The Ultimate Sacrifice

It was with sorrow that I picked up yesterday’s paper and read of the death of a Canadian soldier in Afghanistan. I cannot imagine the greif that must come at losing a loved one under such circumstances and my heart truly goes out to his family. Although the details surrounding his death are still somewhat hazy, it has been established that he was killed during a firefight with Taliban forces and died defending his unit. Hopefully the heroism of his final actions can take away some of the pain of his family’s loss.
Let me muddy the waters by emphatically stating that I am not opposed to Canada maintaining a military presence in Afghanistan. I do not consider myself to be a warmonger, but I believe that times and circumstances sometimes requireus to stand up and be counted, and if necessary, to fight for our convictions. One of the more dramatic historical figures in my religion was a prophet named Moroni who lived about 100 B.C. He had the distinction of living during a period of time during which his people, the Nephites, were almost constantly at war. In addition to being inspired, he was also a brilliant strategist, which lead to him being appointed General over the Nephite armies. During one particularly dark period, with his nation being threatened by its enemies and the government threatened by usurpers and in turmoil, Moroni created a banner out of his clothing, on which he wrote: “In memory of our God, our religion, and freedom, and our peace, our wives, and our children.” The banner was affixed to a pole and carried with him as a means to rally the people and help them to remember what was truly important in their lives.
Sadly, even in today’s world, there are those who would take away our right to these things. I am in no way trying to encourage irrational fear or lend credence to unfounded conflict, but I am proud of our nation for answering the bell and sending troops to protect those who are threatened and send a message to would-be oppressors that we will not be overrun or intimidated. Edmund Burke once wrote that “All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” This has never been more true than in today’s world, and I am grateful for men and women who are willing to literally lay their lives on the line to prevent this from happening. It is tragic that they do sometimes lose their lives in the process, but I honestly believe that their sacrifice will be recognized and rewarded.
After 9-11 I toyed with the idea of joining the reserve core. I seriously considered it but in the end wasn’t willing to make the time commitment. Sometimes I feel badly about it. It makes me feel selfish and callous to enjoy the freedoms of a society that I am seemingly not willing to sacrifice for. When I consider the time and effort contributed by our soldiers, it makes me wonder if perhaps my priorities are out of whack. They give up their families, their jobs, and even their lives; I am not willing to give up four days a month. True, I have a wife and three small children to look after, but that doesn’t necessarily give me an exemption. The soldier who gave his life in Afghanistan this week now has a widow and a young child without a father.
I struggle with it at times. Should I reconsider? What is worth sacrificing for if not the rights and freedoms of my family and my society? Am I shirking my responsibility? My reason for not wanting to give up the time was to spend more time with my family; but at what point do they stop becoming a reason and start becoming an excuse?
I am grateful for the brave men and women who serve my country and I admire them for having the courage to follow their convictions. As I read day after day of the growing discontent with our country’s military presence in Afghanistan, it is my hope that the same people who are speaking out against the movement will at least have the good grace to respect and honour those who have sacrificed for it out of the belief that they are making a difference in this world.
Pte. Robert Costall, thank you. I am forever in your debt.

No truce with the Furies

The Furies are at home in the mirror; it is their address. Even the clearest water, if deep enough can drown. Never think to surprise them. Your face approaching ever so friendly is the white flag they ignore. There is no truce with the Furies. A mirror’s temperature is always at zero. It is ice in the veins. Its camera is an X-ray. It is a chalice held out to you in silent communion, where gaspingly you partake of a shifting identity never your own.

