I knit that afghan.  My mother, who is photographed sleeping under it, started it with aran weight wool that I had given her (so she could knit me a sweater), but abandoned it after twenty rows because her hands hurt.  She had already knit a similar throw with acrylic, desirable for its resilience to domestic machinery and impudence, but less desirable to me for its fake feel and no smell.  It is amazing to me that I actually finished such a big project.  I only had to think every tenth row when I twisted the braid.  It took about 13,000 stitches, mindlessly stroked and wrapped over seven seasons of "24", watched in two and three hour stretches deep into a season of winter nights.  

Scott Kneeland was the Principal of Roslyn Elementary School, a tall commanding old school presence with a  deep voice that wielded the strap on unruly fighting boys (and the occasional girl), walked the main corridors when we were marched to our class in the morning, sternly addressed our weekly assemblies and sang a bass growl to  God Save the Queen.  Miss Springer, disapprover of working moms, my grade one teacher, sent me to Mr. Kneeland weekly, where he would browse through my scribbler and sign the occasional page.  Later, when my mother asked me about the signatures I told her I did it.  Mr. Kneeland might have mentioned that I was with him because Miss Springer said I never finished anything, but he was so gentle about it.   I was afraid of being strapped.  He must of known that because he just told me to try a little harder.  

When I toured the end of school art gallery with my mother looking for one of my paintings to show her, my art teacher told her nothing was there because I never finished anything.   I was deeply ashamed.  I'd like to ask that teacher today what constitutes finished for a six year old with a wide imagination and a bouncing enthusiasm.   That was the system I was in, that was the stick I was prodded with, worse than some, better than others.

Some fifty years later I'm still trying to harness that steel focus on completion, for my own efforts.  I never had a problem with applying myself (where it counted) at work.  Maybe it was that elixir of fear and money that meant I could sit down to endless hours of focused thinking to build the spreadsheet / budget / financial statements, to stand on the set at four in the morning at the end of a sixteen hour day in a cold November rain that numbed my hips and knees, to get it in the can, to hear them call wrap.

When my embarrassed and minimalist friends looked away from piles of half finished projects and mountains of materials piled and stashed in every corner of my house or apartment, I justified myself by thinking that it was harmless entertainment, and that I finished the important things.  I got the job done.  Each working day could be measured by footage, each week by reporting, and each show by a door closed behind me on an empty stage or office.  Now in this new phase of life, without apparent boundaries, I'm weighed down by the volume of stuff, by the open ended undoneness of everything.  A low grade depression aches my brain, and I just want to nap.   Miss Springer is sneering at me.  The art teacher is paying attention to the prettier kids.  Mr. Kneeland is holding my hand, telling me to try a little harder.  Just for today.

Inappropriate

I went to my book club last night.  We, and i hesitate to call us a "we", because I'm an infrequent visitor who mostly lurks on the virtual periphery checking out the reading lists, are a small group.  We call ourselves Phoenix, rising from the ashes of disbanded and disgarded book clubs.  Kay and I started it after her bookclub faded away, and mine exploded in a spectacular and emotional display of ferocious literary opinion and vicious disagreement.  As I punched the hostess who was hanging off my car as I tried to backup the drive-way, I effectively ended what had been an ongoing two year cat fight between all of us. About books, fueled by jealousies and  judgements and I don't know what.
Kay died shortly after we started this bookclub, and my job soon after had evolved into a fifteen hour stamina challenge on film sets that meant i never went to meetings.  Work or sleep, pick one.
I'm the youngest of this incredibly accomplished group of women.  I've seen them at the peak of their careers, and moving into retirement with enthusiasm and grace.  If they've had any identity crises about this change in their life I haven't seen it.  They speak thoughtfully.  They measure words.  I've only been able to glean their backgrounds from passing commentary, and they have that humility that doesn't sing and gloat their glories like the film hacks i know.  Forensic psychiatrist, judges, lawyers, college administrators, teachers, provincial government bureacrats, CFOs,  I think.  They take fabulous world trips.  They remind me of my aunt Nicole in the way they prepare and digest the experience; journals, expeditions, well researched sidetrips, the unique places they stay and people they talk to.
Last night the author of our book came to the meeting, being a friend of one of the members.  He was an established journalist, who is now teaching at Ryerson, and wrote this book while employed full-time.  I liked seeing and hearing the voice behind the voice and getting more story on the story. Knowing more of him, and how he got from there to being a published author, was satisfying.  As I contemplate the same pile of laundry week in week out, I'm entirely amazed and awed by the hundred steps and prayers on your knees it takes to move from idea to bound book.  And rather than feeling overwhelmed by it I'm empowered that I might spend fifteen years writing and actually finish something.  I have no illusions about being published, but I do wonder what the effect of time and concerted effort would produce for my "writing", blog or family memoir, such as it is.
As I battle my intellectual lazieness, trying to overcome my guilt for not multi-tasking a one hundred semi-finished bitty tasks, I am not a measured speaker.  I blurt.  I spurt.  I hide in corners, catatonic and grey, and a month later burst forth staccato opinions, ambiguous, generalized, trite.  I think i did that last night.  It's an old script, being the youngest of a very smart group of people, and not measuring up intellectually, but putting my body of passion on display with outrageousness and inappropriate conversation.  I shouldn't have talked titties.  I should have shutup.  Sorry.  But score, that I didn't punch anyone.

