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A flurry of articles like cherry blossoms falling celebrated Bob Dylan’s 80^th birthday in May. Enthusiasts poured over lists of the best songs, and the best albums, considering what should have been included or excluded. I was reminded of the first time I listened to Bob Dylan. Forget about when Kennedy was shot or 9-11, where were you when you first listened to Bob Dylan?

How to know if what I remember is true? You won’t. For sure, I was late to the Bob Dylan party. I came to “Blowing in the Wind” via Girl Guides and Peter, Paul and Mary and “Mr. Tambourine Man” via the Byrds radio hit cover version.

Top 40’s music poured out of my bedside teal-green plastic AM radio, tuned to CHUM 1050 Toronto. “In Toronto, it’s number one!” the catchy jingle rang out. Dylan’s 1969 hit was Lay Lady Lay and the thirteen-year-old me thought it was a pretty ballad with creepy lyrics. “His clothes are dirty but his hands are clean…” Did I know it was a Bob Dylan composition? I’m not sure.

In the summer of 1971, my brother and I and talked our dad into buying my sister a record player for her fourteenth birthday. It had a turntable and two detachable speakers with long spindly wires for better sound separation. Stereo sound was a new feature on LP’s. (long-playing records). I think the record player cost forty dollars, well over our budget. We didn’t bother asking my sister if she wanted a record player for her birthday. We needed a way to play our music at the cottage. What albums were we listening to that summer? Cat Stevens, Tea for the Tillerman; Janis Joplin, Pearl; The Band, The Band. We poured over the cover art and liner notes to find every detail we could find about the artists. The lyrics were rarely printed, we learned them or mislearned them (a mondegreen), by listening to the same track over and over and over.

My sister loved the Moody Blues, Days of Future Passed and the concept album, Tommy by the Who. We all listened to the Beatles’ Abbey Road and I wished that I owned Blue by Joni Mitchell. And when the cottage floor shook from our leaping up and down during “Jumping Jack Flash” or “Honky Tonk Woman” from The Stones, Through the Past Darkly vol II, we kept the stylus tracking on the vinyl by taping pennies to the top of the tonearm.

But that was usually weekend stuff. For most of that summer, mid-week, my sister and I were on our own in the wooden cottage with plywood walls and worn linoleum floors. The cottage had all the modern conveniences, running water, flush toilets and electricity but was on a large island in a lake in the Kawarthas in Ontario. The store and the payphone were a mile away on the mainland. We would gently paddle the canoe or roar across the water in “The Tin Can,” our aluminum boat with a 9.6 HP motor. Why 9.6 and not 10 HP? I never knew. Our parents were newly divorced–Dad, in town an hour away by car and Mom, in another country.

One the day I listened to Bob Dylan, my sister and I had crossed the water to go to the store to get maple walnut ice cream cones. We were wearing our summer uniform–T-shirts and cut-offs over our bikinis and calloused bare feet. It was my summer of Sun-In hair lightener. Blonds had more fun.

We met these two guys at the government dock. They were friendly and clad in the expected uniform of tight Levis 501 jeans, flapping plaid flannel shirts over tight T-shirts and steel-toed work boots. Their hair was long and shaggy. They were older, maybe even out of high school. Tall and skinny. Did they have names? Sure–single-syllable English names like Ken, Al, or Jeff or maybe even Bob–something like that.

“Do you like Bob Dylan?” one of them asked holding up the album he was carrying. And I knew I was supposed to, so I said yes but I would have been guessing if he asked me to name one of his songs. Which Dylan album was it? I can’t say for sure. But we invited them back to the cottage to play it. We clambered into The Tin Can and buzzed back across the lake to the cottage. It must have been a sunny day with calm water. It was a long crossing when the weather was bad.

One of them put Bob’s record on the turntable of my sister’s stereo system with the fake green leather covering and those separated speakers. They may have smoked a joint before they met us. They talked in slow, low tones. They sat together on one couch and my sister and I sat on the other one. We listened in silence to that rasping voice and those mournful harmonica sounds. I pretended to understand the lyrics.

