MOURNING AT A WRITERS CLUB

“They tell you to keep busy or even to move out of your house. But in my experience, remembering the past makes hoping for the future possible.” --Alan D. Wolfelt “When you are sorrowful look again into your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.” – Kahlil Gibran The Central Lions Seniors Association has a Tuesday morning writers club. We members write at home and read our writing together. My companions in this endeavour are an eclectic lot. They write about all sorts of interesting things: a mistress of Louis XV; the rise and fall of polio; attending a Rose Bowl game in Pasadena; the extraordinary dietary preferences of cats. With a few exceptions I usually write about one thing: my experience of reconciling with grief. I’d like to write about other things. Maybe someday I will. Those who write about grief and bereavement tell us our society is intolerant of grief, impatient for us mourners to move on. With this in mind I tend to approach the Tuesday musings with a cautious suspicion. This is the first time I’ve gathered with the same writers, week after week, month after month. I notice, in their passing comments, that the members worry about boring each other. I worry about that too. Can the day be far off when a weary listener will jump up screaming: “All right already! Get over it!” Alan Wolfelt is a renowned authority on grief. He differentiates between grieving and mourning. He says grieving is what you feel on the inside. Mourning is the outward expression of the grief. Mourning is the thing you do in order to reconcile with grief. Spoiler alert! He says the grieving may never stop and the mourning can go on for a long time. Sometimes I ask myself why, when I was looking for activity to fill my time, I chose to join a writers club rather than a grief support group. The people in a support group would have been sympathetic. They would have expected expressions of mourning. The leaders would have encouraged me to share my pain. So why choose a writers’ club? The answer is: I didn’t compare the two. I joined a writers club because I like to write for fun. I figured I wouldn’t need a support group if I was having enough fun. I didn’t have any topics in mind. I expected to make a few people laugh a little. How was I to know that my journey through grief would show up in almost everything I wrote, exposing my pain to a captive audience of unsuspecting strangers? Alan Wolfelt writes that mourners have six needs: acknowledge the reality of the death; embrace the pain of the loss; remember the person who died; develop a new self-identity; search for meaning; receive ongoing support from others. From my perspective, some of these needs take care of themselves. Others are more dependent on action from me. Some people have trouble acknowledging the reality of death. I’m having no difficulty with this. We spent several hours with David’s body after he stopped breathing. I’ve got the paperwork to prove it and his clothes are long gone. As for the pain, it does not wait for my embrace. It holds me in a hammer lock. After 47 years of closeness in David’s company, it’s quite an adjustment to accommodate the fact that other people don’t need to remember him as often as I do. I am working on that. Things get even more complicated when it comes to developing a new self-identity and finding meaning. That’s going to take a while. As for seeking ongoing support from others, that support can come in many forms. It might come in the company of close friends, or in a group united by a common thread. Grief support groups unite around the process of mourning. Is there any reason to take it elsewhere? Grief, I have found, is more persistent and more flexible than you might think. It is welcome in a support group, but it doesn’t need one so much if you can find other places to take it. It will tag along wherever you choose to go. Writers clubs unite around the process of writing. With little choice but to listen, the members of our writers club have graciously made room for my pain. It holds its own alongside the fascinating variety of topics others bring. Mourning is not a stable condition. The commitment to present writing to a group on a regular basis has helped me shape it in ways that offer some encouragement to me and possibly some entertainment value to us all. Grief doesn’t have to show up at a writers club naked and shivering. You can dress it up in stories. In recent weeks I have written about choirs, marshmallow parties and even Groundhog Day. Each story holds some quirky progress, the documentation of something getting better. Writing is a solitary activity. You explore topics of your own interest. You make your own meaning in your own words. A writers club gives you the added benefit of group support when you share that meaning in your own voice. It disappoints me some to discover that I have no choice about whether to grieve. I expected to be moving on by now. But I do have some choices about how to mourn. Mourning is not so bad if you can make it playful. Playfulness is welcome among writers. Perhaps that is the best defense against the possibility that some fellow writer will stand up and shout: “Enough already! Get over it!”

MARSHMALLOWS

In the months following David’s death our son Lawrence would come over to watch TV in my livingroom. There I would occasionally come upon him, sitting in the chairs his father used to occupy, reaching down the sides to retrieve long lost treasures trapped in the upholstery between the arms and the cushions. “What are you finding?” I’d ask. I would be thinking of spare change and other things that escape from pockets. “Marshmallows,” he’d reply. And sure enough, he’d come up with a dusty dried-up miniature cylinder that must have been there for a while. “To the garbage,” I’d say. “In a minute,” he’d reply. “There are only minis here. I guess when Dad was eating the bigger ones they never fell down that far.” I’ve always been drawn to the sensuality of marshmallows. It’s not just the sweetness that compels me. I love their shape, their ends, flat enough to stand for themselves, and their round, rollable bodies. A marshmallow is a silent treat. Ten of them could roll off the counter and you’d still be able to hear a pin drop as they hit the floor. They are pliable yet resilient. They know what shape they are supposed to be, and somehow they manage to hold themselves and be pillow-soft at the same time. They are simultaneously smooth and rough. Heat them a bit and they’ll stick your fingers together, strong as Crazy Glue. Run warm water over your fingers and the marshmallow glue will disappear completely. From the perspective of physical properties, a marshmallow is a wondrous thing. As I began thinking about writing this piece, I was surprised to find that the only thing I really knew about marshmallows was how to eat them. How were they named? How were they made? Fortunately, Wikipedia was there to save the day. There is a plant, known as the mallow that grows in marshes and damp areas of Europe, Asia and North Africa. The mention of it brings to mind a lush green tree with puffy confections on all the branches. Miniatures would peak out from between the leaves, waiting to grow. But it wasn’t quite that simple. Showing characteristic leadership, the ancient Egyptians ground up the mallow roots, mixed them with other substances, whipped air into the sticky mixture and ate it for medicinal purposes. Much later the French figured out that you could fill a deep tray with corn starch, make holes in it, and pour in the melted marshmallow mixture. When the centre cooled and the starch hardened on the exterior, you could lift out the marshmallows which now had a soft elastic skin. Even later the process was refined to exclude the mallow plant. Modern marshmallows are made by heating corn syrup with sugar and mixing it with dissolved gelatin. The gooey mass is then fed through an extruder. It emerges as a long tube which is subsequently cut into pieces and coated in cornstarch. Lawrence has never cared much for family parties. Any excuse to miss one would do. So I was taken by surprise when he said we ought to have a party on January 10, the first anniversary of David’s death, all the more proof that grief changes people in ways you’d never predict. “We need to have marshmallows,” he said, “And Safeway white cake with thick icing.” It sounded like just the sort of party you’d have for our sweet-loving David—just the sort of party you’d have with him. He’d be there for sure, celebrating with family and inhaling the sugar. I could feel the incongruity of such an event, having David absent yet somehow present at the same time. I wondered whether pieces of his favourite cake would mysteriously vanish when we weren’t looking. Lawrence bought the cake on his own, but he and I did the marshmallow shopping together. It was a task he would not take lightly. I could see that he must have shopped for marshmallows with his dad. He lifted the bags from the shelf and inhaled their sweet aroma. Only the freshest, softest, fluffiest specimens would do. Each marshmallow had to stack independently, never sticking to its neighbours. You could assess this by gently caressing the packages. We came away with two large bags that met all his specifications. Like Lawrence, I am prone to sentimentality these days, drawn to things that can bring David to life—if only in the imagination. Marshmallows had a double meaning in our family. David was our personal marshmallow. If you asked him to account for an act of kindness or generosity, he’d grin and say: “I’m a marshmallow.” That was the only explanation you’d get. It was I who first assigned the label to him. I believe I was angry at the time. “You are a marshmallow,” I bellowed, pointing an accusing finger in his direction. Just what it was that caused the outburst I cannot now recall. No doubt he had raised my hackles by caving in sweetly on some point of order with the children. Did he allow somebody to have dessert when I had specifically warned that there would be no dessert until the dinner plate was cleaned? Did he permit someone to go swimming without having cleaned up the bedroom clutter? Whatever it was that he had done, I wanted him to know that I expected a firmer approach. But in choosing the name I had made a serious miscalculation. Calling him a marshmallow as a shaming device was about as effective as accusing skating ice of being smooth, or blaming diamonds for sparkling. It was a compliment. He loved marshmallows, and if he was one of them, then he had found his tribe. He was proud to be a member. If he could keep them around the house long enough for baking, David used miniature marshmallows to make Rice Krispies squares. He was so good at it that our daughter Ruth asked him to make a Rice Krispies cake for her wedding. In preparation He shopped for four nested wedding cake pans, 2 pounds of butter, 104 cups of cereal and 8 large bags of fragrant, soft, perfect miniature marshmallows. In the hot days of summer we were both happy that Ruth was getting married and sad that she would be moving away. David wanted to choose the perfect time for the making of the cake--to ensure the freshness and also leave spare time in case things didn’t go as well as expected. July evenings in Alberta tend to be warm, lit by a brilliant sun that sets some time around 10:00 and leaves a long soft twilight. They lure you outside for walking and barbecuing and gardening. But now and then you get a series of scorching days, followed by an evening where the sky bruises to black, the rain hammers everything and lightning flashes in all four directions to the undulating beat of continuous thunder. It was on such a night, with the windows wide open to let in the fresh cooling breeze, that we set about the task of constructing the huge cake that would send our daughter off to spend a new life in Ontario. With the tempest raging outside and me acting as baker’s helper, we measured and melted marshmallows into puffy sticky clouds. Then we mixed, marvelling at the way things change. It would never have occurred to us to use Rice Krispies squares as a wedding cake. But the cake we were constructing on this stormy night would boldly grace Ruth’s head table, adorned with a spray of removable flowers. It would be cut generously at the wedding, and served on the spot. The guests would snap it up and go back for seconds. Ruth would proudly say, “My dad made that cake!” And so it came to pass, that on January 10, 2020, with Ruth and her family living in Ontario, Lawrence, Mark and their loved-ones settled at my dining room table to gorge on over-sized slices of thickly-frosted cake and unlimited quantities of marshmallows. With me occupying the chair at the head where David would have sat, we indulged in marshmallow nostalgia. Lawrence and Mark recalled the Christmas morning when Mark’s wife Tracey gave them marshmallow guns—yes, guns that shoot marshmallows. Reverting to joyous childhood, they were pulling the triggers and firing marshmallows at one another. “Those marshmallows go to the garbage,” I said. As they retrieved the spent ammunition from dusty corners David said, “Are you just going to throw them out? Could you not eat them?” Eating Marshmallows was one of David’s favourite pastimes. He ate them in the evenings while watching TV. He also ate them when we camped. We tended to camp simply, in the bush where you find the mosquitos. We didn’t generally have running water, and we never had a good supply of running water hot enough to melt the sticky marshmallowness off our fingers. If we used mosquito repellant the marshmallows would take on the flavour. If we didn’t, then we had to scratch at the bites with sticky fingers. You could cut down on the stickiness by clapping a toasted marshmallow between two cookies and calling it a smore. But a smore was more fattening than a plain roasted marshmallow eaten on its own. I don’t suppose it had occurred to David that marrying a blind woman would relegate him to a life of roasting marshmallows for two. “Blind people don’t roast marshmallows,” I told him the first time he handed me a roasting stick. Just to prove it, I torched the first three I tried. “Blow them out when they catch fire,’ he said. “Blind people don’t see the flames until it’s too late,” I said. Sighing in resignation, David settled into a pattern. He would eat one marshmallow raw, roast one for me, then roast one for himself. Every so often he’d over-roast one that had been intended for himself, and if he could blow the flame out before it blackened, he’d hand it to me. I never minded a little bit of ash. You can know a lot about eating marshmallows, and still have more to learn. Sitting at my table, remembering his dad, Lawrence rolled a marshmallow in icing from the Safeway cake. “Icing on a marshmallow?” we exclaimed. “Did David do that?” “I don’t think so,” said Lawrence. “But it’s good. I think he would have liked it.”

