The New Yorker Comes Too Fast

...Betty swings from the limb of a tree...

I can’t keep up my reading with the pace that The New Yorker drops through my mailbox. 

So I have a set of them, now clipped together with a wing-clip, and whenever I get a spare ten minutes I sit down to the delicious prose of the articles. 

 Bonnie had some time to read and asked me which of the magazines she should start with. 

 I thought the answer would be the latest one, otherwise she might feel the anxiety I feel about trying to catch up by starting back in May or June. 

... Betty plants her foot on the bole of a tree ...

 Later in the day I asked her if she was going to recommend the article she was reading: “Motherland” by Jiayang Fan. 

 “Nope,” she said. “Too painful.” 

 Later in the day she took back her no recommendation and said that some of the reading pain was lifted by the end of the article. Yes, I should read it. 

Bonnie, knowing I hadn’t read the article, went on to talk about our shared experience for three weeks in China and how her feelings about that experience were weaving in and out of the pages as she read Jiayang Fan’s prose. 

 I love living in a house where someone is reading the same book or magazine that I am reading. I stayed up late into the night, reading both the “Motherland” article and a few more essays – ready for the conversation to begin with her in the morning. 

 I read with a pen in my hand, lately, circling words I don’t know and running a line out to the margin where I put a question mark. 

... a little swinging force for a climbing start ...

 I hope that in the future, I will sit down and look up all of those words in an electrotonic dictionary so that I can feel more of the power of those words, having now only an intimation of what they mean to me, words like sycophantic, wan, precarity, reductive, hagiographies – beautiful words. 

I always have the power to understand words in their context.  Every Grade Oner catches onto that quickly.  But most of the words I find in The New Yorker, the ones that I stop to savour, I have never used when I am typing.  I wonder if the words will ever flow out of my mind and onto the page as they seem to with their authors. 

"I bet you didn't know a could climb a tree, grandmother."

I am looking forward to the article called “Aging Ungracefully”. 

Even at 1 am, I can stay awake to read the review of Sigrid Nunez’s novel, “What Are You Going Through” (Riverhead). 

The novel takes on the theme of stripping old age of whatever illusions are left of it. 

Oh, so much in life to read. 

So much in old age to strip away.

Arta

Talking with Theorists

Yesterday, I watched Conversations with Legal Thinkers hosted by Julen Etxabe, Canada Research Chair, Jurisprudence and Human Rights.  

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gp0wHgIBZno

He was interviewing Rebecca Johnson.

Rebecca sent me the link, a zoom call I remember being made to her in the summer.  

That hour of conversation has been edited to one half hour.  Being her mother, I watched the link.  

I have been thinking about some of her points since then, discussing them with Bonnie.  

I am always curious about theory.  A couple of years ago I sat in a class Rebecca was teaching and she was talking about law theory through film.  She asked her students, "How many of you consider yourself theorists.  How many of you would, when asked what you do, say, "I am a law theorist."

Not a hand went up.  Not mine, either, though in my heart I was saying, yes, "I do law theory.  That is why I am sitting in this class and thinking about these films and about the law theorists Rebecca points to in her lecture."

In the video Rebecca invites all of us to think about theory again and invited us to consider the fact that we all live in theory, ... and do theory.

What did I enjoy about the film?

1. She reminded me again that all of us live in several legal orders though we may not have the language for that yet.

2. I liked the point that everytime we watch film, or listen to two people debate a point and then we add thoughts of our own to others who are listening as well, we are doing theory.

What made me nervous about the film?

1. I felt myself cringe when she referred to the drink of forgetfulness -- even though Wordsworth refers to it (Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting ....).  I don't think Rebecca wasn't referring to that 'forgetting' but to a  path I have taken a little further down the line.

2. I don't even want to refer to the other cringe worth phrase.  Anyone can make a guess in the comment box below.  

Nowadays, giving 30 minutes to someone is a conscious gift, both when it is given and when it is received.  Thanks to Julen Etxabe and Rebecca for letting me listen in to their questions and answers.

Arta

PS.  For more about how Rebecca saw the interview see Conversations with Legal Theorists.  And a big thanks to Rebecca for making the links in this post to the interviews of other legal theorists.  I will have my note book out and eventually watch all of them.  What else could interest me on a lazy, warm, autumn afternoon.