-R.S. Thomas, “No truce with the Furies”

Oceans Apart

Almost everyone I have ever met exhibits some sort of emotional attachment or connection with some kind of physical landform or geological feature. I’ve seen this mirrored in an amazing variety of relevant objects or places, ranging from concrete pedestrain overpasses to seemingly-infinite expanses of desert. It is curious and strange to discover where people feel the most comfortable, and often revealing.
I have been fortunate enough in my relatively short time on this earth to cover a fair amount of ground. I have lived in Europe and walked through ancient forests and up 800 year-old stone stairways that once bore the footsteps of such legendary personages as King Richard the Lion-Hearted and Cardinal Richelieu. I have tasted the purity of mountain air at nine thousand feet above sea level, and have sat in reverence at the foot of thousand year-old cedars measuring twenty feet in diameter in the heart of the pacific rainforest. I have tasted the salt of both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, have sifted the orange sands of the desert in my hands, and was raised among the endless amber fields of the Canadian prairie. I can say firsthand that there are places that inspire, places that command respect, and places that convey an absolutely petrifying sense of dread. Sometimes it seems as though the earth itself has a soul.
I’m not sure what it is in us that identifies more strongly with one place than another. It’s more than just a sense of liking or disliking one’s immediate enviroment; I have felt both ways enough times to know the difference. It just seems as though there are elements of landscape that connect more readily with certain personality types than with others.
I grew up in a modest community of 65,000 people. By most urban standards that is a city on the smaller end of the scale, but in Alberta, where agriculture and oil reign supreme, it is the third-largest major centre in the province. I can remember as a child living in a new development on the west side of the city. Apart from memories of constant construction and one incident where a contractor drove a forklift into the side of my parents’ brand new car, the thing I remember the most about it was the back yard. At the time, our street was literally the last one in the city. Beyond our fence was nothing but long, wild grass; a pure, unadulterated prairie that stretched away unbroken to the mountains on the distant horizon. For a young child, it was both enthralling and unsettling. We had all been told not to play beyond the fences, so of course we did so at every opportunity. We would play games to see who could venture the furthest from the gate before turning back. I don’t remember anyone ever making it out of eyesight, or even earshot for that matter. To us it was wild, untamed, and exciting, but carried with it something that impressed on our young minds that the world was a large and sometimes frightening place. The fence itself was absolute protection, and once back within it’s sanctuary we were safe from whatever unseen forces we imagined lurking among the long grasses on the other side of the gate and beyond.
The city was growing rapidly, and it wasn’t long before our prairie disappeared and was replaced by the houses of new friends and eventually, classmates. By that time I was in kindergarten and the days of daring each other away from the fence were a rapidly fading memory. What stuck, though, was the feelings that the prairie had stirred up in me. To this day, the expanse of an empty field conveys to me a feeling of endlessness and a sense of the unknown at what lies beyond the seemingly unreachable horizon. I have come to appreciate the beauty of the prairie, although it can at times be one of the most inhospitable environments known to man. Through the course of the years, I have braved whiteout blizzards, taken shelter from torrential rains, and felt the warmth of the blazing summer sun. Now I look forward to the smell of sweetgrass in the spring or the contrast brought to the fields by the heavy black clouds of an approaching electrical storm. The land once foreboding and exotic now feels like home.
To me the connection is emotional, born out of familiarity. For some it is almost cultural. Many inhabitants of this region are not so much residents of the prairies as they are a part of them. Some farming families have been here for generations, and the cycle of the seasons at which I marvel is imprinted in their very psyche and inextricably tied to their livelihood. It is perhaps all they will ever know, or ever wish to.
It came as somewhat of a shock to me to discover that not everyone feels a sense of attachment to their homeland, or home region. In a way this makes nothing but sense, seeing that many grow up moving frequently and don’t really have the time to form a bond with any one particular landscape or area. What doesn’t always make sense is that even if it isn’t the one they came from, most people do have a connection to something geographical.
