Tornlake

The North Shore

The North Shore of Lake Superior boasts some of the most evocative place names in the country.

Here's a sampling:

Blind River
Serpent River
Batchewana Bay
Sagamok
Thessalon
Whitefish Bay
Terrace Bay
Schreiber
Nipigon
Marathon

I was reminded of this today while wrestling Microsoft Access into submission so I could update our department contacts. Access (or ASS-ess as I now refer to it) is the most frustrating program ever designed. The developers must have been sadists. Why oh why does my 'form' entry never save to the database? What the hell is 'design view' and what good is it to me? Mysteries...

To ease my frustration, I tried to remember what all those lonely towns looked like from the trans-Canada. My family used to drive through them every year in the waning days of August, on our way back from our summer cabin in northern Minnesota.

There was a gas station near Terrace Bay with a blueberry patch beside the tarmac. We'd spend fifteen minutes or so stretching our legs and collecting a yogurt container's worth of berries to snack on till we got to our rest stop - the Watertower Inn in Sault Ste. Marie. Old Woman Bay is one of the most beautiful spots in this province -- a rugged inlet with the face of an old woman carved into the peninsula.

Searching for Infancy

I don't know what to write about.

It's not unusual. I have this problem often. What being in my MFA program has taught me is that, regardless of whether you have anything to say, you must write. PRODUCE! has become my mantra. And surprisingly, after screwing around for a couple paragraphs, I'll come to the thing I really did want to write about -- I just hadn't known it when I sat down to begin.

I spent a few hours with my sister-in-law and three-month-old nephew on Queen West last Friday. It was a joy. How easy it is to forget how wonder-full the world is. Babies remind us.

My nephew is a suburban baby. The street he lives on is serene most of the day, the inhabitants sequestered in their homes or out of town working. So Queen West -- with its constant stream of traffic and people (with piercings!), streetcars and ambulances -- was like sensory overload. His eyes widened at each loud sound. Sometimes he made his own noises in response, like he was carrying on a conversation with this new world.

We had lunch at Terroni's (great pasta - crap portions) and when my sis-in-law went to the bathroom I took my nephew and walked him around the area by our table to settle him. It occurred to me that anyone looking at us could easily assume he was my son. Then I almost passed out. I love him, but I'm glad he's not mine. I can barely afford to feed myself, remember.

Still, there's something about the way a baby can bring things into focus. What is more important than plentiful food, arms to hold you, a good nap and a healthy wonder at the world?

Too bad my nephew can't yet speak, because I think his perception is pure poetry.

Audacity

audacious

adj. 1 Willing to take bold risks. 2 Impudent.

So. The 'audacity of hope' he says. Yeah, I think that's an accurate way of describing it. The way I go around these days, defiantly expecting better from my politicians, my boss, my neighbours and my friends. The way I go around demanding better from myself. It stuns people. The sheer outrageousness of my optimism -- in the face of the CRUMBLING ECONOMY and GLOBAL WARMING and the GAP BETWEEN THE RICH AND THE POOR and WAL-MART, I'm, yes, happy. Hopeful.

I was reading an interview with poet-philosopher Jan Zwicky this morning. She said metaphor is a way of knowing: "that live metaphorical relation in which individual things are themselves and, simultaneously, reflections of the resonant structure of the world - that lived paradox ... is the meaning of what-is."

Maybe it's because I write that I am awed by the metaphor of our existence -- that we are here, on this patch of ground, breathing, as animals, as demi-gods (yeah, that's heavy) -- but I think it's just because I'm paying attention.

Obama is a saviour. He is an unknown threat. He is the embodiment of the work of a generation for the civil rights of black America. He is half white. He is over-reaching. He is introspective. He is possible. He is impossible.

A man can't fix the world. But the imagination he has awakened in so many, and above all the hope (somehow), can. Make connections. Be one and many. See the world in a grain of sand. Pick up a fallen leaf, smell its decay, wipe a spot of dew from its vein, marvel.