WRITING THE CHRISTMAS LETTER: 2019

“If you use the bad parts to get to the good parts you’ve done something good.” Elton John In the last week before Christmas I agonized over the production of a Christmas letter, the kind you add a personal sentence to, and send out to everybody who writes to you, and everybody you expect to get something from, even some people you don’t get anything from and haven’t for years. Back in November, when I carefully contemplated what to write in such a letter, I had decided not to write at all. That plan held up very well until a week before Christmas when people began writing to me. David and I used to co-produce a Christmas letter back in the days when it could be signed with both our names. I’d make a start some time in November, asking David what he thought we ought to write. He’d mention a few things. I would keep at it, adding and deleting, until I deemed it ready for proof-reading. David would correct the typing and add a thought or two. “That’s fine,” he’d say. “It’s ready to send.” Without David in the physical world, I believed the writing of my 2019 Christmas letter would be a solitary pursuit. But then, things got complicated. It seemed I was dealing with two versions of myself. There was the me who had decided to write a Christmas letter, and a reluctant woman sitting at my computer, refusing to press the keys. “How hard can it be to write a Christmas letter?” I said to the reluctant woman. “All you have to do is tell people what you did this year. Start at the beginning. Here. I’ll show you.” Pushing her aside, I wrote a paragraph. “David died on January 10,” I wrote. “His last few days were difficult because we often couldn’t understand what he wanted to say. But he was determined to be understood. He insisted that I immediately put money for 2019 into his tax free savings account.” He didn’t say, “You will have the money after I die if you put it in while I’m still alive.” But we both knew what he meant. He meant: “Go do it right now.” I showed my paragraph to the reluctant woman. She was outraged. “You can’t start a Christmas letter that way,” she scolded. So I pushed Delete and started over. “We were all saddened by David’s death at the beginning of the year,” I wrote. The reluctant woman stayed my hand. “That’s not entirely true,” she said. The truth is, you weren’t that sad because you thought it was time. You’re a lot sadder now than you were then. One of your favourite memories happened right after he died. Remember how you sat with him, marvelling at how his twisted tortured body had suddenly relaxed, how you lingered with him, holding his hand in absolute peace. That doesn’t sound very sad to me.” “Should I take it out then?” I asked her. “Yes,” she said. “Should I add the part about being peaceful at the end?” The reluctant woman was—well—reluctant. “Maybe you should skip David altogether and do what other people do. Try describing your grandchildren.” I pressed Delete and started over. “All five grandchildren make a project of delighting their Granny. Carys is a gymnast with a fondness for unicorns and Lewis can charm you while climbing on top of a table at lightning speed. Ben has learned to read in two languages, Evan builds something with Lego every morning before he goes to school, and Clara spent most of last week pretending to be a baby lion.” After that, I couldn’t think of another thing to say. So I wandered around the house, pouring cups of coffee, setting them down on various tables and losing track of them before I’d finished. “Come back here and finish this letter,” nagged the woman who had previously been sitting at my computer. “And don’t push the Delete key. This stuff about your grandchildren has potential. It just needs a little fluffing up. Take a break from that topic and tell them about your travels.” Feeling a little bit encouraged I wrote that I’d made four trips to Guelph, one to spirit River, one to Jasper and one to Vancouver. I spiced it up with some stories of cruising in French Polynesia. I was conscientious about naming people who had been there for me during my travels. Then I got up, searched the house, and used the microwave to warm the coffee from some of the abandoned cups. “Be happy,” I said to myself. When I sat down again I deliberately wrote about happy things. I wrote that I was happy to be living in my apartment, happy to be walking in my neighbourhood, to be playing bridge and going to exercise classes and writing for fun with new friends at the Joy of Writing Club. I wrote that I had joined two choirs. I mentioned that I still facilitated hope groups, having not quite completely retired from my work in hope studies. All of this was true, and my confidence grew—until it didn’t. In its place there came a tsunami of grief that sent me running to my bed where I howled in abject misery. “What now?” I cried out to the reluctant woman. “Do I have to quit, after all the work I’ve done?” “I don’t know,” she said. “But don’t push the delete button.” Instead of continuing the letter, I went back to the computer and read an on-line article in Psychology Today. “You can’t outrun grief,” the author boldly declared. The reluctant woman considered this. “You are the living proof of that,” she said to me. “Perhaps you should grieve a while. Maybe you’ll be able to finish the letter tomorrow.” In our forty-five years of marriage David and I read hundreds of Christmas letters. Some were funny. One relative always drew her year in cartoons. Another used the language of a medieval castle. Some were informative—births, marriages and such. Others were boring. Enough said about that. But there was one letter that chilled us so thoroughly to the bone that we had to turn to each other for comfort. It was a devastating life summary, sent by Cousin Lila. It was cloaked in sadness and despair. Her husband and all his siblings had Alzheimer disease. She wrote details about each of them. She ended the litany by wishing all of us a Merry Christmas. “Lila is depressed,” I said to David. He said, “Everything in this letter is probably true, but I wouldn’t send it at Christmas time.” With this in mind, I turned back to the reluctant woman. “I’m not Cousin Lila,” I said, “and I’m not Susie Sunshine either. I want to write a Christmas letter. Who am I?” anyway?” “You’re a grumpy, weepy, unpredictable griever living a basically happy life,” she said. And so it was that I found myself back at the computer the following morning, cleaning up my writing and developing an opening paragraph something I hoped would tell a truth that could reasonably be followed by Merry Christmas wishes. “It will be a different sort of Christmas this year. No doubt each of us will miss David in our own way, though it has been some time since we had a Christmas that wasn’t influenced by the need to accommodate illness. I would say that grief in my case is less a gradual process of healing over time and more a situation where kamikaze attacks occur when you are doing well in the big picture. I’ve been concentrating on learning new things, having fun and paying it forward as a tribute to the small army of people who have been lighting up my life over the past few years.” The reluctant woman and I checked it over with a critical eye. It was a longish letter, a little too perky, a little too busy. But the time had come to add personal greetings and send it anyway. Out went the copies, one by one. After so much dilly-dallying, I had expected to be pleased. Instead, I found myself turning apologetically to the memory of David. “I’m sorry that letter seems so cheerful,” I said to him. “I failed to mention how broken-hearted I am. They should be told that every fiber of my being still wishes you were here. I wanted to tell them how utterly bereft I get when I think that all my future Christmas letters will be written without you. How could I have edited it all out?” But the memory of David was remarkably unperturbed. “We couldn’t have sent such a letter,” was his response. “It’s not in our nature. If we couldn’t have said something good, we wouldn’t have said anything at all. But I do think you could have mentioned the tax-free savings money we put in my name back in January. You’ve had that money in savings for a whole year now. That’s $5,500 plus interest you won’t have to pay taxes on. It is an accomplishment worth celebrating.” “Too late for this Christmas letter,” I said. “That story will have to be written elsewhere.”