And after fifteen minutes or so, one of them got up and turned the album over to the B-side. I don’t know that for sure. Maybe he played the B-side first? Not everyone is a purist. I’m not sure I recognized even one of the tracks. But I knew from how they nodded and listened that this music was important. It was like listening to a hymn in church. And that’s all we did. We listened.

Did we offer chips or pop or even beer? No. We wouldn’t have any beer until the weekend when my brother or father would arrive. Did they offer us a toke? I expect so. Did we take one? Maybe. And they stayed for the time it took to play the album. We didn’t dare suggest that they listen to our music. And then we ferried them back to the mainland and said goodbye. The whole event was just listening to music on my sister’s record player.

Since then, I’ve tried to figure which one of Dylan’s albums it might have been. By 1971, he’d released eleven studio albums and one compilation album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, the only Bob Dylan album I ever bought. He composed a lifetime’s work of enduring pieces in under ten years. And at least five of those years were spent recovering from a serious motorcycle accident. Maybe the album that day was Nashville Skyline with “Lay Lady Lay”? But surely, I would have remembered that song with the creepy lyrics and been awestruck by his duet with Johnny Cash in “The Girl from the North Country,” with its old British ballad, Scarborough Fair sound and shared lyrics.

And a few years later, Dylan played with The Band in Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens. At age seventeen, concerts in hockey arenas seemed like a good idea. I was a fan of both Dylan and The Band’s musical confluence of folk, country, blues, and rock. I’d found Music from Big Pink. “The Weight” and “I Shall be Released” are hymns to me.

Musicologists from the 2010 Rolling Stone Magazine list of 500 greatest songs credit “Like a Rolling Stone” from 1965’s Highway 61 Revisited as the number one greatest rock song of all time. (beating number 2, also from 1965, The Stones, “Satisfaction”). Dylan has fifteen songs on this list. And yes, this list was likely created by ageing white males who speak only English. What makes a greatest song? According to the hip-hop artist Jay-Z, “it just is”.

It’s fifty years later. Patti Smith has sung “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall” in Sweden at the Nobel prize ceremony in 2016. Bob and I both have grey hair. He’s sold his back catalogue and I’m mortgage-free. Does he fight of old age by pedalling a Peléton as he tours? And fifty years later, I’m still only familiar with those early years of his work and my favourite piece remains “The Girl from the North Country.”

Do you have a Bob Dylan story?

The Girl from the North Country

So, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair

Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline

Remember me to one who lives there

She once was a true love of mine

In the last days of March, I became obsessed with the mega-container ship, the Ever Given that was blocking the Suez Canal. For more details, here is a link to Amanda Mull’s piece from the Atlantic. In our instant information world, within minutes I could find out how the unsticking operation was going. It was a tasty crisis and a welcome distraction from the inevitable third wave of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Maybe you read about the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956 or listened to the opera, Aida? I learned Aida was not written by Verdi to celebrate the opening of the canal in 1869, although the opera did premiere in Cairo and yes there were camels. Perhaps now you know where Great Bitter Lake is?

There was the incomprehensible magnitude of the ship–a weight of 220,000 tons, the length of one empire state building, a width of nearly 200 feet wide and a capacity of nearly 20,000 containers. I became more aware of the magnitude of global shipping in general. And then all the memes including the stick-your-own-boat app, Ever Given Ever Ywhere.

The financial and geopolitical implications aside, I think this whole event is a valuable metaphor for getting stuck and unstuck in life.

Getting Stuck and Getting Unstuck

Here are some randomly ordered thoughts.

Getting Stuck

Did I really need a bigger boat? Who put all this stuff on my boat? Why did they (me) put all this stuff on my boat?

Should I have said NO? Or even maybe or not-at-the-moment?

What was I going to do with all that stuff anyway? Was I prepared to go this big?

Did I have all the experience I needed?

Did I have all the help I needed? Why didn’t I take the time to find the best help?

Is this the best time to be doing this?

Bad weather usually makes hard things harder.

