when mermaids call us

 when mermaids call us 
     by lucky loudmouth luciano

rivets falling from the sky
blasting out his nether eye
madness must in great ones go
marks of sadness marks of woe
sailors round the world may throw
lines of travel thick as slow
none though there embrace I know
in spite of hints that acke’man showed
we slip blind through the world then end
wow we see then by whom we’re sent 
though proofs of him give little hope
to go on when we miss the rope
the short end of the stick is fine
as long as there’s a lot of wine
wine sweet as lemans nice as terns
fair as hades fine as ferns
free me lord to see the truth
that in a grain of wheat lie doth
the farmer’s daughter never yet
when mermaids beckon we forget
hear them we never when we want
and never when we’re kindly called
grant me the wisdom lord to hear
grow me ears sir and the cheer
to give them credit when it’s due
I have the worst time and that’s true 
so if you should perchance to read 
a book a month about the need
to send more cash to foreign lands 
don’t blame the crazies they’re not bad
we tend to name the ones who fail
we hand them wiseness by the pail
so we are laden with the grave
we get the burden of the slave
the very one that children get

Blanketed

Blanketed
     by Donnie Duvèt 

Penny whistle. That was her name. I made love to her oncet or twice and she welcomed the diversion and then that was the last I heard of her. Until this semester, that is. She is now in her 60s. Me in my early – guess. What do you think? – 40s. She was a hot one, let me tell you. Pine lid, oak gunnels, cherry false floor and Rosewood drawers with teak inlay.  After her, I took up my studies with renewed interest. When three years later I received my diploma and found that I was now legitimately qualified for entrance into whatever University would accept me, I did that. I’ve done that now, and been there. I have no praise for the university system. Nor for myself. Nor for dogs of a woolly type who piddle when the doorbell rings and who bleat more than they woof, if you catch my drift.
     Speaking of which, the year of the great March storm I had just that day, in fact, returned from the West Coast where I’d been working as a longshoreman. Well, tell the truth for once. I had been working as a longshoreman, right enough, but also as a postman, a plumber, a forest jack shimmying up trees and a talismaniac. Talismaniacs read footprints and I was hoping to read a plaster cast of a mammoth or wood buffalo but never got the chance before the fire destroyed the building which housed them and that was that. My new career done, I helped myself to as many potatoes as I could pocket and left the Friendship Centre without paying for the last two weeks. En route to my next rendezvous, I decided to stop at Buckholzes and reacquaint myself with Marla whom I remembered from one of our famous bus trips. She sat next to me for much of the way and I paid her excessive attention. I was younger then and now I would be less likely to indulge such an instinct.
     However, I digress. I meant to tell you about my compulsive friend, Leo. He found himself surrounded by woollen blankets one day, having caught the bug to buy and collect them, a few at a time. He was not planning to do this. It happened to him without intent or guile. He had too many one day, he thought, and said he had to stop this business. A few days later, he turned in at Value Village once again and said he’d just look because, if they did have an authentic Hudsons Bay 5 point blanket, he would see what the price was and just add that last one to his collection. 

     They did. That particular store had, oddly, recently expanded their line of blankets and reduced other items in order to make room for them. Fry pans, for instance, are, and were then, more readily available at the Ness Avenue store. As were various electronic gizmos worth keeping. And so on. This Pembina Avenue store had decided that blankets were their niche, and so suddenly he saw many more blankets than he used to do. He found upwards of 15 newly-received wool ones now, when once he’d come each day for a week without finding a single one. 
     So, he found his five point blanket, a deep purple one about 6’ x 7. In fine condition. They wanted $69 and he hemmed within himself but left without it. Next day he came and took off the tag and the clerk phoned for a price check but the manager was busy and after a couple of questions on the phone she gave it to him for $3.99. An unbelievable buy, wouldn’t you say? Leo thought that he was done with blankets now that he had the five point, but a week later he went to see if they might all of a sudden have one of those original five point ones in white with the signature H. Bay red and black stripes. They did. And not just one, but two. Nice and big. He asked. They wanted $49 and $29, respectively. He felt sheepish and guilty even thinking about it, but in the end could not say no and so brought both home.
     His wife, when he finally showed her later in the evening, was upset and shouted at him. She never shouted, so he was surprised and had to promise he would not get one more blanket. By the weekend she had simmered down and they laughed about it. They piled up all his blankets and counted them. They had 30 of them, and a few more, maybe six, at the cottage they figured. 
     Anyway, this was Leo’s compulsion at that time. He has stopped buying wool blankets, though, seeing that 40 of them is plenty. Reason has taught him this  What would he want with more? Leo is a teacher. He teaches at an adult college. ESL. He loves to watch soccer on TV but seldom does unless someone comes over with a case of beer. They don’t usually. He will watch maybe one or two a year, and then not pay attention halfway through the game to practice licks on his Martin. A D28. He is learning bluegrass flatpicking, you see.         

Reflections on the State of Human Depravity

 Reflections on the State of Human Depravity

     By Return-to-the-Old-Values? Doug
     
My mom used to tell me that it was wrong to kiss a girl before you married her. She also said that God watched what I did and saw that it was either good or bad. She told me on numerous occasions that she hoped I would obey Jesus and be a blessing to Him. Dad agreed with her on all these matters, as far as I could tell, though he spoke of them infrequently, instead simply putting on his reading glasses over porridge and toast and reading passages aloud from Our Daily Bread. Mom would interpret these pithy parabolisms and find in them matter for instruction to guide our day by day lives in rural Manitoba.
     Now, we were raised well. We had food on the table, we had coffee, porridge and toast at breakfast, we had meat and potatoes for supper and we had clothing to wear to school. We never, in my memory, went hungry. We were as lucky as children can get. That was a great blessing, was our full stomachs. I remember coming home from school after 4 o’clock, with more than an adolescent boy’s ravenousness about me and mother trying to put a stop to my whining by telling me to go pick a few carrots In the garden. An hour later, however, she had potatoes and soup on the table for the six of us. Dad did not count in this number since he arrived home at nine or ten in the evening six days out of seven. Working.
     On those occasions when mom would say that we deserved it, Dad had to spank us when he came home. He confided to me later when I was myself an adult that he deeply disliked that job. Mom got us to go weeding beets around Horndean, Plum Coulee, Gretna, Neubergthal and Rosenfeld. That’s Manitoba We weeded most of our two-month summer holidays away, did we five kids. Dad had me mow the lawn and clip the hedges. We had a large number of hedges on the yard and it was my job to be the grounds keeper. I also rototilled the gardens and later pruned the fruit trees. We had three gardens on our yard: vegetable garden, a fruit tree garden, and a flower garden. They covered 1/2 acre of our 2 acre yard in Old Altona. 
     Mom told me years later, when she was quite elderly, that she had despised grandfather Reimer for having made my older brother distribute evangelical tracts on various occasions, including on a holiday to British Columbia when he was only seven. He was required, grandpa said, to approach such people as garage mechanics, hand them a tract and also witness to them about Jesus. 
     My father reluctantly gave me a quarter each Saturday when I was sixteen and seventeen. I bought two cigars with it and smoked them that very evening. Mom made fruit preserves (crabapples, raspberries, strawberries and bing cherries). I purloined a few jars now and then to concoct my own wine. I did this from the age of 15 to the age of 18. When I was 19, my friend, a painter, convinced a 16 year old student of his he taught in a high school art course to let him body paint her. She wore undies and he painted all the rest of her. I didn’t see the process or finished product. He said he still got the goosebumps now, 40 years later, thinking about it. I think about the relative values our world places on activities. I never saw my father in anything less than longjohns  and a shirt once, but found it exceedingly embarrassing. I never saw my mother sans habiliment. I did not want to. I never at all saw any of my siblings in such a state either. Unlike on acquaintance of mine who did. 
     My first thoughts about the adult body arrived—when I was 13–with my cousin who lived 30 miles away and whom we were visiting of a Sunday. We were swimming in the dugout on some farmer’s field, surrounded by cattails and willows, heated insects floating on the thick liquid and the smell of sun-baked mud. Of course, we swam naked. Boys then always did if no females were around (I remember getting the shock of my life at 8 watch a group of my uncles and their friends swimming in a dugout). The sun beat down on the raft we were sitting on. Somnambulant, Huckleberry-Finnish, we (for a few minutes till we tired of it) pulled our penises back between our legs to make them look like vaginas. We caught frogs and tadpoles on that same afternoon in the tepid water there. 
     Mom loved to garden. She planted dozens of varieties of flowers, and later in her 40s began a greenhouse business that she ran till she and father moved to British Columbia. Dad grew tired of being a rural travelling salesman after almost 20 years of doing that. He decided in the late 60s (he was 52) that he had had enough so they sold and moved west. There, in Abbotsford, he became a very successful real estate salesman and died at the young age of 72 of colon cancer. 

