BEYOND FACEBOOK: Reality Refugees--Born to the Dream

Of course the child would be born on a cold night which turned snow to ice pellets to rain and sleet. Before Easter he was born to this world. He is the first native-born Canadian in the family and he is bright with newness, pink plump with a full head of hair. He is a gift. He is a promise. He is beautiful. 

His mother is glorious with her accomplishment with that rare vulnerable essence that speaks of the ultimate strength of women caught like light at her eyes. She is also exhausted. 

The father of course is proud as punch and I left them as he was holding the baby against his skin. They ask that now of new fathers when the mother is momentarily preoccupied. The father’s skin is warmer than the mothers and the baby needs that warmth. The little guy was quiet. I think he will be a studious sort. But his wide mouth looks ready for the smile of bedevilment.

We in Canada cannot appreciate the level of community that this family left behind. In Syria before the war the mother at this point would be surrounded by intergenerational family, women clucking and cooing and handling things; the cooking, the cleaning, the comforting, the stories. In Canada, technology attempts to replace that with Skype to relatives back home. I felt a great sadness that without knowledge of Arabic I had so little to offer.  I tried to explain to the father at one point that his baby now “is.” He is the ultimate expression of the verb “to be” and present tense even.

The father has found work. He is happy.

He has also registered for a month long evening course in English in Ottawa. He is a determined man. In Quebec no such courses seem to exist in this region. Politics and reality sometimes don’t agree. My hour weekly simply cannot bridge the knowledge gap he has to leap. It’s a big leap. 

Simply looking at written Arabic shows us how big a leap it is. Their beautiful almost pictorial language is full of nuance and meaning. The letters of our alphabet to them is as if we were presented with Arabic and being asked to learn it in six months to a year. And your very livelihood depends on it. The father insists that Arabic is far far easier. The way they handle past, present and future seems interesting from what I can grasp. The verbs don’t change but the addition of yesterday or tomorrow informs the verb. I’m quite fuzzy on that. Their language seems beyond my capacity beginning with the sound that comes from the throat. I laugh with the young son because he keeps insisting I learn that sound. And I’m utterly hopeless. Similar to my husband’s Polish, where 6 consonants in a row is simply inconceivable to an English speaker. I am, if nothing else, a source of great amusement trying to speak either Polish or Arabic. I’m absolutely certain I’m pronouncing it exactly as I hear it. But I am not. It is humbling to be a source of great gales of laughter. I suppose. There is no place for pride when learning another language. But humour. That wins every time.

Driving home in the sleet on the empty streets along Verendrye avenue I work at paying attention to the bright red lights and green lights shimmering on surfaces and catching at the dull slush of the road. I know I have to concentrate because my mind waxes philosophical. And birth of a child ranks right up there with musings. What world will he have? Will he grow up strong, tolerant, wise? Will this country embrace him and all that he will be? Are we a tolerant multi-cultural nation? Will he understand that? Will he love Canada geese sweeping high in the sky? No matter where he might go in this world he will always be ours. He was born here.

Welcome to the world child. It’s not perfect but it is yours.

Life: It’s meaning

There was this thing. I found it one day in my less than stellar wanderings attempting to spring clean. It was a metal thing painted blue, about four feet long and it had a thingamajig at the top connected to a doohickymabob and at the other end there was a crooked whatchamacallit. I had no idea what it was. But we had it. It was there. It must have been a thing worth having at some point by someone in our life. So I took this thingamajig dookhickymabob to Himself and put it on his lap and said: “What is this?” And he examined it closely, turning it about in his hands and holding it up to the light and then putting it on the floor. Finally he looked up at me and said, “I have no bloody idea.” So we both looked at this thing with great reverie. And so then I eventually said, “Should we keep this thing?” And he said, “Well, we don’t know what it is. We don’t know what it is for. We don’t know where it came from and so, Yes, we should keep this thing.” And I agreed. And this was the conclusion we came to. Because it was the obvious conclusion to us.

So I would occasionally come across this thing and I would sneak it under George’s pillow so when he went to bed he’d find it. Sometimes I put it in the shower stall at night knowing he would come across it in the morning. Once I put it on the car seat. And once I put it inside his winter coat. One day I snuck it inside my jacket into Giant Tiger and put it in the sock bin before George made his way down the aisle to the sock bin. The unexpected. I did this just because it was bloody absurd. It became a game to play all our years together. Putting this thing where it was least expected. He would hide it after my prank and it would take me a few weeks to find it again. But I always did. I would drag it out of the back of the linen closet and put it on top of the wood pile where he would be chopping kindling the next day. Once I wrapped it carefully in a big box and gave it to him as a birthday present. He would look at me with a ragged flat expression and sigh. And I would do my triumphant smirk. And then we would laugh and the game would begin again.

There are people who are reading this who are trying in their head to figure out what that thing was. I can see their brains logically reconstructing and supposing and concluding. There are others who can’t understand the whole point of this and why we didn’t throw the doohickymabob out. And then there are the other ones who realize how funny it is. But most importantly there are those who truly understand how extraordinarily funny it is. Those are my kind of people.