Sociology and Duncan Carter-Johnson

 SOC 160  - Assignment

My name is Duncan Carter-Johnson and I am a 6’3 agnostic white Canadian male college student who lives in Victoria, BC. My family and I moved here before I was one year old from New Brunswick though I have no recollection of the place and consider my home town to be Victoria.

According to “23-and-me”, I have close to 100% western European DNA and what I know about my family solidifies this image.

Benjamin Franklin Johnson

On my mothers’ side of the family, there is a long history of Mormonism dating back hundreds of years where my ancestors traversed Canada and the United States leading back to Europe. My family are unquestionably settlers that came across from Europe in the 1700s, looking to find a place to live that was better than where they came from. I have been schooled in the history of colonization, which paints these ancestors in a negative light. Though this is entirely fair and justified, I do not have disdain for them. I have very strong connections with this side of the family, which is also unusually large. 

To make this simple, my great-great-great-grandfather had 7 wives and 45 children. My grandmother mocks him, telling us that at the end of his life, none of the wives would move with him to Mexico (they had all pretty much been strong women who raised their children on farms, doing the work to keep everything going). Luckily, there has been no polygamy in the family since then, but the family is large. 

Names of the wives of Benjamin Franklin Johnson

In the summer, I spend some time in the Shuswap (Secwepemculucw) with my family, on 60 acres of land along the lake. There are usually 80 or so people there, with all the great-aunts and uncles, and too many cousins and second cousins for me to reasonably count. There is so much variety in people’s politics and interests and abilities. There is lots of time for music, and games. Despite the size of the family, it is very close, and people are in contact with each other year-round. For example, we have a family blog with new posts appearing every few days.

Both my parents are important in my life, but my mom’s extended family has been more powerfully present in my life and has shaped my identity. My father’s side of the family is a bit more of a mystery. He was adopted by his parents when they were older. So he was raised by a father who had been wounded during the second world war, and by parents who had lived through the depression. They were also roman catholic. Apart from allergies and interactions with my paternal grandmother, my father’s family is less present in my life than my mother’s. Despite both my parents coming from religious households, neither enforced those beliefs on me or my brother. They gave us space to come to conclusions about religion on our own.

When I think about what makes up my identity or ancestry, I honestly am quite confused about how to think of myself. I was born in Canada which makes me a Canadian citizen through Canada as a whole was built upon another society that is still present today. Thinking about challenges to Canadian legitimacy throws into question not only how I think about the country but how I think about myself. My ancestors came to the Americas from England and parts of France. But other than knowing this, I have little to no connection with those parts of the world. In my life, I have many connections to my family in Victoria and in Salmon Arm. These are where I feel most connected to today.

When others see me, I presume they see the stereotypical white male that has a relatively easy life without any hardship. I would like to say that these presumptions aren’t true and that they misrepresent me and my life, but I can’t. In my life I have not been racially profiled, I have never had to worry about access to clean food, water, and shelter. I have had access to learning resources and private tutors to help me when I have had trouble in school. I live in an upper-middle-class household with two working white-collar parents that are present in my life. I know that I fit the stereotype to the letter. Part of this bothers me though I don’t let it affect how I see myself.

I see myself as someone who is first and foremost a total nerd; from Star Wars to Lord of the Rings, I have invested hours of my life living these stories out in my head. I love to debate and question things I hear which has made me very interested in history and sociology. I am a fan of bland foods and like to expand my number of friends when I get the opportunity. I have grown up on traditional first nations territory both here in Victoria by Mount PKOLS and in Salmon Arm in Secwepemc territory during the summers. The stories I have heard (both from my grandmother and from Secwepemc storytellers) and the experiences I have had there have changed my perspectives on some established norms, and have helped shape me into the person I am today, regardless of my ancestry. It is true for me as much as it is for anyone, that you can’t fully understand a person by who their ancestors were. Our ancestry may provide a paper trail that lets us connect back to pieces of our history that may or may not be relevant today. To me, that provides only an outline of who you are, and the rest of your experiences fill things in.

Duncan Carter-Johnson

Deer hide tanning: Part 2 - fleshing the skin

So now that you have all the right tools and have watched a bunch of videos about fleshing the hide, it's time to get to work.  Lucky for me, I also had an in person coach -- Leo.  He has prepared many a goat hide to be used on his drums and has done this fleshing process on dozens and dozens of goat skins.

