Montreal has such wonderful sculptures. I just found this old horoscope...it still applies...Lately Aries you remind me of an oak that's growing sideways out of a hill. You're healthy and strong yet at odds with the more vertical route the other oaks are taking. Personally, I see nothing wrong with this. But then, I've made a career out of going against the grain. if you do want to continue evolving in your current direction, you should probably thicken your bark...I mean, skin. The Guardians of the Way Things Have Always Been Done will be coming around soon to ask you loaded questions.

I am tentatively back...I hope...and I am signing in with my favourite flower...the cosmos!

Alas...I got side-tracked and I lost a month.
Today was delicious...simply delicious...weather wise.
It was humbling in that I had to make appointments with the professionals to prove that I was not excessively aggressive and can see well enough to drive...I am about to hit that age...
My day was made when meeting two wonderful dogs...one of whom was a cross between a Great Dane and a pit bull...and a bit of cow...in colouring and the fact that she loved to eat grass...She had a wonderful head. The other deserves a medal. We have a chihuahua in the community who has attitude. Evidently said chihuahua challenged said dog and said dog peed on said chihuahua...the fact that said chihuahua is owned by a city councillor made the story even more delicious!

Ooops...it happened again...I got side-tracked and a whole month vanished...
Today is delicious and so...
First I had to made a doctor's appointment. Quebec wants proof that I can see and am not excessively aggressive before they give me a driving licence

Today I celebrate Greg, tall and elegant, who named his cat Dog...what more need one say?

I may have already used this sequence and if I have, I'll fix it later. I have a dilemma...a rather fun dilemma but a dilemma. I was involved in the rescue of a wonderful little cat, Charley, declawed on all four paws. He has joined a British lady of 90 who still drives and walks her son's labradoodle daily. The problem is that she has renamed him (operative word) Pixie. He is rather pixie like and evidently she comes from that part of England where pixies are very much a part of the folklore but...how do I tell the cat rescuer who facilitated the rescuer and who is quite literal? The other rather poignant reason why the lady has used the name Pixie is because when she was 11(79 years ago) she and her best friend came down with tuberculosis. She survived; her friend died...and her friend's name was Pixie...so I think I will just avoid the car rescuer's queries. The cat is just very happy to have a lap to curl up on!

The dorky computer kid in the back of the computer is at it again. You don't really want to write here; you want to write there so I will reply with my favourite line, "Whatever."

The flower people in the botanical gardens have really tried hard and I respect their craftsmanship but it doesn't compare to the real thing!

I can just sit and look at a page such as the following and smile and smile and smile and remember how these wonderful dogs loved to lean against one just to ensure their presence!

http://www.fernhill.com/whats-new/january-2011-to-february-2012/

I grew up in an era where there were schools for Protestants and Catholics...my friend attributes her life path to the Sisters of Saint Joseph and the Sisters of Mercy...I don't know whether I would have survived the nuns but they certainly stood her in good stead...and I rather like to say Hail Mary's when I'm in trouble...

I suppose I am overdoing the Chihuly...but it's such a neat name!

On the art of aging:
The thought has crossed my mind that perhaps I should go gray...My hair dresser has promised that once it no longer works, she will tell me. She will line up behind those who have promised to tell me when I should go into assisted living - there's a euphemism!
But I have to confess that I really don't dwell on it and when a voice cries out of the crowd, "Miss Machin?!" I know I have to keep the colour not to look younger but so that students from bygone years will still recognize me!

Today I met a dog named Magoo...I had to look up the reference....There was a comic character named Mr. Magoo who was profoundly near-sighted...This dog, a lovely golden leggy cross between a German Shepherd and a thousand other breeds has been blind since birth...As soon as one spoke, he headed for you! How wonderful that someone took the risk...

I have spent the last two days with two photographers who take their work very seriously and they are very good...I am intimidated...

Yesterday we went to the Botanical Gardens

To day we went to the museum...I rather liked the synchronicity!

My vet is in the process of rescuing a kitten. The family is debating the name. Her daughter wants to call her Ciboulette...which I am rather fond of...her husband is has chosen Dijon...since the kitten is orange..and her six year old son? He is keen on the name Soupe (They are a French family.) ! Why? Because he likes soup. When I left the clinic we were all still laughing but you know what? The name is growing on me!

I sense I may have already posted this Nantucket cat. I took the picture years ago....What I should have taken a picture of was the bush of white snowy egrets that he or she was stalking! But I remember that cat...it may just have been the first time I said to myself, "I think I should get me a cat!"

A thought stolen from Gordon:
Is a stray thought like a stray cat?

Does it just need to be rescued, fed, nurturedand groomed until it becomes your guard?