I can understand this completely. Although the prairies will always be my home, my soul truly resides in the mountains. An argument could be made for proximity here, as my family always lived within a few hours’ driving distance of the mountains and spent considerable time there. I wish I could explain it, but there really isn’t any logic to it at all. There is simply a power that resides there; an unseen force that almost vibrates through the rocks and valleys and seems to resonate through my entire being. When I am there I feel free. I feel like I can think more clearly, and it is much easier for me to block out distractions and concentrate on the important points of my life. I feel comfortable, confident, and self-assured; what the French would call “bien dans la peau”, or “well in my skin”. I feel closer to my God. My career and circumstances have taken me away from that at times, and I now live in a city of over one million people and often struggle to find the time to get away. When I do, however, nothing is more rewarding than to lose myself in the forests of the high alpine, to breathe the crystal-clear air, and to let it all fade away behind me. I can sit up on top of some ridge, forget about the rest of the world, and take some time to allow myself to heal.
Sometimes, a connection to a place can be formed almost instantly. I know people who love the desert more than anything, yet they have seen it once. I have friends who speak of nothing but the ocean, yet they live thousands of kilometres from it. I cannot discount this, because again I have experienced it.
I had seen the Pacific ocean several times before and had always found it beautiful and impressive, but it wasn’t until I found myself in La Rochelle, France, in the winter of 1995, that I saw the Atlantic ocean for the first time. Something about it captured me. It seemed wilder than the Pacific, and somehow angrier. Standing on a beach within five miles of where the first French explorers to “discover” my country set sail from, I was struck by the mystery and the danger of a sea that for hundreds of years defined the world. For three months, I employed every excuse I could think of to visit that beach and watch the waves curl ashore as if each one contained some secret to be discovered. I followed the cycle of the tides and longed to feel the sting of salt on my face. It was so new and yet so intense, like the first stages of passion in a new romance. I cannot explain why I was so drawn to it, and still cannot find the words to voice much of what it made me feel. By the time I left La Rochelle, the Atlantic ocean had become a part of me.
The night before I left, I visited the beach for what I thought would be the last time. That night I witnessed the awesome fury of the deep, as a vicious storm drove the waves high up onto the breakwater, spraying their angry crests at least thirty feet out into the park behind us. It was too dangerous to walk to our usual vantage point out on the jetty, which was in fact completely submerged. The beach itself had entirely disappeared. Even though we stayed safely back from the edge of the walkway, within minutes we were drenched to the core and my companions wanted to leave. I, however, was drawn to the seawall, where I could watch the seething water vent its frustration without being swept away. I stood there for at least an hour, as my companions took refuge in a nearby cafe. Soaked completely through, I shivered violently against the cold but could not seem to tear myself away from the edge. It was once of the strangest manifestations of elemental connection I have ever experienced. I felt devastated knowing that in the morning I would leave that place, most likely forever. In a strange turn, it felt like the ocean was angry with me for leaving, and was doing her best to show it. If she was trying to keep me there, whatever she was doing was working. Heading back to the apartment that night, I felt as though someone had torn my heart out, and I would have given almost anything to return to the seawall and stay there until the tempest subsided. For one hour on that stormy night in early February 1996, the Atlantic ocean had complete and total power over me.
The next morning I learned that due to a railway strike, the train I had planned to take had been delayed and I would be departing several hours later than I had originally anticipated. I went to a store near my apartment and purchased a small, hand-blown glass bottle with a wood stopper, and I went back to the beach. It was almost unrecognizable from twelve hours previous. The storm had broken in the early hours of the morning and the tide had receded back to the foot of the beach, where it lapped gently at a blanket of immaculate sand. Having been completely submerged the night before, the sand had been left almost perfectly level by the retreating waves to the point that it almost looked like it had been steamrolled. I removed my shoes and walked to the water’s edge, feeling the softness of the new sand beneath my bare feet. I was obviously the first one to visit that morning, as my prints were the only ones brazen enough to mar the perfect surface the storm had prepared for them. When I reached the point where the sand became moist, I stopped, turned, and filled my tiny glass bottle with dry sand from behind me. Then I set the bottle down, reached out my hands to the tide, and said goodbye. I have not seen the Atlantic ocean since.
I don’t know why we are attracted to certain things or certain places. I only know that it happens, and that it yeilds some of the most intense and emotional experiences of our lives. Perhaps there is something within the fabric of nature that finds a part of each one of us to communicate with. Perhaps it is a way of keeping us connected to the earth from whence we came. Sometimes it is joyful, sometimes painful. Sometimes it is exhilarating, sometimes it is frightening. Sometimes it is all of these things at once. I don’t know why certain places speak to certain people, but I can only hope that when they do, we will listen.