WHY DON'T YOU WRITE MORE OFTEN?

Conscience: Why don't you write on this blog more often? Me: I have so many good reasons for that, it's hard to count them all. Conscience: List them. Me: Do I have to? Oh fine. I will. 1. I don't have time. Conscience: Rubbish. You are retired, you know, albeit unsuccessfully. Of course I know that you volunteer half a day a week at Momentum Walk-In Counselling, and you still do sessions for the Alzheimer Society, and you are planning hope groups for Parkinson's patients, and you occasionally give hope presentations, and you play Bridge Wednesday mornings, and you go to music classes with Carys and Tracey on Saturday mornings, and you take exercise classes with David at the YMCA, and you go to church most Sundays, and help if David asks you to, and spend time watching TV with him, and your friends come over to keep you company, and you tend your flowers, but if you would be honest, you would have to admit that each of these things is a little thing, and you still have plenty of time to write. 2. This is a hope blog, and I'm not always as hopeful as I want to be. I have a responsibility to myself and the hope community to write hope on a hope blog. conscience: Garbage! You're hopeful enough, given all that's going on in your life, perhaps more hopeful than most, since you have made an art form of intentionally noticing hope. 3. Nobody wants to read my silly writing. I have only six followers. Conscience: Nonsense! Two out of those six have taken the time to comment since you started writing again. I'm sure you wouldn't want them to think they are unimportant. By the way, why did you start writing again? 1. Because I was going to a writing retreat and I knew I'd better warm up for that. 2. Because I still give hope talks and I have to write in order to prepare for them. I was getting rusty. 3. Because when I started writing again, I remembered that writing for an audience always help me think more clearly and more positively. 4. Because two people noticed, and they said nice things, and I'm really a sucker for attention, especially attention laced with flattery. Sometimes I just wish I didn't have a conscience.

GRIT, GRACE & GRATITUDE

A few weeks ago I received an email from my friend and mentor, Ronna Jevne. She was offering an overnight writing retreat at a lodge in the country, and even though common sense told me that the very same email was sent to dozens, maybe hundreds of people in her network, I couldn’t seem to rid myself of the conviction that she was aiming that retreat directly at me. “Ridiculous!” said Common Sense. But I was not listening. “Look,” I said to Common Sense, “there is a ton of evidence pointing to my conviction that this retreat is being offered especially for me. The title of that workshop is Grit, grace and Gratitude, three things I could use right now. And the lodge is only a little way out of the city, so I can take a cab if I can’t get a ride. I’d only need to be away for about thirty hours, which is certainly within the realm of possibility. And you know, Common Sense, I haven’t been writing much lately. In fact, I haven‘t put a word on The Hope Lady blog since some time back in 2015. Yes, when I put it all together, it seems pretty clear that this retreat was designed specifically for me.” “Ridiculous!” said Common sense. I didn’t listen. Life can be pretty dull if you spend too much time listening to Common sense. “You haven’t been writing on your blog,” said Ronna, when I emailed her the news of my pending registration. Her tone was more affirmation than accusation. “See,” I said to Common sense. “I knew it. She’s been checking up on me!” “Just send the money when it’s convenient,” said Ronna, “and I’ll get you a ride.” Ronna and writing and I have a long and storied relationship. Our first encounter happened back in 1993 when I asked her to be my thesis supervisor. “Can you write?” she demanded. Truth was, she needed a Master’s student about as badly as she needed chicken pox. “Yes I can,” I declared with conviction. I needed a thesis supervisor as badly as I needed food for the rest of my life, and Ronna was the only desirable person in the department who hadn’t yet turned me down. “I don’t want to be nagging you,” she said. And I had a supervisor. At the time, I really intended to be self-managing. “I don’t want to hear you whining about how you can’t write,” she said. “The sign on my wall says NO WHINING!” Apparently she’d already had enough whining students to last her a lifetime. “I won’t whine,” I promised. But she did have to nag me, after the fog descended on all my good ideas and the only way out was to disappear and pretend I’d never started a Master’s. And she did help me, even though I whined. “Is there something I can do to move you forward?” said her voice on the phone on a day when I had accidentally answered a call from her. I couldn’t think of anything she could do to help me, so she had to do her own thinking. She praised me when I wrote a little, and laughed when I was funny, and bragged about me when I wrote more. And she published hope work with me, and hoped I would be a writer, which I’ve never turned out to be—though I do love writing when it calls to me. So I’m blogging again, out of gratitude to Ronna for keeping my name on her email list, even though the retreat is still sixteen days away. And Ronna has shown the grace not to utter a word of complaint, or let on that she might be groaning under the weight of responsibility for the good mental health of former students who require more attention than they have earned. I am promising, as you might expect, to write at the retreat without uttering a single whining noise. At this point, it is not clear to me where the grit comes in, but if there’s grit to be uncovered, well, I guess that’s what we’ll find out in sixteen days.

THE WRITER'S ALMANAC

The Writer’s almanac I turned to my computer In search of inspiration A crippling case of writers’ block Had dulled my concentration. And there emerged In white and black The inspiring Writer’s Almanac. A beacon of hope A promise to mind Of treasures still out there Awaiting a find.

WHAT I MEANT TO SAY IS ...

