From lupa at kos.net Mon Jul 6 00:47:10 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 05 Jul 2009 20:47:10 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090706004716.CF9152F9B36@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Craft Fair It was a perfect day for the July craft fair: sunny and not very warm, with a breeze that kept the mosquitos at bay. (Being near a very large river helps.) I had friends with booths in the fair, and so I wandered over in the early afternoon, buying a hot dog for lunch and meandering around the park in front of our handsome town hall, observing and visiting and (with one exception) not shopping. My house already has more than enough dustable stuff in it; I don't need more. The fair was a mildly uneasy mixture of stuff: attractive bags and purses, truly hideous burned-wood signs with not-so-clever sayings, one poetical watercolourist (very new to the game, and nervous), average hand-knits, lots of homemade jewelry, preserves, hand-made soaps, you name it. There were some truly lovely photography booths (hi, Bob!) and some finely wrought wood carvings. We're in a transitional period, my adopted town, one foot still in Church Bazaar Land, the other foot fumbling towards fine arts and true artisanal work, and the fair showed the wobble between two worlds, as the town itself wobbles between past and future. But still, with the exception of a couple of (well, forgive me!) cheaters who were merely re-selling stuff they'd obviously bought, pretty much everything in the twenty-odd booths was made by some sort of creative process. True, tastes vary; stuff that was selling quite nicely (those burned-wood signs) isn't to my taste, as the poetical watercolours weren't to the taste of those who fancied the signs. But there was much creativity there present, some of it misplaced, much of it not. It's a human drive, this creativity business. Probably most of it fails on a purely esthetic scale. Hunting through our local flea market later in the afternoon, I came across so many not-so-successful hand-painted pieces, lovingly mounted photographs, and other projects, the recipients of so much time and love and (at least sometimes) skill, that fetch up in -- well, small-town flea markets. It's like considering the huge proportion of turtle eggs that do not result in adult breeding turtles. But we have to put everything in perspective. There is a range in human creativity from the child's stick-figure picture, lovingly mounted on the fridge with magnets or scotch tape, to the very, very large and very, very excellent Rembrandt I once saw, donkey's years ago, in an exhibition of the Queen's pictures. There is everything from the massive beauty of Bach's Mass in B Minor to the astonishing elegance of "Shenandoah," and it all has its own imperfect truthfulness. All the best beauty we can muster -- the finest endeavours we can achieve -- are nothing to God's perfection in Creation. Are nothing, and are everything. Our creativity, whether we know it or not, is the spirit's response to the Creation in which we live and move and have our being. I am exceptionally lucky in living in a landscape that to me -- bred up in landscapes of lush green and still silver and wintry charcoal-and-white -- embodies the Creator in particular ways. Others, brought up in a landscape that makes me deeply uneasy, one of rocks and sands and starkness, find the Creator there in ways that I respect but cannot seem to share. Still others find a home in concrete canyons and the twist of superhighways. And that's all right, for this earth has room for all sorts, if we can let go of the need to be solely right in what matters. But we respond to Creation and the Creator by creating, as best we can, in ways that we find important and meaningful. That, more than any esthetic, was what the fair was about. To me at least. After a while, I went home (right across the footbridge over the river) and packed two of my own new pieces up, a fused-glass dish and a stained-glass piece of my own design, and took them back to the fair. I showed them to a few people and got words of approbation that will help me move forward. For praise is what Creation and creations need, and what the Creator desires of us. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sun Jul 19 21:49:03 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 17:49:03 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090719214908.7170F329335@barracuda.rutabaga.org> Brunch She got into the brunch buffet line behind the young couple with the curly-haired little boy, seated on his father's arm. She smiled to herself as the child's parents explained what foods were on offer and asked him what he would like. When he opted for more pancakes than were prudent, his mother gently but firmly sidetracked him in the direction of the cantaloupe; clearly she knew what a well-balanced lunch should look like. The older woman helped herself to scrambled eggs, a potato pancake, some fruit, and took them back to her table and ate absently, reading the Sunday paper, keeping half an eye and ear on the young family, seated at the next table. She heard how engaged both parents were with the child, how they treated him with steady affection and courtesy, listening to him and responding, and again she smiled to herself. On her way back to the buffet for toast, she stopped very briefly at the family's table and said, "Forgive me for intruding, but I just wanted to tell you that you're doing a fabulous job of parenting." "Why, thank you!" the young mother said. The father smiled. The child gave the woman a wide-eyed curious look. Returning with her toast, she was careful not to intrude on them again. It was something she'd started to do of late: to praise good parenting wherever she saw it. This was because she was always aware of the wonderful power of a really bad example. When her own kids were small, she'd taken quite a lot of flak from others on her parenting practices. She was, they said, too soft on her kids. (The fact that her most severe critics had less than stellar track records in the parenting biz was something she tried not to mention.) Kids need rough treatment to toughen them up, she'd heard over and over again. The kid is being bullied? Teach him to turn and pound the other guy into applesauce. Somewhat wearily, she'd ignored the criticisms and had done what she thought best, which was generally counter-cultural. But it was hard, bucking all the pressure, and she often questioned whether or not her choices were the right ones, given the family circumstances, which were difficult. Only of late, as her now-adult kids began to come into their own, was she beginning to feel more certain that she had, in fact, done pretty much the best a parent could. And so now she praises good parenting whenever she sees it, in the supermarket, in places like this restaurant, trying not to be weird or intrusive, but giving the reassurance of a veteran. She drops the praise in a few words and smiles and walks away, minding her own business. She was into the book review section when she became aware that someone was standing by her table. A little apprehensive, she looked up and saw the young mother. Had she given offence? She stood, a little uncertain. "I just wanted to let you know," the mother said, "that your words meant a lot to me." She sniffed slightly, took off her glasses, wiped her eyes. "In fact, they made me cry." The older woman spoke softly of the decisions she'd had to make, how so many of them meant rejecting what the culture said mattered -- how, for example, she had insisted on letting her kids have dream-time instead of forcing them into accomplishments that didn't interest them. How the only way to raise courteous adults is to model courtesy to your kids. How children who know themselves to be well-loved will, in the end, come out okay. The young mother told the older woman that she, too, is never sure that what she's doing is the best thing for her son. Others advise her to be tougher with him; others treat their own children without respect or courtesy, as though being under the age of six means never having to hear "I'm sorry." And she has no veteran mothers to talk to, nobody to advise. Only her own instincts. Go with your gut, the older woman told her. "And when in doubt, cuddle. That's what I always did." "May I have a hug?" the girl said. "Of course." So that's why I was supposed to be here, the older woman thought to herself, watching the young family leave. To leave those words with them. She smiled to herself and got on with the paper. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain From lupa at kos.net Sat Jul 25 23:13:38 2009 From: lupa at kos.net (Molly Wolf) Date: Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:13:38 -0400 Subject: [SB] Sabbath Blessing Message-ID: <20090725231347.16E3033E514@barracuda.rutabaga.org> The Lock To get home from the city, I have three ways to cross the Cataraqui River. The southernmost is the causeway and lift bridge connecting Kingston to its military eastern end. The middlemost is the four-lane bridge carrying Highway 401 across the Cataraqui marshes. The northernmost, and my favourite, is a pair of linked bridges, a swing bridge crossing the lock system and an old single-lane wooden bridge crossing the rest of the river, at Kingston Mills. The locks are the last in the Rideau Canal system, a 125-mile-long linkage of lakes, rivers, dams, canals, and locks extending from Ottawa to Kingston. It was built, painfully and expensively and with many casualties (malaria, mostly), in 1827-1832 and is an extraordinary piece of engineering and fine masonry. The Kingston Mills locks are particularly appealing; there's the silvery stretch of the lake to the north and, to the south and east, the