K I T S C H — Cate's Blog

Friday, June 25, 2004

Next up: Oktoberfest allegro

A few years ago my mother and I had the pleasure of seeing Gil Shaham and the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra performing Vivaldi's The Four Seasons live. Eh, it was okay.

Just kidding. It was amazing.

However, this morning I came to a profound realization, which is as follows. You cannot claim to have lived a full life until you've experienced The Four Seasons as interpreted by a busker in the subway. On an accordion.

He wasn't half bad either.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Yo, Schrödinger, step away from the cat

At the precise moment you find out your father died, the world splits into two. The pigeons and the seagulls are still sitting there on top of the stupid TTC bus roof that blends into the sky.

Your husband is crying, and he never cries. He's telling you this is the hardest thing he's ever had to do in his life. And he's been through some tough shit, no mistake. You briefly wonder if he's about to tell you he doesn't love you anymore, but secretly you know what he's going to say. And in a weird way, you're not surprised.

Anyway, your husband is crying, and he never cries. He loved your father too.

Now your whole future -- everything you imagined and/or hoped for your future, anyway -- suddenly drops away. It simply doesn't exist anymore. There's the child you want to have, the one who won't get to meet her grandfather. She's just vapourized. And the detective novel you're going to finish one day? Who else would you dedicate it to but the man who got you into reading the genre in the first place?

And what about all the science-oriented conversations, like the one you had on York Beach, where your father drew sine curves in the sand and explained how the days get longer faster in the spring? Are you going to give up feeling especially hopeful in April? Well, probably not. Sometimes pure sensory perception wins out, even when you're an abstract bullshitter.

On the one hand you're glad that you didn't immediately die yourself, like you always thought you might when you eventually heard the news about your father's demise. After all, when your mother called years ago to tell you your father was hospitalized (for something relatively minor, as it turned out), all it took were the words, "Your father's in the hospital," for you to have a full-blown panic attack and have to put the phone down while you walked it off.

On the other hand, your father is dead. There's no going back. Not by the known and proven laws of physics, anyway.

It's not like this was completely unexpected. Despite the fact that your father was looking great and taking really good care of his health, he'd felt like he was living on borrowed time for the past eight years or so. Since he was fifty-nine, in fact, which is the age at which his father died.

So. The world.

Well, it splits into two, according to Schrödinger and the cat he's obviously not averse to torturing. In theory, it's kind of cool. But in practice?

It feels like you're in the alternate, fucked-up universe, and no matter what you do, you don't get to go back into the real one, the one where Dad is still around. He's alive in so many of your dreams, although you do have the ones about him knowing he's going to die, or -- worse yet -- the ones where you know he's going to die but he doesn't know yet.

It totally sucks.

So if all that physics shit really is true, what did I do to get stuck in the universe where my father's not here anymore?

Saturday, June 12, 2004

An unhappily named celebration

A few weeks ago, we were super-keen on checking out the annual Cookstown town-wide garage sale. We kept reminding each other of the fabulous items we came across the last time we were there -- like, three years ago -- and how nice it was to walk through this friendly, scenic village.

Then last Saturday we actually went back to Cookstown. Wow. I'm sad to report that the town fair is rather unfortunately known as a "Wing Ding" -- something I'd not realized last time I was there. As you might imagine, a name like that is one of the main indicators that you're about to experience an extremely bad time. Lo and behold, that's precisely what we had there! Way to bring down the room, Cookstown.

Apparently, everything remotely worth selling was already sold years ago, and now everyone is trying to pawn off those hideola M&Ms plastic promotional piggybanks as if they were valuable items. I'll expect to see those still being offered at next year's fabulous Wing Ding. Well, if I were planning to attend, that is.

And I'm not.

The crowds were pretty bad too, not that that's Cookstown's fault. Sorry, Cookstown. You're cute, but you're just not what I'm looking for. No hard feelings, okay?

We then spent the next two hours in the car while Peeter attempted to find Kettleby Herb Farms. If I tried to explain the reasons why we couldn't locate it, you'd be really bored. Even more bored than you must be right now. Trust me on this one.

I think Peeter was just being totally stubborn about not letting this herb place -- and the disturbing lack of road signs surrounding it -- kick his navigating ass. While I was perfectly willing to sit in an air-conditioned car for a few hours, I wasn't exactly being super-helpful in the navigation department since I was so engrossed in my trashy novel that I neglected whatever pertinent road signs there actually were. Hey, those people in my novel were running a catering business, and I wanted to see how it turned out, okay?

So, FINALLY, we found the herb farm. We were both a tad underwhelmed at first, since it looked so small. Then we saw the greenhouse and took it all back. That greenhouse is FULL of plants, and Sue provides so much info about the herbs that you can't go wrong.

Plus, she gave us lavender cookies, which were delicious.

They sell all kinds of herbs, many of which I'd never heard of before. See, I have this recurring but mostly latent idea that I'm going to become an herbal expert one day. Need some relief for that headache? Try my special herbal tea. Dropsy got you down? Have some bedstraw. Then you can use the leftovers to dye cheese! (Dude, at least you're not using urine to dye the cheese.)

Anyway, you get the idea.

In truth, I'm far too lazy to really get into it beyond buying your average culinary herbs and sticking them on my balcony, hoping that they won't die like all my houseplants seem to. Fortunately, most herbs are unkillable, even when they're not in their ideal growing conditions. It's true!

But now that I know there are more readily available herbs than just oregano and chives, I'm totally psyched about the herbal experience. So for this summer I now have the aforementioned bedstraw, plus various exotic lavenders, a lime mint and a lime geranium. I must like limes or something. Heh.

We also bought red clover for the new bunny.

She has a name now too. It's...Madame PRESTO! (Must be said very dramatically every time.) We wanted to get some of the magical flavour that comes from her looking like she was recently pulled out of a magician's hat.

Also, she's extremely fast. And tricky. Tricky, I tell you.