Short Story: November Snow (3-minute read)
Evening tiptoes around the mall like a thief. Hallways turn quiet as the thinning flow of workers and commuters mark the hours with the reliability of a Swiss watch. Nestled in the basement of an office tower, the shopping centre opens like an underground cave. Artificial lighting shining through crystal chandeliers belie the darkness descending on the city.
Against the off-white marble of the floors and walls, fluorescent light flickers with harsh loneliness. Each store floats like an island with its unique lexicon and culture. A diverse cast performs closing rituals in silence, counting bills and retrieving castaway clothes. Dreary, November brings a slump in the retail landscape. Numbers are down, sales are slow, eyes are red and hands are chapped.
The first days of November had been cold in the usual back-and-forth of Fall. Bait and switch, catch and release. Crisp and warm sunny days rolled into the bitter windy cold of winter without the calming effect of snow. Attacking a pile of sweaters, a young woman takes note of her 18th birthday as it disappears into a hazy day of classes and work. A fitting welcome into adulthood, she thinks with a smirk. A pang of longing for the simplicity of childhood and the smothering of family comes and goes. She glances at her watch. 5 more minutes.
Lifting her eyes from the clothes she is folding, she sees him hopping off the escalator. His step is bouncier than usual and he smiles in the manner of someone caught in the delight of his own joke. His eyes break into two crescent moons when he sees her. She catches her breath. Whenever she thinks she has this crush licked, he knocks her out with a smile.
Their friendship had been born in the most usual way, bound by the experience of unrequited love. She loved him and he loved a girl who didn’t even know his name, like Charlie Brown and the little red-haired girl. He needed someone to listen and she needed him. Their bond flourished in the imperfection of who they could be to each other, without pretense or artifice. A flawed version of love to a heart wired for romantic passion, yet something closer to the freedom and safety of unconditional love. They lived in a space of longing and dreams where grand romantic gestures were given and received without fear or expectations.
He couldn’t stand in place when she walked out of the store: “Come on, I have something to show you!” They started walking side-by-side in silence. “Thank you for picking me up,” she said, not expecting a reply. They turned a corner as the store shutters closed around them, dropped a quarter in a lonely merry-go-round and walked away as the music echoed in the empty corridor.
Up ahead, a wall of glass doors leading to the street appeared as a perfect dark rectangle. Looking at the darkness, he stopped saying: “Now I have to cover your eyes! It’s your birthday gift!” He took a handkerchief from his coat pocket, the one he usually wore on his forehead like Axl Rose, and tied it gently behind her head. The smell of his hair made her knees buckle but she was too curious to give this sudden intimacy more than a moment’s notice. She could hear the excitement in his voice as he led her to the door and stepped out into the crisp evening air. “You can look now!”
When she removed the blindfold, large snowflakes were falling on her face, lit by a single street lamp. A thick layer of snow laid untouched on the street and sidewalks, absorbing the sounds of the city, making everything cozy under the overcast sky. November had lost its sharp angles, replaced for an evening by the warmth of a Winter’s night.
“Happy Birthday!” he said. They walked away arm-in-arm like two giddy children, leaving four footsteps behind them.
Weightless
In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway wrote about his early struggle to identify the concrete actions or sensations that caused an emotion. The art of writing lies not only in describing external events but in noticing the emotions stirred by such events and identifying precisely what caused the emotion. Skilled writers can bring their readers to feel an emotion when it is accurately set-up in their story:
I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty, aside from knowing truly what you really felt, rather than what you were supposed to feel, and had been taught to feel, was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced.
As a person who feels everything keenly, I appreciate the beauty of a novel based on how it transports me into the world of feelings and emotions. There’s only so much I care about the physical set-up of a novel as long as I can inhabit the emotional life of its characters. Hemingway’s advice to notice an emotion and work your way backwards to describe how it came about inspired me to start writing-up my own deeply felt emotions. It’s a writing practice that I find both soothing and enlightening.
The text below was born out of a moment of pure delight. A mere flash whereupon I felt the weightlessness one might feel at the top of a roller coaster. It came and went but it lives on in my mind as something I recall when I need relief from the oppression of everyday worries and blocked creativity.
