Resolved: That Families Eat Together

So, it’s resolution time once more. Following a long-standing tradition, I won’t be making any. Why torture yourself? Resolutions are really wishes that are difficult to fulfil.

   Just plain wishes are much better. If they don’t come about, there’s no huge disappointment, but if they do it’s a wonderful bonus.

   There are so many things to wish for - wishes that would improve the world. So many, it’s best to pick just one.

   One that would make our world a better place concerns eating. But not just reducing how much and what we eat to lose weight.

   My wish would be that families, no matter how you define them, sit down to eat one meal together every day. No television, no smartfones, no iPads. Just people eating and conversing. Sharing thoughts. Sharing observations and ideas. Understanding each other and bonding relationships.

   A study in Britain recently found that fewer than one-third of British families sit down to eat together every night. Fewer than 10 per cent do not eat together once a week even though 42 per cent adults try to encourage family meals together.(you can read more about the study at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2235161/ ) 

   Other studies in different parts of the world show that eating together makes for better grades in school, healthier eating habits,  builds relationships and strengthens the ability to face problems and resist peer pressure.

   There is plenty of reading available on this topic, including The Surprising Power of Family Meals by author Miriam Weinstein.

   Happy New Year and best of luck with those resolutions!

A Voice of Strength and Hope

    Fresh fallen snow protested beneath the crush of my gumboots breaking trail down the unploughed lane. Dry, sharp squeaks, not unlike the cries of cheap chalk cruelly scrapped against too clean a blackboard.

   Skuur-eek, skuur-eek.

   The boots ignored the sounds. They moved on, ribbed rubber bottoms and laced high leather tops creating a meandering wake in the ankle deep snow. To each side of the trail, drifted snow leaned tiredly against the backsides of the bungalows, dropped there to rest by an impatient Christmas Eve blizzard just passed through.

   Faint strains of music joined the squeaking as I approached our back fence. I stopped to hear the music more clearly, now identifiable as singing voices escaping through an open window. I shuffled forward and listened to the notes float out crisply and clearly, then mingle with smoke rising from the chimneys. Notes and smoke rose together into an icy midnight sky illuminated by frost crystals set shimmering by thousands of stars, and the frosty moon the Chippewas called Manidoo Geezis, the little spirit moon of early winter.

   I held my breath to hear better and determined that the music was the Christmas carol O Holy Night, and that the notes came from the window in my grandmother's room. It was open to the cold because most people smoked cigarettes back then, and at gatherings cracked a window to clear the air. They sang the first verse, and when they reached the sixth line, the other voices ceased and one voice carried on alone:

   "Fall on your knees! Oh, hear the angel voices! O Niiii . . .iiight Diii…vine! . . . ." That's the part where the notes rise higher and higher until the singer reaches an awesome note.

   The solo voice belonged to my grandmother, Louise LaFrance, and I knew she hit that high note while sitting on the edge of the bed that was her prison. She was crippled with limb-twisting rheumatoid arthritis and suffered searing pain and the humiliation of being bedridden, a humiliation that included needing a bedpan to relieve herself and having her son-in-law lift her into the bathtub.

   The others stopped singing to listen to her. Each time she hit the high notes at the words 'O Night Divine', a shiver danced on my spine.

   When she finished singing O Holy Night, the other voices started up again, this time with Silent Night and other favourite carols. I went into the house and found Christmas Eve celebrants - my mom, dad and some neighbours - crowded into the 10-foot by 10-foot bedroom that was my grandmother's world. They sang long into the night, mostly in French because the neighbours were the Gauthiers who seldom spoke English to my grandmother and mother.

   The crippling arthritis had attacked my grandmother not long after my birth sixteen years before. It advanced quickly, twisting her fingers like pretzels, then deforming her ankles and knees. You could see the pain in her eyes and from my bedroom I could hear her moaning in restless sleep, sometimes calling out for relief. She took up smoking to ease the pain. Late into the night I would hear her stir, then listen for the scrape of a wooden match against the side of a box of Redbird matches. Then the acrid odour of sulphur drifted into my room, followed by the sweetness of smoke from a Sweet Caporal. Sometimes I would get up and go to her door and see the red tip of the cigarette glow brightly as she inhaled and I would go in and we would talk in the smoky darkness. Mostly the talk was about growing up and sorting through the conflicts between a teenager and his parents.

   After the singing ended that night, my mother served tortiere, which I slathered with mustard. Then we gathered at the tree and opened our gifts.

   I have long forgotten what I got that Christmas, and it doesn't matter. My real gift came many years later, and was an understanding of how that frail and twisted body came to produce such powerful and sweet notes. My gift was the realization that those high notes were not solely the products of the lungs. They were driven by something stronger than flesh - an unbreakable spirit. They came from strength far beyond anything that a mere body can produce. They came from the will to overcome.

   Adapted from Waking Nanabijou: Uncovering a Secret Past, By Jim Poling Sr., Dundurn Press 2007

We Pretentious Canadians

   Canadians. We are such pretentious pains in the ass.

   We immediately started the finger wagging and scolding as our American friends and neighbours tried to hold themselves together against the shock waves of the mass murder of 26 school children and teachers Friday.

   CBC National TV news, being far more intelligent than Americans and its own declining Canadian viewership, intoned how America just can’t seem to control the problem of guns like Canada has. Its reporters shook their heads sadly, pontificating that Americans probably never will get it right.

