali, his youngest daughter, appeared to have gone to sleep. Mira was also drowsing. But his wife was staring hard at him. She made a small movement with her hand.

Surender sighed. “Only Anita, my wife, is very upset. She would like me to stop the taxicab driving. She is worried that I will be killed. She would like me to be practicing as I did in Chennai.”

“As a psychiatrist, is it?”

“Yes. There I had an office with a nurse and many patients. It was a decent practice, and of course, much better hours. Less… road time.”

“And you have not been licensed to practice in Canada?”

“Incorrect, Your Honour. I passed the licensing exams two years ago.”

“So why do you not practice?”

Surender did not feel at all like answering the question. He shifted in his seat and hoped, vaguely, for a distraction. It didn’t come.

“Mr. Kumar?”

“I do not enjoy it. I find it frustrating and difficult, to listen all day to people who cannot or will not simply get on with it, people who are being complacent in their pains and sufferings. How can I help them? I can give them medications, make them take up yoga, or advise them to write letters to their dead parents, what have you.” Surender became aware that Anita was whispering something to the girls. She had gathered up their coats. He braced himself and carried on, even as Anita began leading the girls out of the chamber. He pressed on regardless. “But ultimately, people must help themselves. They must be prepared to take a risk. To take perhaps radical action if they want their lives to change.”

The door clicked shut behind them.

Surender took a breath, then smiled as he nodded toward the convicted man. “Only, of course it is preferable that they do not hold a gun to someone’s neck to do so.”

Surender was excused from the stand. Thanking the judge in pleasant tones, he stepped down from the box and claimed a seat in the middle row, in the spot still warm from its occupation by his sleeping daughter. He felt good about his time in the box, and his good feeling was not diminished in the least by the judge’s order of the minimum sentence for the guilty man. It seemed proper in the circumstances.

After the pronouncement, Surender made his way to the clerk’s office as instructed. He signed the proffered forms and was handed an envelope containing a cheque for court-ordered damages.

Surender walked out to the parking lot bearing the thought to appease his wife with the offer of dinner in a restaurant. Lamb and okra, costs not exceeding the fifty-seven dollars, of course.

Instead, she slapped him, full force, in the face.

“How does that make you feel, you cold fish? You could have been murdered! Left your girls without a father! And you act like it is nothing!”

She pulled her arm back for another swing. “I did not marry a taxicab driver! I married a doctor! A psychiatrist!” The arm hurled forward. Surender caught it before it made contact with his face.

“Calm yourself, Nita, for goodness sake. Think of the girls!”

Anita broke down in sobs. She stormed around the car and ripped open the passenger door, throwing herself into the seat. The girls had burrowed into the back of the car; they sat clutching each other. “What will I do? What will I do?” their mother moaned.

Surender gently opened his car door and got behind the wheel. He held out the envelope for Anita. He summoned his most soothing tones.

“You could, perhaps, put this in the bank.”

Anita snatched the envelope from his hand. She rooted violently about in her handbag and came out with a penknife. She pried it open, still sobbing, and sliced through the top crease of the envelope.

Surender started the car and began backing out of the space. As he spun the wheel, Anita grabbed his forearm.

“Take me there now,” she said. Her tone inspired alarm.

“What is it, Nita?” he asked her, idling the car, half out of the parking spot. She showed him the cheque. Fifty-seven thousand dollars.

“It is a mistake,” Surender said. “It is a clerical error. I must take it back.”

He put the car into forward gear.

“It is not a mistake! It is payment, just and fair payment, for damages. Three times you have been mugged. Three times these girls have nearly lost their father! You must take me to the bank.”

“Anita, I cannot. There has been a mistake, and if we cash this cheque, the government will surely take it back instantly. Give it to me.”

He held out his hand. Anita glared at him.

And then she lunged forward, spearing the penknife toward his neck. In a heartbeat she had its stainless steel point jammed precisely against the carotid artery.

It was cold. He gave an involuntary shiver. The girls wailed together in the backseat.

“Take me to the bank,” Anita said. Her hand steadied.

“Yes, alright. Here we go.” He put the car into reverse and backed slowly out.

As they exited the parking lot, Surender mastered his nerves and soon felt a sense of calm descend over the proceedings. The girls stopped crying. Anita’s grip appeared to relax.

Smoothly he merged into the drive-home traffic.

“After all,” he said aloud to no one in particular, “It is not my first time in the rodeo.”


***

Fingered out

O2ibe3r if bisualhhy indpaired poele use qwerty keyboafys?

That’s the first thing I wrote this morning, and now you know a hideous truth about me: I am a terrible typist. I didn’t take it in school; I’m strictly a three-fingered hunt and peck kinda gal. On my chiclet-keyed MacBook, the result is a whole lot of unintelligible grark.

