Monday Making Things

I make things.  I used to draw and paint and when I was 10 my dream was to go to art school. But my parents said art was not a job, and I needed a job. And I believed them. Even when I went to high school and took art classes and met art teachers, whose jobs were art, I believed that art was not a job.    It's possible there is a connection between all of that and the fact that I have been depressed most of my life.  Of course, I may just have abnormally low iron, too. Who knows?

Last year I somehow got to help a local painter with a backdrop for a theatre production (different theatre group than I am working for now) and I kind of felt like I was breathing again after a long time.  I mentioned to the director of the play, who is also a friend, about my parents teaching me that art was not a job. He said the most amazing thing. He said, "maybe art is not a job, but sometimes it is a life." Every once in a while someone says something that takes your breath away because it is so true.

And it occurred to me, about that time, that art has managed to seep out of me, in spite of it not being an acceptable life to my parents. I make things. I can't help but make things. I knit and sew and I have some silversmithing tools and I make silver jewelry sometimes. And I build things. And I have to try stuff all the time, like making my own hand lotion bars.
So now  I am going to try to work at making something every day.  And on Mondays I am going to post what I made last week, or last month or last year.  I am going to post the stuff I make on Mondays.  Last week I knit some socks and some gloves, but I have no pictures of those. I also built half a theatre set, of which I do have a picture.  

So Caturdays and Mondays toward the resurrection of a blog.  And in the interest of getting me interested in something again. Thanks for coming along.  

Caturday

Good Morning! Welcome to what I hope is a new feature: blogging every Saturday! I figure if I have nothing else to write about, and nothing that I can bring myself to write about, I have a plethora of cats I can write about. And maybe I can bring myself to write about the things I can't bring myself to write about in a roundabout way.

That is the inimitable Cricket. Cricket is a year old. I adopted her from a family with small children whom I think pulled her tail and mauled her. She is very particular about being touched (only on the top of the head and the chin, thank you human) and it took about six months before she raised her tail off the floor.
My dad has always described a particular kind of jumpy, manic behaviour as being like "a flea on a hot griddle."  He had a customer years ago, when he was selling doors and windows, whom he described that way. Some time after, when I had become a carpenter, I learned that this particular man had a strong liking for cocaine. We don't know if Cricket likes cocaine or not, because it's not a thing we have around, but like most kittens she certainly bounced around like she had been snorting the stuff by the bushel. "Flea" seemed an inauspicious name for a pet, and so we settled on Cricket. We also call her 4 because she is our fourth cat, Bunny because she is a clumsy dumb bunny and Lux because she swans around here in the world's most luxurious fur coat.

That is Cricket doing what Crickets like best: climbing things that are hard to get down from.  And that is the autumn view from my bedroom window. The cat and her expression are also my morning view from March to October. She goes outside, climbs the swing and hollers in the bedroom window.

The cats are a funny distraction from the current sad things happening in our lives.  Dad was moved to hospice yesterday. It is a relief to have him out of the far too crowded ward and room he was in. The nurses were wonderful and kind, but he was sharing a room that was designed to be a private room and it was too near the nurses station. He was hearing snippets of conversations and as he becomes disoriented he thought all conversations were about him. He was getting kind of paranoid.  He is not in great pain, and he is pretty lucid most of the time and still very articulate, as long as his mouth and throat aren't dry. He's been depressed for a long time and sometimes he is really frustrated and angry, and sometimes he wishes with all his being that it would just be over. I have always been close to my dad and it is hard to lose him. He will be 80 this year, though he is very unlikely to make it to June, and this is the way of life, but every day I encounter things I will not get to tell him about some day, share with him some day, ask him about some day. I am trying not to think of him as gone yet, but it's hard not to miss him.  We are also coping with the news that Beloved's mom is in hospital and failing back in Saint John.  She was here for a month over Christmas and we had a wonderful time, so we have something good to hold onto there. We are feeling a little overwhelmed.

While Cricket is not the most therapeutic of the cats, she likes to be near someone. I am the person of choice when there are multiple people here, but mostly she prefers to sit just out of touching range.  As I type, she is sitting behind the computer monitor and occasionally puts a paw under the monitor, or plays with something rustley to remind me she is there. It is enough.

It Was A Wonderful Show

I mentioned last fall that I had taken a job as the the set carpenter for the local theatre. The theatre was in a bit of flux this year: The set carpenter for the previous two years decided that he wanted to stay with his summer job; the light tech moved to England to be with her fiancé; the prop expert decided to go back to school and the costume/wardrobe mistress moved south because of her husband's work.  Previous to all of this happening, I had made the acquaintance of the production manager and he put me on the volunteer list for the second MainStage performance. He thought, until the day before the season actually started, that his carpenter was returning.  

