Trudy J. Morgan-Cole's Blog, page 47

Merry Recycled Christmas

Hi friends, family, and … foes? I hope I don’t have any foes reading my blog. Maybe a few fans (of my books, not of me). But mostly friends and family.

Almost every December, this season brings on some reflection, some deep thoughts about the meaning of Christmas, the culture wars at this time of year, or just what it means to be living in a family, raising kids, being a person at this time of year. Some years there’s no new brilliant thoughts so I just recycle the old ones. I’ve been blogging for ten years now, so here are some of the things I’ve reflected on in past Christmases, for your reading (or re-reading) pleasure:

[image error]From 2004,  before I even started this blog, a piece I wrote (reprinted here in 2011), called “Flesh.” Something I’ve been thinking about for many, many years, about how Christmas is about Incarnation, and how God-in-Jesus meets us in the frailty of human flesh.

In 2007, I was a little less serious. “Eight Songs A-Sucking” was my most popular blog post ever in terms of number of comments, because everybody likes to rant about the Christmas songs they hate.

[image error]Christmas 2009 I was back to reflecting on the meaning of the Incarnation, with “Light.” Again, these are thoughts I’ve been turning over for years — I wrote an article similar to this back in the late 80s — about how we celebrate Christmas at the winter solstice, even though Jesus almost certainly wasn’t born then, and the symbolic significance of light-in-darkness at this time of year.[image error]

In 2010, Santa met Jesus for a showdown! No, not really. I just used my Christmas blog space that year to explore the idea of Santa and how he fits (or doesn’t fit) into the Christian story of Jesus’ birth, and the celebration of Christmas for Christians today.

[image error]Tragically, in 2012, one of the worst mass shootings in US history occurred just a couple of weeks before Christmas. Getting ready for a season of joy and celebration as we were confronted by news of the Sandy Hook massacre left me with some thoughts on “Advent Tragedies.” The season of light can be a dark time.

2013 was the year my mom passed away, and I reflected on how hard it is to be merry and bright when you’re still mourning a loss. My Christmas post that year was titled “Merry-ish.” It’s about my approach to handling grief and celebration at the same time.[image error]

I think I was watching a lot of Doctor Who in 2014, because when I had another try at grappling with the mystery of the Incarnation, the post was titled “Time Lord of Gallifrey, Now in Flesh Appearing.” How is Jesus like, and not like, the Doctor?

[image error]

 

Finally, last year in 2015, a lot of people could relate to my post “Broken,” in which I had an argument with my almost-grown son about the Christmas service at church, then went to church and reflected on how broken we all are. 

Hacksaw Ridge

I can’t remember when I first heard the story of Desmond Doss, the Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector who won the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War Two, but like a lot of Adventist kids, I heard it pretty early. Now his story is the subject of a big-budget Hollywood movie, directed by Mel Gibson. Other people besides Adventists are seeing the story of this man who showed amazing courage in saving dozens of his fellow soldiers under enemy fire — without ever firing or even carrying a weapon himself.

This story has been told many times and many ways, and there is an excellent documentary (“The Conscientious Objector”) about Doss already. But a feature film, complete with special effects that bring the battlefield to all-too-vivid life, does add something that a documentary or book can’t do. It’s one thing to know that Doss brought 75 wounded men to safety by lowering them by ropes, one by one, over the cliff at Hacksaw Ridge while he and they were under enemy fire. It’s another thing to see it re-enacted, to feel the visceral terror and sheer effort that must have taken. Reading or hearing about what Desmond Doss accomplished told me that the man had tremendous courage; watching it made me feel what that must have cost him, and left me in awe. But what I loved most about this movie was how it subverted our expectations of what heroism in a movie (and, by extension, in real life) should look like.

At the time Desmond Doss joined the US Army, most Seventh-day Adventists believed in non-violence and non-combatancy (positions that many today reject, something I consider a great loss within our community). However, most did not go as far as the more traditionally “peace churches” (like Mennonites) and avoid involvement in the military altogether. When their nations went to war, Adventist young men often joined the armed forces (sometimes as volunteers, sometimes when drafted), usually in non-combat roles. Many served, like Desmond Doss, as medics. Doss’s story is not unusual for Adventist young men from the time of the church’s founding (during the US civil war) to nearly the present day, when attitudes began to shift away from non-violence.

Desmond Doss is remembered as unique among Adventist non-combatants for two reasons: his commitment to non-combatancy was so extreme that he refused even to touch a gun in training, and his courage was so great that he was award a medal for it.