This is gonna get graphic.

 Take your skin out of the water and drape it over your fleshing station. 

 

It's going to have some knarly chunks of fat and meat that you need to pull off.  You can pull off the big pieces with your fingers/hands.

Next, get out your fleshing tool and start scraping from neck toward tail to gut under the membrane and the  rest of the fat and flesh. I clamped the hide to the pipe at first to get started, but then ended up just using my body weight to pin the hide against the tube as I drew the scraping tool down.

End, result:  two clean hides with gorgeous fur on one side.  So, so thick and beautiful (spot the dog wishing he could chew on the hides). You'd be surprised how "not gross" the hide is once all the flesh is scraped off.  It's really quite cool.

Now the hides go back in the bins in clean water to soak for a couple of days to help loosen off the hair.  I'll have to check on them once a day to see if the hair is loosening off and to make sure the water is not getting funky.  It may take 3 days and I will need to change the water a couple of times. Next step will be scraping all the hair off. 

Mary

Tanning a deer hide: part 1 -- acquiring a skin and the right tools

When we moved to Alberta last fall, Naomi was able to start learning about hunting with her Uncle Richard.  She got to go out with him a few times, but you don't skin a deer out in the field.  You only do the "field dressing" which involves taking out all the deer organs.  But once when we were in Calgary already, he was just coming back from a hunt and Naomi got to go help him skin the deer in his garage.  At the time I told Richard I would love to try to tan a skin, so he saved all his deer hides from the hunting season in his freezer for me.

Last weekend while in Calgary, I picked them up to bring back to Lethbridge.  I hadn't guessed how much space they would take up.  Most skins I have seen and worked with have been goat skins.  They have some fur, but not nearly as much as a deer.  Richard's deers had the thickest most beautiful hair.  So while they weren't as heavy as the volume of the bag they were in led me to think they would be, they did not fit in a rubbermaid bin the way I thought them might.  No matter, we just put each one in a large black garbage bag and threw them in the back of my van frozen.

Once in Lethbridge, 3 skins went back into my freezer and 2 were put in bins of water to soak and thaw overnight.  I had to weigh the skins down in the water with big rocks so they wouldn't just float on top of the water and not get fully saturated.

The next day I had to make sure I had all the right tools for the first job: fleshing the skin.  This is where you scrape off any meat, fat and membranes that are stuck to the non-hair side of the skin.

I got out on-line to find a fleshing knife.  The only place I could find in Lethbridge that have one was  Markman Guns and Sports.  But they had one, so off I went to purchase it.

 

You also need a slightly rounded surface to work on.  When Leo used to prepare his own goat skins for his drums, he had made himself a nice fleshing workstation with a piece of old water main pipe.  So off I went to drive around and find a construction site where the might have some scrap pieces hanging around. Not far from my house the City was replacing a underground sprinkler system in a park. I parked and walked over to the workers and asked if they had any old pipe I could take.  And indeed, they did.  What great luck.  It was not a pipe with as big a diameter as I would have liked, but I thought it would do the trick.

Back home I went where Leo sanded the sharp edges, drilled holes into it and fastened it to a 2 by 4 so we could clamp in on his workhorse.  

 

We put some bricks under one sideo the workhorse to tip it at an angle, and we added some large patio paving stones at the bottom of the workhorse to weigh it down, and voila.  I was ready to go.  

The last thing, I needed a bucket to drop all the scrapings off into. And the hose, so I could spray the dogs away when they got too close to my workstation, hoping to help me by chewing on the ends of the deer skin hanging down as I worked.  What torture for them not to get to help. Can you spot the dog below, desperate to chew on the skin?

Mary Johnson

Michael Hunter Johnson turns 9

Michael's cake decoration: an 18 sided die

Bonnie and I arrive in Calgary from the Shuswap just in time for Michael's ninth birthday.  

This was an all day celebration for family and friends.  

The morning started with "Crepes by Richard", some of them filled with sugar and butter, but the one for Mary was a crepe, an egg some pesto sauce and feta cheese.  I am glad she shared half with me.

Now feta-pesto was a god-like variation on Richard's icing sugar and butter presentation which is already the perfect crepe.

