Oh, The Busy.

My pet peeve (okay, one of them) is people who talk about how busy they are, because, frankly, that conversation just never leads to anything good. We’re all busy, and so who, really, has time to blog regularly in the face of the excellence of things like of family visits (and four delicious boys — mine and two of my brother’s sons — running around together all weekend; oh, the cousin memories!) and children’s birthday parties and deadlines and the like? Nobody, that’s who, but most of the time we make some time and occasionally we don’t and all of this is by way of saying that I haven’t blogged much recently, but I’ll get back on it one of these days, but in the meantime I am popping up like a groundhog from underneath The Busy to say the following to all of you in Thunder Bay:

Yank yourself away from all your stuff for a couple of hours this evening and had on over to the Mary J. L. Black branch of the public library to spend some quality time with the wonderful writer Farzana Doctor! She’s this year’s headline reader for the Thunder Pride literary and storytelling evening, and she’s backed by a great round up of local queer writers, and I can promise you that it’s going to be a lot of fun.

If you’re not busy tonight, you have no excuse not to be there. And if you’re already too busy, you need the break. Trust me.

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I took myself to the local (read: only one in town) movie theatre to see The Great Gatsby the other night.

Quick crowdsource poll: How many of you go to movies by yourselves? Some people are horrified, or at least somewhat skeptical, when I mention going to movies by myself. Which I really don’t get — I mean, first of all there’s the whole child-care issue: if Rachel and I had to hire a sitter every time we wanted to see a movie, would see far fewer movies than the scant few we already do. Further, if we do splurge on a sitter, then I generally want to spend the time actually talking to her, not sitting side by side in the dark. I’m as happy as the next person for movie company, but, really, it’s not like we’re going to have a conversation, or anything.

Except. Except that I live here, in Thunder Bay, where people do. They do have conversations. People in this city chat all the way through the commercials (including that asinine anti-obesity commercial sponsored by, of all companies Coca-Cola, that protector of all things healthy) and the previews and the film itself. Sometimes they talk to their seatmates — usually inane comments like “Didja see that?” or “She looks pretty angry!” or “Now, Doris, what is the name of that actress again? Oh! Oh! She’s the one from that show!”— and sometimes they talk directly to the characters in the movie themselves. It’s like watching Dora the Explorer with a bunch of adult-sized toddlers yelling “Backpack!” Except that they’re yelling things like “Yeah! Get him!”

All this talking irritates me. And not just because I came here from Toronto, where nobody talks during the movies — where nobody you don’t know might talk to you at all, for days. Similarly, Toronto supermarket cashiers do not comment on or question your purchases the way they do here.

No, all this talking irritates me because it means — drumroll please — I’m a bitch I CAN’T HEAR THE MOVIE. Look. I already live with two young children who make it nearly impossible to have any kind of continuous conversation, and on the rare evening that I get to fully immerse myself in some kind of cultural production, I don’t need fully grown adults treating a public movie theatre like their own private living room.

I snagged a seat on the aisle for Gatsby, all the better to stretch out my right leg with its wonky knee. I dutifully put my phone away when the commercial told me to, and then I listened to the two older women behind me chat. I don’t remember the content of their conversation, just that there was one, one that continued through the previews (that new Tom Hanks movie looks pretty good, I think, but how would I know for sure, ladies?), through the opening credits, and then into the opening scenes.

Usually, I try to give people at least the previews to get the verbiage out of their systems. I pretend that once the movie starts they will actually smarten up, and sometimes I am correct in that assumption, but more often than not I am not. And as much as I am trying to focus on the previews, I am also mentally rehearsing my next steps. Which means gritting my teeth and thinking of a suitably friendly yet firm way to turn around at an appropriate moment and say something brief yet coherent that will put an end to the problem, but what I actually said at Gatsby was something like, “Hi sorry, but when you talk I can’t focus on the movie so could you please … not?” So smooth, but it worked: they stopped, their momentarily stunned silence and looks of horror fading into the comfortable silence of people actually watching the movie with their mouths shut. Except for popcorn. I heard one person ask, “What did she say?” but other than that I got no blowback. Which I was thankful for, because, on occasion, I have received blowback. Not pretty.

