I’m on a clear-the-decks kick, which usually means that I start with the bookcases, get bogged down dipping again into the candidates for a purge, and…well, you know….  I keep trying, for example, to ditch Mordicai Richler Was Here (a collection of excerpts) but it keeps sneaking back to the coffee table, where I suppose I set it down when laughing hurts my stomach.

Beside Richler sits Dropped Threads — also a collection, edited by Carol Shields and June Callwood,  this time of women’s reflections about the surprises that life dishes out.  “Old Age’’ (Callwood’s contribution) is my favourite.   Physical appearance gets barely more than a nod — “In my mind’s eye I look the way I did for most of my life, with a face and body neither so beautiful nor so ugly as to require upkeep;” which is exactly the way I feel, though she too made me laugh out loud:   “One morning our granddaughter, age seven, was watching me dress.  ‘Oh, I see,’ she said pensively.  ‘When you’re old your nipples point down.”

Made you look.

Other than the obvious, Callwood is struck by how little we actually change:  ”Those of us, notably me, born under the celestial sign of impetuosity are still reacting just a microsecond ahead of thought.”  Sounds familiar.  She claims, moreover,  to have acquired in seven and a half decades only two pieces of wisdom (both of which I also agree with, by the way).  The first is that you “can’t fix anyone.”  No argument there.   More importantly, she also realizes that “if…I interfere when something isn’t fair — even if I screw up the intervention,  even if it doesn’t succeed”, she will feel less guilty “than if I decide injustice isn’t my business and pass by.  This is described, by people who haven’t given it a try, as meddling.  I prefer to think of it as character building.”  What a delight June Callwood was — funny and wise;  aren’t we lucky to have known her, if only at a distance.

I also miss Carol Shields, though her writing remains inspirational:
(I)n the calmer, cooler evenings…the phrase tempus fugit would return to me, beating at the back of my brain and reminding me that time was rushing by.  I was spooked, frightened by what this meant.  And then, quite suddenly, I realized it meant nothing.  Tempus did not fugit.  In a long and healthy life, which is what most of us have, there is plenty of time.  (…) Shallow time and fallow time.  There is time in which we are politically involved and other times when we are wilfully unengaged.  We will have good years and bad years, and there will be time for both.  Every moment will not be filled with accomplishment;  we would explode is we tied ourselves to such a region.  Time was not our enemy if we kept it on a loose string, allowing for rest, emptiness, reassessment, art and love,  This was not a mountain we were climbing;  it was closer to  being a novel with a series of chapters.
I needed that reminder this week, if only because sorting “stuff, while motivated by a desire for a simpler future, always toggles me back into the memories of a crazy-busy past.   This weekend in particular, everything reminds me of a dear friend -- a historian whose well-researched and fair-minded texts influenced a generation of Canadian History students.  Ron, who has been part of my life for half a century, died on Friday.  Rest in peace, old friend.      

Ron habitually involved himself in the democratic process and I have been thinking a lot about that because it’s election season again.  Like it or not,  our votes constitute a choice of futures and the torch is in our hands. So here we all sit together in the eternal now, the only time we ever truly have, suspended between past and future while doing our best to keep the present on a loose string.  Let’s practise thanksgiving every day without forgetting on October 19 that young people also deserve plenty of that commodity.








This watercolour is of my mother on her 80th birthday.   I still miss that laugh.  

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The Finale of Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy is beginning its fifth hour of repeating in my brain so I finally faced down the ear-worm and  found it on Youtube.  Might as well familiarize myself with the rest of the piece, although I seem to be wed to the last ten minutes.   It has been one of those lovely solitary days, with time to think or even stop thinking and let my mind follow its own lead.  Being alone for an extended period is the perfect incubator.    About being Scottish, it turned out.

Blame Bruch.  He might have not have been Scottish, but he captured the sense of that nation by doing something inventive.  While as a young pianist I loved baroque “ornamentation,”  and the “turn” in particular, it never occurred to me that a classical composer could use one to evoke swirling bagpipes played by kilted warriors marching into battle.    although the Scottish Fantasy was composed in 1880, it foreshadows  the Balkan Campaign of 1916, where the 10th Battalion of the Black Watch  won the nickname   “Ladies from hell” ("Die Damen aus der Hölle") as a back-handed tribute to their kilts, their pipes, and their fighting qualities.    Whether or not you are a Scot, you want to be, when Bruch is finished with you.

As it happens, I AM a Scot!  Or at least three-quarters of me, if you can overlook the century and a half we’ve been in Canada.  But looking back, I realize that I have consistently demonstrated my weakness for things Scottish — Sean Connery, shortbread, Skye terriers, good woollens,  warehouse sales, red squirrels, formal dances with dates in dress kilts, cool summers, Jamie Fraser, peaty scotch, my two boon companions and best of all, a Scottish brogue.

