In The mid-70s, my old band, Stringband, got to do a tour of Mexico. It was my very first trip anywhere southern and “exotic.” We left Toronto on a bone-chilling February morning; debarking in Mexico City, we entered another world, a world of contrasts and intensity. It hit me the moment we stepped off the plane – the hot humid air, palm trees shimmering in the distance, the dark, hungry eyes of the ragged boys already trying to sell us straw hats and ponchos.
That night we feasted guiltily in a fancy restaurant, while outside, beggars crouched on the sidewalk. Later we went to a huge square where dozens of mariachi bands milled about, all hoping to be hired that evening. I was spellbound by the melodious cacaphony as trumpets, violins, and guitars competed with car horns and the sharp cries of street vendors. The music echoed on through my dreams that night and for many nights to come. Continue reading The Chrysanthemum→
When I wrote the weekly air-force-childhood stories for the radio show, my producer asked me to keep most of the stories on the lighter side because it was a summer afternoon show, and the tone was fairly breezy. But there was more to tell than the lighter side, so a few years later I began this longer piece; I wrote and rewrote it off and on. It’s been shortlisted twice in the CBC Radio literary competition and is published here for the first time.
During the Korean war my air-force pilot father brought back from Japan a length of silk brocade the colour of peacock feathers. My mother had the fabric made into a glamorous, classic column of a dress, floor-length and strapless. The dress mesmerized me, especially the material itself. The blue-green silk was shot through with delicate gold and scarlet threads that sketched miniature Oriental scenes: pagodas on rolling hills, coolies pulling rickshaws, villagers in wide-brimmed hats. What these scenes did not show, of course, were planes flown by men like my father dropping bombs on those peaceable landscapes, or armed battalions advancing in the hills beyond the pagodas.
This irony, though, didn’t strike me until much later, when North American soldiers were once again dropping bombs in a land of rickshaws and rice paddies. As a child I made a game of getting lost in those fabric scenes. At some point I realized that they formed a repetitive pattern and I felt disappointed—how much more interesting it would be, I thought, to have a dress like a painting, where every detail was different. Continue reading The Dress (A Memoir)→
With Beau, a purebred Cheval Canadien whom I had for four yearsAt age 10 in England, my New Forest pony BrunoDuring Christmas in BarbadosAs a teen with Traveller, a quarter horse crossViola, Dutch Warmblood dressage schoolmaster
Mouse was commissioned about 1990 by Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary, along with several other short plays by other playwrights, for a 10-minute play festival. We were told that the plays would be performed as a lunch-time series, so topics that didn’t mix with lunch should be avoided; also, they would be staged with a minimum of props, lighting, etc. Other than that there were no restrictions on style or subject matter. I got the idea for this play after seeing a young street kid in the subway with a pet rat in the pocket of her jacket.
CHARACTERS
VINCE, a punk with green hair, Doc Marten boots, and a black leather jacket with chains. A young seventeen.
IDA, an office clerk in a beige raincoat with unfashionable glasses and no makeup. An old thirty-two.
CORINNE is in her kitchen in Lowertown Ottawa; ELSIE is in the living room of her Montreal apartment. But while these spaces can be hinted at, the set shouldn’t attempt realism. It should be a relatively abstract space in which the three characters can move about freely.
THE TIME
For CORINNE and ELSIE, the spring of 1944 (except for the phone call section of the prologue which is a flash forward to about one year later). For MARIE-LYNN it is the present (mid 1980s). Read excerpts from the play…
The woman was on a quest. She had left her bustling village and travelled hundreds of miles (okay, kilometres, if you insist) to arrive at a white house at the foot of a mountain. Like countless travellers before her, she was seeking spiritual enlightenment. Unlike those pilgrims of yore, though, she had found this place through the Internet. She was also on a tight schedule. She had exactly three days to achieve inner peace.
That woman is me, and such are the contradictions of soul quests in the modern age. I was searching because I had come to a point in my life where I could no longer deal with suffering – not my own so much as the suffering of others, both human and animal. Not that this was anything new. When I was a kid, my family made fun of me for refusing to swat flies. As an adult, I found that the sight of a homeless woman could haunt me for weeks.
I’m walking up the hill again to the hospital in Summerland, B.C., where my mother is dying. It’s a chilly April morning, but the sun carries a brilliant promise of spring, a spring that we know she will not see, because the doctors told us, after discovering an unsuspected, virulent cancer, that she would be lucky to last a few days. It’s been twelve days now, and she is still alive, still conscious, still suffering.