So I was offered the actual job at the last minute in a bit of a panic. He was pleasantly surprised that I could build things, needed little instruction or supervision and also that I was interested in learning new things. Because Jules and Dirk and Jake's Gift travels with all of its set and nothing needs to be built, all there was to do was hang and focus the lights. Lights are their own art, and I have a new appreciation for their importance in theatre. Sadly, we do not have a mechanical light system, which means that we work from scaffolds and ladders. I am not fond of being up high. I prefer the stability of a scaffold over working on a ladder, not to mention the advantage of being able to reach multiple locations from one, but I don't care for being off the ground very much.  It's not my favourite part of the process, no matter how much I admire the effect.  

Mainstage 2, on the other hand, had a big, busy set. I started building set pieces in September, when I would ordinarily be building MainStage 1, and there were several changes before it was all finally assembled. I don't care much for spending my days undoing and then redoing the work I did yesterday, but apparently this is a theatre thing. In the end, the work was worth it. 

We presented It's a Wonderful Life as our Christmas production.  I have never seen the movie, can you believe that? We presented it as a radio play, with live a live foley artist doing sound. The set was the interior of a  40's radio station.   Doing a straight up radio show doesn't provide a lot to watch, so our director did something I thought was pretty cool: He started the play 15 minutes early, as soon as the house opened, with 15 minutes of improvisation. As you were taking your seat, the actors were arriving at the radio station, checking out the microphones, practicing lines and sounds and chatting informally with each other. The actors are called to the mics, a countdown is called,  the "On Air" sign lights up, and the radio play begins. For the first 15 minutes of the play, it is a straight up radio show, actors coming to the mics with their scripts and reading the play. All sounds are produced by the foley artist at stage right, including all footstep and door openings and closings. But then, just as a now grown George meets the also grown Mary, it becomes a play. From this point, the actors begin to act and interact as the characters in the play and they also produce the footstep and door sounds. I thought it was pretty cool, and nearly all  of the feedback I saw on the play was positive, although some people were confused at first.  

That is my set, at the top of this post. I built its bones, all of them, the raised floors, the walls, the foley desk at stage right (that's on the left of the photo), the benches and desk, and the wind and thunder machines as well as a few other noise machines that are not visible. I didn't design it and I neither painted nor dressed the set, but the bones are all me.  

You might notice that there is a sound booth behind the foley desk. Because a radio station needs a sound booth, right? A sound booth needs someone doing sound tech and running the mics, right?  There is no sound tech in the script and there are no characters who can believably be put in that booth, so what to do with a booth that actually takes up a large portion of the set? Why, run the light controls into it and put the light tech on stage, that's what! And so I was on stage, playing the sound technician and running the lights. I was the first one on stage, and most of the actors checked in with me during the improvisation as if I was the boss. It was very fun.  The actors, all professionals from Toronto and Stratford and Vancouver and Calgary, were fantastic. They were utterly professional, generous and kind. I have worked two shows, with a total of 12 out-of-town professional actors and two professional directors, and if they are representative of professional theatre in this country, then something REALLY great is happening in theatre here.  They were a joy.  It was one of the funnest experiences of my life. I am really glad I had this time and met all these kind folks before my real life went to hell in a hand basket.  

Hello? Is This Thing On?

Oh look. I still have a blog.  

Three posts in two years. That is pretty poor output, I must say.  

I have been great and depressed and all things in between. I have had neat things happen and lousy things happen and days when not much happened at all.  I have been addicted to the rabbit hole that is Facebook for too long and I have been too busy to think. 

Currently the lousy thing that is happening is taking all my time, but I think writing might help me through, so here I am. 

My dad is dying of lung cancer.  

It is 7:38 AM, and I have not yet showered or eaten but I have been sitting in the dark, waiting for the light to rise and drinking coffee and thinking for about an hour and this will not be a long post because I want to see my dad before I go to work at 10.  

I am cycling through Elizabeth Kubler-Ross's 5 stages of grief at about 10 minutes each, in random orders, which is good, because the anger is kind of exhausting, but the acceptance stage sometimes comes with the ability to laugh.

I'm going to try to alternate posts about dad and sadness with posts about other stuff and hopefully happiness. It would be easy to get mired in the grief, and I think I will need to force myself to remember good things. 

When I was quite young, maybe even in my teens, something crappy was happening. Not this crappy, mind you, but crappy enough. and I remember thinking I just wanted everything to be the way it was before. And I suddenly realized that it was never going to be the same again. And that that would be true no matter what. 