   The Toronto Globe and Mail rushed in with an editorial saying it is time for the U.S. “to cure its sick gun laws.” It seemed annoyed that yet again it was “forced” to write about mass shootings in America. It called the U.S. a murderous society led by a president who has stuck his head in the sand.

   In times of tragedy, real friends put their arms around those who are hurting and keep their yaps shut. They comfort and they give help, if and when they are asked.

   Americans will debate and eventually solve their problems with guns, and without scolding from holier-than-thou neighbours to the north. But first they need to deal with their grief.

Missing in Action

   It was hoped that the literary fad of omitting dialogue quotation marks in novels would simply slip silently away into the night. Regretfully, it has not.

   The fad appears to have started with Cormac McCarthy, who became hugely successful with his novels The Road and No Country for Old Men. McCarthy has said there is no reason to blot the page up with weird little marks. (That’s a quote, incidentally). If someone can do something outside the norm and still be successful, others definitely will follow the Pied Piper.

   I've just finished reading Hologram for the King, which is a strong parable but takes some thought to figure out the messages the writer is trying to get across. Thought that is constantly interrupted by the use of a single long dash to denote the start of direct dialogue. There is nothing to show where it ends. It’s hard to figure out who is saying what, when and to whom.

   I finished Hologram and started into The Round House by Louise Erdrich, a favourite writer whose work grows stronger with each outing. Alas, Erdrich has been swept up by the fad: there are no dialogue quotation marks in the book. My mind is regularly distracted from the story while trying to figure out who has started and finished talking.

   Why make a reader work figuring out dialogue and risk distracting him or her from the story? Not using quotation marks is a silly, unnecessary technique that adds to the public perception that literature is pretentious.

The Cardinal

   It was just after dawn when I saw him, sitting contentedly on an evergreen branch outside the kitchen window. The sun slipping above the rock horizon across the lake poured even more brilliance over his bright red jacket, making him appear to be a sparkling light on a Christmas tree.

   This morning visitor was a shock. He was the first northern cardinal sighting at Shaman’s Rock in our 27 years here. Cardinals are not seen here because this is bush country, a bit too far north of their range. These beautiful little birds live in forests and patches of bush surrounding residential areas where they find more warmth and more food. Their range has been stretching north with human population growth.

   It was a coincidence that when he arrived I was reading a London Observer article on seldom seen wildlife showing up in British urban areas. The article had one ecologist warning that in future wild boars will invade British suburbs. It noted that wolves and boars are being seen in urban settings in Rome and Berlin.

   The article was not clear on why this is happening. Presumably a combination of pesticide bans, more conservation efforts and global climate change are creating more habitable areas for animals, birds, and insects whose lives all are connected through nature’s food chain.

   North American scientists have said that wild animals once seen only in wild areas are becoming more tolerant of urban settings. Coyotes are an example, and the scientists say we can expect to see wolves, mountain lions and wild dogs in the cities in future.

   I don’t know anything about that. I’m just happy that my morning was brightened by the unlikely visitor in the red jacket.

The Cruellest Season

Autumn, some people believe, is the cruellest season. Like spring, it is two faced and deceitful, but unlike spring it promises nothing better ahead. It soothes and tempts with warm golden days but deliberately deceives, lulling us into believing that the joyful days of summer are not really gone.

Golden days, Dying Leaves

It lulls us then slaps us unexpectedly with biting winds, cold rain, darker days and the first falls of winter snow. It strips sheltering trees, leaving their naked bones exposed to the wolfish winds of winter.

Autumn’s cruelty is a favour, however. It helps us to understand the importance of change. Its soft and golden moments offer time for reflection and preparation. Winter requires thoughtful preparation for shelter, warmth and how to get life’s basic necessities in weather that is unkind to those who don’t prepare.

It also offers a deep satisfaction not found as easily in other seasons. A satisfaction that comes from knowing all that can be done has been done. That preparation nourishes confidence, and the hope that good preparation will carry us safely to the renewal promised by the distant spring. 

(Coming in two weeks my new book: Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America's Tobacco Industry. Dundurn Press)

Remembering Billy

Writing a book can be a mystical experience. Things happen that sometimes cannot be explained. Like last month after the final proofread for Smoke Signals: The Native Takeback of North America’s Tobacco Industry, which will be in bookstores next month.

Once a book is off to print it’s time to reorganize your life; organize and file notes, toss outdated stuff to make space. I was at my burning barrel feeding outdated files into a fine autumn fire. As I steered a handful of 1999 tax papers toward the leaping flames, a breeze caught it, scattering some. I retrieved the escapees and as I started to toss them into the barrel saw the name ‘Billy’ on one of the pages.

I flipped through pages and saw the following sentence: “Billy Skead was buried almost three months ago but the question continues to prick the conscience of this troubled community: Why did he die?”

Lost 1976 News Story about Billy Skead

I was stunned. That was the opening sentence of a story I had written in 1976 about a 22-year-old Indian man who didn’t need to die, but did because of the unbearable social conditions our society had allowed to develop in northwestern Ontario. The same conditions that continue to exist four decades later in places like Attawapiskat on James Bay.

 

I keep everything I write but the Billy Skead story had gone missing many years before. I had looked for it many times because it contained some shocking statistics on violent deaths in the Kenora region. Most recently I had looked for it to see if I could reference any of it in Smoke Signals. I gave it up as lost forever.

The deeper I got into the writing of Smoke Signals, the more I thought about Billy Skead. I didn’t have his story to reference but I did have the memory. So I decided, for no explainable reason, to dedicate the book to him.

After re-reading that long-lost story, I’m glad I did.