The first sentence of a paragraph, as my grammar teachers used to say, prepares us for the content that will follow. These wise voices come to me across the years as I sit down to type, with my HOPE LADY fingers, a reflection on the happenings of the past week. I have been saying—no, face it I’ve been WHINING—about the terrible week we’ve had. Pity the person who casually asks: “How is your week so far?” That person is going to hear a tale of woe. Have I got a tale of woe to tell! It’s been a lousy week. Here is the evidence. There is a cold so attached to me that I fear we are permanent partners. The ground is covered with ice that makes crawling the safest way to avoid a fall. There’s a son who needs his mother’s love because he slipped on that ice and ended up with five stitches in his head. There’s a program that needs more of my time because a colleague is on stress leave. There’s a friend whose tea date had to be changed so that I could help a principal whose staff are devastated by the suicide of one of their own. There’s a plumber who has practically lived at our house lately because our heating system has decided to take a vacation. (Have you ever noticed how well heating systems tend to work in the summer?) There’s a whole night’s sleep gone forever while I kept a watch on the fireplace to ensure that the fire kept going. (How did they ever sleep in pioneer days?) All of this as we prepare for a trip that would truly be inconvenient not to mention expensive to cancel. All of this and even more has sprung to the tip of my tongue when people ask “How’s your week so far?” Why is it, I wonder, that in a bad week, the story of the badness so often steals the show? I’ve been thinking, I guess, that this has been a bad week, and that has been the first sentence of the paragraph. There are, of course, many perspectives on any given story. Here is another story about that same week, a story with a different opening sentence. Our children have chosen top-notch partners—people you’d be thrilled to welcome into your family. For evidence of this, I need only turn to my recent electronic communications. There is, for example a message on my iPhone. My daughter-in-law is out doing a few errands. If it is convenient for me, she could stop by and pick up Pirate. This will give us a couple of free hours that would have been spent taking Pirate to her house (his second home and first choice for a good time whenever we are out of town.) It is, of course, extremely convenient for me, and she knows it, but doesn’t say it. The email contains a message from our son-in-law—a man preparing to collect us at the airport some time around midnight. His refrigerator, he tells us, has been stocked with items selected to delight us: bacon, gluten free beer, chocolate milk. He hopes we are looking forward to our time with them. What he doesn’t say is that he is collecting us around midnight and will likely be up at 2:00 AM even though he is expected to be wakeful for work the next day. Now I wouldn’t want to leave things unsaid that should be said. It should be said that the electronic communications show a history of loving phone calls made by these wise children who chose top-notch partners. They called to chat, to update us on their news, to confirm plans, to ask if there is anything we need them to do. From among all the evidence, one indisputable conclusion emerges. A bad week is not such a bad week when you can count on a loving connection with children and their top-notch partners. Perhaps that should have been the first sentence of this story, but sometimes, when you sit down to reflect in writing, you don’t know what you really wanted to say until you get to the end.

MORNING ON JERICHO HILL

“And in my mind I still need a place to go, All my changes were there.” –Neil Young “The next time we go to Vancouver,” I said to David, “I want to go to Jericho Hill School.” “We already went there once,” he said reasonably. There was no denying the truth of it. For him, once had apparently been enough. We did go there once, back in 1974, when I was nearly 21 and the school was almost closed and the principal, smiling and gracious in a manner that seemed totally foreign to my memories of her, sized up david, glanced at my wedding ring and said to me, “Well, it seems that things have turned out rather well for you.” With that cogent summary, she ushered us off the property. Unspoken by David was the question: “Why would we bother going there again?” For this I had no real answer, only that I wanted to go. Our encounter with the principal was my last memory of the school, and this was a thing I regretted. For I had felt like a stranger in her commanding presence, a guest, unwelcome to explore the rooms I had known so well, or to speak unsensored of my experiences. A part of my life was closed off to me. I wanted to go back, to wander in the time before the principal tied my life into a neat bow. In my mind’s ear, Neil Young sang one possible explanation for my wanting: “All my changes were there.” I was a tearful, homesick 11-year-old Alberta farm child when I first went there in the fall of 1965. She was not the principal at that time. Mine had been the world of curling rinks and grain elevators, of chicken coops and hay lofts, of spring seeding and fall harvesting. I’d had never ventured beyond the safe shelter of loving parents. The house I had always known clearly remembered the days of kerosene lighting and outdoor bathrooms. In 1965 it still did not have a telephone. Vancouver BC was an unimaginable place. It might have been Wonderland, or the Land of Oz, for all I knew of cities. But Vancouver had a school for blind children. So that is where I was destined to spend my first few teen-age years. The Jericho Hill School for the Deaf and the Blind was not a single building, but rather a hodgepodge of structures, old and new, terraced and strewn on a steep hill leading up from the ocean at 4100 West 4th Avenue. At the bottom of the hill were the dining hall—half condemned and smelling eternally of cabbage boiled too long with ancient Brussells Sprouts, the office where we collected our allowance on Friday afternoons—three quarters condemned and creaking under every footfall, and the gymn—one ancient freestanding room, not condemned, though possibly soon to be. Part way up the hill stood the bowling alley where I learned to bowl badly, the swimming pool where I learned to swim sort of, and the Braille Building which housed the school for the blind, along with the dormitories for the junior blind girls, the senior blind girrls and the senior deaf girls. Over to the west was the building that housed the infirmary where the nurses soaked my boils, the auditorium where we put on plays, the residence for the junior deaf kids and the junior school for the deaf. Further up the hill were two buildings that housed the senior school for the deaf, and the home economics and industrial arts classrooms for the blind. Up even further stood the dorm for the senior blind boys and deaf boys. In the three years I spent trudging up and down that hill, I never climbed up to that level. The boys’ dorm was strictly off limits for us girls. In 2013 I was determined to go back there, to climb that hill again, even though I had heard that the condemned structures were gone and the Braille Building had been demolished. “I just want to walk on the grounds,” I said to David. So we boarded a bus sporting a sign that said #4 UBC and got off at Jericho Beach Park. The hill I remember has not changed. For some strange reason, no buildings have taken the places of the old. The swimming pool stands where it always stood and the sunken garden that separated it from the Braille Building remains as it was when I first knew it, nearly 50 years ago. I could face north and conjure up the mournful cries of the foghorns that were ever present when I woke on winter mornings. I could face south into the bush that backed our classrooms. David and I could descend the paths I trod in the rain to breakfast, lunch and dinner. We could take the path behind the pool and climb the 70 steps to the home ec room, now used for other purposes. We could even ascend those last two flights to the boys’ dorm. When we got to the top and surveyed the scene below, a gentleman asked if we needed directions—a reminder that this area might still be beyond limits for me. I left that place in the spring of 1968. My condition was much as it had been on the day I left home—tearful, not really wanting to leave. I was the strange inhabitant of two worlds that did not touch, except through me. Each world was separate and complete unto itself. Both of them were home to me, yet I could not dwell simultaneously in both. Three years is an eternity in the life of an 11-year-old. During that three years I had given up my Barbie dolls. I had expanded my body into bras and compressed it in panty gurdles. I had been kissed and learn go-go dancing. I had been confirmed in the Anglican church. I had visited the home of people wealthy enough to have a private swimming pool. I had slept in the same house as a drug addict. I had sold Girl Guide Cookies door-to-door. I had learned to read braille music. I knew jokes I could not tell my family. I had read To Kill A Mockingbird. I had sat upon a rock until my clothes were soaked by a rogue wave of the incoming tide. I had seen the Supremes perform at the Cave. I had eaten octapus at the Seven Seas buffet. I had drunk Shirley Temples. I had learned to iron. I could spell words in sign language. I had been lonely. I had been loved. I had been adopted by the families of friends I still cherish to this day—friends who could not possibly imagine themselves in the life of an alberta farm girl. It did not matter that the buildings were gone. A thousand insignificant details flooded my mind as we wandered up and down the hill. I recalled how the chairs were arranged in the dining hall, the shape of the pitchers that held the morning hot chocolate and the hooks where we hung our dripping coats. My ears heard the music room with its seven pianos, all playing discordantly from their corners during morning practice. My feet approached the library wall and my fingers touched the 144 enormous braille volumes that comprised the World Book Encyclopedia, 1960 Edition. I remembered throwing crooked pots on a pottery wheel and debunking horror stories about how hard it was for blind children to cope in public schools. (I had coped in public schools for the first six grades. That made me an expert.) I could hear Miss Darwood entering each room in the hallway calling: “Good morning girls.” (what she meant was, “Get up girls.”) I could feel the tension of waiting for her to get to our room. I would shut my eyes one second before she arrived and pretend to be asleep. I could hear the thunk of feet kicking the pop machine that stood steadfast at the swimming pool entrance, sometimes stealing money, other times delivering root beer, Coke or orange. The entrance is still there, but the machine is gone. David said he could see the stain on the wall where a machine had once stood. You can visit the past, but you can’t stay there. David and I left the grounds when I had kept him there as long as I dared. The paths through the forest and along the beach were beckoning us. But as we left, I opened the door a crack, lest he should think we would never go back. “I might,” I said, “want to come here some day and sit on the lawn that slopes down from the place where the Braille Building used to be. I might want to sit there and write.”