Nothing is ever going to be the same again.  But the sun is coming up. And despite the return of the cold, it looks like it might be a bright, sunny day. 

Jake's Gift

I have this philosophy that the universe puts opportunities in your way and that it is important to say yes as much as you can, because otherwise the universe stops sending opportunities. This is how I manage to have done so many weird things in my life. The weird thing I am doing now is building sets for the local professional theatre. Of course, being the set carpenter at this moment also turned into being the light tech - always say yes to opportunities.

But this post is not about any of that. This post is about the beautiful, powerful and moving play that I  had the privilege of light tech-ing for in its local run.

The play is Jake's Gift. It is the story of a WW2 veteran who returns to Juno Beach for the 60th anniversary of D-Day to find the grave of the brother he lost in the campaign. He meets a local ten-year-old girl and their three day friendship changes them both forever. It is ostensibly a play about remembrance, but it is so much more. 

The play is a triumph of simplicity. It is a single act, approximately 70 minutes long; the set is spare: a bench, a table, a suitcase and a cardboard box; The light design is simple, conveying two separate locations without the need for walls or level changes; There are short snippets of period-specific music used to punctuate the character's thoughts; There is one actor: the playwright Julia Mackey performs all four characters.  There are monologues to establish the characters and then dialogue between the characters. Each character has a separate voice and posture, and each is identifiable from the others immediately. Mackey moves between these characters absolutely seamlessly, managing to be all four characters reacting to one another.  As the light tech, I watched this play for 24 performances, and Jake, Isabel, Isabel's grandmother, and Susan, the teacher from Canada, were distinct and real people to me every single time.

Everything in the play fits together. There are words and concepts that circle back and re-echo throughout the play.  The maple leaf, a favourite number, the taking care of  soldiers, gardens, and even Burlington Ontario connect and reconnect so that the play is like a perfect jigsaw puzzle, all of the pieces needing each other.  There are more than 40 places to laugh in the play and a handful that will take the breath out of you. I still wept at the end of performance number 24. 

Its publicity talks about the importance of remembrance, but it also makes powerful statements about grief and resolution,  friendship and connection, and for me it also made a case for the arts in troubled times. 

Isabel establishes a metaphorical way of thinking about the dead in the opening lines, and the spirits of Jake's two brothers, the one whose grave he has come to find, and the one recently died in Canada, as well as those of his also recently dead wife and Isabel's great-grandfather begin to also inhabit the play.  They become characters to talk to, perhaps less gone than we had feared, even if they are better listeners than talkers. 

Isabel and Jake meet, not by accident, but because Isabel's grandmother has taught her about the war, what it was to her, and why Isabel should remember these soldiers who died so far from their own homes, sparking Isabel's compassion and her curiosity about the living Vets. She makes the first move, and while Jake is initially resistant to her overture, her open and accepting manner win him over. Through Isabel, his grief and regrets about the losses in his life are transformed. Jake and his gift give Isabel tangible connections to her grandmother's and Jake's memories. 

Jake does not talk about battles. He talks about the dance halls in England opening at 10 in the morning, with huge orchestras playing, to give the young soldiers something to do while they waited to go to France.  He talks about dancing with the pretty local girls. He talks about "dancing their feet off because they knew they were going some place where they might not come back."  He talks about the trumpet that transformed his brother, and how he learned more about his brother because of that trumpet and the dance halls than he had at home. This was to me, an extra message in the play: The arts make it bearable. The arts help us cope. It is the arts that help us connect - witness: wives met in those dancehalls.

I confess that beyond the fact that I really like theatre and plays, I was not especially enthusiastic about this play. I'm mostly a pacifist, and I am deeply bothered by the use of our healthy citizenry as cannon fodder for useless wars. As such I have never been much of an attendant, never mind participant in Remembrance Day ceremonies and such. I buy a poppy every year to support the legion and the vets, and I wear it, but that is it. I knew that D-Day on Juno Beach was about the liberation of France, but I did not understand what that meant. I did not understand the very real, personal and immediate threat that France was living under.  Yes, I know, the Nazis were beyond horrifying, and I cannot imagine what might have happened if they had won, but I did not really get it.  Jake and Isabel and her grandmama drew the reality for me  in only a very few lines and gestures, and it knocked the breath out of me performance after performance. I'm a bit ashamed of my previous attitude, and glad that I understand better now.

I think art should move you. Jake's Gift moved me to tears. Over and over. And to laughter, which I think is imperative for a bearable life.  But more, it moved my ignorant viewpoint to one of understanding, really truly understanding, that ultimately, what matters in life is doing something for someone else.

