The Ghost of Lego Past: an Ode

From whence did you come,

you warrior’s badge of youth?

From which ubiquitous movie tie-in
were you lost?

Star Wars, or Indiana Jones, or Harry Potter
or no… the list will only sadden us.

Let us roll your sharp corners
in our wearied hands,

and remember your usefulness,
and your former glory.

The hours in former times, in which
your simple symmetry kept children,

engaged, quiet, entertained, head-down
and building for hours.

The many, many, many (oh Lego masters,

hear our prayer) hours,

in which we followed your careful instructions:
numbers 1-17, numbers 18-32,

numbers 33-77, numbers 78-130,
sizes and shapes and colours,

to test our failing vision and dexterity,

in your simple creation

(except that 1,000 piece Star Wars cruiser,

which nearly tore us all apart).

Your parts bible which we followed so religiously,

well past the time to turn the turkey,

or mash the potatoes, or set the table,
or make eye contact with other adults,

forgoing that, instead we built with you,
oh Christmas morning parental rite-of-passage.

On our aging knees, after a thorough cleaning,
behind the couch in the basement,

I find you, red rectangular reminder of boyhood
birthdays and sleepovers,

and loud,  endless Lego parties,

from which this pointed, six-holed

piece was thrown, or kicked, or left
somehow, idle in the dark,

separated and not even a second thought
would bring you to mind,

for you were once so common as to be laughable.

How many times did I just vacuum you up?

I admit! The rattle of your brothers and sisters
up the hose was a release, a small act of defiance!

Why would I stoop to collect something

as small and insignificant as you!

Your kind was a curse! A scourge! To be
carefully avoided when barefoot in the dark!

And yet now, after the great Lego purge
of many years gone,

I feel an immediate kinship.

I honour your place in my past,

I feel your heft and your perfection,
remember your snap and trusty grip,

and return you to your dark corner,

beneath the basement couch.

One day I will find you again, decades hence,
and remember the joy there was in your making:

for now, as long as you lie in wait,

my boy is not completely grown.

PD/Nov. 26/2011

Teenagers in my basement

WELCOME! THIS BLOG ROLLS OVER 100,000 VISITS TODAY, FEBRUARY 28, 2019! 

To celebrate, below is my first ever blog post in this space, from August 25, 2011. Today is the day this blog will hit 100,000 views, so it's taken 8 years to achieve that milestone. Thank you to everyone for visiting over the  years! 

Note: my first few posts didn't have images, or links. Wow.

When I reposted it on August 27, 2013, here's the introduction I wrote: I must be feeling nostalgic today. It's the end of summer, I always am at this time of year. So, I went looking through some old blog posts. I found this one, the first post I did, almost exactly two years ago to the day. The books mentioned are published or about to be, and WE have a dog now. But the rest rings truer than ever.

And below is what I wrote on August 25, 2011. My third book, The Gargoyle at the Gates (2012), was about to publish and I was signing the contract for my fourth, The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden (2014). I am currently about to edit my 12th book, Quinn and the Quiet, Quiet (2019). The "teenagers" are now 21 and 24. Time, she flies.

Enjoy Teenagers in my basement:

"It's been a long summer. I'm a writer, and I haven't written. I'm a mother, too, and I haven't mothered. At least, I haven't felt like I have mothered, not in the traditional sense of the word.

No, this summer has been about keeping track of the teenagers in my life, largely by counting how many pairs of gigantic shoes are at the front door. This isn't really mothering, is it? Counting shoes? Keeping track?

I suppose I HAVE mothered in the traditional sense, by buying large quantities of food. And by daily tidying of the teen-pit in the basement, after the bodies who own the shoes have risen, washed and left the building. This usually happens around 1:00 p.m. or so. Never before.

There is little talk in this strange summer of shoe-counting. There is some laundry. There is some food preparation. There are agreed-upon phone-calls and texting and sleeping arrangements. There is allotted money amounts changing hands.

There is a craving from me, to hug someone.

I have been watching other mothers of teens, furtively btw. Some are friends, many are parents I know from the neighbourhood, acquaintances. I'm not seeing a lot of hugging or chatting there either, to be honest. I AM seeing a new crop of puppies though, or the latest batch of rescue dogs (greyhounds are IN IN IN).

September will come. School and writing will resume! I've just signed a new contract with Dundurn Press for my third book, The Gargoyle at the Gates, which will require editing and marketing input from me. My fourth book, The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden, is now with the Acquisitions Editor at the publisher, and that may require a new contract and so forth. With the new month, I'm going to start working on new writing projects I have planned.

But for today, August 25 2011, I'm in that pre-September lull. Still, the teenagers will awake soon, and there are five pairs of shoes at the door."