Is it so hard, people of Thunder Bay? Is it so hard to just keep quiet for the couple of hours that the film is showing? I don’t think so, but maybe I’m just that crazy lady who came to see a movie all by herself.

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PS — If you haven’t already, please do leave a comment here to win a copy of Stealing Time magazine, which includes my essay, “A Version of Upright.”I have to say, your chances are looking pretty good right now, so go. Click. Comment.just not out loud at the movie theatre.

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What do you call a group of dragons? A pride? A shrewdness, as in “a shrewdness of apes”? There’s a a battery of barracudas, a parliament of owls, an ostentation of peacocks, a quiver of cobras, a  zeal of zebras and — possibly my favourite — an exaltation of larks.

Perhaps I will call these the latest fancy of my eight-year-old, sitting for hours at the back desk with markers and lined paper, realizing visions in his head. “I draw them to calm down,” he told me. A calm of dragons? A meditation of dragons? An obsession of dragons? A magnet of dragons, who can stick by themselves to the fridge door now that we’ve run out of actual magnets? They all work.

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See these?

These — these — are my long-lost car keys. (Or, more precisely, car key, singular.)

I’ve been scanning the driveway and our neighbours’ yard for a couple of weeks now as the snow has receded, hoping for a glint of silver, not getting it. And then, yesterday — the very day that I finally said out loud, to Rachel, “I think I’m going to have to just suck it up and go order new keys” — Isaac plucked them from the newly exposed grass next door: a little rusty, slightly faded, but whole and working. I picked up that boy and literally whirled him around in excitement, and then handed him the mini chocolate hazelnut bar I just happened to have conveniently stashed in my pocket for precisely this kind of occasion. Who knew?

I thought that they’d been gone since November, and now I realize that it had been only since February — February 17, to be exact. Obviously, it seemed like longer — and the niggling of the not knowing, the logic that they had to be close by and yet invisible bothered me daily for the past couple of months. (Reading The Lovely Bones, imagining what it must be like to lose a child — clues glinting, unseen, just below the surface of vision, didn’t help.) It felt symbolic, all this losing and niggling and searching for what has to be there but not knowing how to get it: a metaphor for this past winter, which has felt more difficult than other winters.

And the finding feels symbolic too. “Like Aslan has returned to Narnia!” I crowed in a Facebook status update, but it’s true: the snow is melting, in fits and starts. I had, I have, what I needed there, all along. It may be rusty and faded, but it’s whole and it still works.

I’ve stopped dying my hair. I found my car keys. Things just get more and more exciting around here.

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Just about to head out the door for brunch, but here’s a link to my post about family rituals. Of course, immediately after I wrote this the kids decided that they no longer like my pizza. I asked Isaac point-blank what he thought of it and he said, “I’m not going to tell you.”

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Isaac asked if he could stick a tattoo on me yesterday morning and I said yes, and the result was this, in the space between the waistband of my jeans and the bottom of my shirt. I forgot about it until I got to the gym this morning and there it was, a fierce tiger’s head smiling out from my midriff in between squats. “I love your tattoo!” one of the women in the exercise class told me, and it took me a moment to realize that she wasn’t joking. The truth is, I like it too, even if it is slightly off centre in relation to my navel. I’ve been pondering a new tattoo; don’t have a particularly clear idea about the specifics but I know I want it to be big and visible (as opposed to the too-timid foray I made into the world of ink with my first one, only a couple inches square and obscured by a bra strap). Maybe I’ll just buy sheets and sheets of temporary tats and let Isaac go nuts until we figure out what sticks for reals.

In the meantime, I’m figuring my Pap test on Friday just got a little livelier.

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Greetings from the land of Myrtle the Turtle. It’s the last day of March break. I’m pretty sure I have strep throat — at this point, I hope I do, because then I can do something about the broken glass in my throat every time I swallow.