     My mother made and sold perogies in the first five years after their move because they had no money. They actually went hungry for three years not having enough to feed themselves or the endless succession of guests that came West to holiday and stayed a few nights with them. They sometimes resorted to borrowing money to put food on the table for these visitors who, many well off themselves, never seemed to feel it necessary to contribute to the cost of groceries. Or to pick up the tab when they had convinced my parents to have supper out with them, inevitably waiting for dad to do that. 
     Better off in later years, mother grew raspberries and father grew apples. By the time he died, he had created a fine yard, 2 acres in size, with many apple, pear, peach and cherry trees on it. And that is my reflection on the state of human depravity.                                           

The Blizzard and the Move

 The Blizzard and the Move
     by Willy Whitefish Reimer

The year before my wife and I married, my parents, John and Mary Reimer, left the village where I grew up and, together with two of their children, Lois and Rudi, they moved lock, stock and barrel to the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, Canada. Dad strongly felt that the end of one career, his Raleigh-selling career, should be replaced by another, and if so, then employment might as well be in the new place he had frequently dreamt about and secretly longed for. The story of their move has all the elements of fine narrative about it: indecision, marital dis-ease, the wrenching of children from their familiar surroundings, schools and friends, great fear and terror and stupid decision-making.
     Dad had bought a large utility trailer 30 years before the move that proved to be more durable than expected. It still serviced them at a time when, looking around for a way to bring some of their personal things with them, instead of renting a U-Haul truck or trailer, they made the infamous decision to just use the old trailer. I mean why not? There was a good chance that nothing would happen to it or their possessions. Right? But….the time of year, December, and the year 1969.
     It just so happened that the 1969 winter season was the worst snow blizzard season the Rockies had seen in decades. They made the first 700 miles through prairies  and the early stages of foothills without incident, the trailer staying intact, the tires full and her possessions still comfortably tied down under a tarp. They stayed that first night in a little motel on the outskirts of Medicine Hat, Alberta (where they had spent a night every time they’d ever gone to British Columbia), drove on past Calgary and then 90 miles farther through Banff and then Lake Louise, minds fully focused on Revelstoke, that town that chose inexplicably to situate in the most craggy, road-curvy section of the Rockies imaginable. Sure enough, of course, what else would you expect, not a chance it would be otherwise, most certainly, they travelled the entire 200 miles from Banff to Revelstoke in one of the worst blizzards my father had ever been in and he had been in  many, many a bad blizzard.   
     It was essentially eventually just simply a white out and dad could see nothing. The snow was a foot and a half deep on the road and because a few large rigs had passed through there in the last hour there were tracks they followed. At one point the visibility became virtually zero and suddenly my mother got the claustrophobic conviction that they were about to go over the cliff and down into the Columbia or the Fraser or whatever the river is that goes through there. Without a by-your-leave or any warning, she lunged sideways, grabbed the steering wheel and yanked it towards the right, yelling that they were about to go over the cliff, convinced that they were on the verge of plunging 1000 feet to their deaths. Just in time, dad jerked the wheel in the other direction and they fought for control. Mom, being insanely energized by fear, fought hard and only with great difficulty did dad manage to overcome and bring the car to a stop. Had mom had her way, my family would have died, trailer and all. Dad was correct. The cliff wall was on the left side and the abyss on the right. Mother has been yanking us towards the abyss, father in the cliff wall direction.  
     My brother Rudi remembers the incident in cinematographic detail. He said it was terrifying, just simply mind-blowingly scary. He said he was looking towards the front from the backseat of the station wagon and out of the blue these two adults began yelling and screaming and yanking the wheel back and forth. He said he was surprised that he didn’t have a heart attack himself.
     If you have not met my family, my parents, then you have not understood strange behaviour until now. Such spontaneous extempore yanking and decision-making and startling uncertainties were commonplace in my home. I, of course, have had the rare good fortune to have been unaffected and hardly influenced by my environment growing up. I carry with me none of the negative qualities of the Reimer clan and all of the good ones that my distant, distant relatives sparingly contributed to my gene pool. I would never have made such a mistake. No, not me! I would not have driven out in a blizzard moving to BC. I would not have yanked on a steering wheel when I couldn’t see but was convinced of some direction being correct. I would not have sat in the backseat allowing my parents to argue and fight with each other, endangering myself and my brothers and sisters. I am above such peculiar business, such tortured qualities of character that leave so much to be desired. I am Douglas, refined of tastes and educated, trustworthy and fully rational of mind, a mind that sees well ahead of time such troubles as cause confusion in many and, seeing such dangers in advance, finds himself not making the sorts of mistakes that might drive cars over cliffs. I listen to the clues around me that help me to avoid all dangers. When in the wilderness, these clues and cues teach me how or when to expect a bear and so to avoid it. My very nature, my instincts and intuition, provides me with ample resources to foretell how a word or statement might light on someone’s thought processes and causes some sort of short in their inner wiring. 
     So, being trustworthy and fully competent to make all decisions well, it can be expected by those who follow me into the wilderness, into new territory, that they will find themselves unfearful, unterrified, unbothered by the unexpected and always very well taken care of with all their needs of food, clothing, emotional aid and mental requirements more than fully predicted by myself, seen to and resolved before they cause stress and difficulty for any particular person who might be in the party following me.                                        
                          

