Space

Lately, I’ve been craving vastness.

I’m blaming it on small-town (fine, small-city) life: not enough urban density, strip-mall architecture instead of cityscapes and soaring buildings, the same old same old round of a half-dozen restaurants and bars and cafés. I keep thinking of big cities, everywhere I’ve been in the last 12 months — San Francisco, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, Montreal, Los Angeles — and I’m chafing against the familiarity of this place, the way I can recognize the supermarket cashiers, the way everyone looks the same. I’m longing for somewhere big enough to be anonymous at the same time as I’m aching for my far-flung comrades. I’m chafing against the stark contrasts between home life and vacation life and my desire to integrate them, find some way to find the common ground between room service and no obligations or bedtimes and packing lunches and taking out the garbage and, oh, working for a living.

I’m blaming it on this parenting gig, the way it circumscribes my schedule, keeps me close to (closed in by) home as I navigate life with two small people in tow. Rachel is out of town, and so I am feeling acutely the pull and stress of amusing children, getting them to their various activities, the driving and the drop-offs and the back-and-forth of where are you and are you safe and can you wait to talk to me until your brother is done? It’s hard to leave the house some days with these two sets of often-competing interests, but of course staying home all day on a rainy Sunday leads to sure and utter disaster. The kids are alright, just fine, but I’m telling myself that parenting isn’t necessarily expanding my horizons at this very moment.

I’m blaming screens. I’m blaming the one I’m staring at right now as I compose this blog. I’m blaming the ones about which my children negotiate constantly. I’m blaming the tiny one that goes with me everywhere, its constant feedback or lack thereof both a lifeline and a stranglehold. Again, it's the problem of integration: how to come to a place of peace between virtual and physical worlds? How is it that the vastness of the Internet can fit into my pocket and give me tunnel vision? I had a massage yesterday, and my lovely, snarky massage therapist worked all the angry muscles in my neck and arms and shoulders and said, gently, “Do you think that you might look down a lot at your phone? Do you ever take a vacation?”

I’m blaming, I’m blaming. And even as I blame, I know that all this railing and blaming don’t particularly expand my horizons. And so what I try to do when things feel small, when my ribs constrict my lungs and my heart doesn’t have space to beat and pounds against my chest, is to stretch, find space.

On Sunday, that meant availing myself of a lovely friend to babysit and then getting on my bike and riding as fast as I could to the movie theater to see Boyhood — revelling in the big screen, in the Houston and Austin cityscapes and the hugeness of Big Bend Ranch State Park. Last night, it meant actually shelling out for a babysitter and watching (with the same friend) Gillian Anderson, Ben Foster, and Vanessa Kirby in A Streetcar Named Desire — even if I couldn’t be at the Young Vic Theatre in London, I could watch the live satellite stream of the production, and that was pretty amazing. (Yes, what I wouldn’t give to have been in the flesh-and-blood audience, but I’m trying here, people…). It means playing hooky from the obligations in my head to have a beer with a grieving friend on a weekday afternoon, and finding myself surprised by the intensity and emotion of the conversation that ensued at that bar. It means taking a chance on Tomlin, a new restaurant in town, and feeling life relax and melt over pork chicharrones and charred broccoli and grilled trout in a lovely space that could have been anywhere else I’ve been over the past year.

And, many days, making my life feel bigger means this: the Cascades. You walk a short distance through the woods and then end up on a vast, exposed chunk of the Canadian Shield, some of the oldest rocks on Earth. You can't get cell reception at there. Yesterday, a friend and I went there. We had planned for a quick walk around the neighbourhood to save time, but she showed up at my door and said, “I really think we need to go to the Cascades,” and I hugged her. And we scrabbled up and down the worn stone, next to the rushing water. And we talked — another one of those so many conversations I’ve had of late that brings tears, unexpected, to my eyes, nothing in particular so sad, just that everything right at this phase seems to bubble and rush to the surface.