PANIC

It was August 26 when Panic hit me—knocked out my breath and set my knees to trembling. Somehow I had managed to keep her at bay with soothing words, with promises. “Don’t panic,” I had said to myself. “You know you never miss a deadline. There is still time.” And with those simple words, with the promise of time, Panic had been persuaded to hide backstage, waiting for the right moment to strike. Even in the summers that aren’t so great, summer is a marvellous time to let yourself lose sight of deadlines. Time stretches out in a summer, stretches out and flies away. Go on holidays and you soon get to wondering if it’s Tuesday or Thursday. Time gets distorted in the summer. But the ultimate, inescapable problem with time, in the context of a deadline, is that there gets to be less and less of it. Every unused day before a deadline is a day you never, ever get back. All through the spring and summer I had been looking forward to the pleasure of losing myself in whatever stories I would develop for the T.A.L.E.S Fort Edmonton Festival on the Labour Day weekend. Storytelling, after all, is a hobby, a pleasure. I had been promising it as a reward to myself, since I had not been writing THE HOPE LADY Blog, and writing always helps. But more to the point—in relation to the panic—I had also promised one 15-minute concert story and one 50-minute story performance to my hard-working, ever-faithful colleagues at T.A.L.E.S. The concert story would be about light. I had promised it for August 31—a story to pick up the threads from a beautiful song to be performed by The Once, a folk group from Newfoundland. The 50-minute performance, a montage of folk tales and personal reflections about mirrors, was promised for September 1. It was April when I first made the promises. None of the folk tales about mirrors had been located. None of the personal stories had been written. But it was all highly possible, back in April. It was May when I signed the contracts. May was followed by June and July and 25 days of August when I did absolutely nothing to move the project forward—nothing except for thinking occasionally about it, then shooing Panic back into the wings. At a certain point, when I was no longer certain that the project was possible, I turned to Hope. In fact, it was a hope statement that caused the panic. I woke up on the morning of August 26 and said to myself, “Don’t worry about the future. Why, just think, a week from today your stories will have already been told.” When Panic heard this, she rushed forward and knocked the wind out of me. “Worry, you idiot!” she shrieked. “You have left this so late, you’ll need a miracle. I have heard too many excuses about having writer’s block, and being on holidays, and spending time with little Ben, and dealing with all the issues in your life! This time you have pushed me too far!” Then she shook me so hard I saw stars. And so it was that, in Ontario, on the road between Long Sault and Gananaque on the morning of August 26, while sitting in the very back seat of a rental van, I took out Mona the iPhone and launched an Internet search for folk tales about mirrors. This is how it all ended. A concert story was performed in Edmonton on August 31, and a 50-minute set was performed on September 1. I have the recordings to prove it. I did the hard work of preparation. I did the suffering. But Panic is taking all the credit. These days Panic is feeling pretty smug—pretty proud of herself. “Bow for the applause,” she sneers, “but let me just say that you couldn’t have done it without me.” And, reluctantly, I have to admit that she is probably right.

HOMEWORK 2: ABOUT MY NAME

As a little girl I planned only two things for my grown-up years: I would have my birthmark removed, and I would change my name to anything but Wendy. In retrospect, these seem like small plans, given that my more focused contemporaries were dreaming of marriage, wealth and career advancement. But I held the theory that once my birthmark had been vanquished and my name changed to anything but Wendy, other things would be able to fall in behind. Now the birthmark, as my mother liked to point out when I mentioned it, was a harmless hill on my left cheek. Covered in soft brown hair it had the texture of a grassy knoll and spanned a circumference that would nicely have framed a fifty-cent piece. “Distinctive,” is what my mother called it in a fruitless effort to free me. Having survived medically necessary surgeries on a variety of body parts, she was disinclined to show any enthusiasm for surgery for beauty’s sake alone. I, in contrast, wrapped in a cloak of surgical innocence, remained steadfastly convinced that no mere operation could rival the indignity of wearing a big, brown, hairy birthmark. “What’s that?” babies would ask their mothers, pointing at the hideous thing. Cringing in embarrassment, I told all who noticed it that it would be coming off my face soon and hoped that Mother would soon come to see the wisdom of my declaration. . Mother said in a compromising tone that, when I was a grown up, I could make up my own mind about the surgery, though she, herself, would never recommend it. On the subject of changing my name some day, she was a little more flexible. Had it been her favourite name for a daughter, she might have been defensive. But Wendy was, in fact, her fourth-favourite. Her favourite name for a girl was Donna, and that name had long since been assigned to my eldest sister. The second sister had claimed Sandra, the second favourite name. The third favourite name, Diane, was reserved for use in case they should accidentally produce a third daughter while trying to have a son. But though I followed Sandra into the family, my mother overheard a conversation that changed her plans while I was still wriggling inside her. My aunt was heard to say that she intended to call her unborn daughter Diane. And so my mother opted for Wendy, publicly pretending—most of the time—that she thought it a good name. It was fashionable in those days to assume that any girl named Wendy must have been named in honour of Wendy Darling, the motherly little girl created by J.M Barrie to stand guard over her family amid the playful antics of the rascally Peter Pan. It’s a great story, and many a modern Wendy is said to be her namesake. I, however, am not one of these. My mother simply heard the name somewhere, and liked it fourth best among the names she considered giving to daughters. In childhood I cared neither for J.M. Barrie’s creation nor my mother’s name preferences. Being a Wendy was almost as humiliating as having a brown, hairy birthmark and I wished the curse of death by mosquito bites on every playground bully who ever called me WindyWendy As adulthood approached I occasionally indulged in tantalizing daydreams about the pleasant life led by a clear-faced woman named Karen, or was it Elaine? But then, before I had found the time and energy to seek out a surgeon, the birthmark sprang to life and grew with such enthusiasm that doctors insisted upon its removal and urged me to sign papers saying I was willing to submit the future landscape of my cheek to a plastic surgeon. It wasn’t until surgery day that I met the surgeon in question, a miserable fellow with all the bedside charm you’d expect of a rhinoceros. By the time I emerged from a half hour with him snipping, tugging, stitching and barking at the nurses, and subsequently survived the ripping off of bandages, I had decided to stick with the name Wendy. Perhaps, I mused, not being personally acquainted with any official name changers, I should leave well enough alone, maybe even try to like the name I was given. Wendy, it is said, is a modern derivation of older Welsh names with similar sounds, Gwendolyn, for example, and Guinevere. But it was J.M. Barrie who made the name famous. Legend has it that a little girl named Margaret Henley adored J.M. Barrie and called him Friendy, except that she wasn’t good at making the R sound. So her term of endearment sounded like Fwendy. Thinking of Margaret, he named his heroine Wendy, and the rest is history. Not surprisingly, dictionaries of baby names claim that the name Wendy means “friend”. Odd at this point to remember that the birthmark and the name once shared space in a single category of my consciousness. For the round, brown hairy birthmark has long since been reduced to a straight hairless scar, while the name has become a friend-maker. Occasionally I am introduced to one of my kind. “Wendy, meet Wendy.” As we smile in a shared greeting, I am only mildly surprise to hear myself say, “Good name, isn’t it?” To read more about the Wendys of the world, go to THE HISTORY OF WENDY