This isn’t news to anyone, but I only recently learned that our standard keyboard set-up – the qwerty keyboard – was designed not to enhance our ability to write with machines, not to speed up the spark-to-page ratio, but exactly the opposite: qwerty was designed to slow us the hell down.

It had to do with the mechanics of the first typewriters. Those had keys that were set out in an alphabetical order, which, arguably, is kind of intuitive once you know how to read and stuff. Alas, the first users of these machines were all too proficient. Rattling away at high speed, Early Typist would often hit two keys almost simultaneously, which caused the machine to jam. I guess there was no way to speed up the response of the machine, and so the answer was to slow down the typist.

We’ve been stuck with qwerty ever since, and for whatever reason, here’s what was on my mind this morning as I toddled off to work: Do visually impaired people use qwerty keyboards?

I hope not. They’ve got enough to deal with.

And quiet flows the Don

Driving into Toronto from the east, the fastest way to get downtown is to peel off the 401 and head south on the Don Valley Parkway. Built upon what must once have been a verdant river valley, the DVP is six lanes of furiously buzzing expressway that splits the downtown core like a chainsaw through old wood. Splinter roads fly up the Don Valley’s ravines, singeing the adjacent neighbourhoods with diesel fumes. The floor of the valley itself is cluttered with bricky remains, railroad tracks and tire parts. It is space so befouled that even bridges span the whole cut rather than touch any part of the valley floor.

There is what is optimistically referred to as “park land” in the valley: garbage-strewn paths cut up and down the ravines, skirting around power lines, cement dams and piles of half-burnt clothing. There are bike trails along the rails, and arthritic willows upon which crows and grackles roost among tattered grocery bags.

Years ago the Don River was aggressively trimmed to make room for first the railroad and then the Parkway. What’s left of it is a canal; dutifully it conveys runoff from the ravines, along with assorted urban spillage, down through the valley, past the brickworks, factory lofts and storage elevators, dipping under the Gardiner Expressway and then finally spewing out into Lake Ontario. The river is sick-kidney-coloured, needing dialysis, pumping unfiltered ooze into the guts of the city.

I work on River Street, which, as you might guess, is a road that runs parallel to the river, and although I also live west, ongoing construction causes me to have to take an odd route to and from work each day. As a result, I cross the valley twice a day on the streetcar - either the 505 across the Gerrard Street Bridge, or the 504, which crosses on Dundas. I have been doing this for almost two months now: coming and going, morning and night, I look out upon the valley, and although I have noticed the slight mist of panic and despair rising up from the Parkway (it’s hard not to!), I can’t say I had ever really looked at the river.

But yesterday, even though it’s still bloody cold and wet out, I decided to walk across the Gerrard Street bridge. Stopping in the middle, I looked south toward the lake, following the stream of the water. The northbound lanes of the Parkway were clogged with drive-home commuters, while the southbound lanes moved slightly faster as they force-fed dinner-goers into the downtown core. I leaned over the railing and watched stuff float out from under the bridge: a coffee cup, a plastic bag, something pink.

And then I realized there were swans on the river. Two of them sailed by going south, gliding around the broken willow branches and crumbling bollards that line the western bank. I looked down the river and saw another swan and a family of ducks, paddling upriver along the eastern bank. The funny thing is, the birds were in the proper lanes. Keeping right, maintaining a proper distance, the two groups passed without incident as I looked on wishing I had a camera.

Telling James about it last night, I wondered if the Parkway, with its relentless controlled flow of traffic, had imprinted on those poor birds. Is it possible that living alongside six lanes of mayhem had trained the swans and ducks in the waterfowl equivalent of keeping three chevrons back?

Just to be sure, I went back today with my camera. This time, I walked from east to west across the bridge. It was around 11:30 in the morning, so the Parkway traffic wasn’t as intense. Alas, there weren’t many birds in the water. Just a couple of swans, hanging out in an eddy pool near the bank.

I took a couple of pictures anyway.

Keeping it all together

It’s been a while since I went off on a physics riff, more than a year. In that year, my brain has off-loaded what seems like a significant amount of archived information. For example, I can’t remember what I was so mad about all those times, and I have probably forgotten your phone number. Likewise, I’ve misplaced the names of a number of world capitols, and one or more of the tent poles. Whoever sang that irritating song, thank goodness, I’ve forgotten that too.

But on the upside, as a result of the dumping of world capitols etc, I have a little brain-space for goings-on in the world of physics - and how timely! - because there are goings-on of major note.

See, they’ve built a Big Bang machine in a tunnel in Switzerland. Actually, the Large Hadron Collider is kind of old news, its construction having begun twenty years ago. But with this machine, which resembles a huge, shaggy Ferris Wheel that’s fallen into a mine shaft, the great minds at CERN intend to fire off a whack of protons at hitherto unseen speeds from opposite ends of the tunnel, and when they meet, they will collide with the force of energy present at the birth of the universe – the Big Bang.