Food for thought

Excellent posting on the “Celibate in the City” blog yesterday. (March 27) One of the best I’ve read in a while. Check it out, and ask yourself if you’re guilty of the same things I am.

The darker side of Glossettes

Somewhat alarmingly, I’m posting another entry about poop. This one really should be swept under the rug, but for some reason I’m driven by forces I can’t explain to recant it for the good of all humankind. I will warn you: if you are weak of stomach, read no further.
It began when the Bear was helping me clean up the living room. Our house is tiny, and the living room, being the focal point of activity in our home, usually looks like someone picked it up, turned it upside down and shook it, then replaced it. It is generally only at the end of the day when my wife and I pick up all the toys that we remember what colour the carpet is under there. My wife is a good housekeeper and makes a point of vacuuming daily, so the mess is not actually mess so much as it is clutter. Still, it gets pretty hazardous in there at times. Our kids like to have snacks while they are watching TV, and being the kind, accommodating parents we are, we sometimes let them. Unfortunately, this often results in goldfish crackers, raisins, and apple slices being mixed in with the toys. It keeps us on our toes as parents when a child picks up food off the floor and attempts to ingest it. As I said before, the room is cleaned and vacuumed daily, so the problem can’t become too serious, but things like apples really shouldn’t be eaten after they’ve been lying out for three hours. The occasional raisin or cracker I will let go, as I know it can’t be more than a few hours old anyway.
This is where the cruelty of fate comes into play. The Bear and I were cleaning away, and I was feeling a deep sense of accomplishment at not only have the room clean in the middle of the afternoon, but actually getting him to help clean up his own mess! We had almost finished when he unearthed a small, round, dark object and picked it up. He held it out to me and asked if he could eat it. I looked at it carefully, and for all the world it looked like a raisin. Moosie had been eating raisins in there about an hour before, and I assumed that it was a straggler. I told him he could eat it. Into his mouth it went, and immediately a strange kind of look came over his face. He looked at me and grimaced, then spit the “raisin” into his hand. “Daddy, that’s not a raisin.” I thought maybe it was a rock or a piece of a toy, so I took it from him for a closer inspection. I began to have a sinking feeling when he handed it to me and it felt soft, and the moisture had revealed a fibrous, black-green surface. “Daddy, that’s a brown yucky”. Brown yuckies are three year-old code for poop. I pushed the offending object and it split in my hand, confirming my worst fears. Not taking time to question why my three year-old son knew what brown yuckies tasted like, I immediately carried him to the washroom to sanitize both of our hands, and poured him a king-sized glass of water to rinse out his mouth. I felt terrible. I had allowed my child to eat a piece of crap.
I still have no idea where it came from. The only possible explanation I can come up with is that a stray nugget got away from either my wife or me as we were changing a diaper. Regardless of the origin, I will always harbour some guilt over the incident, and needless to say, we now have a strict “no food in the living room” rule to allow us to quash the possibility of a re-occurence. All I can say beyond that is parents, watch those raisins carefully. Who knows where they’ve been.

Winter Ghosts

Hurry quickly, through the doorway
Laced with January’s cold stain
Hide your faces and funnel onward
Mindful of the passing hours

Featureless, you inundate this place
Flowing like an awkward black tide
Moving cautiously over a ground
Dirtied and painted by your movements

Follow blankly along your way
Among the tired shadows of morning
Clinging tightly to the darkness
Of a sleep too recently abandoned

Yet do not linger here too long
For the garish day comes quickly
And shying from the grayish rays of sunlight
You emerge, heads bowed,

Into the dawn of another season.