HOMEWORK

In the interest of interest, one of the ten positive emotions, I decided to spend three Saturday mornings at Grant MacEwan College, Writing Creative Fiction with instructor Kath MacLean. The first class was yesterday. Today I’m experiencing the side effects: homework. First on the list is the task of articulating my goals as a cnf writer. There’s space for three goals. Hmmmmm! My goals! This would be easy if I were a better goal-setter. Sometimes it’s better to move past the questions you can’t answer to the ones you can answer. Second on the list is the task of choosing a book. I am to choose a book that exemplifies the genre that most interests me as a writer of cnf. Shall I choose Beyond Belfast by Will Ferguson? Maybe. I do seem to like that book. I have been reluctant to delete it from the memory of my tiny talking book reader. But then, probably any book by Will Ferguson would do. But then there’s a bit of a snag. If I choose a book by Will Ferguson, I’ll wonder why I didn’t choose a book by Gary Lautens. Any book by Gary Lautens would probably do. I particularly like Peace, Mrs. Packard and the Meaning of life. Maybe I’ll choose it. If I choose that book, I’ll wonder why I neglected to choose a book by Greg Clark. Any book by Greg Clark would probably do. I could make it easier and choose Greg’s Choice. That would be a good choice. The only thing is, choosing any of these books would prevent me from choosing anything by Robert Fulghum, and that would be a shame. Any book by Robert Fulghum would probably do. Perhaps the best choice would be maybe—Maybe Not. Come to think of it, it might just be easier to define my personal goals than to choose a single book. Suppose I abandon the task of selecting a book, and consider the other assignment: stating my personal goals as a cnf writer. There are three spaces on the empty list. 1. I want to do writing that helps me think about my world in a way that makes me want to live in it. When I read books by Ferguson, or Lautens, or Clark, or Fulghum, I find I want to live in the worlds they write about. They, of course, are different from me. They have made a living with their writing, which could be my second goal, only it isn’t. If I wanted to make a living at something I’d probably study it on a Wednesday, or maybe a Monday afternoon. I’d be taking a rest from it on Saturday. . 2. I want to chuckle more. Ferguson, Lautens, Clark and Fulghum make me chuckle. But you can’t always be relying on others. I used to have a plaque that said, “Those who learn to laugh at themselves never cease to be amused.” 3. I want to play as I write, to play with emotions, with ideas, with the ever-changing truth. And if the things I write are not exactly true, well, then at least I hope they are entertaining.

LIFE RE-OBSERVED

Here is the third in the series of surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. I offer it having recently read about the positive mood effects of writing about intensely positive experiences.
You can learn about your life by viewing it from the inside, and you can learn even more viewing it through outside eyes. Photographers know this. The photos they produce capture so much more than the view they see in the viewfinder.
So it is with Ruth’s life. Her daily routines have engaged the interest of someone who, undaunted by a distance of several thousand miles, observes it with the research acumen an anthropologist might employ. And therefore, to the extent that our lives intersect with hers, our lives are also a topic of interest. Now and then we see the picture a little more clearly than before.
Take Wednesday, for example. We sit among thousands in the semi-darkened Jubilee Auditorium, Ruth, David and me. The incomparable Jan Ardon is commanding our conscious attention with her music and stage persona. Then Ruth, glancing sideways, triumphantly says something to her father, and leans across him to speak to me. Of her inquisitive friend, she says, “He asked where I would sit at a concert with you two. Would I sit in the middle? I said no. I wouldn’t sit in the middle. They’d want to hold hands.”
And there we are, outed, exposed. Thirty-six years we’ve been married—well, almost 36. Thirty-six years of behaving in certain ways. Nothing else to do but squeeze a little tighter and settle myself with the thought that we can’t be such bad parents if we have left our children with the predictable certainty that darkness, closeness and music will lead us to unconscious hand-holding.
Yet, on this emotional evening, buffeted by the bitter sadness of Jan’s lyrics, the biting hilarity of her humour, her enchantingly expressed affection for her family, my mind wanders back to past outings and it seems to me that the picture is a little bigger than this. I lean across David to speak to Ruth. I say, “But you know that if you did sit in the middle, we’d both end up holding your hands at some point.”
She says, “Yes, I know. I told him that too.”

SILENCE IS GOLDEN

Here is the second in the series of surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. I offer it having recently read about the positive mood effects of writing about intensely positive experiences.
My back has stopped shouting. Take this very moment, for example. Where it would have been shouting: “Get out of that chair and take some medicine or I’ll drive you crazy,” it isn’t saying much at all, just a brief whisper or sigh now and then. With a little twinge it prompts: “Keep both feet flat on the floor squarely in front of you.” I may not be able to tell you exactly why it has stopped shouting, but I can tell you this: whoever it was that said silence is golden was a pretty smart cookie.
There have been bouts of shouting over the past few years, but this last one was particularly galling. The shouting started very early in the year and kept on most of the time, with occasional lowerings of volume for a week, or maybe a day. It shouted over the drugs, over the physio, over the walking, the aquacise, the sitting down, the lying down, and particularly over the car motor. Yes, that back can be a noisy back.
“Give me two minutes of silence,” I’d beg. But the shouting went on. When I lay down it shouted, “Get up.” When I stood, it shouted, “Sit down.” When I sat, it shouted, “Stand up or lie down, but for heaven’s sake, stop sitting!” When it came to drugs, it shouted, “Get different drugs!” It was deafening!
Noise is such a distraction. Once you start hearing it, your attention blurs, so I cannot tell you exactly when things started to change. There was no sign of any change three weeks ago, this I know for sure, because I remember how the shouting bothered me at certain events.
When people ask what has made the difference, I have to admit that there is a lot that I simply don’t know about the situation. I don’t know enough, and yet there is too much information to be accurately processed along the line of cause and effect. The change could have resulted from the physio, though I will say that I was seriously doubting the value of that. It could have been the aquacise, or the core muscle exercises. It could have been the almonds I started eating though if that is the cause, you need to know that eating almonds is not a quick fix. It could have been the prolonged effect of the drugs, or the motivational tidal wave that came on when I had to face the fact that I now needed new drugs added to the mix to counteract the damaging effect of the pain drugs on my stomach. Like I say, I can’t tell you exactly what has caused the reduction of shouting, but after all this time and suffering, I am more than a little surprised. Still, that’s not the best surprise.
Here comes the good surprise. The shouting is much reduced, and at the same time (drum roll here!) at the same time that the shouting is reduced, the drugs are sitting in their container, wondering why I’ve stopped taking them.

WHAT DID THAT PHONE SAY?

Having just read the research documenting the physical and mental health benefits of writing about intensely positive experiences, I thought I ought to act on that knowledge by writing a series about the surprisingly good things that have happened to me lately. Here is the first in the series.