But that ain’t all: when these protons collide at very nearly light speed, the hope is that the collision will knock loose a God particle, and that someone in the lab will, figuratively at least, be able to pick it up and dust it off and take a good look at it.

Also known as the Higgs boson, the theoretical God particle has the unenviable job of literally gluing together all the bits and pieces, as well as the non-bits and non-pieces, that make up the Standard Model of an atom. It’s the particle that confers mass upon quarks and leptons, which in turn bunch together to form neutrons, protons and electrons, which then gang up in the shape of atoms and molecules, which then… well, you get the picture. Which then make the universe as we know it.

So why is this important? Because even though we have Standard Models and Periodic Tables and spectroscopes and red shift and we can tell just by looking what the stars and planets are made of, there’s all that pesky in between stuff, the so-called “fabric” of space, that’s all invisible and undetectable and comprises 96% of everything that’s out there (and in here). Which is another way of saying that 96% of the universe isn't there. But what’s not there, in case you’re quite reasonably wondering, can’t be just “nothing”. We know that there is some kind of dark thingy (dark matter, dark energy) at play, gluing the universe together, because we can plainly see galaxies and whatnot flying around in space that by all rights should come completely unhinged, given the amount of detectable matter they’re made of, and the speeds they are traveling at. And yet, they don’t. Something keeps them together, those galaxies. Something that’s so inherent in everything that it’s like the hand of God – thus, it’s called the God particle.

And if this particle shows up, then wow, it also kind of proves Einstein’s “theory of everything”, which nowadays is mostly referred to as “supersymmetry”. See, Einstein figured out a lot of stuff about how elementary particles work, and how the really gigantic cosmos works, and of course being a physicist he had the day-to-day down-here-on-Earth itself wired, but the rules for one (particles) didn’t make any sense in the Newtonian sphere, and then again in the greater cosmos rules that should be true on Earth were not true for gigantic bodies in space. And so the physics world said, by way of not very good explanation, “More is different”. And Einstein spent the last years of his career trying to come up with a theory of how and why more is different, how big things are connected to little things, and how the rule-shift works. That’s supersymmetry. It’s sort of like when you want to make a double-batch of muffins, you can’t just double everything in the original recipe: if you’re a decent baker you know that there are some things in the recipe that you can double, and some things you have to tweak a bit. Why? No one knows. At least, not me: I’m a famously crap baker. It has to do with some ingredients responding differently in large volume that others, I guess.

In the case at hand (detecting the God particle), the existence of the God particle goes a very, very long way to explaining how mass grabs hold of some subatomic particles and not others. If it can explain that, then it can also help explain how gravity works, because that’s a stumper for physicists as well, even though there is mostly a connection between mass and gravity – you can’t have one without the other – unless you can - and sometimes that’s the case and oh, crap.

Sometimes I think about all this and I am almost convinced that I understand it. And then I realize that I am full of shit and I don’t get it one little bit. But I will tell you this: I have my own “theory of everything” that explains why galaxies don’t bust apart in space even when they should, or why some particles leap out of dark holes while light itself gets sucked away in a thin white line. This same theory also explains why you often feel you’ve known a person forever, even though you’ve just met, and why I love my husband with all my heart, and also why I can always find Timmy’s keys, even over the phone, and why some places in the world make us cry because they are so beautiful and strange and yet feel so much like home.

Here goes: Once, everything that there was, would be, and is now, was a singularity. This singularity was either tiny or enormous, but it doesn’t matter because, being a singularity, it was all there was and therefore no scale could measure it. And something happened to blow this singularity apart, a Big Bang, and when it did, the universe suddenly thundered into being. The singularity turned itself inside out, if you like, and disgorged a blob of plasma, which then cooled and expanded (or expanded and cooled) into shapes like galaxies and supernovas and stars and sunsets and planets and mountains and hospitals and tractors and people. All of the things the universe became (and is still becoming!) are made out of the same plasma goop, which just nanoseconds before becoming plasma had been snug as a bug, side by each, packed into this singularity. All the stuff that makes up your foot, my desk, Pluto, Nebula 375, were all once the same singular “thing”. And all that dark energy, dark matter, invisible stuff was there too. In my theory, that dark stuff (which you can call gravity if you like) I simply think of as “the universe’s collective memory of being together”. In other words, all the stuff in the universe was together once, and now, that “oneness” is as much a dimension of the universe as are mass, volume, and time.

Thus it follows that everything that exists (even in theory!) has oneness, and the job of oneness is to be oneness, and to never let you go, no matter how hard you strain to break apart.