Uncommon sense

Every now and then I come across something that provides me with a resounding conviction that the human race as a whole is a few sandwiches short of a full picnic. Like the bold-type warning on the instructions for a new clothes iron cautioning us: “Do not attempt to iron clothes while wearing them”. Thanks, tips. What is ultimately more distressing is that these warnings are not completely unfounded because there are actually people out there who might be inclined to try. Picture it. Bob, the high-powered business executive and his wife are preparing for the company Christmas party when he notices that the shirt he plans to wear is wrinkled. He puts it on anyway, hoping that the wrinkles are minor enough that they will not be noticed. Unfortunately, he quickly realizes that this is not the case and calls for help.
“Honey, my shirt is wrinkled. Do you think you could iron it for me?
“Sorry, dear, I’m in the middle of painting my toenails and don’t want to mar them. You’ll have to do it yourself.” comes the answer.
“But I’m already wearing it and I have to trim my nose hairs before we go. I don’t have time.”
“The iron is already hot.” She calls from the other room. “Just run it over the shirt quickly.”
Bob, figuring he’ll save some time by cutting out the process of removing and replacing the shirt, sets the dial for extra steam and applies the iron to his chest where it promptly covers the upper third of his torso with second-degree burns. The ambulance ride is spent trying to come up with some way to explain this to the board of directors tomorrow without coming off as a complete idiot.
Another favourite of mine is the warning on the cough medicine we give to our kids. “WARNING: May cause drowsiness. Do not drive or operate machinery after taking.” This from a product that is formulated for children two and under. I imagine we’d have a real problem if all those two year-olds out there started driving forklifts around while under the influence. Can these people be serious? Again, imagine the conversation.
Me: “Honey, I’m going to give Moosie his medicine.”
My wife: “OK, but hide the car keys first. He made a real mess of that BMW last time.”
The term “common sense” is truly the biggest oxymoron of them all. The more of this world I see, the more entrenched I become in my belief that it is not common at all. If I could bottle the stuff, I would give it away for free just to do my part to end the ridiculousness.
A few minutes ago I went to get a chocolate bar from the vending machine. Discovering that I had no change, I pulled a ten dollar bill from my wallet and threaded it carefully into the change machine. The machine immediately spit the bill back at me, its little red light flashing angrily. I snapped the bill between my fingers and tried again. The red light flashed and the bill came back once more. Thinking that perhaps I had the bill oriented incorrectly, I turned it over and tried again. The machine, unrelenting, rejected it a third time. I reversed the bill and tried yet again, and the machine once more spit it back at me. Growing frustrated, I tried four more times to cram the bill into that lousy slot and was foiled on all counts. That’s when I noticed the label in near-microscopic print near the bottom right-hand corner of the machine. It read: “Do not fold bills.” This struck me as particularly absurd, as I can probably count on one hand the number of times in my life that I have encountered an unmolested bill of any denomination. as soon as we get them, they are invariably folded and placed in a wallet or billfold of some kind, rendering them effectively useless for this particular machine. Who has unfolded bills lying around? It’s not like we all carry an ATM in our back pockets to provide us with pristine, unfolded bills to use in cantankerous change machines. Ridiculous.
My father has a book about the Darwin awards: distinctions that are awarded each year to some unfortunate meathead who kills or maims himself in the process of committing some outlandishly stupid act. One of my favourites is one about a man who steals a rocket and fixes it to his car, figuring he should be able to satisfy his need for speed by lighting it up on a remote desert highway. Of course, the velocity generated by the powerful thrust is far in excess of what his limited driving skills can handle, and he tries to slow down by hitting the brakes. Pushed far beyond the limits of their design, the brake pads instantly fuse to the rotors and the car goes airborne, embedding itself in a rock face some thirty-five feet off the ground. Our hero, sadly, did not live to fly another day. I can only hope that the next time some misguided genius decides to attempt something of this nature that they come here and take this rotten change machine with them.