This blog was intended to catch my stray thoughts. Alas, there are times that when I come here...and I have already forgotten my stray thought!
I still follow animalarium - there is a poignant post on it about the loss of a cat and I thought of Charlotte. She was a gutsy lady. I use the names of my various cats as passwords...sometimes, I forget which one and have to go through a whole litany...but Charlotte is my guard cat - I know the accounts she belongs to.

I would love to be described as having a gift of disruptive wonder. At the moment, all I seem to have is gas.

DID YOU LET IT GO?

Post Script: I like the word, cackle! It diminishes the cackler!
Post Post Script: This is definitely cheating. I haven't been to Chicago in years...but I wouldn't mind going again.
Post Post Post Script: The cackler pretends to be a photographer.
I say: Humph!

I'm trying to get away from posting flowers.

Yesterday, someone cackled at me at Bridge...I'm not good at being cackled at. It's not that I don't cackle at people but mine is a silent inner cackle...I cackle on my blog. I don' think one is supposed to cackle at one's opponent in Bridge. In Monopoly yes...but in Bridge...or Chess...or Scrabble? No, definitely not. I don't know how to cope with cacklers. I want to verbally hit them but I don't think that in certain circles verbal sparring is approved of in Bridge...or Chess...perhaps monopoly... definitely at the beginning of a race track...if one were racing cars.                                                                                 When I was growing up, no siblings cackled at me...I had no siblings...I suppose that is what is meant by only children being spoiled...but I suspect my grandmother would have frowned at cackling and she was the standard by which I operated. Not that she was tolerant. Not that she could not throw a good verbal spar...but...she would not cackle...and she had seven siblings...So my goal this week is to become deadly in Bridge...I won't have to cackle...I'll just...win...if my hands are good! That is what is called Fate...One has to work with the hand one is dealt with!   Now I am cackling!                           

And Gordon!

Rarely do I get the name of the flowers I find save for the obvious...but this one is called Bee Balm...It must have been too windy for the bees!

So I suffer from hubris...of course there are things I can write about...at the moment only me, Julia, and and Sandra are reading them and that's the fun of it. I like to know people who don't know each other...

A thousand years ago I edited a newsletter for a group of teachers. I diligently wrote and sent out newsletters without much input. In fact first bit of input I got was from a Board member to say that I should check my data base since I had sent her two newsletters. It was my first communication from a Board member and I felt an overwhelming freedom. I responded immediately to say that there would be no more problems since I had decided to not continue with the newsletters. She wrote immediately to say: But I enjoyed the newsletters! And I replied: Ah but, that is what you should have said first! I like the newsletter but...
     Teachers have to watch not to turn on the find-out-what's-wrong switch...it is well meaning but it sometimes is destructive!
      That was probably ten years ago.
      Recently, I've been writing the newsletters and doing the mailings for another and very different group. I just received the note to ask if the sender was a member or should she be renewing her subscription. Is it too much of a coincidence that she has the same name as the lady of ten years ago?

Speaking of pretentious...these birds are too far away really...but I just can't not post it. They are Great Egrets (or white herons) two adults and a fledgling...

The picture does not do them justice...

But I will remember them!

Put aside the pansies; put aside the poppies; put aside the bees...this is the week of lilies...

I have so much to write about but I can't because it is sensitive material...

That sounds pretentious...but it is so...delicious gossip that I can't deliver...and so...advice from Joyce Carol Oates on the art of writing.

1.       Don’t try to anticipate an ideal reader – or any reader. He/she might exist – but is reading someone else.

And even more intriguing: The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written.

I am a jealous person - there is no two ways about it - but I can laugh at myself. Yesterday I was in the dentist's office and couldn't help overhearing the conversation in the hygienist's office. One tends to should whilst having one's teeth cleaned. A woman was talking about how she had given up on all those questions that are asked when one wants to create an Internet account...beginning with the password. Suddenly she was inspired and decided that all her passwords would be some variation of horse - yes the word, horse. If she were asked for additional numbers, she would write, horse1 or horse1,2,3
She extended this practice to answering the obligatory privacy questions. What was the name of the first street you lived on? Horse. Who was your best friend in kindergarten? Horse. What is your mother's maiden name? Horse (Why not?) And I metaphorically whacked myself on the side of the head! Just the day before I had been trying to decide if my favourite colour was purple or pink. If I had given the answer, horse...I wouldn't have had to start from scratch! Naturally I would not use the word, horse - that would be cheating!

I'm a bit concerned that I am only inspired in summer when the flowers are out...
Another purpose of the blog is that of saving some good quotes such as the following:

The first thing one must do every morning is swallow a live frog…

And then there are daisies and bees....

With apologies to both the poppies and pansies, I now declare that the lilies are out...and I must be off to Heron Island...

I got this wonderful sentence from someone tonight: 

I bought a draft dodger from Carole and Marcie was the one who made it.

 

At first I thought she bought a car...and then I thought she supported a draft dodger...and then...I finally got it!