Smalls

 Smalls
     By Thoughtlessness Personified 

      
     sausage breakfast up in my room

          by rupert mann 

     emily dickinson
     gobbled the thickest one
     she could imagine each day
     when she was good and full
     crammed with the cream and all
     once more she’d so much to say

Oh my darling Rupert Mann.  I just wish that I could stand the noise and lights and rollicking band that plays so loudly the idiots stand and cry and call and whine for peace I hate to bother you about this insignificance but I know you will take my part and let the owner of the mart know that a woman down below in number 825 is feeling nauseous every night because the music loudly bites.
     Such nonsense and more Emily thought to herself about her most current imaginary lover. Her father had expressly forbidden advances by the handsome farmer, Rupert, who had recently called asking for her hand. Well, not asking for her hand, exactly, but the next to it. He had inquired if he might confer with Emily, to speak with her privately because he owned a large farm with sheep, horses, cider press, barns, various outbuildings and a spacious house with a well-appointed attic in which Emily might spend her time unmolested writing poetry. He wished, he told her father, to strike up an acquaintance with her whom he had never seen, whose beauty was legendary, who excelled at all the arts, and in particular, poetry, and whose laundry he had espied occasionally from his pasture close by as he was riding horse and counting livestock. The various items of lingerie hanging there, especially, had forcefully called to his imagination and beckoned to his heart to inquire after her availability for some brief social intercourse. 
     Her father had roundly berated this fine specimen of a man and commanded him in the future to not make reference to his wife’s laundry (for that’s whose it was), neither to those items flapping outside, drying on racks inside the house, lying in her drawers, nor draped about her person underneath her dresses and blouses where none might see them or make comment about them except himself. And if this thick man – father referred to him so – if this thick man would condescend to be set straight, the beautiful one of the two was his wife, Eleanor. And furthermore, Emily‘s laundry had never yet, ever, whispered in the breezes outside on the line over the lawn for all to goggle at. If he, the farmer, struggled under such a profound load of curiosity as he seemed to do, however, he might be allowed have a look, instead of at his wife’s, at Emily‘s lingeries and, furthermore, he just might find them a little less to his taste than those being breezed about on the lines nearby. 
     Father forthwith took the thick man upstairs to my bedroom. Characteristically loutish, without knocking, father entered my room, followed hard on his heels by this strapping young buck, who looked at me and stopped dead in his tracks. His gaze only removed from my person when Father opened the specified drawer and patiently handed out item after item, holding each up in the air for this fellow (Rupert) to experience. He did look at them, at my dainties and lacies, my sheer stockings and other sheer smalls, with increasing confidence, I noticed. He was dumbstruck. He could not believe his eyes. I saw all of this in them. To my quiet astonishment he even received into his own hands a few of the smalls for closer inspection, ones that must have especially roused his interest 

     Father said then, “Now are you satisfied?” The man simply nodded, but then stopped and asked whether that was all there was, all the pieces in the drawer, and then, when father reassured him, rather arrogantly I thought, that not a single undergarment had been left unobserved, the two of them walked back down the stairs. 

     Now I write a lament for this pathetic loss, for the disappearance to me of such a fine muscular being. 

     rupert sing
          by emily dickenson 

     rupert mann came to call
            he came with his big

 hands
     and, oh, so small 

               heart 
     he looked, saw
       the dismal state of my 
                  bedroom
     and of my very 
             
                  person

my               very          my         every

          

             sheer

     he’s gone 

along with 

                  the flowers 
     which will blossom now 
     sans eyes
             sans heart

                    i 
      and 

  flowers 

                 unsung

That was today’s conquest of passion. What will tomorrow bring? I hardly dare say, but write I must of my own unworthiness and the beauty of the men who come to call.    
       I recall, for instance, Basil Bayleaf. With his tanned exterior and white insides he struck me at first as a dismal prospect. I did have some embers fanned by his outwards. What I liked about him really, though, was the way his mouth in its pinkness tongued me when he finally got me to meet him in the woods. I did that. Meet him. He talked little. We loved and I noticed the pinkness of his tongue and, looking closer then, the neat and bright pinkness of the inside of his mouth. He showed me when I asked.
     “Open wide,“ I said, and after a minute of fine remonstrance, he did. He did not return. I don’t blame him, really. 
      Now, Nelly my horse is another matter entirely. Like sir Topas, I ride her on errands. After dark, mainly. We canter along and then stop and roll in the meadow if the air is warm enough and there’s a modicum of light. We like this diversion for no reason so much as the togetherness it speaks of. It expresses how we feel about each other. She likes me, and I like her. On her back, utterly at peace, with her legs dandying the air, and mine too, and our hair flying in the night wind, we take our time and play to our hearts’ content, and then we sleep. And, lying there for two hours or more, we become one with the earth, our limbs tightly entwined. Nelly, my horse, has my heart now. No man will ever love me as she does. I love her whinny. I can recognize it among those of the other horses in the barn. When she whinnies I come. I dash out and throw myself on her back and we ride away.      
     My doggy, too, is a favourite of mine. If not actually my most favourite animal, then one of the ones I list high on the scale of friendship. His tongue lolls when he has run for a space. His eyes sweat and seem tired but happy if he exerts himself. I, on the other hand, seldom physically extend myself, no more than is necessary for the practical tasks at hand. I write, true, but writing requires no swift movements of hands and legs. I sing now and then, but the forming of musical notes with the throat and mouth taxes none of the ligaments or major muscles. I sing without perspiring, and so, even when I am active I seldom lose myself to exhaustion. Doggy, in contrast, is frequently spent and so weary. 

     Now, the other afternoon, for instance, he came to me at night. He whined beneath my window and when I heard him I opened it and let down a ladder that he has learned to climb and up he came and spoke to me, in a language that we both understand, of his most recent adventures. Then he laid down with his head in my lap. I pampered him. He slept, finally. But then he spent the night in a restless state. I do not let him up here too often. If my father found out he would thrash me. He spanks me when he disagrees with my habits. He takes me over his knee and spanks me with increasingly more vigour until he thinks I have learned my lesson.
     
     doggy
         by emily dickenson 

     doggy doggy on the wall
     who’s the fairest of them    
         all
     is it me or is it her
     tell me please you little cur

     doggy doggy panting hard 
     you’ve become my little
         pard
     I would give my life for you
     my love for you shines 
        bright and true

      Doggy doggy darling pet
   You are not my favourite yet
Once you are
          I’ll let you know
Up till then
                    you’re free 
                                   to go

Emily fixed her gaze on a sheep in the pen outside the barn near the chicken coop. Oh Henry, my darling woolly lamb. You take me to heights of joy. I your lovely sweetheart am. You my special little lamb. When the church on Thursday meets, and my family leaves the house, you and I can freely play, spend in pleasures all the day. You will sweep the chimney first, I will be your special nurse, we will watch the evening’s sheen, then the darkening of the green. Children coming home to sleep, will not rush to greet their dams, for their hearts at evening time, beat no more fiercely than does mine. I in my bed, and you in yours, each to other fond will bleat, you of troubles I can’t see, I of things I’d rather be.
     Emily fixed her mind on her next poem and wrote it quickly. Then, tired, she hauled her self up off her bed and went to the window to survey the grounds below. Who would she engage for this evening, she thought as she looked about her at the moon-strewn field. A pig somewhere grunted in its pen.           