Getting Unstuck

Celebrate the small changes. (honk your horn)

Stay curious and stay creative.

Unburden yourself from what you do not need to carry. (cast off unnecessary ballast and cargo)

Believe it or not, there are other people that can successfully replace you in some of the jobs your are doing now. Let them have a go so you can focus on what you need to be doing now.

Prepare to feel unstable as you unburden yourself.

Stay in contact with the natural world. Watching the waxing moon and the tides really help. Think about the impact of the six-foot tide in unsticking the boat.

Consider solutions that will not damage you any further.

After the crisis is over, check yourself for damage and give yourself time to heal.

Reflect on what you learned.

Say thank you to those who helped you get unstuck.

So…

Next time I’m stuck and I will get stuck, it’s part of life, hopefully I’ll remember some of these aphorisms. Happy unsticking if you need it and happy helping those who are.

“…the errands born from the gap between what we can imagine and what we can in fact create.” 

M. Cunningham The Room at the End of the World

It’s been a hard November. On the days when you can see it, the sun sets behind the mountains at four in the afternoon. I have a sense of unease and trudging futility in creating this blog. Who is it for? What does it mean? Do I or anyone else care?

I’m thinking about the gap between what I can imagine and what I can create. That’s the challenge as you learn a new craft. You become cruelly aware of what you don’t know. My writing, formerly intuitive and pleasurable is now under crippling scrutiny. Yet, like a toddler, teetering on a tile floor, I’ll stumble into this piece.

And it is foolish to ignore the effects of COVID on our creative efforts. We are all constrained by the restrictions and uncertainties of this more ominous second wave of infection. And at home, the weight of each repetitive routine rounds my shoulders. I’m reduced to counting.

I count the number of days and months it has been since I hugged certain loved ones and the number of grandchildren’s birthdays I have missed. (Three–A fairy tale number)

I count the new cases, hospitalizations and ICU admissions here on Vancouver Island and they are increasing. I count the number of vaccines in Phase III trials. (Thirteen) and feel the optimism as others are approved. I count the opinions on how the available vaccines should be distributed.

I count the soiled paper masks strewn about the car and crumpled into the pockets of my coats. I count the mask-wearing shoppers in the grocery store line-ups and the wavering spaces among us. I count the times I have been to a restaurant since March. (less than two hands worth) which leads me to count the times I have made yet another uninspired meal.

I count the deaths of people known to me or any of my friends (so far Zero) and I wonder when and for who this number will change? How close will this death be? Will we all know someone who has died?

I count the hours I spend doom scrolling, flicking through the news on my phone and wonder what it’s doing to my brain. I skim short stories without concentration. When I go out for walks. A nice lady reads Jane Eyre to me from my phone and somehow that is soothing. Listening to The Stand, by Stephen King was not.

Using Facetime, I read stories to my grandkids who are 13,000 km away. I count the minutes left in my Zoom meeting with my writing group as my brain begins to wander and I cannot control it. And in my Zoom music lesson, I count the couplets and triplets (Piz-za and Blue-ber-ry) and feel the rhythms relieve my tension.

I count the persons-with-positive-COVID tests flying into Comox from Calgary. Oh, the sorrow in Alberta! I count the times I have thought about various tests and their accuracy and how they might make our lives safer. (and I have to re-read it each time) Incredulously, I count the advertisements in my in-box of cruise lines offering discounts. Can you imagine that, going on a cruise? I’m counting on the members of my community to be as careful as I am.

I count the times when I have been less-than-accountable. Was that trip to the store necessary? I count the eggs and the amount of milk left in the fridge. (lots of both)

I count my blessings that the pool is still open and I can count my laps. I count the empty wine bottles waiting patiently to be taken to the recycling centre.

I’m counting my fears. I can’t understand what 64 million global infections mean. What is not counted? What will our new world be like? What are the global errands that need to be done to close the gap between what we can imagine and what we can create?