And in that space, so big, so old, so primal, things shift — at least temporarily — into the proportions that I need. For a few moments, in this exact space, in this exact moment, life is the right size in relation to everything else.

I'm trying to learn how to hold onto that.

Little boxes

I've mentioned before that one of my superpowers is getting artists to sell me works of art that they don't actually want to sell.

It's not as though I'm some mercenary art trafficker, stealing art-babies from their sad parents just for kicks (which makes it sound as though the LAST thing that any working artist would like to do is — horrors! — sell a piece of work). It's more that I seem to hone in, coincidentally or not, on the pieces that resonate with their creators. I prefer to think it's not coincidental, that I am in fact some kind of artist-whisperer who can tell, just tell, when an artist is truly in love with something they've made and then earns their trust enough to let me give their work a new home.

All of which is by way of saying that Kathleen Baleja did not want to sell this little series of nested glass boxes to me. And yet, here they are:

I bought these pieces when Rowan was a baby. Kathleen was participating in a cross-border studio tour featuring Thunder Bay and Northern Minnesota artists, and we packed the baby into the car and went for a drive to see pretty things, counting on him to be fairly placid in the car and to fall asleep on the drive back. Which he was, and did, and it's nice to have memories of when babies did sleep as well as all the memories of when they didn't. I remember, vaguely, singing lots of "If you're happy and you know it" on that little road trip, and popping in and out of studios to see whether Rowan was still asleep in his carseat. It was during that stage of babyhood where I could leave him for 45 seconds to, say, pee, and he would grin and coo and clap his hands when I came back into the room. EXACTLY like he does now. Except silently, in his head, while reading a Big Nate book.

BOXES! Sorry.

I've always had a thing for tiny treasure boxes, vials, wee lidded ceramic jars, what have you — they hold the possibility for endless potential, for surprises every time. Isaac has a similar fetish: his room is littered in layers of mason jars; fish tackle boxes filled with beads and Rainbow Loom elastics, sparkly rocks, coins pressed into clay, sand, glitter, Valentines, metal curtain brackets.

And these stained-glass boxes take the concept to an entirely new level: one inside the other like rainbow-hued Russian Matryoshka dolls (also totally fascinating and evocative to me as a child — and check out these ones), until you get to the red one (the size of my thumbnail!), which holds a tiny feather. Kathleen said that she was experimenting to see just how small she could go to create a functional container, and that was it.

Both kids adore the glass boxes, and will frequently ask to look at them. Sometimes I say yes, when I can handle the thought of a child’s fingers opening and closing delicate glass lids, sliding one highly breakable tiny glass box into another. Sometimes I tell them I'm simply not up for the stress. I want the boys to get as much tactile and visceral pleasure from the work as I do, but I also want to work to survive. So, mostly, they sit quietly on my desk, and sometimes when I'm working, I un-nest them and line them up next to me on my desk (they are lined up just so right now), and I open and shut their hinged lids just like Isaac and Rowan do, and I check that the feather is still there (it is). And I stack them one on top of the other, and I, eventually, put each one back inside its sisters, and I took them gently away in my little desktop altar of things that inspire.

My gay husband — New post on VillageQ

Hey there – today on Village Q, I'm talking about why everyone needs a Gayhusband, even queer women:

Back in August, I came home one day to find my gay husband on my back deck, sweaty and intense, his arms elbows deep inside my … barbecue. What did you think I was going to say, gutter mind?

My gay husband, whose actual name is Rob, was deep-cleaning the barbecue. That’s one of his jobs, as was assembling the barbecue. He also washes dishes, makes lattes, occasionally batch-cooks vast quantities of stew or gazpacho (depending on the season), acts as our in-house tech troubleshooter, and holds the ladder while I clean out the eavestroughs. (He holds the ladder with one hand, while in the other, he manages to balance a latte and browse Grindr on his phone.)

Go thee and read the rest  posthaste.