I'm no longer a hospital virgin, having undergone my first real procedure in a hospital since i was born.  I did have two stitches to close a cut on my forehead that i sustained from diving head first into a metal bed frame when i was two years old (back in the days when bed springs meant something).  i walked into the OR, a bit disappointed because everyone else in the prep area had been wheeled in.  "Have I missed the Party?", was the best I could come up with.  Just a bunch of bright eyed hospital gowned guys and gals hanging around a very cold room.   a couple of introductions.  i was trying to be as hip at this cocktail at this party as i could be, striking a nice balance between interested, not too gushy, one of them, please don't hurt my feelings or my body.  I hopped up on the table, to some hoo-hawing fanfare that they have to help everyone else up.  I guess any show of enthusiasm for their work is lauded.  They wrapped me with a warm blanket.  i said something about "better than a spa".  This mistress of potions and her resident helper who was way too handsome to be an Igor, smacked my hand for a vein to pop, and put an IV in, an oxygen mask over my face.  I told Dr Yudin to not fuck it up, chortle chortle, my knees went weak like the best drink in the world, wait for the burning, here comes all the burning down my vein highways like i'm strung up for lethal injection, oh fuck,

an annoying fly of a woman keeps coming in and out on me.  is she talking to me.  shutup.  oh i feel sick.  i'm slurring my words.  my eyes won't open.  i'm going to puke.  oh i'm really sick.  she's going to throw up, quick, she's going to throw up. blech.  what did i have in my stomach?  yudin talking. moving, being wheeled.  look over, there's clive, warm and golden brown and plump full of life in this gaudy hard light.  ice chips. i forgot they were there. dressing my body, slow and thick.  more wheeling.  clive driving with a fan blowing hot air.  open the window. get a breeze.  looking over at me, and racing up to stopped vehicles the words can't get out of me fast enough so i hit him. brake.

i'm going to throw up. home.  edgar big and strong, moving around too fast for me to catch him. i take his place on the couch.  nina comes, bringing food.  one forkful and i lie back. still can't keep my eyes open.  water.  i'm going to be sick.  phone ringing.  bed. go to bed.  edgar follows, lies close.  gone, dreaming about about highly painted cruise ships speeding through rice paddies at night.

and then i woke up.

A coyote ran down the centre of the street yesterday at noon. It loped quickly, streaking fawn brown gray past the three oblivious sets of fannies bent over flower beds across the street from me. There is a ravine on the curve of my crescent, a deep dark green wet and steep buffer to the trestle for the commuter trains blasting through to the eastern suburbs. That is where a pair of coyotes live, in a den burrowed into the hill under a deck jutting out into the high cover of tall trees. Small cats go missing around here all the time. The Neville coyote down by the beach has been known to hop a fence, and jump back just as quickly, mouth stuffed with a squealing miniature dog. Scat. What mourning pet owners go looking for in the ravines, when Percy or Tims doesn't come back the next morning or the next week. Poking pooh with sticks. Clive used to take hector, our big bad black cat, to the ravine where he could be a panther, slick shiny black and stealthy through the ferns. I stopped walking Edgar through the ravine when we came upon the body of a newly dead raccoon, not begun to fall back to rot with fluttering crawlies. Just asleep on a bed of fall leaves. I didn't want to see him disintegrate. This morning when we were walking back to the car, up a wide avenue running from the beach flanked with taupe arts&crafts verandas, a posse of three dogs raced up the street. A vaguely coyote-Akita mix chased two Australian sheep dogs in sweeping curves over lawns sidewalk and street all the way to queen street. Follow the mummies and daddies cooing their precocious charges back to their leashes.

It's a long holiday weekend.  Edgar and I are installed on the front veranda in the shade, dozing to the sounds of industrious neighbours madly scrambling away at dirt and plants in hot sun.  Obviously to the (NDG) manor born, I'm more suited to a long cool drink, crushed white linen, a snoring dog at my feet.  My street has a sound of whooping kids and chatting neighbours like the street I lived my first eleven years on, in Notre-Dame-de-Grace in Montreal, stacked with the Lambert duplexes which were built at the same time as these east end semi-detached two storey houses were.  Same trim, floors and doors, same narrow little rooms, same burnt wood and paper smell when the doors and windows have been opened on the first hot day.  Plus ca change....  I don't remember neighbours like me, single women with big pooches.  Everyone was in some stage of family evolution or devolution, breeding, raising, booting from the nest or baby-sitting grandchildren.  We had no backyards, so we played on the street, swang off pipe balustrades like gymnasts, called off hide and seek, and tag, bounced balls  against brick walls between the houses in narrow little driveways to the back alley that were paved, and roamed the in-between green between Vendome and Marlowe where a grove of weedy trees could hide forts that we built without Dads or adults of any kind.  Public play was on the street, private play was under the balconies and verandas, and in the back gravel alley that ran the length of the block.  At night on my way home from a hard day's play, I could hear the neighbours at their kitchen tables eating their dinner, the noise of plates and pots, small conversation, scrapping and washing up.  I'm comfortable with this moderate cheek to jowl existence, hearing my neighbours, seeing parents run after their kids, Edgar's friends partaking of the yellow fire hydrant on our front lawn, cocktail hour two houses down.  For the most part I'd rather be sitting on the front stoop or porch, than insulated behind the high walls of my back yard.  On a long weekend, with my boy, knitting, drinking tall glasses of fuzzy water, exhaling.