pretty gorge that the lock were built to bypass. In summer, if you take this route, you accept the risk that when you get to the locks, the bridge will be swung across the topmost lock and the lock keepers will be letting water rise or descend, taking pleasure boats up toward the lake or down toward the last stretch of the Cataraqui River as it heads toward Lake Ontario. The bridge was swung when I reached it late this afternoon. It's about a 10-minute wait, so, as usual, I got out of my car and ambled toward the lock to see how far along the locking had gone. From the looks of things, it would be a while. So I ambled back and leaned up against my car and got into chat with the guy in line right behind me, who was likewise leaning up against his pickup truck. The rich green-and-silver landscape in front of us was exceptionally tranquil under a pearly sky. Four or five boats were peaceably tied up alongside the wall leading from the lake into the first lock, waiting their turn, as the previous lot of southbound vessels slowly descended to the next lock. You don't hurry on the Rideau Canal, not in summer. There's no point. "So where'd it happen?" the guy with the truck asked. I pointed at tied-up boat #2. "About there, I think, as near as anyone can figure." "Incredible." "And it's just such a pretty place," I mused. Sometime on the night of June 29-30, a black Nissan Sentra with four women in it -- a 50-year-old and three teenaged sisters, all from an Afghan family now living in Montreal, on their way back from Niagara Falls and spending the night in Kingston -- had somehow managed to make its way past a locked gate or over a substantial concrete curb and had backed between two tie-up posts, over the wall, and into the canal, right by the first set of lock gates. The lock keepers found out about this on the morning of June 30, when they couldn't open the gates. The car was in the way. The girls' parents, tragically afflicted, talked about the eldest daughter's habit of joyriding; she had taken the car's keys. Why she had also taken her aunt (or maybe cousin? it wasn't clear) and two younger sisters for a joyride in the middle of the night, and how she'd fetched up at the locks, much less three metres underwater, was a mystery. None of it made sense. Until the arrests last week, of the girls' father, mother, and brother, each charged with four counts of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. The 50-year-old woman, it turns out, was the father's undivorced first (and childless) wife, who'd acted as nanny to the couple's seven children. The eldest daughter had been beaten for dating a Pakistani man. The first wife had told her siblings that she was afraid for her life, but she loved the kids, and besides, her successor was holding her passport. But now in Canada, she could file for divorce. The daughters could breathe free of the air of Kabul and Dubai. And so four women -- the girls were 19, 17, and 13 -- fetched up drowned in this tranquil place. Father, mother, and 18-year-old brother will be tried for their murder. Three younger children are in care. The guy with the truck and I knew all this. Not in Canada, we're all thinking. Not three young girls who'd never get to experience their lives. Not a loving woman who'd never had a chance properly to experience her own life. Not in our canal. Not this extraordinary evil. Not. Not. Not. The guy and I thought about this as we waited for the lock gates to close and the bridge to swing back in place. I thought, but did not say (he wasn't that kind of guy) that nothing has happened to diminish by one iota the beauty of this place, the serenity of the water. The water is totally innocent; it had nothing to say in the matter. The people who should have loved these four made our clear, cool water their guiltless executioner. The canal walls are innocent; they were given no choice either. Creation may be in grief for evil, but it does not partake of it. I remember driving through Gettysburg, right across the field where Pickett's tragic charge occurred, and feeling Creation's grief for the suffering that we inflict on each other and ourselves. Sorrow felt built into that soil. But not corruption. But it feels to me as though the fresh water of the Canadian Shield -- because that's what flows through the Rideau Canal in two directions, north to the Ottawa River and south to Lake Ontario -- had somehow blessed and redeemed the evil that consumed these four innocent lives. Evil can ultimately have no victory over the Creation that Creator blessed and found supremely good. It can't, in the long run, even have victory over us, because Jesus took care of that already. We all pray to learn that the four were not conscious when they drowned. The city waits, simmering, to hear what's next. ***************************************** A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. -- Mark Twain