I’m counting the whirring hummingbirds at the feeder. (Two) I’m counting those long-necked trumpeter swans sitting in the cornfield today. (Two) I’m counting the scree-screeing eagles perched in the tallest hemlock overlooking the creek. (Two) I’m watching the full-moon high tides that are co-operating with the crashing swells and high winds to re-arrange the shoreline. The natural world is carrying on with its rhythms.

I am not counting the days to Christmas or to 2021 but I am counting the days to December 21^st when the days will start to get longer again.(Eighteen)

I’m counting the number of revisions I have made on my recent short story (lots) and am thinking about that gap between what I can imagine and what I can create. I could try to measure the gap. But how? With what instrument and in what units? Would knowing that number make it an any easier or more pleasurable journey to learn how to narrow that gap? Instead, I think about those newly-born errands, those incremental skills that I need to practice to close that gap.

Please stay safe during this challenging time. Keep imagining and keep creating. Thank you for reading with me.

The reluctant sun sheds its tardy rays on Brooklyn Creek as it wanders across the low-tide mud flat. The light catches the white plumage on the head of my Bald Eagle, splashing in the stream.  I hadn’t seen him for a few weeks.  The gossipy cacophony of the flocks of Brant geese, resting in the harbour from their ridiculous migration from the Arctic, seemed to have pushed him out of his routine.  The Chinook jumping in the Estuary excite the anglers. And after the heavy rains of last week, my mycologist friends tell me it is an outstanding year for Chanterelles. So many things to be grateful for.

Gravid dew drops outline the miraculous spirals and radii of the super-sized spider webs on the porch. I think of Charlotte, the arachnid heroine of E.B. White’s, Charlotte’s Web. (although these days I have been referring more to his The Elements of Style) I remember when I was a young mother watching the video with my two small children – two long decades­ after I had read the book. I remember my leaking sorrow at the thought of Charlotte dying without ever seeing her babies– all 500 or more of them. Her babies would learn of her genius and compassion only from the stories of Wilbur and her other survivors. I’m struggling with similar sorrows today.

Here in the Northern Hemisphere, it is past the autumn equinox, that immutable delimiter from where darkness will exceed lightness.  It’s a time when I count the days to December 21^st when the light will return. It’s a time when I wake up with a dry cough and a slight burning in my throat and wonder for a minute if it is now my turn, my turn to have COVID.  And then I remember the smoke that filled the valley over the last few days and darkened the days even further with an hourless monotony. And that reckless bike ride I took despite the smoke.  My sorrow for the loss of summer deepens. And it is easy to wallow helplessly in our global sorrows, political and medical – and the two are not separable.

I am tired. My sorrow is a dignified affair managed with a procession of denials where I rely on distraction and doing to make sense of things – baking of banana bread, breathlessness at the top of the steps at the Spit or after laps in the pool,  – and then immobility in front of Netflix with a glass of wine. And I would prefer to be surrounded by the chaos and the authentic anguish of toddlers in their transitory moments of grief – from an attack by the coffee table, a dropped ice cream or a forbidden iPad – sorrows usually resolved by a hug or a kiss until the next time.

I cannot visit my adult children or my grandchildren. The two-dimensional spaces of Zoom and Facetime and the like will do but they are insufficient. And despite all my privilege and denial of the situation, I am exhausted. 

What to do? Rest. Carry on but permit my grief and allow my sorrow. Find strength in the beauty of the natural world outside my window. Await the arrival of the snow geese and trumpeter swans to the field stubbled with the remains of the corn harvest. Tell stories to my loved ones.   

 “Hatred is always a sin. … One drop of hatred in your soul will spread and discolour everything like a drop of black ink in white milk.” 

Marietta to her daughter Euphemia in the short story, The Progress of Love by Alice Munro.

Perhaps some of you will find the colours in this simile unsettling, but I didn’t want to alter the original quote.  It’s been a difficult few weeks and my discomfort with my own silence is no longer endurable. And while I am a grateful immigrant who became a Canadian citizen in the seventies, this is the first year that I felt uneasy about Canada Day celebrations that ignore the realities of a racist and colonial past.