I was the pale cream moon legs poking out from the deep shade of the thatched beach umbrella.  Knitting in humid heat that was only relieved by sea breeeze.  So humid that the chart paper flopped over, and that the Hebridean yarn which was born in North Sea cold and raw, flushed and plumped in dripping tropical heat.

Edgar ate my knitting needles

Edgar was advised in no uncertain terms when he came to live here that to touch the knitting was to make his mumma unhappy. We know if mumma isn't happy, no one's happy.  The day came when I came home after work, doing my post work home inspection of what mischief (i don't know, is eating kitchen cabinetry mischief?) a galloping 140lb year old bullmastiff can get up to when he's left a lone for a couple of hours.  He has been a master shredder of assorted papers, but he had never touched a textile.  Until the day I came home and found my knitting had been disturbed.  Deep intake of breath.  Gingerly picking up the remains.  The knitting, of a gray boring brioche note, was untouched.  The lovely additurbo needles however were crunched.  Good boy.  This boy likes sharp implements.  One night recently when we were getting ready for bed, he bounded up onto the covers with an ahoy matey tilt to his head and a flash of silver in his mouth.  Ack.  I had been finding bits of blue plastic around the house, but now I found the source of the plastic, a wonderful henkel paring knife.

I think I like him better when he shreds

Evolution

In the fall of 2010 I danced my little heart out, performing in Shagara Moon's THE RED SCARF.  I rehearsed and sewed and ferried people and bits about for a couple of months between paying gigs as a television production manager.  It culminated in four performances over one weekend, at a University of Toronto theatre.  A total high.  A total relief to have done.  A total awareness that I am an introvert, and performing for anymore than three people is a stressor.
A couple of other things happened too.  I expended my physical resources, which made me really sick in 2011.  Girl issues, iron deficiencies, nothing drastic.  I just couldn't walk a block without stopping three times to catch my breath.  Only in 2012 am I finally regaining stamina, but after not dancing for what is now close to eighteen months, parts of my body have almost rusted stiff and away from non-use.  Originally because I was home on modified puppy maternity leave I had been able to give my attention to this endeavour.  It's been a long slog to move from enthusiasm for a fabulous career and being well compensated for lending my skills, to hoarding my best energies for me.  My resulting boredom in negotiating kit rentals and lunch receipts for entitled film technicians and walking a tightrope of controlled chaos  reached its zenith in the spring of 2012.  So i quit.  Not really quit quit walk out the door, but I called uncle.  This disturbed the well established order of my working relationships, in particular with the producer I had worked for for over 20 years.
I had to face the loss of a good working relationship and a good job, by taking a peon job across the hall as an accounting clerk.  Another quasi police show being produced by an American network with money.   In the eyes of my old colleagues they probably think I slutted out to the evil empire.  But  the experiences has been good.  I've  mostly laughed my pants off so hard everyday I peed.   That felt good.   I've refocused what I can give and what I would like to do, and what I want to be paid for it.  And it only took five months to figure it out.
So now, waiting on my next job,  I'm back in the basement, the basement I so desperately tried to avoid 14 years ago.  I'm with large dog, knitting needles, fabrics and sewing machines, and a handsome apple iMac.  I follow my selection of lifestyle porn blogs, now emboldened to share my own visual aesthetic.  I've thought of starting a "journal" blog, a food blog, a quilt blog,  a bullmastiff blog, but I think I'll stay with bellydance knitter.  There is something disturbing to me where one's life and interests are compartmentalized.  Where knitting Turkish stockings leaves off, collecting Persian rugs begins, and where sitting on a rug ends with a meal adapted from Paula Wolfert's writing, discussing Edith Wharton and where the Arab Spring meets Occupy Toronto, and my family's well trod path through alcoholism and addiction to wellness and healing, and wholeness.  Not wanting to be too scary here, but the blog is a package deal I think, what I would share with a stranger in a coffee shop, or co-workers by the monitor.  Maybe I'm too open a book, too shallow, too concerned with pretty colours and nice flavours, too messy, too much rage, too much dog hair.  et bien.

So writing on the bellydance knitter blog continues.