The road strays through the highlands’ bedrock like a streamer unrolling, erratic. On the horizon, the yellow line dips, dives and disappears at the will of a curve, only to reappear farther and narrower. Cedar and Spruce line the granite cliffs, their roots gnarled around rocky crimps and crevasses. A turn reveals a clearing of rolling hills covered in the bright emerald of the windswept grass. In the car, the landscape runs like a movie to the sound of Castle on the Hill:
“Found my heart and broke it here
Made friends and lost them through the years
And I’ve not seen the roaring fields in so long,
I know I’ve grown
But I can’t wait to go home”
Wooden fences and grazing cattle announce a homestead. Driving up a hill, the road takes another sharp turn as it descends along the soft roll of a field. The urgent guitar riff leads into the chorus as a teenager on a dirt bike bursts from beside a cedar cop, his hair dancing in the wind. For an instant, we drive side-by-side as the music beckons:
“I’m on my way
Driving at ninety down those country lanes
Singing to “Tiny Dancer”
And I miss the way you make me feel, and it’s real
We watched the sunset over the castle on the hill”
The music continues as we part ways but I keep the feeling of wind in my hair and the weightlessness of speed.
About Moi
Véronique Bergeron, by Herself
Véronique started writing and illustrating stories in elementary school when she discovered her father’s typewriter. Elementary school was not kind to this quiet introspective child: she became the bane of her teachers’ existence by learning to read before it was permitted. While everyone was learning vowels, Véronique was reading books by Sophie Comtesse de Segur and learning what fate awaited young girls with unbridled imaginations and a lazy streak. This was in the late ’70s in the Province of Quebec where the biggest classroom management issue was precocious readers.
Fast-forward to high school and Véronique is excelling in French, learning English by reading Agatha Christie and failing in math and science. A slow STEM death by a million unanswered questions: “If you were listening, they said, you wouldn’t ask questions.” Véronique graduated high school in 1991 with a diploma, a repressed creativity and the certainty that she was not as smart as people thought she was. She abandoned her dream of becoming a midwife and applied to Law School after getting a College degree in sex, drugs and rock & roll.
Law School conformed to the contours of her brain. For the first time, Véronique saw decent grades appear on her transcripts. To avoid taking Law School for granted {or maybe because she didn’t know how babies were made?} Véronique got pregnant the following summer. And again the following summer. And again just before graduating. In a strange twist of fate, she learned as much about normal pregnancy and childbirth in Law School as do most students in Med School.
In 1995, Véronique punched way above her weight and married the world’s last gentleman. It turned out to be the single best career decision she ever made.
With her law degree in hand, Véronique decided to stay home to care for her three young children. She hung her diploma on a nondescript wall and carried on the anonymous life of the mother of many, adding two more twigs to her fruitful family tree.
We are not sure if Véronique got bored by the quiet with 4 children or if she thought she could get a pee break by finding a real job but she applied for a Master’s in Law with specialization in biomedical ethics while expecting her 5th child and got accepted on her due date. When her infant son was 5 months old, she started commuting from Ottawa to McGill University in Montreal to complete her Master’s degree.
During her time at McGill, Véronique published two Scholarly Articles with Very Serious Titles, including My idea of natural childbirth is ‘no make-up’: {re-titled for publication The ethics of cesarean section on maternal request.} Her practicum were at the Montreal Children’s Hospital neonatal intensive care unit and the Children Hospital of Eastern Ontario neonatal intensive care unit. Her thesis topic was informed consent in neonatal intensive care through the lens of legal pluralism. Or something.
After graduating, she lectured in bioethics at St-Paul’s University in Ottawa and found work as a legislative assistant for a federal Member of Parliament, a job renonwed for requiring no education whatsoever.
Véronique had her sixth child while working as a political staffer. Shortly before the Canadian election campaign of 2011, Véronique got pregnant with her seventh child and accepted a position as her boss’s campaign manager because why the heck not. That’s when the universe thought “Let’s see what she does with that one!” and threw her a curve ball: in the thick the election campaign Véronique found out that she was expecting twins. Babies number 7 and 8 if you are still counting.