After breakfast, Michael and his dad sped off to the grocery store for ice-cream: Rainbow.  I didn't know the taste of Rainbow Ice Cream, but it was a rainbow taste was definitely in my bowl.

The gift of the day was a three-D pen with which Michael could create small vehicles which would have a roller derby with each other, propelled by a tiny motor inside.  Now that was sweet.

Paper was rolled out on the table and a colouring station established which provided hours of fun for Mary, Alice, Betty, Richard and me.  Mary took on the job of hand-sharpening the coloured pencils for us as we sat together and talked.

... a lemon filled cake -- a 9 year old boys' delight

Miranda brought out the lemon cake.  I had seen her making the filling in the morning, as well as baking the cake, which was now a four layer cake when it came time to consume it.

I didn't know if I should hurry and eat the cake, so that I could get seconds.  

Every bite seems so delicious.  I leaned over to Richard and remarked that I was having trouble trying to imagine that the cake that was left over could be divided equally again if every ]wanted seconds. .. thus the need to eat quickly.

He said he was having the same idea.  In the end, one piece was all the satisfaction either of us could manage.

After the cake was served we sat around and shared something favourite about Michael Johnson.  I love that part of the birthday celebration.  There was so much mirth that Richard remarked that we might have scared his children.  The scare was that he thinks they have never seen adults laugh so long nor so loud.  Now that could be a scare that would scar.

There was Mac and Cheese served at some point during the day.  

A game of "Here to Slay" began later in the day and was played into the evening hours -- until it was too cold to stay outside.

A Covid birthday to remember.  

Guest list:  

Mary Johnson, Rhiannon Brooks, Dr. Bonnie Johnson, Arta Johnson, Miranda Johnson, Richard Johnson, Betty Blanche Johnson, Alice Margaret Johnson

 

On watching #ScholarStrike

I wanted to say something about the #ScholarStrike 2-day teach-in which occurred Wednesday and Thursday of last week. 

Bonnie and I decided to treat this as though we were going to a conference: road trip and hotel, going out to dinner, making new friends, but since our lives are in the same full sweep of covid-19 that would mean we would stay at home to do all of this.

I hadn’t listened to more than two sessions, when I discovered that the event was too intense and I knew we would never make it through every session, as I had planned.

BC Scholars Support #ScholarStrike

I did take 11 pages of notes. 

As well, I have gone back over the notes to highlight some places with yellow colour, or big stars, or some kind of colourful asterisk reminder that I want to revisit an idea.

I want to say in response to the session by Bonita Lawrence called “Indigenous Responses to Black Resistance”, that I also felt an irresistible response to write her a letter, something I rarely feel when I listen to a speaker. 

Her argument was tight, concise, compelling, and struck to the heart of why coalitions are so difficult. She said that her research has centered around her own indigenous identity. When she spoke she looked like a retiring academician to me. She posted a younger picture of herself, long dark luminous hair past her shoulders, like a triangle spreading out over her back. I don’t know if she would have called herself radical, but I love that word and I could imagine it cemented across her photo like someone might print a WANTED poster to be hung in on old west post office bulletin board.

I am going to have to accept that I could only watch the number of sessions I got in, and that I am not gong to be able to take in all of them. Sometimes that happens at a conference to me too, though not often. 

In person I seem to be able to make myself walk to and sit in every session, but given the technology set up seems harm to me, I find it is just too many clicks away.

At one point the moderator to the session said, we’ve had 30,000 people tune in to #ScholarStrike. I think she also said 3,000 were attending the session I was watching. That’s one of the nice things about today’s electronics, you can count the number of people in an instant who are watching with you.

I wrote a note to at least 7 young people I know who are attending University right now, and alerted them to the fact that they could attend this free. I don’t think any of them did. As well, I know some professors who didn’t attend. They were busy with the extra burden of learning how to teach electronically, a hard task when much of their teaching skill is centered around watching their audience, picking up on cues of when people are lost and when it is time to move quickly ahead. I think they’ll miss seeing the twitch of an arm or the furrow of a brow on a student’s face as a signal that the lecture needs to broaden at that point. At any rate, I can see why people’s lives made it impossible for them to find the joy in those two days that I found.

It’s a week away now. I’m sure I’ll read my notes over one more time. There are some phrases I am not going to forget. 

One of them is “1492 Land Back Lane.” 