PD

She's coming home!

September 2012, saying goodbye

Yesterday, I cleaned my daughter's room.
I washed the floors, dusted, moved
all the perfume bottles and wiped underneath them, washed sheets and aired out the bed.
It felt like an important guest was coming to visit.
My daughter is coming home from first year university this weekend. She's been home for visits, lots of them, and stayed a few weeks when classes were light, too.
But she hasn't lived here for ten months. The rhythm in the house has changed without her. I've missed her terribly (being the only girl left in the house), but have gotten used to her not singing in the shower, not playing music in her room, not barging into the house at all hours of the day and night, calling hello.
Cleaning her room yesterday reminded me of what I've missed. We've changed. The three of us left behind are the quiet ones. Of course, she's changed, too. No one cleans her room at school, no one dusts her perfume bottles or airs out her bed. Girls her age call hello back, when she barges into the dorm room. Okay, women her age, call hello back.
After this weekend, our lives will all be different for a while, part of the reality and constant flux of being a family. It''ll probably be a little like bringing her home from the hospital for the first time, or picking her up from a week-long school trip when she was little. It won't last long, but for a little while, we'll have to get used to each other, again.
I can't wait.

Here are a few similar older blog posts that might interest you:
http://phdowding.blogspot.ca/2012/10/first-year-university-then-and-now.html http://phdowding.blogspot.ca/2012/05/musings-from-back-porch-poem.html

A favourite time and place

The author at Wasaga beach

Beach trail

Summer sunset on Georgian Bay

It's been a short summer. It always is. Three weeks until school. So here, in no particular order, are some photos that say we'll live the last three weeks of our short Canadian summer like kings. Or, as Stuart Little said, "Never forget your summertimes, my dears."

'72 Corvette at the cottage

ARCs for The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden!

The ARCs for The Strange Gift of Gwendolyn Golden go out this week!

Coming January 2014

It's pretty exciting to see your book take shape. For the longest time its an idea, then an outline, then a string of chapters, then a manuscript, then a manuscript with a contract. Then a proof. Then another proof. And another proof. Then ... another proof. Then an e-ARC. Then a paper ARC. Eventually (although we're not quite there yet), it's a book. It's a fascinating process, one which is becoming more familiar and more transparent as I go through it a few times.
This time around, my publisher also asked me to provide a note to accompany the ARCs, to discuss my thoughts about the book. How it sprang to life, major themes, what I want people to know. It was an interesting exercise, which really made me express exactly how I feel about the book and the writing process. All good!
Here's a short excerpt from that letter:

When I was young, I used to have vivid dreams of flying. My favourite character in Greek mythology was always Icarus, I understood his yearning to soar, despite the dangers. When I started jotting down ideas for a new book a few years ago, I kept coming back to the idea of a flying girl. I wondered: If you woke up one day with the ability to fly, how would that change you?

Given all the other changes that teenagers face, it didn’t seem a huge leap to add the gift of flight to my main character. It would be just one more change in a huge jumble of hormones and change. And Gwen’s gift DOES change her, although she doesn’t grow wings or anything so obvious. Instead, her gift of flight is a metaphor for all those teenage changes we can’t see...

If you have requested an ARC, I hope you enjoy it. If you'd like one, please contact my publisher, Dundurn Press. There may be a few left! Here's their ARC announcement: http://ow.ly/i/2Apim

That Clothes Thing in the Basement ...

Here's a poem for my 13-year old son.

Machine

It is midnight, and there is a word for

the machine you are trying to describe:

that clothes thing in the basement...

for cleaning stuff...

It is a laundry machine my son,

a tool too long in the making

since it only helped to lessen

the domestic drudgery for women,

not men

had men been in charge of clean clothes,

the laundry machine would have been

invented centuries earlier

the best we came up with was a stone, a board, and a line

not bad, though, for found tools within reach

of the babies and the bean rows

women would get the wind and the sun

to help, it only makes sense

when we’re doing everything else, too

delegation is key

Martha Ballard attended the birthing of 835 babies

(834 live)

sometimes travelling all night on horseback,

between neighbouring farms when
two deliveries were imminent,

falling into icy rivers drying her wet

skirts and wool stockings by the fire,

riding home by daybreak

to plant the peas and rhubarb

the only day of the week that laid her low

was the day she died, which also happened to be a laundry day

You and your adolescent friends

seem awed by this machine,

cranky and well-used, you

intone “Maytag” as though it is a superhero

Yet you all wait patiently
as I explain about permanent press

and whites and spin cycles,

I’m a little awed myself

that you even care

that you need your clothes cleaned

so badly, at this hour, on a Saturday night

I tell you “laundry machine”

then give you the tools to clean your clothes

I leave you to the ancient mysteries of the wash

and you do it, yourselves, as men

First year university, then and now ...