Véronique delivered a successful election campaign and won a pair of babies in 2011 {but was mostly noticed for paying more in childcare than she earned on the Hill}. In a spectacular feat of poor timing, Véronique was offered a bioethics consultant position for a healthcare institution in Montreal halfway through her twin pregnancy. She turned down this unique opportunity, fearing that her Master’s degree would end-up being giant money cigar. To avoid being proven right, she started writing a novel based on the adjoining worlds of law and medicine since it worked so well for John Grisham.
In 20-something, and the year after that, {it’s a bit of a blur thank goodness for journalists} Véronique was invited to participate in the Ottawa Human Library Project. In 2014 she gave birth to her 9th child {or so the papers tell her.}
While on bed rest hatching her twins, Véronique started her first personal blog Vie de Cirque (Circus Life), offering the no-nonsense perspective of a mother of many to a small but loyal readership. Vie de Cirque eventually morphed into Fearless Family Life. While her writing and ideas are often complimented, her Internet fame came from spending only $25 per kid on Christmas gifts in 2015 {but not for real}.
Véronique’s most spectacular failures include — but are not limited to — homeschooling her children and crowdfunding her creative work {on both Kickstarter and Patreon} . She came within a tenth of a point of graduating summa cum laude and has never won a single writing competition, including the CBC Short Story Contest. She will likely remain anonymous, remembered by no one but her family as someone who tried, but not quite hard enough, to become a writer. The dog will remember her as the person who fed her. Until someone else does.
Veronique has 9 children, all hers, all from the same father, aged 21 all the way down to 3 and works as a technical writer. She has been potty training for the last 19 years. She still hasn’t it figured out.
Podcast Episode 13: The Deal with Teenagers Part 1
Today’s podcast is titled “The deal with teenager” and is the first part of a two-part series on handling the delicate balance of privileges and responsibilities with our teenagers and young adults.
Parenting teenagers is like flying a kite: it’s all in the art of giving enough rope and maintaining tension. Should the kite ever land in a tree, would you rather be around to help your teen untangle the mess or leave them to figure it out? Some parents will say “Let them figure it out on their own, they have to learn eventually.”
I take the longer view on that one: my teenagers might figure it out by cutting all the strings and burning down the tree, leaving them with no kite and a burnt down neighbourhood; or I might help them figure out how they can climb the tree, untangle the strings and, should they have to cut it, do it in such a way as to preserve as much of the kite’s functionality as possible. Then hopefully they will have learned something about getting kites out of trees and will be better equipped to do it themselves the next time it happens.
I once met a parent who was looking for advice on handling a request for money from a young adult child. We got chatting about lending money to our kids. She said: “I only ever lend money to my children because I want to teach them the importance of paying back debts.” I said: “I’ll let the bank teach them the importance of paying back debts when they repossess their cars. As for me, I’ll teach them that their family always has their back.” We worry a lot about what we might teach our teenagers by helping them out of a hard spot; but there’s a whole wide world of people out there who don’t love them. Let the world teach them hard truths: you’re the only one who can teach them unconditional love and support. I wrote a blog post about that, you can read it h e r e.
As promised in the podcast, this is a picture of our Subaru after it took a pick-up in the teeth. For the whole story, you’ll have to listen to the podcast.
The podcast opens with an update on my blogging and the deal with teenagers — including how our car got smashed — start around the 8:30-minute-mark.
Thank you for listening and please come back for part 2.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
New podcast: Where have I been and a reflection on kinship
Hey everyone! Long time no podcast!
Yesterday my husband took our teenage daughter out on a movie date and I took the opportunity to record a new podcast. I rarely record when my husband and teens are in the house because someone always crashes into the room I’m using to tell me something wholly irrelevant to the topic I’m discussing. Like “I’m going to bed” or “Can I have gas money.” I guess this is where the dedicated studio with the “On Air” light came from. At some point my dishwasher sounds like I’m flushing a toilet but otherwise the sound quality is half-decent.
In this podcast, I reflect on the nature of crowdfunding and why I don’t feel comfortable charging my patrons for the quality of product I’m releasing. There is an awkward-teenager phase to growing a blog or a podcast where you make some money but not enough to hire help, learn a new skill, or buy better equipment, let alone leave your day job. The result is something that should sound professional — because I am paid for it — but doesn’t.