 

             

                         

                         

No Fruit Picking

 No Fruit Picking
     By Frog Leather Leigh

In 1000 AD no fruit grew on the steppes of Asia. The Mongols had had a taste of raisins imported from the Mediterranean, but apples, oranges, papayas, pomegranates, weese, grapes, grapefruits, pineapples and cherries had never yet been tasted by a single Mongolian. They harvested blueberries, pin-cherries, snake berries, chokecherries, loganberries, strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, snorgies and huckleberries, but these undomesticated fruits remained only available in small quantities most years. History changes behind our backs. No questions we ask make any difference to it. And that indifference of history to personal agon exactly characterizes the story of fruit in the Caucasus. This is the account of the coming of fruit to the Mongolian plains. 
     Benghis Kahn, brother-in-law to Genghis, was born in the year 944 into a wealthy family with ties to power. He was a musing fellow it became evident as he grew, and he liked nothing better than to sit nibbling raisins and reading in his “uncle’s” library. Food was not allowed in the library but for this young, fastidious, shy boy Genghis made an exception. Genghis loved Benghis in an honourable way and would have done anything to promote the lad’s desires and loves. When one day Benghis asked to accompany Generals Sarovovian and Slobobadin on a mission into Northern China, Genghis agreed, despite his grave fear for the boy’s survival, given Chinese penchants. Benghis went, and he returned unharmed. In fact, he returned elated and filled with wonder.
     His wonder concerned a discovery. To everybody’s equal wonder, Benghis brought back with him seeds. Sacks full of them. Apple seeds! For the first time in their history, fruit entered the lives of Mongolians. In his great joy and generosity (attributable to the goodness and kindness of Genghis’ own character, really) Benghis began to distribute apple seeds about the grounds of the Palace. Outdoors, he also planted seedlings that he grew during the winter, indoors where light entered the passageway bordering the library. 
     He planted 6000 seeds the first winter, and 5000 seedlings survived. These became the primary apple source for all the fruit with which the Khans learned to cook during the next many years. They baked and consumed apple pies, upside-down apple cake, apple strudels, apple platz, apple kartoflehgn, and apple tortekahn (a recipe created by Genghis himself) until they grew almost sick of apple dessert. Yet, they did not. A season later, apple fever once again found its way into their stomachs and more apple cakes and fruit platters materialized and were ingested.
     General Genghis became extra fond of picking apples. He would climb a step ladder into the orchard near the Palace, get up as high as he could and pick away his afternoons of an August day when little else called him to duty. He picked them, brought them by the bucket into the kitchen and had his cooks prepare both succulent dishes from them as well as make them into cider, for his consumption as well as that of the troops. Apple cider is potent beyond the ordinary. Unlike wine, it easily allows the production of drink with an alcohol content well over 18%, and that without the artificial addition of purified alcohol.      
     So, apple cider became a fixture in many a royal as well as many an ordinary household. A flask of it was considered a necessary item of apparel on a man, woman, maid or young fellow. Such an accessory could be seen prominently dangling about the being of most individuals attending the theater, studying at school, riding horse, mucking out stables, climbing an apple tree, musing in a park, or herding a hassle of children. Frequently, walking along a busy street, one would witness the lifting of flask to lip by those of all ages. Young boys and young men were least likely to do so, but adolescent and unmarried as well as married females could more frequently be seen quenching their thirsts in public places. Yes, cider also had arrived among the Mongolians. 
     Benghis became the first missionary in ancient history. He took to touring the nearby neighbourhoods and friendly nations to distribute seeds and plant trees. Genghis passed a law that no apple seeds might be thrown away in his entire kingdom. Hundreds of thousands, and then hundreds of millions of Apple seeds accumulated until Benghis needed thousands of cubic metres of space to house all of this abundance. His journeys ranged farther afield. 
     Eventually, by the time he reached the age of 37, he found himself at the very gates of Europe, sowing apple seeds even there in hostile territory. He came to be known as Benghis Appleseed and was respected far and wide across Asia minor and all the way from the Mediterranean up through the Danish lands far to the north in Europe. Apples throve in those northern climates and now many varieties abound throughout the world. 

The Trip

 The Trip
     by Fairly Well-Travelled

Joe Braun, Alvin Wiebe and I chose to make a trip to the East Coast the summer of the great exposition in Montreal. I must say that, though our choice was not to, necessity required us to travel in a Volkswagen bug belonging to Alvin. Three big, full-grown men, just recently adolescents, in a small space like that, subsisting on pork and beans and bread (we bought a case of 24 cans of Libby’s pork and beans because that’s what we could afford), makes for malodorous journeying. One of the most common activities on this trip was accusing this or that one of being responsible for the last episode forcing us to open the windows wide, rain or shine.
     Most of our gear travelled on top of the vehicle wrapped in a canvas tarp, tied down with ropes. One of these items, a canvas tent borrowed from my family, weighing at least 80 pounds, became quickly responsible for one of that trip’s most tenacious memories. We stayed the first night at the Falcon Lake campsite because, though we’d only left Winnipeg 90 miles ago, we felt like opening the twenty-four of Labatts we’d bought at the Montcalm and not driving any further. Mother Nature decided to test our endurance. It began to rain, and it rained hard. Literally, at once the canvas tent sprang leaks. By morning Alvin and Joe could be seen huddling against opposite walls of the tent where they had a slightly greater chance of not getting soaked, while I lay in the tent’s middle in a puddle of water a couple of inches deep with my sleeping bag as wet as if I’d chosen to lay it out in a tub full of water. Our moods began to improve once we’d put a hundred miles between the campsite and us and stopped for bacon and eggs at a greasy spoon somewhere on the way to Dryden. 
    When we got to Montreal, we immediately lost our way because we had no idea which roads went where, it being midnight, raining and pitch black. Every exit we came to, written surprisingly in French, told us nothing about where to turn off. At each exit we decided to continue a bit further on the perimeter that circled the city (number one est; no, not an error. We repeated the French direction over and over like a mantra throughout the rest of the trip, laughing uproariously. At the time it seemed funny). Confused, indecisive, we settled for simply continuing until we had made an entire, seemingly never-ending circle of that huge city and fetched up where we’d begun. We camped somewhere, and then drove blindly into the city’s heart the following day. 
     Quebec city gave us another experience, one that we boys (or men, as we would have wanted ourselves called) thoroughly enjoyed. That was introducing our stomachs to the rich decadence of Québécois poutine, a dish with more than enough calories to provide us with get up and go for the next 24 hours as well as flavours that begged to be washed down by tankards of ale.
     On the East Coast in Nova Scotia, we got what we considered a steal of a deal for an ocean sightseeing tour, until we realized that we’d purchased the privilege of spending four hours jigging for a commercial fishery. Sheepishly, we jigged along with the best of them and helped to fill the boat’s storage coolers with dozens upon dozens of great big cod. Free labour is always appreciated and we were offered all the cod we wanted. We decided on just one big one that they filleted for us and put into plastic bags. 

