POETIC (HA!) REVELATIONS (aka: Tag! You're It!)

I WAS recently brought back to my high school days and what I admit is (was) my utter misunderstanding of poetry by Lady Wordsmith, a very imaginative person who needed to translate for me some of her beautifully written works.

Basically, my thing is: I didn't "get it." How is speaking in rhymes and riddles and making imagery and hidden meaning and not saying things directly the method of choice to communicate feeling and life and thought?

The poem I most enjoyed in my school days was The Cremation of Sam McGee. Followed closely by Three Blind Mice.

Of course, I have now been saved from that starkly black and white world, although I still couldn't tell you the difference between a limerick and a pin prick. Cut me some slack! I write sports for a living! I'm a Jocko Journalist, not Edgar Allen Poe!

I now fully realize that poetry is to writing what Da Vinci was to my stickman drawings. I can draw a four-legged dog or The Last Supper or Mona Lisa too, but which is going to be more artistic and creative?

Anyway, Lady W (http://ladywordsmith.blogspot.com/) has recently tagged several of us in a stimulating game of revelation.

So, to wit:

I am thinking about:
What my kids are going to grow up to be
And in a sense asking the same about me
More than halfway through, a tad off kilter
It's changing times, I'm stuck on tilt(er...)

I said:
The turtle can't be the hare. Pace isn't everything.

I want:
Whatever I need to happen, happily
Good things I lost to be found again
Bad things I found to be lost again

I miss:
Having my feet on solid ground
Having my head on my neck instead of sometimes up my ass
Intense feeling and purpose and passion
Maxwell Smart and the Cone of Silence

I wish:
1. Bush would go away already
2. I could be in India again
3. I didn't feel so stagnant (sometimes)
4. I was playing ball or some other sport this year
5. We'd let the Middle East sort out their own shit
6. We'd stop B.S.ing about the "terrorist threat." It's our own creation because we won't do No. 5
7. I could be driving down the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia
8. I could be pushing a giant boulder down a cliff on "Mike's Mountain" in Newfoundland and saving my brother from falling over the same cliff

And with each wish I wish,
That they all come true and that I get more

I hear:
Voices giving me choices that I sometimes choose to ignore

I wonder:
Why some people dig far too deep
Why some people don't dig at all
Why we let ourselves be consumed by shallow mass messages

I regret:
Doing some of the things I did in a blind trance
Getting some of the things I thought I wanted
Losing some of the things I should have had

I am:
At a crossroads
Trying to read a half-burned map

I dance:
Not nearly enough
But when I do,
To life's loveliness:
In the faces of my kids and family and friends
And caring, feeling feminine faces and forms

I sing:
Too quietly, in the shower
While my guitar gently weeps
Because I don't play it enough
For its liking or mine

I cry:
When I see men being emotional
And overcoming great odds or difficulties
With feeling and fight and passion;
When I think of my dad
And the life he has had

I make with my hands:
Loving grasps for my kids
120 words per minute on a keyboard
Sickly little stickmen

I write:
For a living
But also to live
And communicate my thoughts and feelings best

I confuse:
Myself
My ex, I'm sure
My intensity with my expectations of the intensity of others

I need:
A whole bunch of stuff besides this, but...
Contentment;
To DO the things I only talk about

I should:
Become more of the kid I was
Regain confidence, honesty, zest and
A belief that I always had

I start:
Things I don't have the commitment to finish

I finish:
Things I didn't have the balls
Or foresight or intention to start

CENTIPEDES, CATERPILLARS AND OTHER CRITTERS

IT'S a gorgeous morning in middle Canada on the eve of my country's 139th birthday, sunny, clear, and so hot you can already feel the heaviness of the forecast 30C heat and the potential thunderstorms to follow.

It conjures memories of one of my favourite pastimes as a kid venturing out the door on a sunny day, a solitary but so rewarding and intriguing pursuit: collecting insects. Or, more generically, bugs.