I completed my undergraduate degree in English in the mid-1980s. I did an MA a few years later.

When I started university, my parents handed me an old, second-hand typewriter that had been left at our house by a long-ago visitor. It was made in the mid-60s, of indestructible cast iron. This ancient piece of equipment was sturdy, enormous, and must have weighed over 60 pounds. I kept it under my work desk by my feet, and rolled up my sleeves whenever I needed to hoist it desk-side to use it.

It was electric, barely. When I plugged it in, it warmed to life and shook the table. It needed time to calm down to a gentle, roaring, reliable chug.

It was fantastic. It had a wonderful typeface and never broke. The ribbon was endless. I don't recall ever replacing it, and I used it through four undergraduate years of interminable English essays. It was always the standby for panicked room-mates at 2:00 a.m. when other, lesser typewriters broke down.

Who has a typewriter I can use? Philippa does.

When I started graduate school, a newer typewriter was purchased for me. It had a reversible, back-space correction ribbon (good-bye half dried-out bottles of correction fluid), plus a 25-word memory buffer. It was the newest thing, but I never really liked it as much as my first typewriter. It needed repairs constantly, and zipped through ribbons like candy. I bought them in bulk.

Fast forward to 2012. My own child is now in first year university. We sent her off to school in September with a very reliable PC she'd had for a year. But it might as well have been an ancient typewriter. It was too big to take to class. It didn't fit on the tiny flip-up tables at her seat. It wasn't the same equipment as the teacher was using.

For the first six weeks of her university career, my child used, gasp, a pencil and paper in class to take her notes, just like I did. Positively stone age. She aced all her mid-terms and her course work, no problem. 

This weekend, we acquiesced and she now has a new little sleek machine which she will tote to class and follow along with her teacher's powerpoint notes. I wonder, I really do, how this will affect her retention. There is nothing like pencil and paper and our own handwriting for learning new concepts.

I digress. The real issue here is the impermanence of technology. I wonder how long her sleek little machine will last (despite the three year warranty)? Will it make it through her four undergraduate years? I doubt it, that seems like several lifetimes for a laptop.

I have lost track of my first typewriter, it was sold I think, in a garage sale years ago. But I have no doubt that someone could use it still, reliable and indestructible beast that it was. 

And my daughter's laptop? Landfill-bound, I have no doubt, in three years.

That crazy dress your mother wore...

... a poem for my daughter, when she was 14.

Summer dress

Take one more moment to look back at me.

In this day as I always was, am,
standing in the flowered dress,

bewitcher of butterflies and dragonflies,
my summer aurora,
running as we did from a monster in the
park laughing until we escaped it together,

you could always find me in a crowd
and take a fistful with your thumb in your mouth,
my baby elephant, my tail,

2017: The dress (on me)
and its sister, (on daughter),
which she found at a
second-hand store this summer,
20 years after I found mine.
Same unknown seamstress,
same hand-made label, 
same loud, strangely magical dress.

which you never fail to remind me that you hate,
now that you are 14.

But you will see it.

Me comfortable in a folding chair at the beach,
or beside the soccer pitch,
or walking toward you on the sidewalk,
waiting for you after school and a hard day,
by the kitchen sink in the heat of summer,

smell of house and sound of mowing
making it July, and hot and early evening.

or pulling weeds in a moment of futility,
looking sideways, in the way that memory sneaks up on you
and casts itself forever, indelible,

in another mother walking with her child
in a flowered summer dress,

and you wondering who I was,
and where to find me.

PD

Musings from the back porch: a poem

Found by dog

Blonde ragdoll (just the head)

Plastic beaded bracelet (muddied)

Red plastic beach shovel (no handle)

Pink swim shoe (size 2)

Heinken can (ten years out)

Manky scrub-brush (his favourite thing of all)

Bubble blower (yellow)

Star Wars Death Star model (still in remarkable shape, considering)

Six inch plastic Yoda (spotless, but then, its Yoda)

Beautiful green glass Buddha (strangely the same size and spotlessness as Yoda, wonder if they’ve been communing in universal radiance down there)

Mouldy yard gloves (in the garbage, this instant)

Yellow rubber gloves filled with potato bugs (ditto)

What appears to be the sole of a shoe (ditto ditto)

The blue plastic bottom of an elephant sprinkler (totally forgot how fun that was)

An eyeball bouncey ball (always gave me the creeps, weird to see it again)

A porpoise water gun (from the “no-guns-allowed-in-our-house” phase)

A can so old and soft with time that it must have been there when the house was built in 1912.  (More proof that every home is an evolution)

Delighted by detritus, a junk-pile curator,

these are the layered treasures my young dog has brought me, 

faithfully, each day in his wanderings through the dark, 

hidden places under the back porch.