     On our return trip through rural Quebec we started to notice that the normal assault on our noses that we’d become accustomed to on the way in had become another sort all together on the way out. We looked around the vehicle and found nothing we could blame. About the time we got to Montreal and became desperate finally to pinpoint the cause, Alvin suddenly rose up from the backseat floor shouting, I’ve got it, and he held up a plastic bag with the cod fillets in them that had been brewing in the sun, the temperature around 30° inside the vehicle. What luck to have found the fillets! What exasperation with each other! How could we possibly have forgotten about them!
     On the way through Montreal we stopped at the exposition grounds and thoroughly enjoyed the international sensation that was Expo 67. We stayed for two or three days and then said goodbye to the exotic part of our trip and drove the rest of the way to southern Manitoba.                                    

I Would Help You, Too

 I Would Help You , Too
     By Freddy Feltguid

          Trust a blind man to tell you about light. 

A small boy tripped along on his way through the forest to his grandmother’s house. He felt lithesome, but as he continued along he began to feel uneasy. When he got there, having met no one on the walk, he breathed a sigh of relief and opened the door. The moment he did so, a hairy snout and jagged claws lunged and bit at him and bore him down. He struggled and he screamed, the pain of lacerations intense, but encumbered by the basket he carried and by its contents, he could not manage more than a quick chomp on the creature’s leg and a kick at its underside before blackness overcame him. When consciousness returned, he found himself in darkness dank and foul.
     “Hello. Is anyone there?” He called. But no voice answered. He moved a little, since he felt the tightness of his circumstances. His legs appeared stuck in a hole, his arms and hands sloped upwards towards a narrowing of a tube of sorts and his torso sagged upon some wet, rubbery netting.
     “ Gosh! Where on earth am I? he whispered to no one. He punched and screamed suddenly with what force he could muster. All muffled, all mute, little distance achieved. Little force effected! Oh what misery to be attacked and left for dead inside a watery bag! The boy began to cry. He seldom cried, but on this occasion, the thought of this unfair treatment more than his bodily discomfort brought tears to his eyes and sobs to his chest.
     “I am only 12,” he thought, “and much too young to die! I wish to travel, to see India and Sanziban, I wish to be kissed for the first time by someone I love (and here he sobbed with renewed intensity). And I need so much once in my life to live in my own room unshared by a sister or brother!” Having articulated to himself these sad sentiments, the small one let go of his self control altogether and wailed till the heavens themselves began to shush him, though he heard the angels not.
    Nearby, in the deep and heavy woods, a brave, strong axeman wielded her blade in her lonely labours. She whistled and sang, for she loved this life, solitary, quiet, productive and slaking as it was. She arrived with sharpened axe each morning and honed it back to a bright edge at night when wood had made it pay the price. Cutting into a large birch, this young labourer thought she heard the tree call out for help. She stopped the second swing of her blade just in time and stood there perplexed. She listened. Feeling sheepish, she asked the tree if it was sensate, but it answered her not. She waited, sure that she had heard something and then, to her satisfaction, the muffled  call came again.
     “Help! Help, help, help!“ she heard again and again. Feeling sure that somewhere close to her an individual languished and lay in great pain, she put down her ax and cupped her hands, calling in return.
     “Are you hurt? Do you need assistance?” She paused. The calling had stopped. Then it rose again with great intensity.
    “I am here, inside something!” the small thin voice  came to her, as if from the ground itself. She shivered. What if a wraith? What if ghosts? But she bit back her fears and did not run away.
      Again the voice resumed, answering her second question. “I am hurt, yes! My abdomen seems to have taken some injury and bleeds, I think, since all is dark as pitch in here. My shoulder on the left side hangs useless and I have a feeling that my face is badly cut! Other locations and types of my wounds I decline to name or describe! Also, I am lying in some sort of disgusting filth!”
     The woodcutter stood enchanted. The voice soothed her, though it made her fearful for its proprietor. The white birch by her side seemed as bent on hearing each word as she, and it leaned in the direction of the quiet enunciations.
     “Do you need my help?“ She called in her loudest voice. She knew the answer and leapt into action even before the other could respond. She beat the bushes about her and soon discovered, lying there in the gorse behind some shrubbery in profound sleep, smiling, at peace with himself now his stomach did not growl any  more, a wolf or huge grey proportions. 
     “I hear your approach, your footsteps resound here. You must be nearby,” the distant voice called. Then the woodcutter knew, and in an instant had severed the head from the body of the dangerous beast. She reached down its gullet, blood, filth and gore rinsing her fumbling hand. She felt a foot! She knew she had found the source. She reached further until she found some purchase and then, with her large hand firmly grasping whatever it was of him that let her hold on, she slowly extracted the boy through the slipperiness till he lay there before her, breathing heavily, overcome by sensations of light and air. 
     Thank you!” He spoke, finally, when he could breathe again. “It was a wolf I was inside, then?” he asked, staring at the severed head. Then recovering his equanimity, he added, “If ever you were eaten by such a beast, I would do the same for you. I would not hesitate to slap him and punch him and free you from his digestive grasp.” So saying, he straightened his clothing and, waving to the astounded woodcutter, jogged home to his supper.                                  