The centipede is not an insect, but it fit the bill and was always the most challenging foe. It was the biggest, for one; the most quick and evasive and hard to find, plus most difficult to catch. And it packs a mean bite.

I was like the pith-helmeted hunter heading out into the wilds of Africa or India in my child-like zeal, arming myself with a new jar, a lid with holes poked in the top, a magnifying glass.

The 'pede was my No. 1 priority, my biggest quarry setting out each day on my solo journey. I'd hit the same old spots, lift up the same old rocks, check under the same piles of wood between garages, in my quest.

Beetles, army ants, waterbugs, even worms were my prey. I'd spend hours under the hot sun finding them, protecting them, nurturing them, watching them...and then set them free when it was time for lunch or supper.



The dragonflies, the most amazing and beautiful of them all, I didn't even try to catch, but just marvel at their evolutionary brilliance. Butterflies, so delicate in nature, were impossible, fluttering off gently just as I got so agonizingly close...

When I get the chance, I still find myself lifting rotting logs in the forest to see what explosion of life lives there, still find myself wanting to walk among hundreds of crayfish scurrying along the sandy bottom of a lake.

Oh, to be a kid again sometimes...

GRAD UPDATE

WHILE I contemplate my next serious or innane topic, for those of you who tuned in this past week as I waxed nostalgic about my daughter's graduation and how women are for teasing and other stuff, here she is...

Graduating, and being forced to pose during said life landmark event with dad, a form of teasing in itself...

The OTHER male to the left is her love, of course, the dirty scoundrel (he's cool)...

Now where did that pic go of her in her pyjamas, hiding the big zit on her face with a pillow as I mercilessly snapped the digital?

WOMEN ARE FOR TEASING...and other stuff

THIS is a picture, one of maybe 50 or so, that I have on my fridge. It's me, about 20 years ago, making a goofy pose for a picture as I'm making absurdly silly, boy-like faces at my eminently teasable sister.

Think about that...

I was teasing my sister -- one of three I have, all of them younger than me to go with two brothers -- as she slept on a hot afternoon at a cottage on Wallace Lake in the wilds of eastern Manitoba in the beautiful Canadian Shield.

And I was getting huge laughs out of it. And I have been doing it for three generations of women in my life.

My sister (who would many years later struggle with breast cancer and survive the removal of both her breasts, and become a huge inspiration for me) promptly woke up and just about kicked me in the gonads. Mission accomplished, gonads still intact.

And now fast-forward to yesterday, and I was teasing my daughter by taking pictures of her in her pyjamas, a big zit on her cheek, hair all tussled, looking not like she'd want to look for a picture, hiding her face behind a cushion.

The pictures themselves? Lost, unfortunately, somewhere between a digital camera I still don't know how to properly use and a fancy-schmancy computer I still don't know how to properly operate.

Suffice to say, said daughter was protesting as dad took the unwanted pix as he was laughing, and she was crying and cursing and laughing all at the same time...

So the moral of today's moribund missive is that women are many things to men, the most basic of them, of course, being that they are indispensable and our reason for being and everything, basically, that we live for.

But an inescapable, unavoidable, thoroughly enjoyable and necessary element of that male/female reality is that they are teasable, and we males wouldn't be doing our duty -- or making their lives worth living -- without teasing them beyond all reason.

All of the most precious women in my life -- my mom, who we incessantly teased about her manner of even saying hello on the phone; my grandmother, a French-Canadian under-five-footer who I'd pinch on her large bum and turn around in her swivel chair (you HASS-HOLE!).

My three sisters, who still treasure my teasing and give it back to me in spades and much more; all the women I've been with romantically, in one way or another that only enriched our relationships; and now my daughter.

They all have had to endure my silly, roll-your-eyes, moronic, kid-like humor that's modelled after, let's see, Agent 86 on Get Smart, Hogan's Heroes, Ace Ventura, Mr. Bean, Austin Powers...you get it.

And they love it, or at least I hope so. And if I didn't have the freedom to do it and to have women who love me accept the corny stuff and laugh at it, and let themselves be the targets of it, life just wouldn't be so much fun.