Autumn shifts and shimmers

As I write this, it is Saturday evening and I am parked by the fire, finishing up a few things while kelly-yoyoKelly makes butternut squash ravioli from scratch; yes, I am a lucky woman indeed. Beyond my window, the first real storm of autumn has the trees lashing to and fro. Raindrops are clinking glassily against the windows and there’ve been a few loud skid noises from the busy road outside. No actual crashes, thankfully. This happens a lot at this time of year: not only are the roads wet, not only are we on a hill, but there are the piles of slick, slippery leaves in the mix.

The storm is a real shift from last weekend, when Barb and I caught this heron out in the mists of Burnaby Lake:

Heron in fog

It’s even a change from this morning, which was nice enough out that we ambled along False Creek to the electronics store (I keep hearing the siren song of an iPad I don’t really need) and a grocery I’d picked as a good prospect to have fresh sage for the pasta. The walk takes you through the shiny new developments that were the Athlete’s Village during the Olympics, and that are now supremely expensive condos, waiting for upscale would-be owners with high credit ratings to save them from emptiness. We talked a bit about how they might have been developed differently, or for a different demographic of potential purchasers, even as we appreciated all the Hey, this is gonna be on TV, let’s make it look fantastico and then make a mint for it! amenity-rich design features of the green spaces.

I got in a good round of agonizing over the gadget without actually buying one. Then, at the grocery, sage was scored along with smoked salmon rolls and delicious, decadent figs. We ate them in the park and walked back along a slightly different route.

It was still quite mild out when we returned to East Van. As the skies darkened and the wind rose I fiddled with my web page some more, checked on the current UCLA class, roughed out a synopsis for my spring class, finished drafting an article that has been giving me fits, watched a TED talk, by Melinda French Gates, about what nonprofit aid organizations can learn from Coca Cola, peeked at Twitter and, any second now, I plan to make a salad.

All that and it’s not yet six. I foresee loafing and some television–Merlin, perhaps?–in what’s left of the day.

Pretty, and witty, and gay!

It’s easy to imagine that all of Vancouver’s twenty thousand plus crows are the same. They have that black outfit, right, and the same favorite song, and they really only love you for your leftover taco chips. They also hate the camera. I can mime taking a picture of one and immediately cause it to flap off.

If they are sitting still, it’s because they know the light is bad. “No peanut, no piccie!” seems to be the widespread crow policy. But not this individual, who was only too happy to preen while I stood snapping maybe four feet away.
Crow

The lesson one might draw from this, if one chose, is no less valuable for being totally obvious.

Facelifting Planetalyx

I am tweaking my site this evening and the time has come to engage in a bit of judicious experimentation… I expect there to be a good deal of fiddling in the days ahead, but hopefully most of it will be behind-the-scenes stuff. An adjustment here, a new photo there, that kind of thing. But right now I need to beg your patience, because I need to see how this will look when it makes the rounds of LJ, Facebook and the like.

If you are curious about the source of the mess-in-progress, it’s here.

Attentive

There is a community garden about six blocks from our apartment and Kelly and I had a short walk-by on the weekend. The sunflowers are full blown and ready for the eating. In the past, we’ve been treated to hyper-spastic squirrel antics as the seedquest becomes desperate, but this time the visitors were more finchy:

Neighborhood birds

Walking through East Vancouver in this way, taking pictures of the same things over and over and then winnowing out the ones that have something special to them, is, obviously, something I do for pleasure. But it connects up to other things. For one thing it’s physical self care, as much as it is mental. I get out, I walk, I stretch.

I also see it as writing, in its way. Paying attention to something so familiar it might be invisible, noting the variations, absorbing the sensory experiences on offer in the world: this is one of the things that keeps the universe from narrowing to the desk, the screen, the cup of tea beside the keyboard, and the occasional misbehavior of the cat.

Story Intro: “The Children of Port Allain”

The Children of Port Allain” is the example I pull out when someone asks me where I get my ideas… because I happen to remember exactly.

The story is a distorted vision of life on the rainy, forestry-dependent West Coast of B.C., this place:

RSCN5385

It was back in the days when I still followed current events, which would put it before 2001. I would usually have CBC Radio One on for an hour or two when I was cooking or playing Asheron’s Call, and in that time I might catch the local news twice, as well as a national or international broadcast.

On one such occasion, the B.C. news had two stories back to back. The first was about a Vancouver Island town whose core employer, a pulp mill, was closing down. The town council was, therefore, wooing a medicinal marijuana operation to come in and set up shop, the idea being that the government-anointed pot growers would replace the lost jobs.

The second story was about a newly paroled pedophile who was getting hounded from town to town. He’d settle somewhere, there’d be an outcry, and eventually he’d try somewhere else.

“Where should these people go?” the interviewer asked one of the most recent hounders in this story.

“What do we care as long as it’s not here?” was the reply.

What happened, naturally, was my writerbrain came up with a mashup: the same desperate pulp-mill town, working up a scheme to create jobs by becoming a haven for paroled child molesters.

“The Children of Port Allain” is a prickly, uncomfortable story. There’s no overt violence in it, but it’s unsavory by design: if it was something you found in the back of your fridge, you’d imagine you could still smell it weeks later, even after giving your kitchen a nice bleach flambe. It’s about how kids live where their parents do, whether it’s next to a toxin-emitting mill or a prison; it’s not a great conspiracy, just a fact of life. It’s about the idea one hears lofted, sometimes, that anything is okay as long as one’s creating jobs. It wasn’t much of a surprise, once it was written, to find I had a little trouble finding it a home. But then I found myself at Norwescon on a panel where someone asked where my inspiration came from. I told the above anecdote and my friend, Derryl Murphy, who happened to be in the audience, said I should send it to On Spec.

“It’s too long,” I replied automatically. (Their word limit, then as now, is 6000 words.)

“Tell ’em I said it was okay,” Derryl said, and the eventual result was that the story appeared in their Summer 2003 issue.