Yes, we do have racism and a policing problem in Canada. There is no room for our anti-American smugness here. We have our own post-colonial issues to deal with. I’ve read more about killology in American police training and what defunding the police may mean.  I learned what a wellness check is. I donated money to Black Lives Matter, Vancouver. I am continuing to learn how to be an anti-racist, acknowledging my implicit biases. ( see November 2019 Blog)  I am looking out for any minority voices in my community that I can amplify. I am capitalizing Black and White in the context of racial descriptions. I can see the racial caste system that exists in North America.

Suggestions for reading

Ibraham Kendi’s, How to be an Anti-Racist.

Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility (this book has been critisied for diverting attention from Black issues to White issues)

Buy and read more books by Canadian Indigenous Writers and Black Canadians. Buy and read creative works from any minorities. Some of my recent reads include works by David Chariandry, Alicia Elliot, Richard Wagamese, Eden Robinson and Jordan Abel.

And on a lighter note…

Here is a non-fiction piece, wrote a few years ago about my first road biking event.

Fast and Safe – A story of a Fondo.

I’m descending, bumping, and banking along the curves down the road to Okanagan Falls. I’ve safely pedalled the seventy kilometres to the rest station without stopping. There are still twenty more kilometres to ride before I finish the race.

 I’m high, euphoric – it’s the endorphins.  Team Hawaii, the volunteers decked-out in Hawaiian shirts and leis wave madly at us as the riders gasp into the rest station.  Both my water bottles are empty and I really need to pee. I have to get off my bike. The echoing slams of the fibreglass Porta-Potty doors guide me to the facilities. I pant through my mouth to lessen the reek resenting the time it is taking to disassemble myself as I peel my bike shorts off my sticky body and relieve myself.

“Don’t look down, don’t drop anything and don’t slip on the pee-soaked floor.”

I am competing in the ninety-kilometre road biking event in Penticton.  In my five previous Fondo events, I had ridden for fun, for completion.  This year, however, I am now sixty and I am one of more youthful competitors the sixty to sixty-nine-year-old age group. Maybe I have a chance to do well?  My serious athletic friends at work suggest a coach, Paul.  I hire him and now I have a new part-time job, training fifteen hours a week or more. I discuss this with myself. Yes, it is selfish. No, my actions will not serve a larger purpose. No, I am not taking into account the needs of others. Yes, I am doing it simply because I want to.

Paul teaches me about riding using gadgets that measure heart rate, speed, the cadence, and the pinnacle parameter, power.  It’s high school physics, right here on my bike. I focus on scheduling, performing, completing and recovering from the workouts.  I don’t finish a single session successfully. I don’t really belong in this group of experienced athletes.

 Why am I competing in this ride at sixty? I’m barely a recreational rider. Am I frightened of my ageing? Am I still angry with my doubting and disbelieving mother, a woman who knew that females should not participate in sports?  She didn’t understand the value of sport for anyone of any gender.

            “Go-out-hard,” Paul says.

If I go-out-hard, drafting behind stronger and faster riders will make me go faster. I worry. I always worry. If I go-out-hard, will it be safe for me among those stronger more experienced riders?

“You need to ride non-stop to the seventy-kilometre station.  You will be able to do the race in about three hours.”

 Riding seventy kilometres without stopping?  Without peeing?  I ask myself.

The official name of my event is the Medio Fondo – the shorter ninety-two-kilometre distance. There are over three hundred and fifty women in my event. Thirty-eight of these women are in my group, women over sixty years old.  I wonder what my mother would think about that. And then I wonder why I am still thinking about what my mother would have thought. She’s dead and you’re sixty for God’s sake.

The stores, the restaurants and the sidewalks of Penticton are clotted with athletes, their friends and their families. The streets are filled with small groups of riders that have that specific road biking body, tall and lean, the natural body shape of an athlete with a high strength to weight ratio. Me, I’m a shorter mesomorph, a more chunky type.  We are all marked with the sign of the cult, the plastic wristband with the race number on it. I stare at it and wonder if my mother was right, maybe I don’t belong.

