Lucid Perplexities

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009

So it is spring !

I don't see spears of spring bulbs pushing out their heads from the earth yet, but today's anticipated high temperature and the sunshine with a cloudless sky affirm the fact that it is finally spring. Any snow from now on won't have the upper hand any more, so let's rejoice and enjoy St Patrick's Day !

I felt very silly yesterday after getting up and dressed to go to my therapist only to knock on her door and be told that my appointment was for next week ! She was frazzled, baking a cake for her son's birthday. If she weren’t putting the garbage out , she said, she wouldn’t even have answered the door, looking pretty stressed herself. I was sure it was yesterday and had even marked it on my agenda, but she had it marked on hers for the 23rd. She said we could start the session but if her son called at any time we had to stop. I thought it wouldn't be fair if she was stressed out in the first place, so I left —not before advising her to reduce the oven temperature to 350 from 400 degrees for the cake, after she told me that she had burned the first one. I felt I made an unnecessary trip over the expressway and the bridge at a time when I'm watching my budget carefully until my lawyer's bill is paid off. Isn't it awful to have to feel this way? But even worse would be if I really get my dates and other facts mixed up— in other words, if my memory were going bad. I hope that is not the case. I've been on too many medicines for the last three years, and my doctor says I should still continue them, although sometimes I question his wisdom.

I'm so happy to that S and P feel they have begun their 'retirement' together. S is beginning to relax, and both are enjoying themselves, trying not to push to do everything at once. I think that's what retirement should be all about : enjoying life and taking it at a leisurely pace. They are so lucky to have each other.

I am lonely.

My sisters— my closest friends— are distant in physical space; and my best friend has her family and grandchildren but we manage to spend time together by phone or getting together since we live within proximity of each other. But when she spent the last four months in Istanbul, I was really, really alone, trying to keep myself busy writing to escape spiritual alienation and pain, or trying to turn the feelings into something beautiful which could only be achieved through extreme anguish and voiced through the craft of diction.

When I start to think to philosophically (or perhaps selfishly) I try to sort out things into their perspective. That usually provides a reality check and makes me grateful for what I have. I even feel shame for daring to complain. I have been following the Cougar helicopter crash in the North Atlantic, just off St John’s since March 12— and I feel so close to the people of Newfoundland in their loss and grief. Somehow the emotions are still raw and ring close to home every time I see the news and the background on TV- the South side Hills or the St John’s Harbour. . . My heart drowns in nostalgia. Last night Helen Fogwell-Porter, a local writer whom I got know well and became friends with while I lived in St John’s, was on CBC's "National" reciting E.J.Pratt’s poem "Erosion" and talking about the collective grief of Newfoundlanders from a writer’s point of view. I listened to her familiar yet unique Newfoundland accent while my memories of teaching the poem as a young teacher to my seniors were juxtaposed with the circumstances under which it was being recited by Helen on national news. It had always been one of my favorite poems- so much packed in such few lines and so poignant in the experience it speaks of.

The night before, it was Mary Walsh on a program called "Who do you think you are?" searching her roots from St John’s back to Ireland. I can close my eyes and travel back on certain routes, the streets still clear in memory, one yielding into another and changing name without warning. A Tim Horton's on one corner or a convenience store on another (Montrealler's version of a depanneur). The Churchill Square on Elizabeth Avenue and the only Farmer's Market where I had made friends with the fresh produce sellers and written an article for the Telegram. The bins of brine that keep salt cod and seal fins; the meagre offerings of the Newfoundland terrain: root vegetables for a jig's dinner. The hilly topography, uneven streets, colourful clapboard houses with a unique charm of their own... I do miss it all and —at the same time— feel banished from it all .

I still read the Telegram on-line although I do not write for it any more. That's my way of keeping in touch with the pulse of Newfoundland - a weak pulse, albeit. I read the comments readers post in response to news— many are very acrid about their premier and still hang on to the Newfoundlander mentality of 'Them' against the rest of Canada. They rant and rave even from as far away as Alberta and Washington, DC. as "ex pats", blaming much on Danny, but forgetting that it is they who elected him and will probably do so again. I take a look (with disdain) at the Saturday columns of Wells- the so called food writer and restaurant critique (whom I met at the opening of The Rooms in St John's). He used to be the weather man on CBC in St John's and has no culinary training or the refined understanding of food except consuming it, but he tries so hard to sound eloquent and knowledgeable. Sometimes even his writing gets away without being copy edited that a couple of comments I posted — very polite but subtly sarcastic— were censored and not published. But more often than not his column doesn't get any reader feedback. I wonder how many Newfoundlanders read or are even interested in food articles about ostrich steaks or bison roast.

It's time to get off my high horse and see if Selim wants to come in. He is such an anal cat— my domestic tiger— that he waits until he's let in to run to his box. He still doesn't understand that the outdoors are his to use as he wishes. Yesterday when I came home from Petra’s, he was at the door like a little boy, shifting from one leg to the other in a dire rush to go to the bathroom, and as soon as I opened the door he made a bee line towards his litter box for a long relief. Then he spent the next hour preening his silky hair and licking his paws clean before curling up for a well deserved cat nap after an entire day of chasing robins.

Füsun Atalay ~ Copyright © 2009