We Have an Agreement

 We have an agreement
     by Darting Douglas Deodorant 

I wish to tell you a story about wild wealth and a prospector’s discovery. Waylon Falls had been searching for gold in the regions south of Kenora for all of his mature life. At 63, he felt 43, given his six foot frame, broad shoulders, dark hair, strong arms and muscular legs. A year ago, at the Kenora Prospectors’ Days, he had carried a pile of 8 one hundred pound sacks of flour on his back the distance and earned a second prize. Two years ago, he carried an injured Dakotan over three portages down from Tegau Lake through Dryberry and Berry Lakes and canoed him into the Kenora hospital. Waylon’s grandfather once pulled a team of horses out of the marsh by the bridle in a fit of irritation, and his own father, already retired, small but very strong, once lifted, unaided, a granite boulder the size of a sluice box onto the back of a pick-up truck. So, Waylon felt strong and youthful despite his age.
     Women all the way up to eighty year olds drew to him and wanted to talk, sit, marry, walk, visit, kiss, play, whisper, work, drink, wrestle, carry, live, sleep, fight, laugh, and conspire with him. He enjoyed all these activities in their company when he’d been out of the bush for some time and in town. People inspired his inner drives. The moment he left human territory for a day, that part of him shut down, however. He had tried, many times, at his camp, for the sake of diversion, to quicken desire and imagination, to spur on his inner desires, and to experience the jarring pleasure on his own. Now and then, if the lapse of time still snailed the memory of the human form enough to keep trees, gulls, rocks, water and sun unimmediate, he achieved a reduced version of what the town’s bustle and comings and going’s of body and motion provided with certain clarity. Mostly, though, he had learned in the past decade to leave the thought of those others, those beauties, alone.
     That was why he bathed seldom. Sometimes a year went by without a voluntary dip in the water. This time, despite having been to Sioux Narrows for supplies, food, wine and tobacco, and having seen at stores and gas stations women in their clumsy grace, he had not stopped long enough to let himself begin to think of lingering. Instead, as soon as the taxi loaded his purchases, he returned to the Berry Lake landing and bore them off north in his canoe.      
     Hurried because he had discovered gold! A vein of it lay there at Marny’s Point, inland from the water 100 yards, where quartz ran unexpectedly in great, thick roads through the gray and pink granite. This part of the lake, hemmed in on all sides by tangles of tree roots and shallow reefs, remained unvisited by people from one century to the next, so quite understandably the treasure could have lain there forever exposed but untroubled by pick or ax. It was, however, not so situated, not so available. Covered in peat and moss, deeply blanketed by red pine needles, the entire kraddock of smooth rock would never have come to his attention accept for a stroke of great luck. A large pine, a white pine two feet in diameter, had its roots in the air near where he had camped one night some months ago. The moon had risen and it shone with unusual brilliance upon the wide waters of Tagau lake. A gathering of loons a hundred strong bobbed in two groups in the bay, filling it with their strangeness. They made no sound. They stayed so still, just bobbing. Not a ripple disturbed the warm world before him. Waylon lay on his sleeping bag near the fire in thoughtless quiet. 
    He drank from his wine bottle now and then, he smoked his pipe  frequently, always once more in his mind before he would turn in. Alone, floating on a timeless point of stone Waylon felt, as often he did on such pleasing evenings, the gentleness of opened eyes as the world closed its. He would relieve himself before drifting off. The evening breeze was beginning to freshen. Walking to the edge of the woods behind his tent, he followed the moon’s bright tree-shadows further inland under the sweep of red pine, with their soughing above him and their clear going underneath. 
     As often happens when quiet makes time unimportant, for a moment he could not decide which tree to lean on. He saw a great tangle of roots and soil ahead and wandered over.  Beneath it lay the dirty gravel of a recent uprooting. He stopped to start going back, then stood still to pee, holding onto one of the roots.      
     Standing there, he looked about, as we are wont to do when peeing in the woods, and bent down to look at the stones more closely that his stream had cleaned. They had sparked his interest. He must have seem the glimmer of gold among the stones without at first marking it. But then he knew. What had eluded him for forty years now wanted capture, and he had it in his mind’s hands as surely as an old Irishman has his wish ready for a leprechaun he sees beside a mushroom in the moonlight peat. 
     Yes, something glimmered and shone in among the chips of granite. He knew enough about these things to recognize it without having to see up close. Before he bent to pick up any of it he stood there like an old tree and wavered on his legs. He smiled a wide smile and mused upon his life. He knew that everything he’d ever endured in the woods was about to continue and keep him interested for the rest of it.
L
(To be continued)

More Reimers Loose

 

More Reimers Loose
     By Leigh, the Lassoo Kid

Father sold Raleigh goods around the countryside. Mother was the only parent at home 96% of the time. She raised us and towards the end of my stay in the village of Altona, let’s say the last three years, she operated a little greenhouse that grandpa built in the backyard. Heated by an oil burner, with a chair right next to it, the place invited lazy reading and in this spot, so delicious close to the stove, I loved to sit and wile away a Saturday. The smell of the warming earth, the wet growing green leaves, the sound of rubber boots on the sand path in between the three rows of plantings, brought me as close to heaven as I thought then it was possible to get. Where outside still insisted on the presence of winter, on the tyranny of cold, inside—in my chair with the peaceful little sputtering of flame in the hot stove and just behind this a plastic barrier—proclaimed the possibilities of spring and summer. While father stepped from his warm station wagon into the cold prairie air, carrying his sample case, and knocked on another windswept door in Lowe Farm, Plum Coulee, Horndean, Letellier, Dominion city, Saint Jean or Greta, I sat in my comfy hidy-hole besotted with Warren Neale and his girlfriend, Allie Lee, in The UP Trail as they set about helping to build the Union Pacific railroad through Wyoming and into the dangerous desert canyons of the Black Hills. But….! Already I have broken my own narrative rule, that I would not dwell on any one event in the years I spent with my parents but honour them in a modest way, devoting a sentence or two to each thing so as not to make to much of it. Yet, I’ve gotten caught up in the ambience of mother’s greenhouse in late Winter. New resolve: I’ll rein in the lingering horse of my unbridled enthusiasm and chuckchuck to the sleepy one of disciplined authoring and, with any luck, I’ll speed at full gallop through the 18 years of mommy-daddy-me. Maybe in a number of segments each ending with (to be continued).
      In 1950 (two years old) I got a burn the size of a nickel right  through my hand when I stepped out of the tepid tub water in our Rosenort basement to warm myself on a glowing space heater. Wet, I stuck to it, my frightened brother Jim (seven), scared by my terror, also drenched from the tub, stuck to my shoulders with two hands and mother, hearing screams and running up, only to grab Jim and get one hand stuck, too, had the presence of mind with her free hand to pull on the long electric cord running up the stairs until it came out of the socket. And we all were released and healthy, outside of a wounded hand and, well, a lingering general limiting effect on our powers of thought and observation. The pictures of that whole hour are burned into my memory!
     1960. Dad bought 50 evergreens and planted them along the south side of our one acre yard. 1957 dad bought a half acre of pastureland just at the eastern edge of our yard. Mom made that into another garden with hundreds of tomato plants and everything else you could think of. One year, after first frost, four of us threw the thousand unripened watermelons and musk melons wherever we felt like it, loving how they shattered. Of course, we had a war.
      Speaking of war, half a dozen of my teen cousins, on a visit from Steinbach, made slingshots from lilac branches and gathered lots of stones from the road gravel. When evening came, in its moonless darkness, we warred with a half dozen local neighbours, them invisible on the opposite side of a high hedge. We fired a hundred stones in the general direction of the enemy. One rock from their war party went through my hair just as I bent to pick up ammo. 
    1959, BC.  Rudy climbed high into a bing cherry tree to postpone picking raspberries. I threw green damsons at him where he sat in a fork twenty feet up. I eventually connected, just above the eye, and he teetered, lost rigidity and fell unconscious, limp as a blanket, through the branches to the ground. 
(To be continued)

Remembered Trysts

 [circa 2001]