 It’s race day. The streets are filled with cyclists coursing between the buildings to the cordoned-off start areas. The loudspeakers fill the air with dance music and enthusiastic observations from the announcer. The singing crowd proudly performs the national anthem and the electric atmosphere intensifies.

 The countdown to the start begins. The low murmuring of the quieting crowd is extinguished by a wave of metallic clicking washing down the street, the sound of the two thousand riders mounting their biking shoes into the pedal clips. The river of riders oozes forward like cold molasses.

        “Be safe, be safe, please be safe.”

       “Go out hard on the climb.” I hear Paul’s words.

My heart is thudding, I’m panting and my front gear cable is slipping. The chain jumps on the small ring and stays on.  I’m struggling to keep up with the paceline I’m in.

       “Safe and fast. Fast and safe. Safe and fast.”

       This is my mantra.

Cyclists swarm over the width of the road, the faster cyclists dart around the slower ones. I sprint along the section to Summerland, swept along in the draft behind a very steady rider. I’m feeling fast and safe. I wonder if the rider is an event host. He is loaded with extra repair equipment including a tire. I feel him glancing back at me to see if I am keeping up if I am still on his wheel. There is this ethereal connection between us, he is my angel or am I just imagining things? I am being delivered to the steep climb in Summerland.

       “Safe and fast, fast and safe.”

 There is a long climb. I emerge at the top and begin the beautiful winding descent back to the highway along the side of Okanagan Lake. I luck into a paceline of twenty riders or so. We weave in and out as a unit, a machine, slipping past the other riders. The hum from our race wheels and the balletic unison of the clicking from our gear changes unites us. It is magical. The light crosswind has turned into a tailwind. We dance down the East side of Skaha Lake enjoying the view of the glistening lake and the West Bank.

We reach the turnoff to the next climb at Maclean’s Road. I dig in, climbing up the hills and huffing past the wafting scents of hay and manure from the picture book farms and barns.  I am sticking it to the sections with the steep grades.  I nail the winding descent into OK Falls.

After stopping to refill my water bottles, I pass the fork in the road and the waving volunteer showing the route for the longer rides.  Perhaps next year, I think.

       “Push, pull. Push, pull. Push, pull. Left-Right, Left-Right”

I’m puffing, panting and sweating up the hill on the West side of Skaha Lake. No help here. I am on my own.

       “Stay on the bike. Keep turning the crank.”

A stiff headwind greets me at the top of the climb but I manage to catch up to another rider.  I’m guessing she is about forty and from her style, strong and steady, a triathlete, used to working alone. But today, we pull each other along, taking turns leading and eventually catching up with two other guys. All that’s left of this ride is the big descent. We surge forward together.

“Push, push, push. Leave it on the road.”

       “Fast and safe, safe and fast.”

We cross the finish line together. It’s over. I am glowing, pulsing and vibrating with excess adrenaline, adrenaline I no longer need.  I’m safe and fast, faster than last year anyway. 

The clouds have lifted and the day is transformed into a hot July morning with the promise of watermelon, beer and a grease-laden hamburger. I’m feeling all of relief, pride and exhaustion, the complicated and potent potion of emotions like those I experienced after delivering each of my two babies.  I sift through my thoughts and get stuck at disappointment. I’m struggling with the admonishing voice of my mother. If it’s worth doing it’s worth doing well. Maybe I could have done better? I’m confused. The sweat crusts on my skin and my muscles stiffen.

I’m crashed on the bed in the motel when my phone beeps – a text from my friend, Heidi.  What? I have won in my age group for the event?  I scroll madly on my phone to read the results for myself.  It’s true. I did it! I have won, that is to say, I’ve won in my age group and gender categories! I allow myself a moment of satisfaction.

I was safe enough and fast enough for today. I wonder if my mum was still living whether I would have the courage show her the picture of myself in the red polka dot jersey that I won. Would I have invited her to listen to my story and to share in my feelings of triumph? And then, I realize I haven’t really won at all.