La Matina Nasce

La matina nasce senza dir’ niente, senza ballare come la prima volta nell’intesa fortuna del momento. Ed io, qui nel tronco di quest’albero, sospeso, aspetto il ritorno del sole: globo dorato, liquefatto, globo rinascimentale.

Venite accanto, voi della foresta oscura ed’ascoltate: qui c’e solo sfortuna che vi cerca; Formiche vi mordono la pelle, e nel buio guasto trovate l’humore. Ascoltate! Qui c’e soltanto la mano sinistra che vi trova.

La matina nasce senza dir’ niente, senza ballare, ma in questo tronco, umido ed aspro aspetto, quieto e sicuro, la fine del mare.

Cantico A Veronica

Cantico a Veronica…

Cara mia, soto la penombra della santa maggiore mi riflessi sull’ordine d’un appuntamento sbagliato. Quanto a dir’ qual era mi somiglia di morire, ma sempre con le stelle in alto. Dimi quieta sostanza, dimi nella solitudine dell’ alta strada la meraviglia della bassa.  Senza l’attegiamento del dolore mi svanisci, cara mia, e le labbra – le dita del colore – ti ciercono nel buio – eternamente; oh dimi, dimi prima che venga la conoscenca del mio cuore.

Boys to Men

There’s a guy in every man, but not a man in every guy.

Forgiveness

Forgiveness requires greater courage than apology.  If you do not know how to forgive, your apology means nothing.

A Terrible Fear

The pro-choice position seems predicated on the idea that the political right of a woman to choose is superior to the biological right of someone to survive. In order to uphold this perspective, and to give adherents supreme authority over their bodies, pro-choice contends that no one can prove when life begins, thus challenging us to establish criteria for “life.” Because it is a debate with no resolution pro-choice offers an intellectual umbrella beneath which women can invoke the right to terminate a pregnancy at any point. The benefit of the doubt is given to the host female, not to the unborn child.

To preserve the right to choose, the female, and the males who support them, must be allowed to view the unborn child through the lens of legalism and a clinical vocabulary. Through objectification, the individual is absolved from bestowing upon the foetus the status and rights of an entity. If it were to be declared a being as distinct as the mother, abortion would perforce be outlawed.

The demand by pro-choice for what it calls reproductive rights has a militant flavour. It claims that the female alone has the right to determine the course of conception because the outcome resides within her body. This thesis did not arise in a vacuum; it emerged from the rebellion of feminist thinking against a social system that was in many ways oppressive. Without the power to control reproduction, pro-choice believes that women would forever be at the mercy of that system. Because of this, the focus for pro-choice is not a question of life – it is one of personal power.

Coupled with Feminism is post-modern thought, a form of relativism on steroids. This view of existence proposes that there are no absolute truths, and therefore one person’s world view is as good as another’s. The pro-choice platform is upheld by this belief and is plainly heard when advocates say things like: “I believe that conception creates a living child but I cannot hold others to this view.” A parallel statement would be: “I believe it is wrong for adults to have sex with children; however, if other cultures find it acceptable, who am I to say they’re wrong?” Relativism allows adherents of pro-choice to believe that truth is a matter of opinion, and gives permission to emphasize personal choice over life.

In defence of pro-choice, it must be said that the adherent is not necessarily against the possibility that conception has created a life, it simply emphasizes a philosophy which allows women to abort whether they think life begins at conception or not. Each person decides for herself; in this way, she retains control over her own life.

A terrible fear impels pro-choice, and therein lies the sadness. It is a position like that of a woman who has successfully stormed the citadel and vows, “Never again!” She has seized control over reproduction, and drawing a line in the sand proclaims that the choice to birth her child is solely hers. She alone claims the right to choose whether she carries a living being or a piece of tissue to be discarded.

Love In November?

What a sight it was!  The male duck, festooned in all his colours, sidled up to her, bobbing his neck and dipping his beak into the pond; while she responded by slightly mirroring him.

 

Whoa buddy!

 

He feinted a short turn around her and fast as fast can be mounted her feathered back.  I thought, “Whoa buddy!  This isn’t spring; whatcha doin!?”

He must have either had the fastest gun in the west or was involved in some dominance game with this feathered filly of the waters, because he didn’t ride her for very long. 

As soon as he dismounted he stretched his head and neck outward – an arrow skimming the surface in a menacing circle around her.  It was quick this faux love play and I wondered whether he was reminding her that she was his: a foreshadowing of love in the spring.

Gracious Indignities

I followed him through the entrance to Willow Park church.  From behind he stood tall and broad as a refrigerator capped by a bowling ball.  I’d come for my H1N1 and seasonal flu shots and had some anxiety about the fallout: my wife had spent a day and a half recovering from the double barrelled bursts she’d received before me.

At the registration table, I stood beside my giant, looked up and saw a lovely smile emerge from a face that bore scars from burns he must have suffered long ago.  He moved to one of the many inoculation stations and then I heard it…the plaintiff cry of a child pierced by a needle; in fact, I noticed dozens of children: innocent little lambs, hand in hand with mom or dad, unaware of what was to befall them.