The question I had to ask myself as a creator was: “Is the forward momentum of my blog and website strong enough to justify pushing through the awkward-teenager phase?” Does the trajectory of my podcast suggest that I will someday earn an income and build a professional presence on the web? To me, the end goal of having patrons is not to support my hobby, it’s to make writing and podcasting my profession. The money I am currently squeezing out of my patrons doesn’t allow me to move out of the hobby realm into the professional realm, and the trajectory of my crowdfunding efforts doesn’t suggest that it will for another 4 years. That’s way too long to expect my early supporters to humour me.
In the second part of the podcast, I talk about a trip to France I made last summer with three of my children. I reflect on the ties that bind us to our kin, despite time and distance, and the importance of building a strong family culture and identity.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Virtual Open Mic: What’s that?
There’s a new category on my blog, the “Virtual Open Mic.” What is that?
Last January, I made the New Year resolution to participate in an open mic event. The goal was to overcome my very deep-set fear of being seen and heard. Let me tell you, it’s very hard to grow as a creative person when you are deathly afraid of being vulnerable. Since music is by far the medium that makes me feel the most exposed, I decided to fight fire with fire and try to sing in public.
When I looked into the open mic scene in Ottawa, I learned that venues use open mic events to draw clients on typically slow times. Typically slow times are times when normal people do what normal people do on weekdays evenings or Sunday afternoons instead of going out in bars. See for yourself.
Since the open mic scene in Ottawa is making it really easy for me to wriggle out of a potentially mortifying situation, I decided to create an Instagram account and a dedicated corner on my blog for my virtual open mic. If you would like to participate in my virtual open mic, send me a line. Maybe we can make something fun out of this, with testimonies, personal stories and music. Let’s see where this go, shall we?
October skies
August stretches like a sleepy tomcat over early October days.
Encased in the emerald of an evergreen forest, the fields rest in the blush of the setting sun, exhaling the day’s heat like an aura. The earth glows in the evening light, returning to the sun its radiance.
~ Lanark Highlands, October 2017
Object Writing
In his book Writing Better Lyrics, songwriter Pat Pattison recommends the practice of “object writing” as a way to improve our writing technique. Strong writing skills liberate us to express our unique creative ideas, not only in songwriting but in every form of creative expression. Creation is a deep dive into our senses and memories to retrieve gems buried in the sediments lying at the bottom. The deeper the dive, the better our senses, memories and experiences have mixed and integrated each other. Object writing is a diving technique by which we focus our senses on a object and describe it using all our senses: sight, smell, sound, taste and touch, adding to it the organic feel of the whole and the kinesthetic sense, the sense of relation of the object with the world around us.
I took up the practice of object writing last year when I started reading Pat Pattison’s book and I got stalled at chapter 1. Today I added a new “Poetry & Photography” category to my blog to catalogue the writing exercises suggested in Writing Better Lyrics. The first-level end goal is, of course, to write lyrics I am not mortified to share, leading to the second-level end goal of finding a musician willing to put them to music. Writing Better Lyrics has helped me improve my creative writing in general and it’s my hope that more regular practice will help me speed up the process of putting ideas to paper.
Just shoot me
“Mom drinking” by Colin
Every once in a while I get invited to give a talk, sit on a panel or chair a board of directors and a request for a headshot inevitably follows. It always feels something less than professional to send my latest selfie but all the other pictures of me were taken my children and involve either my less flattering appendages, booze, or both.
A nagging little voice kept telling me that I should pay for professional headshots but an even less pleasant little voice always answered “It’s not like you’re paid for these gigs, right?” Why should I fork real money to be reminded how old and doughy I’m getting? When there are guitars to buy and live shows to attend?
And so the little voices stood at a standstill on my shoulder until I had to apply for a job using LinkedIn, making my profile selfie my first chance to make a good impression. Chastised, I booked an appointment with a fellow mom and local photographer and started planning my 5 minutes of glamour.
This is what I look like in my head. I feel way cooler than I look.