So I'm entitled to think about Sean Connery, all right? His looks are okay but it’s his voice that slays me.  I have been trying, without success, to download it onto our GPS, who has earned the name “Dim Bulb” for evident reasons.   Sean would be unable to guarantee any more than Dim Bulb that I  "have arrived at (my) destination,”  but this time I might not care.  The only occasion when I literally had too much of him was when the only seats for Dr. No were in the front row and his chest was thirty feet across.  So I closed my eyes and just listened, mercifully released from the sight of Ursula Andress’s monstrous cleavage.

If you too love Scottish burrs, there’s Scott MacKenzie, the famous flyfisher who does master-class videos about spey casting, the double-handed method of presenting the fly. Or Davie McPhail, who ties magnificent salmon flies on line.  I treat them both as podcasts and can practically hear my blood pressure dropping.  I still regret that I’ve lost the brogue that a year with my Scottish exchange teacher in Grade Two  bestowed.  Thank heavens for Outlander, although I do keep an eye as well as an ear on Jamie.

Finally, there is the "Heavenly Breed," though the fierceness of Skyes has also won them the respectful ​moniker “Land Sharks."  I knew that Jewell and Theodore  are direct descendants of an ancient breed, but recently discovered that cairns and Scotties branched off from Skye terriers only within the last century.  Skyes cover all the bases - comic-looking ("designed by a committee") but elegant;  tough-minded (aka STUBBORN)  but snuggly;  prone to bizarre phobias (Theodore turning to jelly around any one of the bikes in Jon's stable) yet brave ( confronting a large coyote);  dim (see "brave") but exquisitely affectionate and loyal.   Not to gild the lily but I like to think that Theodore’s thinking voice is appropriately burry like Sean's, Scott's and Davie's.  Maintaining this fiction is made a heck of a lot more difficult when he cries like a girl after an hour’s separation.  Still, one tries.

The weather this week is autumnally blue-sky cool so today I am pretending to be in the Highlands  -- feeling the urge to break out the woollens and the shortbread, and to go to the back garden to locate a red squirrel with whom to exchange insults.  All the while, I'm gratefully aware of doing this in Canada, where Boris Johnson is mercifully irrelevant.  So, channelling Kennedy's  "Ich bin ein Berliner" and Alex P. Keaton's hilarious "Today I am a woman,"  today I am a Scot -- albeit one who hasn't been home for a LONG time.  

Maria Popova observes that “most of all, we read to become selves. The wondrous gift of reading is that books can become both the life-raft to keep us from drowning and the very water that sculpts the riverbed of our lives, bending it this direction or that, traversing great distances and tessellated territories of being, chiseling through even the hardest rock.”  Brain pickings, 08/19

While I might not have been in danger of drowning this week, the new novel by Julie Orringer chiseled its way into me.  The Flight Portfolio is nominally based on the true story of the American, Varian Fry, who distinguished himself during WWII by setting up an American rescue mission in Bordeaux to smuggle to safety the great Jewish minds of Europe:  “Chagall, painting in his house at Gordes, was an irreplaceable treasure. (...)They had to matter more than others, those men and women; they had to be brighter manifestations of light."  The plot hurtles forward, as Fry races the clock.

He does succeed in saving thousands of Jews from certain death.  In fact, Fry was, like Oskar  Schindler, posthumously named  “Righteous among Gentiles.”  Thanks to him,  not only artists like Chagall but philosophers like Hannah Arendt and writers like Max Ernst, survived to further enrich Western culture.

It should be said that part of this novel invented --  in particular, a memorable character who is the vehicle for a moving love story.  (The author’s Afterword advances an argument to justify such a character.)  This character's presence only deepens the theme of consciously choosing the precipice of action over comfortable complacency:
If we could pin down the moments when our lives bifurcate into before and after—if we could pause the progression of milliseconds, catch ourselves at the point before we slip over the precipice—if we could choose to remain suspended in time-amber, our lives intact, our hearts unbroken, our foreheads unlined, our nights full of undisturbed sleep—would we slip, or would we choose the amber?  

​This novel is about the precipice.

The American Rescue Mission that Fry founded is profoundly inspiring, but what really elevates this novel is the richness of its prose.     Objects take on deeper meanings:  A wind at sea describes a tense moment in a sailboat:  “The air had become taut between them, snapped into a sharp transmitter of movement and respiration.”   Later, warily  in public, Fry notices someone holding “a wicker cage on her lap, inside of which lay the shadowy form of a doomed rabbit.”  He descends a staircase “that spilled from the station like a cubist waterfall.”  I particularly loved the description of Chagall’s atelier as containing work “in its pupal state, damp and mutable, smelling of turpentine, raw wood, wet clay.”  Yup.  
 
Throughout, the sparks of human intelligence drive the novel.  When a great writer commits suicide out of despair, Fry mourns his death in both mechanistic and spiritual terms:
the drug had gone to work, shutting down the intricate machinery of the body, breaking its fine linkages, silencing its humming wires, dimming the electric light of the brain until it went dark. That beautiful brain ceasing to send its beacon out into the night.

Fry and Orringer both believe that "Artists save lives. So do outspoken champions of democracy. And journalists."  I heartily recommend The Flight Portfolio and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.  I read a library version but plan to buy the novel.  Let me know if you would like to borrow it.  z