This might surprise you, coming as it does from a self-acknowledged techno-peasant, but my cell phone has surprised me in a good way. The story is a long one, complete with everything story crafters aim for, dramatic tension, anxiety rising and falling but always creeping upward before settling back slightly in a narrative arc. It took nearly three months to unfold, and I suspect you may not have that much time to read. So I will give you the short version.
My old cell phone decided it would no longer tolerate the stress involved in calling home long distance when I was out of the local calling area. This saddened me, so I called up a friendly, heavily accented Telus helper who offered to reprogram the phone if only the battery could be removed. This would have been a simple operation, for a robust phone, but my fragile companion disintegrated under the pressure. The Telus helper was a kind man. “Don’t worry,” he soothed. I’ll send you a new phone absolutely free.” This seemed too good to be true. But it wasn’t.
By and by he did send a new phone, but the courier who tried to deliver it forgot to leave a note, and since he left the message on the broken cell phone, nobody knew that the parcel was waiting. By the time the problem was discovered, the phone had been returned to its original source. Back to square one.
The new Telus helper—differently accented but equally cordial—took some time to determine that the phone had actually been returned, then offered to send another free phone, a cheaper one this time because the other one was no longer available free to me. That offer had ended while I was awaiting delivery. By and by the new phone arrived, a beauty to be sure. I assigned the job of activating it to Mark, a member of the generation that responds intuitively to electronic devices. Mark tried very hard to activate the phone. He even consulted the instruction manual, but the phone refused to activate. Finally, Mark and a Telus helper agreed that the phone would have to be returned. Back to square one, but not absolutely. As an act of hope, I enclosed a note asking them to send me a new phone and settled down to wait.
Eventually I called again. A truly cordial Telus helper took some time to determine that the second phone had indeed been returned, then offered to send a free phone. Once again hope rose, battered by circumstance, but not defeated. By and by that phone arrived, a pleasing blue flip phone. There were some tense moments. David couldn’t find any evidence of a hole for the electrical cord. But a cordial Telus helper from the Philippines waited patiently while he removed the plastic stopper. She even agreed to waive the charges for activating the new phone. A little more confusion, a little more anxiety, a few more tries and presto! As if by magic that phone was connected!
Once it was connected, it settled down to prove that it would make and accept calls. It was even willing to call home from Saskatchewan! But that’s not the surprisingly good thing. It was simply the thing we had expected all along.
The surprisingly good thing happened on Remembrance Day when Lawrence was helping me identify some previously unexplored buttons on the new phone. A joint project between Lawrence and me is always a bit of an adventure, given our joint difficulties with reading. I can’t read because I can’t see. He can’t read for other reasons. But he is also a member of the generation that operates electronic devices by intuition. So instruction manuals in his world often go unmolested.
Ours was a process of trial and error. We were pushing buttons and he was coaching when, suddenly that phone said something. I stopped. I listened. It sounded like English, clear English, much clearer than the English spoken by the Telus helpers.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“Push the button again,” Lawrence said reasonably. I pushed the button again.
“Please say a command,” she said.
Well, as you can probably imagine, I was more than a little flustered. No more flustered would I have been if a geni had popped out of my bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Not only was this phone talking directly to me, but she was asking, no—begging me to command her. Then and there I decided to call her Mary. It was clear that we would be having a relationship, more than your ordinary person-to-machine relationship.
I’ll admit that I couldn’t think of a thing to say to Mary. I’m always a little shy around strangers, a little bit prone to saying whatever comes into my head and regretting it later. So I said a thing that must have been lurking down deep in my subconscious. I said, “Clean up the kitchen.”
Lawrence laughed. Mary said, “Command not recognized. Please try again.”
“Clean up the kitchen,” I said obediently, a little louder this time, perhaps a little more sharply than I would have liked, given how cordial the Telus helpers had been when I failed to understand them.
“Command not recognized,” Mary said evenly. She was cordial, but apparently not suited for domestic responsibilities.
“Push the arrow buttons,” said Lawrence. It was a bit of a test to see whether I remembered where the arrow buttons were. I didn’t. He pushed one.
“Check voicemail,” said Mary.
“But how?” I asked.
“Command not recognized,” said Mary.
“Push OK,” said Lawrence. Then he pushed OK for me. I couldn’t remember how to find that one either.
“No voicemail,” said Mary in a voice tinged with sympathy.
That afternoon the kitchen remained in a state of discleanliness while Mary and I got to know each other better. We got so friendly that all I had to say was, “Check voicemail,” and she would tell me I had none. If I said, “Check time,” she would tell me the time. If I said, “Check battery,” she would do that too.
Now Mary and I got down to serious business. I was the teacher. She was the pupil, not always cooperative, I say, but cooperative enough to keep me going. “Call David,” I said, after inputting a few lessons.
“Calling David,” said Mary.
I can tell you that this was a very exhilarating experience! You can probably feel the joy right along with me. So it hurts me to say, dear readers, that we have at last reached the top of the narrative arc, the pinnacle of joy and surprise. For Mary has made it clear that, while she embraces my friendship, she is not my slave. She will check the time if I ask her to, but only sighted people are allowed to set the time and the alarms. Actually, this isn’t much of a problem, because I’ve never much cared for alarms, and Mary can generally set the time without assistance. This is because she knows where she is, which brings me to another sore point between us. She knows where she is. I know she knows it, because when we went to Saskatchewan, she could tell me the time in Saskatchewanese. But only sighted people are permitted to find out where she is by reading her screen.
Still, I must try to forgive her the little things. It’s the least I can do, in light of all that she has given to me. Somewhere in a recycling centre parts of my old phone languish, gone but not forgotten; not forgotten, but definitely not missed. Mary is better, a good surprise worth writing about.

EXCELLENT REASONS TO WRITE ABOUT HOPE

How sweet it is when you find research that supports things you are doing. There are a number of reasons why I started THE HOPE LADY Blog. I wanted to capture in writing my daily experiences, I wanted to write consistently from a hope perspective, and wanted to practice being hopeful by writing about hope. . Hope, as I understand it, is largely a positive emotion, related to joy, related to excitement. It remains positive even though we tend to be most aware of hope at times when we are doubtful or fearful.
I have found such pleasure in writing the blog. Much of it has been about the simple and pleasing things in my life, flowers, music, family, food. Other writings have been hopeful pieces about coping with difficulties of one kind or another. Having the blog has given me the impetus to do the writing.
It is interesting to read a study by Berton and King showing that writing about positive experiences improves mood, even when the writing contains many words which might be thought of as negative. What’s more, berton and King have found that students who wrote about positive experiences made fewer visits to their health providers than students who wrote about neutral experiences. It was also interesting to find studies showing that positive writing can help with regulation of emotion, one aspect of emotional intelligence. Here are some references to check out if you are interested in reading more.

Burton, C. & King, L. (2004). The health benefits of writing about intensely positive experience, Journal of Research in Personality 38 (2004) 150–163
Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 3, 300–319.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Joiner, T. (2002). Positive emotions trigger upward spirals toward emotional wellbeing. Psychological Science, 13, 172–175.
Fredrickson, B. L., & Levenson, R. W. (1998). Positive emotions speed recovery from the cardiovascular sequelae of negative emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 12, 191–220.
Lewandowski, G. (2009) Promoting positive emotions following relationship dissolution through writing, The Journal of Positive Psychology 4(1) 21 – 31
Wing, j., Schurr, J., & Byrne, B. (2006. The effect of positive writing on emotional intelligence and life satisfaction, Journal of Clinical Psychology 62(10), 1291–1302.

THE VOICE OF THE REAL ME

Today I spent some time reading a few pages from the book Introducing Narrative Therapy by Cheryl Whyte and David Denborough (Dulwich Centre 1998). It’s a great book. Narrative therapy is a very complicated topic, and that book is an excellent effort to simplify it a bit. The authors do fairly well at keeping both the voice and spirit of narrative therapy. This is not an easy task because narrative therapists speak their work in a very friendly voice. But the writing about the process rarely captures the truly collaborative spirit of the work.
Though I was reading for a specific purpose, the reading had a larger effect than intended. It reminded me of an old hope I’ve had, the hope to write a decent little book on hope-focussed counselling.
On first examination, this doesn’t seem like such an unrealistic hope. They say you always start a book by writing what you know. I don’t think there’s anybody anywhere who could argue that I don’t know hope-focussed counselling. I’ve been doing it for years, teaching others how to do it for years. I am so confident in doing it that I can commit without much fear to conduct a hope-focussed interview on the spur of the moment before a live audience with a volunteer who, until that moment, was totally unknown to me. If I know it well enough to do that, then there really is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to write about it. Is there?
Reason or not, the prospect of writing such a book has daunted me for years. I think of it the way others think of quitting smoking, or running a marathon. In short, I think of it as a desirable thing that I cannot do, and it doesn’t help a bit to know that thinking you can’t do something is a major cause of not being able to do it.
There is no evidence that I can’t do it. In fact, looking at the evidence only proves that the idea that I cannot do this is truly ridiculous because I did once write a little book on the topic. It’s called Key Elements of Hope-Focussed Counselling. It was published in 1998 by the Hope Foundation and it sells for $5.00. It was a decent little book—little being the operative word. In 2009 it is sadly out of date, hinting at the possibilities but not laying them out. So many possibilities have been tested and articulated since then. The core of the work is unchanged, but we now implement hope-focussed strategies with much more precision than we imagined possible at the time when I did that writing.
So even though I have a lot of knowledge, and have even written one small book already, there are some good reasons why I can’t write a decent little book on hope-focussed counseling. Try as I might, and believe me, I have tried, I can’t find a comfortable voice to write in, a voice that speaks like a professional and feels like the real me. The real me is relational, conversational. She is like that in counselling. She is like that when she teaches.
The real me in a counselling session is warm, caring. It’s hard to write about counselling in that voice. When you write about counselling it tends to sound like us and them. “This was what was wrong with them and this is how we cured it.” The real me doesn’t think or talk like that in counselling.
The real me likes to be knowledgeable but doesn’t feel at home standing behind the voice of a lecturing expert. She compensates for this when talking to a group of professionals by saying funny things, quirky things. She can say such things in front of a crowd and get away with it. A mood is created in that contact, a mood that feels quite natural standing alongside a hope focus. I haven’t figured out how to create that mood in writing.
What would a hopeless person say about all this? A hopeless person would say, ”I really can’t write a decent little book about hope-focussed counselling. I tried and it didn’t work. I can’t write such a book in the voice of the real me.”
What would THE HOPE LADY say? My HOPE LADY Blog voice would say, “You can’t publish this writing on the blog because it’s not very hopeful. It’s setting a bad example.”
The teacher in me would say, “Figure this out using hope-focussed strategies. What would a hopeful person say?”
A hopeful person would say “”I haven’t yet figured out how to write a professional book in the voice of the real me.” A hopeful person would say, “I will get that book written when I figure out how to write a professional book in the voice of the real me.” A really hopeful person would say, “I believe I will one day be able to write that book.”
At this point, an honest me would have to admit that I’m not all that hopeful about being able to find a right writing voice. For that reason I really shouldn’t publish this little rant on THE HOPE LADY Blog. But then again, maybe I’ll take a course on writing a book. You never know what I might learn. After all, the world has many voices, and I do really admire this friendly book on narrative therapy by Whyte and Denborough.