Just a quick note to let you know that my latest post is up at Today’s Parent: We’ve been adopted, so to speak. It’s pretty lovely.

Also, yesterday, the incomparable Casey, of the equally incomparable Life with Roozle metaphorically held my hand and walked me through the steps of installing some kind of WordPress plug-in that will allow YOU, dear readers, to subscribe to my posts via e-mail. Who knew? Apparently, many of you did. Just click on the title of any post and then go down to the bottom of the page and check the box that says “Notify me of new posts by e-mail.” Casey swears this is the way of the future and that you won’t be disappointed, so don’t prove her wrong.

Off to the doctor! Wish me really excellent antibiotics!

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“Hello. I am a turtle. My name is Myrtle. I am going to cuddle you. The only thing I can say is ‘Myrtle.’ Myrtle. Do you know what that means? It means ‘I am hungry.’ Also, it means ‘I love you.’ And it means, ‘Could you bring me my clothes?’ Myrtle. Myrtle Myrtle Myrtle Myrtle Myrtle. Myrtle. Myrtle. That means, ‘Pat my shell.’ Myrtle Myrtle Myrtle.

“Also, I never stop talking.”

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I walked the boys to school yesterday, which makes me feel virtuous, what with readying their minds for a day’s worth of learning without consuming even a smidge of fossil fuels. Et cetera. It was only -19°C out, otherwise known as downright balmy — the school herds the kids inside only once the temperature hits -25°. We are hardy souls.

So there I was, feeling downright virtuous as we walked along, the kids all adorable in their matching snowsuits. And I tried hard to feel virtuous. Really, I did. Except that the entire walk to school I was instead consumed with feeling anxious and irritated as my sons played what is fondly known as “The Shoving Game,” which — loosely — involves running full force into each other and knocking each other into the piles of dirty, rotting snow along the sides of the street. The Shoving Game also involves a certain amount of sitting on top of your opponent/collaborator, perhaps occasionally sprinkling his face with snow, hacking away at large ice boulders and hurling them into the street to see them explode, using my body as a human shield, maniacal laughter, and walking along the top ridges of said rotting snow banks, any moment liable to crash skull-first onto the unyielding pavement below.

Also, there is screaming.

It takes maybe five minutes to walk to school when you just walk. Longer, obviously, when you play the shoving game. It felt like an hour. An hour, in, say, stirrups, during which time I tried to remember that this is normal — even healthy — behaviour, that these kids need rough-and-tumble, outdoor play, that they are, by and large, quite good at negotiating the boundaries of their bodies. And even when Rowan momentarily (and not entirely innocently) shoves him too hard and Isaac bursts into sudden, over-reactionary tears, those tears are gone in moments — especially if I don’t intervene.

And I tried not intervene. Really, I did, but it’s almost physically impossible not to find yourself spouting aphorisms like “Careful!” or “Watch the road!” or “If I have to tell you again…” when all you can see is — when you can practically hear — your child’s head splitting open like a ripe cantaloupe on asphalt. I was trying to be cool, trying to be Zen, but mostly I found myself wishing that this city’s blighted urban planning program had seen fit to install more goddamn sidewalks in residential areas here in the 1960s, and occasionally trying to subtly frogmarch Isaac a few steps forward to gain a little bit of distance before the next onslaught.

This is my current, ongoing parenting challenge: maintaining serenity in the face of justified chaos. I tried again last night, when I desperately needed the kids to play in the basement and they just as desperately insisted that they would play in the basement only if one or the other of their parents stayed down there with them, because the Basement Is Scary. So I sucked it up and went down there with them and decided to quilt while they played the “Use the Couch As Leverage to Hurl Yourself over the Spare Bed, Coming Precariously Close to the Edge of the Cupboard Game.”

I had a bit more fun than I had that morning, which just goes to show what an awesome parent I must be.

P.S. I have a new gig! I’ll be blogging weekly at Today’s Parent Canada, as “The (Other) Mother.” Please check it out!

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