Soon it was my turn and I confess that I am no braver than the pleading children that I heard desperately protesting while a parent held them firmly to facilitate the nurse’s grim task.  When I sat down I jokingly said that I wished my wife were here to hold my hand.  The nurse looked over at her colleague and said, “Alice’ll hold your hand…” and as she nodded I diplomatically declined.

My nurse was a virtuoso; I didn’t feel a thing!  I moved to another chair for the required anaphylaxis monitoring and listened to the chorus of wailing children.  One in particular captured my attention: a little boy with a stentorian voice now pleading, now shouting angrily, struggling against a tide of arms that wrestled him in place for the well meaning insult.

As I listened and watched, memories surged within me of a young lad, fifty or more years ago, undergoing a needed blood test; terrified of the firm grip of a rubber tourniquet, and what appeared to be a thick, giant, stainless steel needle entering his scrawny arm.  It hurt like hell!  And thereafter I have cringed at the approaching steps of the well meaning phlebotomist.

I knew exactly what those kids in the hall were suffering, and I wondered about my friendly giant: had he too, throughout his pained convalescence, suffered the repeated, but gracious, indignities of the needle?

 

photo: Andrew Barr – National Post

Like A Serpent in The Belly

Angelo’s Roman nose was a monument on an otherwise slim, narrow face.  In the third grade he defended it against the taunts I hurled at him by pushing me and running away.  I threw a rock blindly, but was alarmed when the unintended victory struck the back of his head.  so I followed his tears home where I subjected myself to his parents’ reproach, and to their threat to tell my mom and dad.  Soon after, he and I became friends and together navigated the shoals and reefs of Catholic school.

Angelino was his baptismal name – a diminutive bestowed upon him by a mother who thought he was an angel – but we just called him Ange.  Both of us were skinny Italian kids, which no amount of pasta or homemade bread could fatten.  Our calories were rapidly burned in the rainforests of our parents’ adopted country, and we didn’t care if our supper was spoiled by the wild harvest of berries we found there.  We pulsed with energy and were curious about everything; we were feral chldren – dirty and gloriously alive.

Ange came to every one of my birthday parties with his accordion and played songs for us kids as we goofed around like puppies.  We were innocents who had not yet awakened to the snake in the garden – and in the third grade it bit Ange hard.  We were in Miss Night’s class, learning how to write cursive letters from the MacLean Method of Handwriting.  I’d already been nipped by this woman once and froze when she held up a sheet of foolscap to the class, mocking someone’s attempt at an assignment.

I remember her walking directly to Ange, taking him sternly by the arm and making him sit on a high-stool, facing a corner.  With a safety pin she attached the offence to his grey knit shirt – the one with the little black Indians woven into it – and publicly invited everyone to look at his transgression.  When I thought it was safe I walked up behind Ange but couldn’t identify the source of MIss Night’s mean spiritedness.  I heard him crying silently, his thin suspenders tracing the stoop of his shoulders, while his hand tried to staunch the drip of his noble Roman nose.

He wasn’t in the playground at recess, and when I saw hm the next day we never talked about it because we were not mature enough to understand the necessity of grieving.  We just went on – even when Miss Night, in the fourth grade, called a troublemaker to her desk and slapped his face fiercely with the belting that was supposed to be used only for hands and buttocks.  We just went on – trading comics, building forts and playing Cops and Robbers – our fear growing, like a serpent in the belly.

When my parents moved to another city Ange and I lost track of one another.  But years later a chance meeting with a boyhood friend told me that Ange still lived in our hometown, and that his great mark of distinction had become a vacuuum for cocaine.  He’d lost his business, had undergone therapy and was struggling.  Because of the gulf which time had torn between us I made no effort to contact him until a family vacation brought me back to his parents’ home.  Ange was out of town; but there, in the kitchen where his parents had threatened to disclose my misdeed, it all came back: the rock blindly thrown, Ange in the corner, his accordion, our romps in the wilderness – and Miss Night.

As I drove back along the highway, my young son played in the back while images of straps, belts, pointers and missiles paraded themselves in memory.  I felt a stirring in my belly and wondered if Ange had calmed his with coke.  In the rear view mirror my eight year old quietly read comics, and I asked myself: What in God’s name did Miss Night, and the others, think they were doing!

Kissed by Spiders

Sister Mary Albert was a blackbird with a white throat.  Her habit flowed behind her tall gaunt exterior like a little black tail as she clicked down the school corridors on bird feet – her mean, suspicious beak seeking those whom it could peck.  Children were afraid of this nun and when I saw her approaching I would hold my breath.

When she spied a troublemaker – someone who had disobeyed some rule like running in the hall or wearing shoes instead of the slippers required upon entering the building – her scowl would tower over him while she fingered the dark brown rosary beads that hung from her waist like a flagellant’s precious perversion.  In particular, I remember her long, mottled fingers, which to this fifth grader were stilettos of pain.  While scolding me, her thumb and forefinger would pinch my scrawny arm to the bone – like a spider’s kiss.