Life is a doohickymabob: We don’t know what it is for. We don’t know where it came from. We decide to keep it because it is there. We don’t know what to do with it. We hide it when we can. Sometimes we pull it out and play with it and laugh. It always keeps turning up somewhere when we least expect it.

There are many people who think that we are living in a hell world now. That we have culminated our entire human history into an amorphous mass of conflicting angry and righteous opinions without sense. That we have descended into a theatre of opinion and rationalizations. Some think we are in the post-Ideological age, or on the cusp of robotic dominance, or creatures now reduced to living in a meaningless universe. We are none of these things. We are simply absurd. Meaningfully absurd in a foolish kind of way. And in our deepest being we know this. That our lives are a bitter irony leading to our biggest fear, that of death.  That we are, after all is said and done, insignificant. I’m going to tell you something. We "are" insignificant. We are deeply absurdly utterly insignificant. It is this fact alone that makes life worth living. How in hell else can we not find that deeply worth living for? It’s extremely funny. And the search for our own significance is the funniest thing we ever will do. How many times do we find ourselves sitting inside the shambles of our deepest failures and darkest despondency desperately attempting to at least pretend to look like we’re not bloody idiots? How many times do we rush out to buy a book to teach us how not to look like bloody idiots? Or take up causes so we can join all the other bloody idiots trying not to look like idiots? We are all idiots. There are no exceptions.

The only difference between the bloody idiocy of our lives up until now has been the number of choices we have to mitigate our own idiocy. We have a lot more choices now. We’re standing at the Starbucks counter of life looking at the menus trying to pick the right coffee. No one ever chooses the coconut latino raspberry  latte. Because nobody in their right mind would choose the coconut latino raspberry latte. This is why you have to try the coconut latino raspberry latte. George taught me that. It’s not the fact of life we need consider. It is the fun we can make of it. And the ultimate answer to life is the love that guides us in that direction. 

 

In memory of my George. August 24, 1953 - March 21, 2016

I will always love you.

 

 

BEYOND FACEBOOK: Reality Refugees--Lunar Terminator

The clear cold night of March stuns the sky with its moon. The waning crescent blinding in its beauty. Sometimes when it is particularly clear you can still see the outline of the shadowed part of the moon; as it was when I drove home from Hull. Stubbornly in the way of the full-on brightness of the sun, the earth itself was playing puppet shadow on the wall as we did with flashlights and fingers as children.

Between the bright dazzle of the crescent and the false shadow is a boundary line called the lunar terminator. It is the space of the moons hemispheres that separates the darkness from the illumination. It is in between the dark and the light. It could go either way. For some reason teaching my Syrian family English makes me philosophical in a foolish kind of way I suppose. The crescent symbol of Islam comes to mind. And that mostly round shape of the shadow of the earth echoed in the round belly of a woman whose child is taking his time to come into this world. His life is a promise. It could go either way.

Back months ago in the dark of winter I met a family and we could not talk to each other. And the slow sometimes painful weekly sessions stretched ahead of us. A mutual goal. A crucial goal far distant. And then one day you discover you are speaking to each other in English. You can’t touch that feeling when you realize it is happening. It is beyond words. I don’t think I ever saw a man work so hard at something. He’s devoted. And, it turns out, he’s bloody funny. 

Despite never having taught English as a second language in my life I think I can safely say that the people you are teaching teach you how to teach them. This family just wants to talk. They want to share their life. They want to explain what happened to them that week, a year ago, when they were born. They want to know about our lives. They want to communicate. They want normal. And nothing beyond the love they have of their family is normal. And that, for everything there is in this world, is their saving grace. That, and apparently a wicked sense of humour.

In our last session, I had to explain that the past tense of buy is bought and not buyed. I explained that most verbs can be made into the past tense by adding ed because they were regular but SOME verbs are irregular. This ended up as there are two types of verbs: Verbs and Crazy Verbs. The father took this glumly. For he felt very encouraged with regular verbs. This week I was explaining the Crazy Verb “To Have.” He looked at me wickedly smiling and said, “Past is Syria” “Future don’t know.” Now Canada. ONLY Present. He said he only would learn present tense then. “I did not walk to store. I am walking to store.” And so, he brilliantly articulated every single philosophical theory in a nutshell. He was going to live in the present moment. It was easier he decided. And we laughed like fools. Who was I to argue with that?

I did not write last week about my session with my Syrians because it was a dark subject. Suffice it to say, health care in Quebec is bordering on Third World. At 39 weeks pregnant, the wife has not seen the same doctor twice. They are all giving some conflicting information and mostly it is “okay, out you go, next patient please.” They can’t find a family doctor. It is not the fault of the doctors but a ridiculous unforgiveable provincial government that fails its people miserably in this department. Consistency of care is key for everyone but critically so for new immigrants who speak neither English nor French. Their world has already been traumatized and rendered bewildering. Negotiating Quebec’s healthcare system becomes a reminder both of disenfranchisement and oddly the better health care they had in Syria before this debacle, this horror, this proxy war began. Consistent meaningful care after trauma needs to be a priority for new immigrants. If we really mean what we say when we “open our arms” to these desperate people. Particularly for photo ops. Talk, as they say, is cheap. Put your money where your mouth is. These are some idioms I could teach. If I wanted to get all political, which I am not going to do. So far anyway.