My typist just asked me what treaty occurred in 1492. I reminded her it rhymes with “Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” She laughed and shook her head in disbelief that she had missed that one. I also want to say that for the first time in all of my studies about Indigeneity the penny dropped for me about two different world views: the one that the settlers have as contrasted with the one that the Indigenous people share.  The two major view points stem from the different creation myths they hold.

When I first began working at the University of Calgary, I was working in the University Library. The pay was low, but  the perks were high.  One of the benefits was that the department believed in educating its workers, so anytime we wanted time off to go to a lecture or a conference it was made available to us. I developed a taste for going to lectures, conferences, and talks at the Nickle Arts Museum.  I was up to exploring new forms of knowledge, and I’m glad that I still have that taste even though I don’t work there anymore.

Arta

For more info look here

Miss Susan Dreyer

pre-kindergarten Betty with her raspberry harvest

Betty began kindergarten this year. 

In the months preceding Betty's starting date, her two siblings would gather round her telling her about her new-to-be kindergarten teacher, Miss Dreyer. 

"When Miss Dreyer comes to work she wears the same colour. Her jacket, her skirt, her shoes, her purse. Either it’s a pink day, or a blue day, or a yellow day.” 

There was a longing in their voices for the good old days of kindergarten with Miss Dreyer, a teacher didn’t like having bullies in her class. 

If an altercation happened, or a stand-off between two kindergarteners  happened, Miss Dreyer would run over to the apparent loser, perhaps from a fall of being shoved, or the indignity of having someone take something from them. 

She would say, “Oh, are you alright?”   Apparently Miss Dreyer gets down low, looks right into the child's eyes and the tone of her voice is soft and loving as she speaks to the child.  We can only imagine that Miss Dreyer teachers in high heels, for when her walk is modelled it is not the walk of someone who has on good tunners or walking shoes.  Quiet, small, quick steps.  So darling, watching the older kids take on the "Miss Dreyer personna".  

It seemed to Michael and Alice that feelings, hurt feelings and how to heal them, was the highest objective on the kindergarten teacher's agenda. 

And here’s the best thing about her, or the memory she left with the older kids. On the last day of school she looks each one in the eye and said to them, “I am going to miss you. Please come back and see me.”

I wonder if any of them do.

Maybe I have the answer to my question.

Michael and Alice know how to revisit Miss Dreyer, for they did it in their explanation of how school would be for Betty.

Arta

PS  Since the telling of how lucky Betty is going to be to go to kindergarten, Bonnie and I sometimes declare "Miss Dreyer" days and when we take on that wholey loving vocal tone that we heard in their voices our accidents and disappointments, our whole days go better.

What Does the Sky Taste Like?

 So I have not yet had the heart to completely harvest my mint since it still has flowers that the bees are visiting.

But yesterday, with a fall chill in the air, I decided to pick some leaves and make some tea to warm my hands as I worked outside on my patio (one of the joys of tele-working from home is that I can take my tablet outside and work anytime I want).

I decide to try to take a picture of my tea, hoping the mint leaves steeping in the water would make a nice shot for this blog.

Instead I was blessed with an image of the sky above me. 

What does the sky taste like you might ask?  Well, chocolate-mint of course.

 

Fall Treasures: Garden Spiders

One of my favourite parts of the Fall season is catching a glimpse of a garden spider in my backyard.  They make the most beautiful big webs, and just sit there with what seems to be pregnant bodies.  I don't know if their bodies actually swell in the fall, but that is the way it seems.

I love that in the above photo you can't even see the web, it is so fine.  I know it is there not only because the spider must be clinging to something, but because in the bottom right you can see a tiny fruit fly caught in the web.  It must have been too small to bother with.  Certainly not a meal, and evidently, not even big enough for a snack.

And here, a photo with my finger for scale. She is a big beauty.

I have gone back to the spot where I found her every day since I took this photo, but I have not had the pleasure of her company again.

I recall one Fall at our home in Gatineau having the chance to see tiny spiders spill out of a spider's egg sack on our patio table umbrella. They scurried to the edge, let loose a thread of silk, then drifted off in the air.  Just as described in Charlotte's Web.  It was magical.

I have not spotted any egg sacks in my backyard in Lethbridge yet, but I will keep an eye out.
 

