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Dog Show Dancing
The next performer, Coco, a six-year-old Belgian shepherd, stood on his back legs and hopped alongside a woman wearing white go-go boots who jiggled her hips in time to “ymca.” Coco weaved between her legs, rolled across her feet, lay on his back and kicked his legs in the air. The woman’s brow was furrowed and sweat ran down her face. Coco bounded in front of her, then backed through her legs and sneezed twice. The judges looked at each other and one of them wrote somethingdown.
Punch
It was at about this moment that I hit him in the face, which is something I’ve never done before. I don’t know what perfect form the punch took in my mind, but by the time the impulse had pushed its way through me, my hand had bent inward like an old person’s claw, or a doll’s hand—curved around but without a bottle to clutch.
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Separate Crossings
Dr. Portillo, a Mexican physician, lives with her husband and son in a balcony-festooned six-bedroom house in a gated suburb. The adobe walls that enclose the garden, the coloured tiles embedded in the walls and the servants’ garden house are all typical of the home of a prosperous Mexican family. The multi-generational collection of relatives who occupy the spare bedrooms also reflect Mexican tradition. Dr. Portillo receives her patients in an office located in a tower in the northern Mexican city of Tijuana; since many of the patients are American, much of her working day takes place in English. When she goes home at night, she relaxes by speaking to her husband and son in Spanish. Her son, however, often responds in English because Dr. Portillo’s typical Mexican home is located in suburban California.
Happy Hearts
A series of lucky events seemed to conspire to bring me to Stettler, Alberta, one day in June 1998. Jennifer, the woman who was in between being my roommate and my girlfriend, was at the Banff Centre and I was on my way there from Saskatoon, where we lived. She had left me fifty dollars for gas so I could pick her up after her workshop, and I had accepted, hoping that when the time came I wouldn’t need it and I could give it back. I did need it, of course. I had been waiting for a cheque to come from the Globe and Mail for one of a series of drawings I was doing for them, and when it was time to leave, the cheque still hadn’t arrived. So I set out from Saskatoon with just a tank of gas and the fifty dollars.
At the Margins
In Chicago, where he settled, William Henry Jackson, British settler, transformed himself into Honoré Jaxon, Métis freedom fighter. He identified so closely with the Métis struggle for justice that he became one of them. He had no trouble convincing others that he was a Native and probably had no trouble convincing himself either.
The Definite Article
The top-selling American novel of the nineteenth century was Lew Wallace’s Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The phrase “the Christ” reminds us that the second word originally meant something along the lines of “the person who has been anointed.” By the twentieth century, the article had been dropped, making “Christ” sound like the family name of Sometime Carpenter Jesus, offspring of Joe and Mary Christ, brother of Jim Christ who keeps cropping up in the New Testament. But a couple of generations after Jesus lost His definite article, His spokesmen on Earth were still “the Reverend” So-and-so or even “the Reverend Doctor” until the editors of Time and their kind followed Samson’s example and warning: metaphor ends in 25 metres—smote them with the jawbone of an ass.
Wild World
One day a Swiss couple stopped in at the carpet shop, just as they had each year for the last ten years. Every spring they loaded up a cargo van with nets and jars and drove from their home in Switzerland to east Turkey, where they collected butterflies together. The man, Walter, had caught snakes in Africa and South America all his life and sold them to universities and private collectors, but that day he was turning seventy-five and, he said, it is not so wise at my age to play with snakes.
Gangly Man
I don’t take public transit very often, which is a failing—not just environmentally, but also personally, because sometimes that forced contact with the rest of the populated world can be profound. In Japan, many years ago, I was trapped in the small space between train cars by a crowd of schoolboys; my claustrophobia reached such a level that one leg began to judder up and down like the needle on a sewing machine, and the only thing that prevented me from climbing out over the tops of my fellow passengers’ heads was the gaze of a man about a foot away who conveyed calm to me by keeping his eyes trained on mine.
Window Booth at Rapido
A group of university exchange students from France at the next table watch the entire interaction as if they were on a field trip for Lessons in North American Social Behaviour. They discuss the annoying aspects of the life they’re having here. Quebec is more American than they expected, they say. You can’t smoke in restaurants. The Québécois accent is drôle.
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CBC Shows an Interest in the Pine Beetle Epidemic
The National calls from the cbc in Toronto. They want me to be their “eyes on the ground.” I try not to laugh—I’m a part-time poet who lives in the suburbs. The woman on the phone asks what it’s like to live in a city in a forest. Does she mean here? In Toronto, she explains, that’s how they described it to her. She must be picturing deep woods with houses and corner stores tucked in among the paths, and roads more like wagon trails. When I drive past Winners and Costco I don’t think “forest.” No, I tell her, Prince George is a lot like the outskirts of Guelph. She falls silent and I amend it: Prince George is like Edmonton but planned by drunken loggers. She seems to like that better, so I carry on: it’s like living in a logging camp but with easier access to big box stores. What about the trees, she asks. Oh, they’re fine, I say, just shorter and mostly gone.
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River Queen: The Amazing Story of Tugboat Titan Lucille Johnstone
Eventually Lucille Johnstone told her story to Paul E. Levy, who made it into a book, River Queen: The Amazing Story of Tugboat Titan Lucille Johnstone (Harbour), an absorbing read even for people who think they’re not interested in reading about bus
Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road
On my summer holiday I immersed myself in World War I, thanks to a friend who loaned me all three parts of Pat Barker's trilogy: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road (Plume/Penguin). This is a large and important work conveniently pac
Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars
Since the Canadian withdrawal from the North American ballistic missile defence treaty, you might think you don’t need to read Mel Hurtig’s ominously titled Rushing to Armageddon: The Shocking Truth About Canada, Missile Defence, and Star Wars (McCle
Sacred Places in North America: A Journey into the Medicine Wheel
Notman's department store approach to photography is carried on in this century in the work of Courtney Milne, whose recent Sacred Places in North America, subtitled A Journey into the Medicine Wheel (Stewart, Tabori & Chang), represents the fruit of
Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women
The photographs in Saqiyuq: Stories from the Lives of Three Inuit Women (McGill-Queens), are plentiful but wretchedly printed, which is a sadness because this book of stories is so good that you want to return to the photographs again and again to se
Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail
Stephen R. Bown’s Scurvy: How a Surgeon, a Mariner, and a Gentleman Solved the Greatest Medical Mystery of the Age of Sail (Thomas Allen) is an excellent account of life and lingering death on the high seas during the age of empires and oceanic voyag
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All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia
When I took a west coast vacation in Tofino last summer, I took along Justine Brown's All Possible Worlds: Utopian Experiments in British Columbia (New Star). This slim coffee table book chronicles the history of utopianism in the most western of Can