Resurrected, lined up across the railing, an impressive archaeologist this little dog,
a magician in fact…

…bringing me my daughter in her pink swim shoes, pudgy arms raised to catch bubbles, running through the elephant sprinkler, 

her brother patiently waiting to be born

and me there too, somewhere, 

almost forgetting to remember.

Magenta rocks the stage

Magenta, centre

It is opening night of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. My 17-year-old is Magenta, one of the main performers, and I couldn't be more excited for her.

It is opening night of her last performance in high school, and she has worked so hard to get here. 

Here is my first blog entry about Magenta: 

Magenta gets that floating feeling

Who knows what the world will be like for her next year? She starts university in the fall. Will she have the time and opportunity to tread the boards again one day? Will her father and younger brother and I ever sit in the audience, watching our talented family member sing, dance and steal the show again (in our hearts, anyway)?

I don't know. I do know that for tonight at least, the world will be a perfect and beautiful place. And Magenta, that strange french-maid alien in fishnets, will own it all.

Truth and beauty: what a mother knows ...

Derivative

I walk behind,

they ahead,

laughing and insouciant,

too loud on lithe, lovely legs

The girl striking, green eyes

and thick wavy hair,

who also happens to be a genius

with low self-esteem

(and strange fingers due to fever,

once you hold them and stroke them,

you realize how short they are,

and crooked

and unfortunately sweaty)

but they work so well with

type, and charm birds with a clarinet

The blue-eyed boy a swaggerer

or maybe it’s just the age—13—

and broad, so very broad,

those shoulders

(so broad that they were stuck

at birth, and one collarbone

was snapped, like a twig,

to remove him)

but great for batting practice

or hauling wood

or establishing dominance

among the other bull calves

These are mine I want to say,

as they cut a swath through the mall.

But they are not mine.

They belong to each other,

and to whomever is beguiled

by their crooked fingers and green eyes,

broken bones at birth, and blue eyes,

warped, mended, derivative

flawed, and so beautiful


PD/Nov 2/2011

Magenta gets that floating feeling

My 17-year-old daughter, let’s call her Kay, came home from her first day of grade twelve with the best news: she got a major part in this year’s high school drama production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show!!

Big news indeed.

Considering that this girl has a fine, clear, sweet voice. Considering that this girl rocked the six main voices in “Goodbye, Blue Sky” in grade nine for the school production of Pink Floyd’s The Wall.

Considering that she had a headpiece and mic in the grade ten production of Thirteen (a dreadful musical that no high school student should ever have to endure).

And also considering that she had a terrible, terrible year in grade ten, because of an awful boy. A boyfriend gone sour, gone awful, gone bad, bad, bad as a boy can get.

And because of this terrible boyfriend, her marks dropped. Her friends vanished (except for the true blue few). Her teachers all gave up on her.

And she got a rotten non-singing part in her grade eleven production of Cabaret, because none of the teachers thought she would turn up for rehearsal, or learn her part, or pay attention (all true the year before because of the Very Bad Boyfriend, who from now on shall be referred to as the VBBF).

Imagine. A non-singing part in C-A-B-A-R-E-T!!

So this year she picked herself up, dusted herself off, and started all over. She learned a fantastic song and a hilarious, pouty monologue, which she nailed in her rehearsal last spring. She was willing to face whatever came, another crap part, even if it was her last year in high school, her last year doing the musical, her last year waiting for a lead role…

…and today she found out that she got one!

Her teachers (bless them) see what I see, a great girl who had a rough year in grade ten with the VBBF, and who deserves another chance at a bigger role. She came into the house tonight bursting with her news:

I GOT MAGENTA! I GOT MAGENTA! I GOT MAGENTA!

(It’s a main part in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, for those of you whose viewing of said movie is so long ago, it is now a misty memory, or perhaps for those of you who somehow made it through high school and years of Halloween without seeing it!)

And we danced around together! We linked arms and danced around the living room, me just loving the joy on her face, and the excited race of her voice. It was just like she was six again.

She stopped dancing, and she said all out-of-breath, “Wow, what is this I’m feeling, mom?”

“It’s called happiness, Kay. Remember that? You don’t get to feel pure joy too often in life, just go with it. Float on it as long as you want.”

Then we danced some more. And I have to say, her joy was infectious: it was pretty easy to float right along with her.

It was just like she took her first step, or rode her bike for the first time, or lost a tooth, or got an “A”. I realized something important tonight: the milestones get fewer and further between when they reach their teens, but they get bigger, too.

And they still need you to dance along with them, and you never forget how.

For more on Magenta: Magenta rocks the stage