Remembered Trysts
     by Douglas Remember-Me-Nots

Many of us humans remember our pasts with a tranquility that belies the phenomenal moment. We lie on a couch, for instance, and recall in a flash of peace and uproar that speechlessness that was the ’67 Pontiac Fury in which we and one other did not die as it plummeted over the bridge and down, near Neubergthal, into a dry creekbed twenty feet below, the shallow liquid mud with squished cattails around our nostrils, our legs pinned beneath the passenger door for two hours while we sang our pain into the night and knew our girl was dead. And, in the sleepiness of church on Sunday morning—with the preacher reminding us duly of the deadliness of pontification and the putrid flux of sexless being—there’s the deer we shot as it ran along the bottom of the ravine (on our first hunting trip). It trips through our mind once more and gambols there until the report of the .30-.30 and the dropping of the head forever. The knife from the belt, the puncturing of the throat, the glazing over of the eyes, the stiffening of the muscles that will soon be only venison, and our heart as we perform this surgery, all float about in our recollection as in a bathtub of tepidity and scum. And again, in a reverie brought on by nothing to do on Saturday afternoon but possibly the exercises we promised ourselves we’d undertake three times a week at 8:00 AM and find we have need of now to keep the stiffness from the knees, we recall Audrey in that town in North Dakota when we visited there as a 16 year old with our parents who had decided to travel south for once to see the Carlsbad Caverns. Her sister Eileen and she lured us (lured by their simply being nearby) from the park flowers, that mother and father loved and looked at and smelled hour by hour, and into the old growth where we walked and held hands, and they put theirs on our shoulders and legs in ways that made us dream later and welter. In the basement sorting screws, we remember Janet Baker-Tupper who’s upper body and lower body did not fully seem to match. They had about them a mix of colour that clashed, bland above, dark below. She graced Flin Flon, living near a lake, working in a restaurant, fighting men each and every day. Valerie Walker, the librarian from Exxton, New Mexico, met us in a bar in Brampton, Brazil, and we spoke for two hours together over millet beer and Pringles. She wore a slight dress of pale something with lace and Danish cloth above the breast. Her hair, the purple black of some birds about there, cut short and pointed at the outer extremities, remained unnoticed by us in our memories until this moment of screw-sorting. Memories fade from memory but grow in precision. Smells’ presence, especially, intensifies with the years.

Knife Ennes

 

Knife Ennes

     By Mr. Douglas

I met Reverend Henry Gerbrandt at my mother’s deathbed who had married my wife and myself. He was now 90 and tottering. He spoke in the hospital, to myself and my brothers, of a soldier who had tried to confess to him that he was a murderer and could not let it rest. Rev. Gerbrandt finally said to him, after many vain attempts at some consolation, “You know, I can think of nothing that will make a bit of difference to you. OK, you are a murderer. So am I. I murdered Christ on the cross. We are told that again and again. We all have sinned and come short of the glory of God. That may not help you, but I think that is the truth you are looking for.“ When I asked the preacher if the soldier had felt healing from these words, he smiled a little smile (the same one I had seen him smile standing before my wife and myself at the altar some 35 years earlier) and shook his head. “I don’t know,“ he said
     Which reminds me of the boy from the Enns family near Winkler who chased a local preacher down the street with a knife but didn’t catch him. The boy was from a Rosetown family infamously named the Knife Ennes. The father had been known to give chase with a knife if angry enough, and the grandfather had cut someone with a one. Their history had knives in it.       

      Preacher Wiebe happened, as bad luck would have it that day, to walk by the Wesley pool hall just as Jimmy walked out of it. Wiebe had a habit of giving out religious tracts to people on the street. He flipped one out of his jacket pocket now from force of habit. A big mistake. As he pulled out the track, and mentioned that it was one, Jimmy drew a knife from his pocket and drove at the preacher with such precipitation that the goodly man fell down. That is what saved him, he later claimed. The knife missed his vital organs and only cut his skin a little at the throat. He was up like a shot running for home, Jimmy at first in close pursuit. Jimmy was a big, heavy man, and though younger, not as quick as the preacher. Jimmy had the disadvantage also of being slightly drunk and so not at his most agile best.
      Well, the preacher suddenly saw 
before him in the sidewalk gutter a stick of good heft and weight and, in mid stride, picked it up from the ground as he passed. He turned the corner of a building and waited. When Jimmy rounded it, knife first, Wiebe  let him have it right in his loins. The boy dropped the knife and fell roaring to the ground where he rubbed and twisted holding his stomach and clutching the parts just below it. He swore and cursed mightily. 
     The preacher stood over him with his stick raised, debating whether to give him some more of the same medicine. He reasoned that, since he had been so fabulously frightened, he was justified.  But also he realized that the Lord asked his servants to forgive and to love their enemies. He debated, and in a flash of insight decided upon an action. He lay a tract upon the big boy’s back, took the stick and hammered down with it six times, thinking about the sacredness of that number, reasoning that the imprint of the words would forever be burned into him and leave their spirit there as marks of wisdom if not actualizations of it.                                                

 Aging Mothers
     By Dougie Waves Goodbye

Chorus
     F.                              C
     Just now as I’m recalling
     F.                                C
     My mother when she died
     F.                          C
     I have a sudden wish
     C.                     C.                         Em
     That she was standing by my side
     C.               G.        C
     Breathing by my side




C.                       G
Pictures of my mother come
C.                         G
To memory as I wait
C.                     G
4 o’clock just home from school
C.                                       Em
I’d see her through the gate
C                     G            C
Through the garden gate

Her back all bent and hoe in hand
She’d work a row of beets,
An old dress on of dirty white
And slippers on her feet
On her aching feet

Once when the censor came around
She mentioned all our names
But when it came to Rudy’s turn
She couldn’t do the same
Calling, “Rudi, what’s your name? “

Chorus

She’d get us up at 5 o’clock
And in the dusty Ford
Muddy hoes and sugar beets
And children praise the Lord,
Oh!  we’re lucky praise the Lord!

The whole shebang off to BC
Who knew where we would stay
A month of bread and pork and beans
We’d work to pay the way
Picking berries every day

Chorus

Father worked late every day
And through the raging snow
Mother at the window pane
Praying he’d come home
Midnight thinking he’d be gone

Chorus

“My son, my son, what have you done? “
She’d  sometimes say of mine
When she caught me smoking pipe
Or found my hidden wine, 
Her preserves into wine

When you were born she often said
Sun lay in the room
So thick and warm and plentiful
I had a blessed womb
You blessed your mother’s womb

Chorus

1000 stories I could tell 
of mother’s oddest ways
I leave her to the Lord she loved
In Beulah land she lays
I’m sure there she still prays

Chorus

                                                                  2006?

       

 
 Alphism in Males and Females
     By Leigh Bent PhD, D.Sc. 

I am delighted that the world includes in its welcome of variety that sub-species of human commonly referred to as Alpha, though members of that ubiquitous, self-satisfied classification hardly know themselves, let alone call themselves, by that name. Alphas self-identify as ordinary human beings. 
     By scientific consensus worldwide, according to painstaking analysis of the most recent census data available, generated by laboratories, universities and think tanks around the globe, and compiled with international oversight at King’s College, Oxford, alpha humans number 2,400,349,866 individuals, with the data skewing the numbers slightly in favour of the female sex. Publishing of these findings has so far been scant since officially agreement has not yet been reached because it is generally conceded that some claims of inaccuracy have been published by female scientists who consequently have submitted an official recantation of the finding’s conclusions, citing gender bias and arguing that the tallying of numbers typically and regularly slants information, from even controlled experiments, in favour of males who constitute an estimated 74% of scientists engaged in overseeing the myriad experiments. Boasting fully one quarter of the earth’s population, Alphism, increasing at an alarming rate globally as it is, must be considered to have become a dominant form of human psycho-evolution.           
     Research shows that, contrary to the expectations of the scientific community, both sexes rate, on the Sliding Harvard Compatibility and Authority Scale, as both equally likely to exhibit 97.6% of empirically established characteristics associated with the alphac, of which 421 such traits have so far been formally identified. And in each case, with an average intensity of expression of the trait firmly determined through controlled experimentation as slightly less equal at 95.2%, the conclusion becomes indisputable that alpha male and alpha female behaviours must be considered indistinguishable 97 times out of 100, with a statistical deviation of slightly less than 2%. 
         . 