There is nothing quite so astonishing as an unopened echanicia...(All my spell check could offer was euthanasia!)

This is just to say: I love my dentist!

Whereas others are having extractions and implants and selling their cats to make the costs, he is just going to fill my crumbling old lady tooth with lava...or at least that is what it sounded like...

My cats can breathe a sigh of relief...

Daisies and pansies...how trite!

He was a man so kind that migrating birds came to rest on his shoulders.
Nancy Richler, The Impostor Bride

I like this book very much. I recommended it to my book club but some who had read it, said it was shallow.
I flinched...
And I have just had a eureka because I thought that Tobin's Brooklyn was shallow. They saw it as a work of art. I saw it as a not so interesting history of my own grandmother's immigration to Canada from Ireland.
And so it may be that those who damned The Impostor Bride see it as shallow, as just a repetition of their own stories in Montreal...
One's own history is much more vital than fiction.
So one ends up debating whether the word is imposter or impostor!
Is it Toibin or Tobin?
And...much to my amusement, when I heard Toibin speak, he delighted me and I will read another book by him...something I swore I would never do!

Post Script:
I almost resisted the pansies!

I must remind myself that just when I think I'm about to become a bag lady and my old lady teeth are crumbling...all I need to do is go out in the early morning and find me a flower to photograph and a dog to pat...and it seems...rather impractically...as if this too will pass!

And yes...it is passing rather well...

I was reminded just now of a quote:
We can't all be heroes. There has to be someone sitting on the curb clapping as we go by!
My hands are getting sore!

A long time ago I stood in a book store, book in hand, waiting to be served whilst four cashiers chatted animatedly about the workshop they had just attended.
The workshop dealt with marketing strategies for small book shops.
I stood there wanting to buy a fifty dollar book whilst they ignored me.
Finally I started to laugh and they looked at me in puzzlement.
I held up the book and said: "I'd like to buy this book, please!"
One of them got the irony and laughed with me.
Yesterday I sat with a group of women none of whom were larger than a size eight and for twenty minutes they discussed dieting and how weight was simple to control.
I have been on every diet imaginable to mankind.
I am very healthy. I am not proud of my weight...but it does not define me. I know for a fact that one of the women in the room is frantically trying to eat...she has difficulties just maintaining her weight since dealing with oral cancer...thanks to an earnest dietitian who said weight was bad, she was 100 pounds before her surgery. I know that another woman has a daughter who fights anorexia. And I know that two other women in the room are wraith-like...
     But what I knew most was that I would have to sit quietly and not say a word. I obviously was not an authority on weight control....
     That having been said, if I had decided to say anything, I would have cautioned all of them that appearance does not define a being...that we all have to work on the inner being...that's what I'm working on! Inner beauty...alas that is in direct conflict with my Irish nature...it is a battle with the yes-but's...
      And of course the great irony is that I have lost close to 20 pounds in this last year and no one notices...but I know...and my doctor knows...and that's what counts...
       I think Chihuly understood inner beauty.

The poppies are out! The poppies are out! For one week they explode then disappear.

So I was part of a James Joyce reading...We rehearsed...and people fluttered...and the signal was given and we began...

And there was silence...the man at the end of the table did not give his line...the whole table looked down in his direction and still he said nothing. He is a very fine actor but I think the fluttering had got to him...I couldn't believe what was happening...Wasn't anyone going to rescue him...and I couldn't bare the silence and the staring. He was a proverbial deer in the headlights. So...I changed voices and read his lines. From then on he was there...
What amused me or puzzled me was I'm not too sure if anyone realized I'd read his lines. There were six other readers. No one looked in my direction...I do not know to this day whether they were approving or censuring! Why did you read his line?
But it took me back to my first day in class at the University of Edinburgh. I arrived late and tucked into the back of the room. The professor asked a question. There was silence...and more silence...as he waited...and finally I could stand it no longer. I gave the three word obvious answer: Man has soul.

All the heads turned and for the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be a foreigner...they were not impressed.

The professor smiled and said: Ah a breath of fresh air from America!

The class sighed.

In Edinburgh such questions are rhetorical.

Three months later one of the students finally spoke to me. What part of the States are you from?
And I laughed and replied: Canada...
I had so many invitations for tea after that....