She wasn’t always severe, this bride of Christ; sometimes she would smile and for a moment you could almost trust her.  The menacing clouds would retreat, the sun would shine and you’d be tempted to remove your storm gear.  On one occasion I remember her lighting up when I spontaneously donated ten cents for the Children’s Missions.  But in those days the little professor within me could not trust the interplay of cloud and sun in this love-starved woman.  Her short-lived invitation to lower my guard was never accepted.

Being scheduled into her classroom in the sixth grade provoked anxiety; after all, she was the Sister Superior, the principal – a martinet who let nothing slide by her.  When her glowering form entered the room all were expected to rise as one and proclaim, “Good morning, Sister Mary Albert!”  No one sat down until she did.  Everyone was expected to have his dictionary lying on the left hand side of his desk – not the right side.  When you were spoken to you rose, then sat when she nodded.  When she exited the room, all stood whether it was the end of class or not.

There was a host of rules that were to be followed, and it was the red ink decree that I will never forget.  The rule was simple; it stated that you could not write in red ink; only Sister Mary Albert could do so because she marked your work in that colour; blue ink was mandatory for everything, but math, for which only pencil was to be used.  One day, when she surprised us with a quiz I found that my blue pen would not write.  Fearing a zero on the test, I decided to risk using the red one (You were not allowed to borrow from another student once she’d announced a test.).

When the tests had been collected, she quickly discovered my felony, confronted me before the class and told me to follow her.  She led me to a back room where she held out my hands and strapped them with some grey belting that was used in those days for punishment.  My hands shared ten swats, and when I began to cry she stopped and hugged me at which I righteously pushed her away.  She discounted my tears, told me to dry them and to get back to class.  I was later mollified by the knowledge that my classmates were about to leave in protest (A revolutionary act in those days.).

Soon after that incident which I never shared with my parents, our family moved to another city.  The years passed, I graduated from high school, and one summer as a junior in university I saw her standing alone at the entrance to a mall: still a blackbird whose hollow bones now seemed vacuum packed in skin.  Because I was now bigger, she no longer seemed a great heron with an edge…more a taught, vigilant sparrow surveying the terrain around her.  She recognized me, we shared some pleasantries, but there wasn’t much to say, so I wished her well and let her slide back into the humus of memories long past.

Forty-three years have elapsed since that mall encounter.  And as I write, I feel a strange tenderness for her, kindled by the sunny moments that peeked quickly from behind her storm.  I ask myself: Who was Sister Mary Albert?  Was she born wrapped in the black’n'white pinions of the Sisterhood?  Or was she once a sixth grader like me? – Someone with a name like Rachel or Cathy; a giggly young schoolgirl with a honey-blonde ponytail – her father’s little princess.  As a young woman had she ever fallen in love?  Or was it love betrayed that had made her so bitter?  Perhaps she was just passing something on when she kissed my skinny arms like a spider.  Perhaps she too had been kissed, by spiders greater than she.

Gifts Unwanted

To say that Maurice* likes to talk is an understatement.  This short, round septuagenarian is an avalanche of words, shoulder grips and backslapping mirth that demands complete attention.  For a time I observed him from a distance, reluctant to immerse myself in his typhoon of anecdotes, chirpy laugher and small, circular eyes – I felt overwhelmed just watching him.  But there was something that I liked about this little man – something in his manic, quick quick, two-step dance that flung energy at you like some dynamo on overdrive.  It was the genuineness and innocence with which he practiced his art that attracted me; with which he delivered his spontaneous outpourings like gifts that wanted to bless you.

One Sunday, from across the Fellowship Hall, I saw him emerge from the sanctuary and decided to take a chance.  I wanted to know more about him and what impelled his extroverted stream of consciousness; so I introduced myself.  His handshake soon evolved into several shoulder grips; an offer of a xeroxed article on Don Cherry that he withdrew from his shirt pocket; a spontaneous recital of two Bible verses; a brief history of his interrupted training as a tail gunner during the war; an anecdote of how he met his wife – while pointing her out; a short delivery in French, and finally an offer of another article which he kept in the other pocket – all without my having said much.

His proximity within my personal envelope allowed me to smell his breath; but he meant well, this whirling dervish of thoughts and actions.  He had maximized a good thing, and it had become a weakness.  Like most of us, I reasoned, he probably wants to give in ways that are meaningful to him rather than in ways that are meaningful to another.  He is like a lover who gives his woman flowers because he believes they are beautiful, when in fact what she really wants is a break from the kids.

I looked at my watch, extended my hand and said I had to leave, which triggered a sally of well-wishing whose content I cannot remember.  As I walked toward the exit I felt endearment for a man who does not mean any harm, despite feeling singed by him.  I drove home wondering about his wife – about whether she was an introvert like me, and how she had adapted to a man who proffered gifts – sometimes unwanted.

 

*Maurice is a pseudonym.