My two sisters and I are suffering too. Not physically, but we’re all crazed, in shock. My mother is in her late 70s, but up until a month ago she had been healthy, vibrant, full of that joie de vivre that French Canadians are stereotypically famous for. My sisters and I have always assumed she would live into her 90s, as her parents did. And we love her very much. Continue reading The Orphan Age→
Oligodendroglioma. What an ugly word, I thought, when the doctor first pronounced it: an ugly word for an ugly thing that had just been found in my beautiful sister’s brain. We – the doctor, a nurse, my sister and her partner, my other sister and I – were all crowded into a small, windowless examining room at Toronto’s Princess Margaret hospital. I was already feeling claustrophobic. Now, that huge word, like the tumour it described, seemed to swell malevolently and swallow up whatever space remained between us. Continue reading Creature Comfort→
Roxanne Salinas of British Columbia has done extensive work on the history of the Canadian horse. Her research has taken her to Ontario and Quebec, and she’s explored the digital collections of the national archives of Quebec and France. During this research, she met another passionate fan of the breed, Élène Sergerie of Joliette, QC. Together on the Internet they spent many long winter evenings exploring the history of the breed, sharing discoveries and helping each other with translating old stories in English and French.
When I learned that Roxanne and her husband would no longer be breeding Canadians and were going to cancel their website, she graciously gave me permission to move her pages over to my site. They’re too good to be lost! Click here to discover the fascinating history of Canada’s National Horse: Legacy Canadians resource pages
Swallowfield Eno Kelbeck
Re the gorgeous stallion, above, Roxanne says, “I first saw Eno, sire of Kelbeck (Kal), in the summer of 2000; he died that winter. He was out with two mares and foals, and one of those foals was Kelbeck. We went into the pasture to see the mares and Eno walked out from behind a grove of trees.He held himself so proudly, and he looked right at me with a look that was strong and confident yet showed a stoic and wise old soul—one of those moments that is forever embedded in memory. I’d looked at quite a few Canadians already but Eno stood out to me with a presence the others didn’t have.
“I mentioned to Eno’s owner that I would like an Eno son one day, so when we returned that fall to buy a mare, we managed to stuff Kelbeck—who was a fuzzy, un-halter-broke weanling—in the trailer too and we brought him home.” Kelbeck went on to do brilliantly in dressage, showing off the athleticism and calm temperament of the Canadian horse.”
While it was difficult to part with Kelbeck, keeping a stallion is not an easy task, and Roxanne can take comfort in knowing he’s gone to a breeder who’ll ensure that Eno and Kelbeck’s genes are passed on to future generations of the Canadian Horse.
With Beau, a purebred Canadian I had for four years
Mainguy Bismark Joé (Beau)
I was lucky enough to own a Canadian for four years. Then fate intervened and I had to sell him. But before that, I wrote this piece for a magazine about my love affair with the breed:
Love at First (Canadian) Sight
Although I’ve been around the block a few times, I’ve yet to fall in love with a man at first sight. I did, though, fall that way for a horse. Not only that, I fell for a dead horse. What I mean is, the horse came in the form of a small black-and-white photo, circa 1930, that I found on the Internet. He took my breath away.
Laurent de Cap Rouge
He was a Canadian stallion, a prominent sire in his day. I’d first heard of the breed 25 years ago, from a horseman who told me that they were close to extinction. I’d always been horse-crazy and I’d owned a horse as a kid, so I was curious to know more and see a Canadian in the flesh. But back then I was a folk musician, too busy and too poor at the time to get back into horses. More than a decade would pass before I could allow equine dreams into my life. Eventually I started riding once more and began to think about buying a horse. Someone mentioned Canadians again, so I searched them out on the Web.
And there he was. His name was Laurent de Cap Rouge, and I still can’t fully articulate what it was that made me fall so hard, because he wasn’t flashy. Maybe it was the proud head carriage, the kind eye, the alert and intelligent expression. Maybe it was his solid, compact, curvy build (forget those long, lean creatures – I’ve always been a sucker for Baroque breeds). But there was something more going on. Perhaps it had to do with my Quebecois roots, because Laurent seemed … familiar. It was as though I’d known this horse in a past life.
Beau, airborne at the canter
Fortunately Canadians are no longer close to extinction, though they are rare (the breed numbers about 6,000 currently). As I began to research the breed, the more I learned, the more I got hooked. I’m a real nationalist, so the Canadian’s romantic history appealed to me. Descended from horses King Louis XIV sent to New France in the mid-1600s, the Canadian, known as “the Little Horse of Iron,” adapted through centuries to become hardy, versatile, calm and low maintenance, with excellent feet – all things that mattered in my limited-budget middle age.
Plus, they come in smaller sizes; I wanted a horse I didn’t need a ladder to mount. In Quebec I found and bought, with uncharacteristic impulsiveness, a 15-hand, three-year-old gelding named Mainguy Bismark Joé, whom I nicknamed Beau.
Suffice to say it’s been an adventure. I’d never dealt with a young horse before, especially not a smart, strong-willed one! But I don’t regret a minute of it, and now that Beau is almost seven, he’s matured. He’s the best horse I’ve ever ridden out on trails: sensible, eager, brave, and perfectly happy to go out alone. He has a trot to die for. He learns tricks in a minute and he’s more bilingual than most of my friends. And every time Beau stands alert, ears pricked forward, he takes my breath away, and I get that feeling I got when I first saw the picture of Laurent de Cap Rouge – somehow, in some deep mysterious way, this breed and I are connected.