Smoke in the air

I woke looking to the north-east and I could see a white cloud along the top of Bastion Mountain. I thought, “Oh, it’s going to rain today”, and I checked the table on the porch where I could already see that the dew had pooled in the night, … but no rain yet. A few hours later Bonnie said, “Oh, that’s not the mist of a cloud. That is smoke that has come from the fires raging in Oregon. I think this is just the beginning of it.” And she was right.

The smoke has crept in until it covers the water which means when I look out I can only see the cabins that rim the perimeter of the lake which I can see beneath me.

Bonnie wondered, “shall we drive to Moiya’s to stay out of the smoke?” after Moiya had invited us over for lunch. I thought about that drive versus what can only be a two-minute walk between my house and Moiya’s. I thought back to other years when our home was filled with smoke. Those are the years when the claustrophobia of staying inside seemed to equal the danger of the smoke to our lungs outside.

While we’ve been living in a pandemic for almost five months now, six months, really, the danger of the pandemic has to be imagined in my mind. The danger of too much smoke inhalation that I now see is so visible, that seems more like a pandemic to me, though that is just danger of smoke inhalation, not something that the whole world has to worry about.

The fall rains and autumn winds will take away the smoke, but the dangers of the pandemic will still be here.

... Dave on my deck ...

I hear Dave Wood talk about the pandemic.

He lifts his arms off the table and spreads them, holds them apart for a second as if he has caught time and the virus in that space for me to see. 

He moves both of his hands toward  me, as though he has caught them for a fleeting moment in time and space. He holds them for a second as if that second represents the six months of coronavirus.

It seems like a l-o-n-g second.

Then his hands fall open to the table with a thud that marks his powerlessness over this danger.

I can see these thoughts on the lines of his face, a face that is usually stoic, even unreadable. But when he talks about the pandemic, I l watch the lines on his face as well as listen to his words.  The lines deepen.

I change the subject.

“You don’t like playing games, do you?,” I asked him. He nodded.   He doesn't.  I felt a solidarity with him. I don’t like to play because the cards don’t have print that is readable to me anymore, nor are board game pieces legible anymore.

Dave did play a game with us, but when the game he ended, he said, “Well, I’ve wasted three hours of time. Fun for me is chopping wood.” I don’t think I have the same feelings that he does about the time we’ve just spent together, though I’m holding some of the frustration of having a good hand that will not play out for me and there are 9 iterations of this hand. I feel that frustration every time 10 cards are dealt to me, yet I win the game. I worry how the others must feel toward me since they were working with the same frustrations. I may have added to their angst because sometimes I gave them a skip card, and I wonder why I even worry because I play games so seldom.

I woke this morning again taking some of those very deep breaths of somewhat smokey air to the bottom of my lungs, the breaths I like to take when the air is fresh and I can almost taste the cedar that I can smell. As well those are the breaths that are coached by the physiotherapists or any therapist who is trying to help me remember the joy of being in the moment , using the full capacity of my body. Unlike the fear of getting sick during the pandemic, I know the air outside will be clean again. I’ll be able to see it, and walk in it, still conscious of the virus terror that Dave Wood helped me imagine, there between his hands.

On reading manga style graphic novels

When Michael, Alice, and Betty were at the Shuswap, I liked finding one-on-one time with each of them. If I say to all three of them that I am separating one of them out so that I can “do school”, the two that are left behind don’t feel that they have been cut out of something that is going to be really fun. Just the words “do school” seems to set up parameters that they don’t want to enter.

The book binding is on the right hand side
and not on the left hand side.
This is confusing to me.

Now, I had been watching Michael carry around a book called The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons – Oracle of Ages by Akira Himekawa . Once I saw him with his finger inserted into the middle of the book so he wouldn’t lose his page. Then he crawled into the chicken coop, did what he needed to do there, and backed out of the coop again, finger still inserted in the book so he would know what page he was on. That is a kid who wants to read.

Fifty years ago, I can remember my dad telling me in response to my question about how to engage with one of my children, “You have to find something they’re interested in.”

Doral went on to say, “that may take weeks, months, maybe even years.”

I didn’t want to hear that part of his advice, but something about the whole message rang true for me when I looked at that book Michael was carrying around.

I knew my job was to talk to him about what was in it if I wanted to make a connection with him.

To my drawing of an angry manga character
Michael added the ear extension meaning "blowing off steam".