Went on a guided tour of Giffentown on the only sunny day of the weekend. Found this on the door leading into the now vacated horse stables...the condos are winning out...and was reminded of a book I just bought - Debbie Millman's Look Both Ways - Illustrated Essays on the Intersection of Life and Design...
I have to go back and be more careful with my picture...the words need to be saved and are easier to save than the horses.
And that reminded me of libraries...I don't use libraries even though there is one two blocks up and I work for the volunteers who make money for said library.
I don't use libraries because fifty years ago at McGill, the librarians made it very clear to me that I was an intruder...I caused their books to be disturbed...
That has stayed with me and now between my Kobo and Amazon, I don't need the library...
However I was in the library the other day thanks to a Bloomsday project. On June 16 for 24 hours the text of Ulysses was read around the world.
I was reading with the Montreal readers and we were practicing...and enjoying ourselves thoroughly. Unfortunately we were enjoying ourselves loudly and we did not realize that the room though over a hundred years old was not sound proof.
A desk clerk fluttered into the room and without hesitation began her speech: Don't you know you are in a library? You can't behave like this in a library. You will have to whisper or I will have you removed.
Our average age was 60 (I'm being gracious.) Four of us were retired teachers. All of us were academics. We were horrified and embarrassed. We had no idea. And we apologized immediately.
The librarian was not satisfied and in fact repeated her speech three times.
I would like to think that she was treating us like school children, but in fact I'm afraid she was treating us like senile seniors who didn't understand where we were.
And that's when I realized that whereas fifty years ago I was afraid of what the librarians would say to me, now I was afraid of what I might say to this young woman who didn't have the sensibility to understand that she had made her point the first time around.
     We left and did not return...until the event...we broadcast from the library to a world wide audience.
      That young woman is probably very proud of her achievement. Little does she know - we upstaged her by fifty years!!
   

Ok...almost enough of pansies!

I lost my breath today...fortunately I didn't lose my cool.
Six of us were working on a reading from Ulysses in the Reading Room of the library...we got carried away with the crowd scene...

A young nondescript librarian came into the room and said: This is a library.If you can't whisper, I will have to have to have you removed...
We immediately apologized and explained that we hadn't realized that the room wasn't sound proof. And she repeated her threat. The room is not sound proof. If you do not whisper, I will have you removed. She was speaking to six retired teachers not one of whom had spoken to their respective students in that way ever. She was half our age.
       And I was transported back fifty years the the librarians at McGill who terrified me.
       The reason I was in that library was that the retired director had wooed me in. It had taken her two years. And that two years was shot in two sentences.
        I will stay out of the library not because I am afraid of the librarian but because I am afraid of what I might say to the librarian.

A friend once pointed out to me that all pansies have faces...I should have noticed but I hadn't...I have ever since and I think of my friend and smile.

Actually...this is a particularly grumpy pansy...


I seem to choose quite earnest ones!

So...I'm  back and looking through my notes and trying to figure out if I used this or that or what...but..I've just met his highness...I'm playing bridge...I'm substituting at bridge...and this delightful creature is my hostess's seventeen year old poodle who lies on her lap and snores as we play...I might add that he is a seventeen year old poodle with a $3000 knee replacement - now that's love!

So...a story I found...hopefully not a repeat:
The Little Girl
I was out at a mixed supper...kids and parents.
Suddenly there was one of those howls that is so familiar at such parties. A five-year-old girl had knocked down a little boy. I watched as her mother thundered over and said," Did you say you were sorry?"
The little girl looked up at her, shrugged and said, "He got up didn't he?"
I assume that if he hadn't gotten up, she would have apologized.

Ok ...so I spent my seventy-fourth birthday not figuring out what happened to the 73 years, 364 days before...no...I know what happened to them...I lived them for the most part rather well! Or relatively well.
No I spent my seventy-fourth birthday coming to terms with the fact that for at least the latter part of my life, I hadn't  been standing on my toes when I thought I had...been standing on my toes!
Let me clarify. I knew that couldn't stand on my toes in my running shoes. That was obvious. Running shoes are not malleable. They especially don't bend when they are size elevens.
But I was taking yoga.
Yoga is done in bare feet on a special mat.
I can stand on my toes in bare feet on a special mat...or so I thought.
In my 73 years, 364th day I was in my yoga class.
At the end of the of the class the instructor asked us to stand on our toes.
I stood on my toes.
The yoga instructor looked at me and whispered, "Can you stand on your toes?"
I said, "I am standing on my toes."
She shook her head and said, "Not quite."
I went home and stood on my toes.
She was right.
My heels were  off the floor but my toes weren't up...it was sort of like a bridge.
I have two weeks to practice standing on my toes...
The task is futile.
I have congenitally flat feet.

Could someone please tell me why the cat who is supposed to be eating Vet food shuns it and the cat who used to shun Vet food now can't get enough of it...

...and oh...the shunner will polish off a plate full if he thinks he stealing the shnnee's plate...

Meanwhile the Fancy Feast sits abandoned in the bowl...

My camera is out...the butterflies are back at the botanical gardens...
Yes...I know...that's a moth...
Daylight saving has kicked in and we saw sunlight for the first time in 17 days!

 

 

 

 

 

My camera has been in the drawer for so long but this week it came out and I had forgotten how much I love to play...

I went to see the butterflies!
I got distracted by the leaves...
But...I did finally find my butterflies!