 Song

I Looked Down in the Valley 
     by Leigh D
1.
I looked down in the valley this morning 
I looked down in the valley last night
I looked down in the valley 
Hoping that I’d see Sally
But she would not appear in my sight 
No she would’ve appear in my sight 

2.
Walking down that long lonesome highway 
Walking down that cold ribbon of steel 
I’m going away
I’m going to stay
Travelling on is the way that I feel 
Travelling on is the way that I feel 

3.
Look for me up there in the city
Look for me down there in the town
Look for me everywhere
But I won’t be there 
Cause I’m busy travelling on
Keeping busy travelling on

 4.
I looked down in the valley this morning
I looked down in the valley last night
I looked down in the valley 
Hoping that I’d see Sally
But she would not appear in my sight 
No she would not appear in my sight
                                                              2003

Learning to Think

 

Learning to Think

     by D Ougalasreimer

Imagine, if you will, you retired ones who have not had a thought in your lives but do not know that, imagine what the difference would have been between this and that, or such and such, had you not, and then again had you, lived a life in which you learned to think. What would it have been like, how different, if you had lived a thoughtful life? 

     We live one thought, we thinkers. Only one thought constitutes the difference between us and those who are not inclined to think. What does that mean, exactly? It means that, for the thinker, nothing is prohibited, while for the thoughtless one everything is entirely prohibited. Thus, thought is a product of freedom. Thoughtlessness derives from, and likely drives, captivity. What is it to be free? Certainly not Dylan’s idea that birds might not be free of the chains of the skyway. The exact nature of freedom will have to wait. I am not there yet. First, this bumbling here about thinking. And the story of the thoughtless one’s life.

      The thoughtless one felt prohibited. Nothing was allowed. Everything was properly restricted. She could not go into town Saturday night until she was old enough for her parents and aunts not to care if she did and, in fact, for them to encourage her to finally go. “Go girl! You’re going on 22! For goodness sake, woman, when do you think you’ll get yourself a man if not now? Yesterday they wanted you, today….” Well, like that. It’s much like the joke,“You know you’ve been married a long time when you don’t care where your spouse goes, as long as you don’t have to go along.” Also, she (the person above) began to do certain things on her own, alone, when she got to be about 19. Then it was OK. Till then she recalled her mother saying, “Don’t, Veronica! People will see! That is not what ladies do!” Later on, when her mother no longer cared, and when she was older, she did same with the familiar accompanying shame, but then it was all right. Shame, and doing it, were OK, just the way that she and Armand together in bed doing whatever came to them, within reason, felt shame and relief simultaneously most of the time that they engaged and loved. Love was shame and emptying at once, always. 

     Love is just such filling and emptying for the thoughtless. The thinking ones have so long ago looked hard at shame that they defy it eventually, and try the very things that shame tells them not to try and, trying anyway, in despite of shame, to overcome shame, they become free of shame and live shameless lives in new areas, though shame is still there for them to overcome in other areas, and this is why and how they continue to think, instead of thinking only once and then leaving it all behind once and for all. This is the one thought that takes a lifetime. It is overcoming shame, resisting shame, in all the houses of Baghdad, for instance, and everywhere, slowly winning over it, over shame, in this urban warfare. That is thought.

     Nolan was a humble man. All his life he worked for Eatons. He stole almost no merchandise. He gave up his one chance for promotion in order to let another in line ahead of him. He earned a fair wage which let him have a new vehicle every 10 or 11 years. He drank a great deal, to excess, and finally attended alcoholics anonymous with success. He turned amateur golfer in his retirement and had his own golf cart. He made wine and beer at home. He did not start drinking again, however, until he was in his late 70s. By then his brew stash filled ever nook, cranny and shelf in the basement. He died peacefully in his sleep in the car on the way to the next town to spend the afternoon in the pub with friends. 

Nolan had bad breath. That bothered his wife who asked him to think about how much suffering he caused others by continuing to drink milk and eat milk products. He did not listen to her but kept at it. He was not a thinking man. Wisely, once when he drove his pick-up into the ditch near Gretna, Manitoba, Canada, he abandoned it at first, then returned and dumped a 5 gallon container of gasoline on it and ignited it. Years later, he did the same thing to an ageing Chevrolet, which he had learned to dislike with an intensity bordering on ferocity. This time he parked it under a neighbour’s bulk farm gas barrel, opened its nozzle and let the whole tank empty into the car through an open window. Then he threw in a firecracker from behind an elm where he hid. The blast toppled the elm onto him and left him permanently wounded in the thigh. This wound his wife adored, since she could trace the scars with her slim fingers and think about her hero escaped from such danger and calamity. He never explained to Rita how it was that the car had ended up under the bowser, nor how it had caught fire. She never asked. Devoted though she was, she was not a thinker.

     Lillian did not think. She once slept with a man from her hometown after she was married and had four kids. She felt shame. She asked for forgiveness in the church where she told her whole story. She wept, she got angry, she confided it to her husband and others. She told everyone. She was proud of herself and felt the shame as a product of her bad upbringing. She trusted God increasingly. She did not learn to think.

     Evangeline did not learn to think either. She curled weekends. She never got married. She did not know why she found men unattractive. She never practised anorexia but obesity came her way naturally. She made friends with other women who were also heavy. These women in groups of twos and threes accompanied Evan on summer cruise ship cruises on the Caribbean and down the Mediterranean. They had, these girlfriends of 30 and 40, summers off, being teachers. Being elementary school teachers. They did not learn to think.

     Sniggles did learn to think. He nipped his own testicles. He did learn because he kept giving himself reproachful pain. He inflicted on himself pain which he could not talk to others about. They saw, of course. They felt revulsion. There was nothing he could do about it though. He could tell no one. He could not discuss it in forums. No Dear Abbeys would have paid him the slightest attention. No priest or minister would have said, “Ah, my, but you must be sad!” to him. They would all instead have suffered him poorly. Yes, testicle-biting Sniggles was a thinker. He learned to think the one thought that separated him from the rest. He bit, he snipped, he snapped at himself, and in his shameful, visible vulnerability he became a thinker. He thought the one thought thinkers think in their lifetimes. People would say, when they saw him sneak another nip at himself, “Sniggggguuuulss! What are you doing!” They would wag their heads and make him feel so silly and so perverse. He would lower his ears and look in stupid self-knowledge at them and whine a bit his discomfort. Then, the moment they turned the corner, he would be at it again, knowing it was improper, doing it anyway, and enjoying himself in a slanted kind of way as he hurt. 

     Yes, that is the nature of thought. It has long been known to involve just such self-immolation and satisfying pain. Think not, and you find yourself in good company. Think, and you are ruined. Think and you perform shameful perversion on yourself in public which others blink at and pity.

                                                             2007