To do my homework I had enter the internet and look up what manga meant. I had to read that the style of a manga character included drawing large eyes, small mouths, and abnormal hair colour.

I’m not really good at visualizing what that might mean, so I opened his book and tried to draw “manga-style.”

I held my finger on the page of my instructions and when I would read that the character’s tears had to be large enough to be caught in buckets, I drew big tears. 

Soon my note paper was filled with manga faces; I read a laugh had to engulf the face while the eyes at the same time had to be slits. Anger was portrayed with rosy cheeks, so I took a red crayon and made some of the faces angry. I was having fun.

I didn’t do just a little research. I did a lot of research. I went to the internet to find out who Akira Himekawa is. I found out this is a pen name for two women. I make the same mistake other people make on the internet because I found the two women were just one click away, which led me to their appearance at a gaming convention, and of course I had to watch them, now, so I listened to them in translation. I was busy making a large set of notes in one of my scribblers that I will never find again. At the gaming convention I learned why the book is written Japanese style, which for me seems back to front.

self portrait by Michael
Huuuua on top is the sound the character is making

When I felt armed with enough knowledge, I tried to get Michael into a discussion about the author(s). He showed no interest. I thought again about what my dad had said to me. I could see that a 9 year old boy had no interest in gathering the knowledge I would have gathered as an adult if I had been writing a nice essay.

I really had to drop my adult agenda and go to the child’s agenda. 

That feels like a loss to me because I have so much to give to him now about manga, at least in my terms of reference. “I did my homework. I am bringing it to you.” That is the feeling I have. I tried to remember my role is to be the teacher. I am not seen by him, yet, as the holder of the information he needs or wants.

I’ve discovered, if I want to keep the child’s interest, I have to turn mine off, just like a toggle switch. 

I’ve also learned that when he reads aloud to me, I have to let the pictures be driven by his interest, and not mine. 

“Doing school” is really hard, even when a person is certified by the corporation that seemingly owns all knowledge.

These are my notes as I am
learning how to draw  manga characters.
The words whoooo, kaboom, bwoof
bloomp, vwosh, snap and slasd-d,
ka-chin, urg, klang and fwoo
are not usually in my vocabulary.

I tested out Doral’s theory. Talk with children about something they are interested in. That was my form of “doing school.” Michael and I traded information now, and I showed him one of my angry manga face drawings. He took my pencil and to the ear of one of my characters he attached a pipe with a cumulous cloud at the end of it, which is the best way I can describe it, steam. Then he said to me, “Now the character is really angry.” I was thrilled to be trading information with him. A breakthrough for me, if not for him.

He didn’t take the book back to Calgary. He told me it belonged to his Aunt Bonnie. I’ve kept the book on my dresser, for a month now, since he has been gone. 

When I look at it, I feel a strong connection to my dad and to my grandson. 

 I think about The Great Binding Law of the Anishinaabe Nation which explains, “the seventh-generation stewardship is a concept that urges the current generation of humans to live and work for the benefit of the seventh generation into the future”. 

For me, “doing school” that day involved four generations.

Arta

Backyard Harvest: Is it too soon? When will it be too late?

So, I didn't plant too much in my new backyard this year: some chocolate-mint, a few tomato plants, chives and a Kale plant.  I've been wondering what to do with my chocolate-mint. It doesn't taste too much like chocolate, but it sure does smell like it.

It was a beautiful day on Sunday, and with September in Alberta, you never know when you might get an overnight freeze.  I decided to go pick all my mint and dry it out to use for tea later in the winter.

Alas, as I got down on my knees with some scissors, I saw this little friend.

I couldn't bear to take away what little food this friend has now that the fall is here, so the chocolate-mint harvest has been delayed for another couple of weeks.

Mary

Fall Treasures: Milkweed Pods by the Oxbow

When the fall arrives, I can't get enough of milkweed pods.  They just make me think of dragon eggs and dragon scales. 

I took these photos on Sunday as we walked the path in the river valley around the Oxbow.

About the Elizabeth Hall Wetlands:  This 78-acre Nature Reserve is found along the west side of the Oldman River. The wetlands are protected because of the unique cottonwood forest, oxbow pond and wetland. A two-kilometer walking path, with interpretive signs about local species, circles the pond. This is an excellent spot for watching birds and other wildlife species! Lethbridge Parks and Trails