Jake's Gift will play in Lindsay Ontario, Hudson Quebec and Guelph, Sudbury and Gravenhurst Ontario between now and the end of November.  I cannot recommend this play highly enough.
(And if you go, and you get the chance, say hi to Julia and Dirk from Karen. They are my favourite actor and director in the whole of the world.)

Mondays, All the Way Down

I am gainfully employed again.  Hooray.

I am partly of the mind that working for a living is for the birds.  Although, I am also partly of the mind that having something unselfish to do is good for me, and entirely of the mind that being independent and paying my own bills, thank you very much, is also a good thing.  There you go - early morning multitudes.

I am scaffolding again. After six years of teaching and going to school and writing curriculum I am back on the tools and in a harness.  Dear god I am sore and tired.  I had just kind of got used to 40 hours a week on my feet and lifting things (scaffolders move between 2 and 10 tons of gear in a day - how about that?) when we started 10 hour days. Two days later we went to 7 days a week.

I am wholly of the mind that no one ought to work 70 hours a week, even if they do get paid a lot to do it.  But whatever, I am in the minority in the construction, scaffold, pulp, and oil and gas industries on that one.  After 14 days, though, people start to wonder when there will be days off.  We started the 7 day nonsense a full 3 weeks before the actual shutdown, which is supposed to be 35 days long. Last weekend the rumours about days off started; the plant was going to shut down early for cleaning out of vessels and pipes and we were not going to be allowed on site during the process.  Every day, the day after tomorrow was going to be a day off and we might be off as many as five days.  Every day we were told to come to work tomorrow.  I have just been going on the assumption that it is Monday until they tell us it is Friday.

Yesterday was actually Friday. And a good thing too.  It was day 18.  I am getting enough sleep and eating properly; in my old age, I am a bit of a stickler for those things. But I am unused to the hard physical work and my muscles dearly needed the rest. I am much stronger than I was when I went back to work 6 weeks ago, but for the last 18 days, there has been no time for shredded tissues to be rebuilt. I was actually kind of punch drunk. I felt like I was moving and thinking through molasses.  I'm pretty sure something bad would have happened if there had been a day 19.

Tuesday is Monday again.

Changing MInds

There was a link this morning in my Facebook feed to a BC Business article about how giving people the facts is not enough to change their minds.  In my mind this is connected to the moan I always hear from developers that they just have to package their plan the right way to get the public to buy in.

The trouble, I think, is that developers think the facts are all on their side. Pipelines built extra thick to last longer, world class spill response, double hulled tankers, extra tugboats to guide tankers (I don't think there are any plausible facts for Site C, are there?)

But the fact is that the Kalamazoo River is still filthy from Enbridge's spill in 2010.  The fact is that the Gulf of Mexico has not recovered from the British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon blowout in 2010.  The fact is that Prince William Sound is still not entirely recovered from the Exxon Valdez running aground in 1989.  The fact is that there is a catastrophic methane leak in California right now.  The fact is that there are earthquakes in places where there are no natural reasons for earthquakes that have been directly linked to hydraulic fracturing.  The fact is that human error actually accounts for much of this*, and before you tell me that automating and mechanizing things will prevent these events in the future, remember that in fact humans made the mistakes they made because they misread or over-relied on computerized systems.

The fact is that the people who are labelled opponents think this destruction is unnecessary.

We are not dealing with an inability to accept the facts. We are dealing with two fundamentally different worldviews.  I am perfectly able to grasp and even admire the technological advances and innovation that will purportedly make resource extraction faster and safer and hopefully cleaner. But I am completely unable to see it as anything but unmitigated greed and ecological rape.  Even if I back up from my inflammatory and contentious characterization, it is still single minded and short sighted destruction.  Developers either can't, or won't, recognize that.

I suppose it is possible that there might have been a time when some common ground might have been found here and that "development' could have taken place sustainably, but I suspect that time is long over.  We have befouled the earth, and the air and the water over so much of the globe that we are probably hurtling toward its uninhabitability.  Most days, taking the long view, I honestly think that our own extinction is the very best thing that can happen to the earth.  We have so much hubris as to think that we matter to the existence of our little blue planet, that we are of some consequence.  We are wrong.  We are a mere blip here.  Earth's tragedy is that we have left so much poison in our wake that we will very likely have rendered normal, healthy existence for other creatures impossible for several hundred years into the future.

But by all means, explain to me how cutting down the trees that hold eagles nests on an island in the Peace River and flooding a valley that is home to bears and deer and moose and foxes and could grow food for us while not hurting those homes is such a good idea.

* When I looked for articles to link here, using the words environmental disaster human error,  the results were 3 pages of mostly clickbait. There are some pretty heartbreaking lists there if you happen to want them.