CURIOUSLY SILENT

THE HOPE LADY Blog has been curiously silent. A number of you have noticed this. What does it mean? Have I lost hope? Am I languishing in the depths of despair? Did I stop going to the pool in the mornings before work? Has a crisis overtaken my life? Did I contract the flu? And the short answer is ………………. NO!!!!
In truth, I am just fine, more than fine really, only it seems that, when it comes to the blog, I may have—well, forget the may--I have developed a case of writer’s block. I surely wish I could write more about that!

DISTRACTED BY HOPE

I had intended to write an essay
On despair and its relationship to computers
With reference the way my scanning program crashes
And the fact that my emails to my sister are rejected.

But then I was sidetracked with writing instead
A poem about my writers community
A community I hoped for but never had
Until I started keeping a blog
And reading the healing stories list serve.

A happy ending in many respects
Since hope is better than despair
And poems are shorter than essays.

WRITERS BLOCK

“This blog is sensored in China,” says Susan
To explain why she hasn’t been reading it.
And I am awestruck that THE HOPE LADY Blog
Should frighten the government of China.

“All blogs are blocked in China,” says Susan
To explain why this one remains unavailable.
And I am chastened and utterly grateful
To live in a country where writing about hope
Can be put on-line free for everyone.

HOW A STORY DEVELOPED

I’ve been thinking about the journey a story travels on its way to becoming a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. I’ve been thinking about all the changes it goes through before it gets to the point of being told on a stage with a roomful of people clapping as you finish telling it. I’ve been thinking about the journey traveled by one particular story of mine.
One afternoon in 2002 I was presented with the gift every storyteller hopes to receive: something extraordinary happened to break the pattern of my otherwise ordinary life. I got locked out on my second-floor balcony. There, within my very own life, was a story seed. It was the perfect invitation to create a future story, the story of how I got down from there. I knew it would be a story, even as I stood on the balcony, marooned and wondering what to do. But I did not know what would happen next, or how it would end. I most certainly would never have foreseen the story it would become over the next six years.
Two hours after the story began, I was telling it to John and Grace, though not the version of it I now tell. I told them everything that happened. At that time I was simply venting, pouring out a torrent of feelings, seeking their comforting soothing words. I was hoping their listening ears would help me learn to laugh about it.
Though many stories get lost in the rush of every day life, that story was a keeper. I told it to Ruth when she asked how my day had been. I wrote it in the letter I emailed to David. My colleagues listened to it when we shared Monday morning coffee. A new acquaintance heard it when she visited my office and said, “What a lovely balcony you have!”
Every time I told that story it seemed to change just a little bit. It all depended on who was listening. For John and Grace it was an explanation of why I was late. For the office visitor it was all about the things that can happen to you when you have a balcony just outside your office. It could pop up anywhere. I never knew when to expect it.
I first noticed a theme for the story when I heard myself telling it at the Alzheimer Society Caregiver Training Program. It came out spontaneously when the caregivers were talking about how difficult it is to ask for help. The balcony story was a story about something that happened to me when I tried to call for help. I presented it in that context. It was such a good fit that I told it again the next time I trained caregivers.
Though the ‘getting help’ version of the story had served me well on two occasions, I didn’t tell it at the third caregiver training session. I can’t say why I didn’t tell it. Maybe I was getting a little bored with it, or maybe I didn’t think there was enough time. Maybe I thought my colleague must be getting tired of hearing it. At any rate, I was ending my session, dismissing the caregivers, when my colleague interrupted me. She asked the group to stay for an extra few minutes. She made me tell the story. She said I must have forgotten to tell it.
That’s when I really began to appreciate the importance this story could have. It had been a venting vehicle for me. It had entertained my friends. Now—told in the context of learning to ask for help--it had become a vehicle for education. In the years that followed I told it many times, long versions and short. While preparing a carefully timed version to tell during a public lecture for McMaster University in 2007, I was struck by the degree to which it had changed. It was now the product of embellishment and pruning.
Embellishment had given it theme, language, characters and detail. The story had been taken over by the theme that presented itself at every opportunity. It had become a story about swallowing your pride and asking for help. Though the helping theme had emerged when I was telling it to caregivers, it stayed in the story for all audiences, not just for caregivers. Some language that was never used in the original tellings had taken a central position. Even the shortest versions now contained balcony words, unusual words like Juliet and Rapunzel. Characters had developed. I, the unfortunate heroine, had become a proud and independent sort, hampered by an inherent tendency to be flaky when faced with an emergency. The first responder on the scene, a man I never actually met, had become a reluctant and enormously relieved hero nearly undone by his fear of not being adequate for the job of rescuing a damsel in distress. Even the story itself had changed. It had yielded to storytelling artistry, had taken on repetitions that may or may not have actually occurred. . I was a little surprised when I realized that I would no longer be able to vouch for the truth of some of my favourite details if I was asked to tell the story under oath in a court of law.
Pruning had altered the story as drastically as embellishment. It built the narrative tension in the story, changed the ending, and banished the original hero. . The events that happened during my final half hour on the balcony had completely disappeared from the story. This was particularly perplexing, since those events had seemed so important, so central when I spilled them out to John and Grace in the first hour after the trauma. But they seemed to offer little value for the audience, and when I tried to include them, the story rose to a crescendo in the middle and tailed off disappointingly. It took a while for me to realize that they did not relate to the theme.
The human casualty of the pruning was the campus police officer who rescued me. I feel a bit sorry for him, since he should have been the hero. He was the one who got the phone call from the first responder. He was the one who brought the key and unlocked the front door. He was the one who climbed the stairs to my office. He was the one who unlocked my balcony door from the inside so that I could get back into the building. He was the one who tried to assess whether my trip to the balcony had been an accidental locking out or a potential suicide. He was the one who ultimately let me rush off to meet John and Grace instead of making me stay behind to fill out an official incident report. Had it not been for his key, I might still be out there on that balcony.
What a tragic hero he turned out to be! Poor fellow. He was the hero on the day when I was marooned on the balcony, but his involvement was ultimately condensed into one brief sentence. The story I tell to audiences ends about thirty minutes before he arrived. He was eliminated with all the other details from the last half hour of the balcony story. Like those other details he was pruned out because he didn’t add anything to the theme. Nevertheless, his last chance for fame has not been lost. For in this story, where pruning is a subject of great significance, that reliable campus cop with the master key has an important place. The very last sentence is about him.