notes : abbreviated

Anniversary



Married.

Four years today.

It feels like a mere two weeks.

I know her better than I know myself. I hardly know her. I want another 80 years of learning her.

I want another 80 years of falling asleep in a warm nest of tangled limbs. Waking because we have moved apart in the night and my body, of it's own accord, seeks the warmth of hers.

I want another 80 years of her kisses, and the way she inhales when she kisses me, as if she's trying to take me in with all her senses.

I want another 80 years of making shopping lists with her, and taking road trips with her, and being surprised by her laughter, and charmed, every day, anew.

I want another 80 years.

Another 80 years of her.

When I was about 6 years old we moved next door to my grandparents.

Grandad owned a small farm, Mum and Dad wanted to build their own place, and so they bought a section of his land. (Family rates maybe? I wasn't old enough to catch the details.)

What this meant for us, as kids, was that we had two homes. We wandered in and out of both as we pleased. I guess it effectively meant we had four parents, too.

The presence of my grandparents became as familiar to me as the contours of my own skin. Their physicality was a balm to me. Everything about them comforted me. Enchanted me.

I reserved a particular fascination, however, for their hands.

I spent hours observing their hands.

I knew every buckle and ridge of Grandma's fingers (I had no concept that these 'knots' were caused by arthritis and gave her a lot of pain). I loved the way that, when she was in a reflective mood, she would sit with her hands in her lap and stare out the window, rubbing the pad of her thumb lightly over the knuckle of her index finger. It was such a quiet, private gesture, that seemed to me to speak volumes.

I loved the way that Grandad's hands were brown all year round. Midwinter, midsummer, his hands were always the same colour: years spent outdoors had weathered them a permanent dark bronze.

I loved that his hands had crazy hollows where his tendons were thickened and raised like rope­. I longed to place my own hands in his, and follow the depressions with my fingers.

My grandparents belonged to a generation uncomfortable with physical demonstration, however.

I learned every inch of my grandparents' hands -- every line, every pore, every furrow -- through years of grave, surreptitious observation.

Perhaps this is why, even now, hands are the first feature I will notice in a person.

Hands mesmerize me.

I memorize them, imbibe them, learn them by heart.

They're like a map, or a landscape where the essence of a person's life and character are etched deep.

Hands -- and a person's laugh -- characterize, for me, the very weave and texture of love.

When I think of someone I love, and about what makes them uniquely, genuinely them, it's their laugh and their hands that most readily spring to mind.

Music is my life, Part 1

I'm a hardcore music lover.

It's my drug of choice.

Listening to music gives me a contact high.

Luckily it leaves no visible marks, and has really quite manageable side effects.

Like any self-respecting junkie, for example, I might, now and then, engage in a little criminal behaviour to support my habit.

And I spend a hell of a lot of time and energy looking for my next hit.

I’ve always been this way. I've been an addict since I was a kid.

I remember putting on a pair of Dad's headphones, (they were silver, with huge, cushy ear pieces), and reaching up to turn on the amplifier. I would open the lid of the record player and take the needle and place it as carefully as I could on the vinyl.

Listening to the scratch and hiss of the record as it began to turn, I could feel my whole body begin to tingle with excitement. As the first few bars of music played, I'd be completely submerged by a rush of pure adrenaline, and a barely containable, ecstatic joy.

Eyes closed, prostrate on the floor, I was enveloped. Intoxicated.

As I sunk deeper into the music, I would shift the focus of my attention to different parts of the sound -- now on the drums, now on the voice of the singer, now on the way the guitars changed pitch and rhythm -- and every time I listened it was a new and wondrous experience.

It was around this time I developed my first full-blown crush -- nay, dear I say it, love. For a musician.

Cat Stevens.

We had a copy of his Teaser and the Firecat LP.

God, I loved that album.

And I could stare at his picture on the inside sleeve for hours. I was utterly hypnotized.

I mean, look at him:





Such gorgeous, gentle eyes. Such flowing locks. Such full lips.

Quite feminine, really.

Was this presaging something, perhaps? (I have a thing for brunettes to this day.)

It’s fall.

The leaves are turning and the gutters and roads are strewn with autumn’s detritus.

I used to love autumn. This year, for some reason, I’m finding it more elegiac than usual. It signals the end of summer, I suppose, and I don’t feel I’m ready for it. It’s strange: normally it’s the other way around -- I can’t wait for summer (that florid, show-off of a season) to be over -- halfway through and I'll already be pining for the cool, melancholy days of fall.

But this summer I loved the humidity. And the storms and the lurid green lushness of everything, filling my eyes and my mind like an intoxicating, carcinogenic hallucinogen. It seemed to be over in a flash, though, a nanosecond. Already the trees are losing their leaves. Can it be possible? Here they are, slowly revealing their meagre, winter-skeleton-selves. And it saddens me. To be staring down the barrel of another winter. So soon.

I was riding home from work last night, through the park at the bottom of the mountain, when I saw two guys in some kind of chicane. One guy was backing away, the other following him closely, yelling, pushing his face forward aggressively and punching the air with his index finger.

It was one of those weird, close evenings you sometimes get in Montreal, where the sky feels uncomfortably low, and everything and everyone moves slowly, as if the air is viscous.

In every other way it was a perfectly innocuous scene -- people were meandering through the park, making their way home from work, unperturbed, glancing only half-curiously at these two guys whose anger seemed on the verge of spilling over into violence.

And then suddenly my brain jumped on ahead of itself.

I imagine one of the guys pulling out a gun and waving it around, before levelling it at his friend’s chest and pulling the trigger. The friend folds up. The guy looks around wildly, sees me biking past, and fires another shot.

I hear nothing at first, see only in split-second, explosive still frames: the veins bulging in his neck, his mouth moving, the spittle on his lips.

Then I hear the report of the shot, and a great whooshing sound as blood roars in my ears.

Something slams into my body with the impact of a careening car

Adrenaline empties the air from my lungs

A hot, sticky wetness blossoms in my abdomen. The sharp, fresh smell of grass fills my nostrils. Leaves in the trees above my head are each one distinct, lavishly green and ornate. The sky tilts sickeningly and wheels in a slow arc.

This whole ghastly scenario has spread out before my mind's eye in less than a second, as I’m turning my head from the men, to look at the path in front of me.

I feel the ghost echo of adrenaline pulsing through my lower body. I breathe in the cool evening air.

As I lean on the pedals to begin the slow ascent up the mountain, I wonder if we are always just this one swift moment away from chaos?

When I was a young wee thing -- hailing as I did from an articulate family, but not being much of a reader myself -- I spent my formative years believing that tenterhooks was, in fact, 'tender hooks'.

I had never seen the word written down, had only ever heard it spoken. It seemed such a luridly perfect description of a very peculiar and particular state of waiting (and wanting): of a sharp uneasiness mixed with nervous, excited tension. Of being strung up and strung out, but in the most deliciously delicate way possible. It was so descriptive, and apt, and honest: I am on tender hooks.

When I later discovered that it was actually tenterhooks, I was surprised and (secretly) rather disappointed. Granted, it was interesting to learn something new and unexpected: to see that this word had its origins in something grounded utterly in the prosaic. It thrilled me to learn something fresh, to see how and where language originated, to have an appreciation of how language evolves and changes over time, so that a word still has meaning, even though it's original context is forgotten. This interested me no end.

But the romance was lost. And this saddened me.

Tender hooks.

The gentle barbs were no more.