In search of commentary?

I got my first comment the other day. Someone is actually reading this stuff, and what is even more astounding is that they apparently find some value in it.
This blog is largely just ramblings and commentary on my family, so in some ways it feels good to know that someone is able to actually visit here without going away with the conviction that I am completely loopy. Still, I sometimes read back through some of these entries and wonder if they aren’t lacking direction and/or clarity. Then again, more often than not our lives themselves are alarmingly short on clarity, so I suppose the reflection is not totally unjustified.
Back to the comment. I was somewhat dismayed to realize that I was pleased that someone had voiced some appreciation for what I am doing here. It has never been my intention to pander to anyone else; in fact, I was relatively sure that nobody was paying any attention to what I was doing here. These entries have been completely of my own devices, borne largely of a desire to keep track of the events of my life coupled with a knowledge that I am absolutely incapable of keeping a regular journal. For some strange reason, airing my inane musings on the internet has provided a sort of motivation to make regulat entries. In my opinion, that alone has made it worthwhile.
Still, I hunt through the circle of bloggers and so many of them seem to “know” one another. They reference each others’ blogs on their sites and give props to each other in their entries. Some of them, it seems, have even met physically. There seems to be a sort of sense of community. In this context, I am an island unto myself. In most ways, I am very comfortable with that. On some tiny level, however, it felt good to get the comment. Day after day my hit tracker tells me the story of nobody visiting, nobody reading, and nobody commenting. I have visited other blogs, even put up links to some of the ones I liked the most, and left comments for them. To my knowledge, nobody has done the same, and I am happy to live on in anonymity. I do, for some reason, get lots of referrals from foreign language blogs. I’m not sure why, but apparently my blog holds some kind of animal magnetism for anyone who speaks portuguese. Funny then, that I would get a comment in English. Funnier still that I would actually care.
Human beings are peculiar animals. Even actions designed purely out of a desire for self gratification are somehow validated by the approval of another. Why is this? I’m sure I would have kept on doing my thing indefinitely even if I had never received any indication that any eyes other than my own were seeing this. Funny then how now that I know otherwise, I suddenly find myself more conscious of what I write here. Now I have to resist the desire to structure these entries to appear more sophisticated. I have to try and remain true to my thoughts instead of making an attempt to write about something that I feel will have value to someone else. The comment has changed everything. Now I will do my best to ensure that it changes nothing.

Tick-tock

Isn’t it amazing how the more time you need, the less of it you have? Run into a day where you have absolutely nothing to do and it will drag on forever, boring you to tears. Try to stick to a schedule though, and it all just slips through your fingers. Lately, it seems like I have no time whatsoever that is not comsumed by work, more work, or family. In fact, I really don’t even have time to be writing this and that makes me a little crazy. I’m going back on nights on Monday, so at least I’ll have a few hours to myself. Normally I’d ask you to check the sanity of anyone who said they were looking forward to working twelve-hour night shifts, but I honestly can’t wait.
Until Monday…

Poop?

Moosie is notorious for pooping his pants and not saying anything. He hates having his diaper changed and would rather walk around with crap squishing everywhere than let us clean him up. Consequently, we have to check him periodically. If something smells dodgy, we pull on the back of his pants and look down inside to see what colour things are down there. Usually where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
The other day Moosie was particularly fragrant and I was checking him frequently to make sure that the smell was gas rather than the nastier, more solid incarnation. He tolerated it fairly well, coming over when I asked him to and standing there patiently while I checked his drawers.
The tables turned on me when I sat down on the couch to change the Frog. The Moose was playing on the floor and I didn’t want the Frog to get trampled, so I leaned over to start undressing her and that’s when I felt something pulling at the back of my jeans. I turned around and there was the Moose, my belt in his little hands, pulling the waist of my pants toward him and peering down at my butt. He looked up at me, then down into the gap, and said “poop”?
Good to know he’s got my back.