First, I would get a new outfit. Simple but classy, I had it all figured out: new skinny jeans, a loose-fitting linen tunic with some new jewelry and a new pair of sneakers. Then I would book the few hours before my headshots for a haircut and getting my nails done. My bangs are almost nose-length, it was necessary anyway, and my hair person could style it for me, a skill I was not blessed with at birth. It would be a headshot session doubling as a day of beautification and pampering, the perfect antidote to a sagging spirit. Monday would be clothes shopping day. Tuesday would be eyebrow threading and leg waxing. Wednesday was hair and pictures. Everything blissfully booked while my children were at school.
It all came crashing in a thundering mess on the Sunday evening when I got the photographer’s email reminder. “We’re looking forward to see you tomorrow, Monday June 12th for your session” … I had it all planned out on the WRONG DAY! Right date, wrong day. I had nothing to wear, an overgrown haircut and bushy eyebrows.
In a panic, I hit my oldest daughter’s closet for a dress, any dress. Unfortunately, my oldest daughter, while statuesque, doesn’t have the right curves at the right place. One does not simply carry 9 children to term and expect to fit in a dress from Sirens, even in a size 10. I grabbed some XL shape wear with the desperate energy of the moribund and almost died trying to get it off. Relieved that the jaws of life were not necessary to get me out it, I reluctantly accepted that I was too shapely for shapewear. I grabbed a simple black and white dress from Walmart that made me look as grumpy and unkempt as the Walmart in my small town but at least it covered the right parts and I could take it off without calling the fire department.
The little voice of insanity kept whispering in my ear that Monday morning would not be too late to go dress-shopping. Like a Home Depot ad suggesting “You can do it, we can help.” Like the Scotiabank’s “You’re richer than you think” So many reminders that stupidity could pay off, if only, NO STOP IT!!
On the morning of the photo shoot, I concluded that the only way to avoid a desperate attempt at dress shopping and hair cutting would be to go to the gym. I could shower and dress at the gym with only minutes to spare for make-up, which should discourage any delusions of grandeur but the most humble slapping of foundation and mascara. On my way out the door to drive the children to school I grabbed a curling iron, a flask of tinted moisturizer and my daughters’ mascara; threw the Walmart dress on top of my gym bag and attacked the day with a significant lump in my throat. The day of pampering and beautification had become just another fight with chaos.
After my workout and shower, my hair was kinked in its usual pony tail shape and I knew I couldn’t beat it so I might as well join it. I arranged my hair in a high pony tail and tried to curl some of it behind my back. I didn’t even know how to turn-on the contraption but maybe I could use it backwards with my arms extended on the wrong side of my head, the one without eyes. Once I found the “on” button, I let the device heat on a ziplock bag of bobby pins. I curled molten plastic into my hair repeatedly before cluing-in, combed it out over the next five days. So far so good.
Undeterred, I whipped my daughters’ new mascara out of my bag. My daughters, while genetically-related to me, have a gift for make-up. It’s a form of artistic expression. See for yourselves.
Is that a brush or a weapon? It depends on who wields it.
If your main consideration when choosing mascara is “can this brush maim me permanently?” you shouldn’t borrow it from my daughters: they’ve been using it without poking their eyes out since grade 1. This was my reflection as I beheld the sickle-shaped, black-paint laden, rigid object I was about to take dangerously close to my eyes.
I emerged from the gym’s change room with a “this is my normal face” attitude, hoping that no one had seen me wipe melted ziplock off my curling iron, and stepped into the car for a mad drive across town. I knocked on Sara’s door taking my first breath since breakfast and greeted her with an executive summary of my confusion and the effort exerted to get my butt into her studio. She laughed and said “On the other hand, this is exactly what you look like in real life. Sometimes I meet people at business events and I don’t recognize them from their headshots.”
She’s right isn’t she? I don’t wear make-up because it bugs me. I don’t have nice clothes because I hate shopping. I’d rather spend my time writing, playing music and answering emails about parenting struggles and victories. I’m not at an age and stage where I can look polished and be a decent human being at the same time. Every morning, I choose being present and un-rushed to being properly dressed and styled because being-both-level has not been unlocked yet. This is who I am.
And this is exactly what I look like.
Photo creds: Sara McConnell Photography http://www.saramcconnell.ca/