The are obvious ethical and moral complexities surrounding a position like Doss’s; Adventist writer Nathan Brown examines them very well in his reflection on the movie. Desmond Doss believed that if he didn’t carry a weapon God would protect him, and I have no doubt God did, but he was also protected by his fellow soldiers’ willingness to fire their guns, as the movie frequently depicts. Doss, like most Adventists at the time, believed that it was ethical to support your country’s war effort as long as you weren’t doing the killing yourself, which is problematic, to say the least. But the movie’s battle scenes are unsparing in showing the horrors of war, and there’s no sense (that I saw, anyway) of glorifying the violence.

Doss, as portrayed by Andrew Garfield (and in fact in real life, based on the interview clips I’ve seen with him) doesn’t seem like a guy who’s given a lot of nuanced thoughts to the issues around non-violence. He clearly hasn’t read Thoreau or studied Gandhi. He’s absorbed a few very basic Biblical principles — thou shalt not kill; turn the other cheek — which he applies with absolute literalism to his own life. (A tangent I haven’t got space to get into here: why is it so many Christians, including Adventists, are willing to apply certain Bible passages very literally, and brand the rest of us as heretics if we don’t take them that way, yet the same people can glibly explain why “thou shalt not kill” or “sell all that you have and give to the poor” are not meant to be taken at all literally, and we’re just crazy to suggest it?). Movie-Doss, not unlike real-life-Doss in interview clips, comes across as a likeable, a bit naive, incredibly stubborn kid, who just turns out to have almost superhuman reserves of courage and compassion.

What really struck me hard about midway through this movie, while Doss is still in basic training and getting bullied by his commanding officer and fellow soldiers for his principles, is how very, very rare it is to see nonviolence portrayed in a positive way on a movie screen. As I saw a fellow soldier taunting Doss in the barracks while Doss stood there refusing to hit back, I thought of how many movies and TV shows I’ve seen where the expected, and cheered, climax of this scene comes when the mild-mannered, non-violent victim finally snaps, lands a punch on the bully’s jaw, and knocks him out cold. The great-short-story-turned-terrible-John-Wayne-movie The Quiet Man is the classic of this genre, but there are many other examples: the good guy can only take so much before he resorts to violence, and everyone applauds his courage.

In fact, if someone managed to watch Hacksaw Ridge without already knowing Doss’s story (which, admittedly, seems unlikely), they might go through the whole movie thinking that it would climax with Doss actually picking up a gun or throwing a grenade — if not to defend himself, then to defend one of the wounded soldiers he’s dragging to safety. That’s how deeply ingrained into our culture is the idea that, ultimately, violence is the solution. And if it were fictional instead of a true story and had ended that way, many in the audience would have cheered to see this naive idealist finally pick up the gun and fight. It’s the ending we’ve seen over and over, the one our culture celebrates and  normalizes. Violence may be distasteful, but in the end it’s just what a man’s gotta do.

I don’t know if Hacksaw Ridge is, objectively speaking, a great movie or not. I’m not a movie critic; I like what I like and I found this movie engaging and moving. But what I loved best was seeing Doss not punch the bully; not pick up the gun; not throw the grenade. I loved watching a movie where non-violence was not a lead-up to the climactic moment where the hero finally realizes he has to stand up and fight for what he believes. We’ve all seen that movie a thousand times. I loved watching a movie that celebrated a hero who stood firm for his right not to fight; a man whose courage could not possibly be questioned, but who staunchly maintained that courage did not mean having to hit, shoot, or kill. 

It is the most counter-cultural of all assumptions: that you can be brave without ever physically fighting back. In a time when our American friends are more politically divided than I can ever remember their country being, people on both the left and the right of the political spectrum will find something to cheer for, and also something deeply troubling, about Doss’s story (different things in each case, of course).

As for me, Hacksaw Ridge reminds me that I’m glad to belong to a faith group that once had a heritage of non-violence. I’m disappointed that that heritage has been so inconsistently applied and often forgotten in late years, because it’s a heritage worth remembering and preserving. All of us must, in different ways, face the question of how to stand up to injustice, to cruelty, to evil. We need stories that remind us that the “punch the bully” moment, when the audience claps and cheers, is not the only possible ending to that story.

 

Love, Hope, Optimism, Cake

I started baking a lemon blueberry cake at about 10:30 last night. I was going to bake while watching the U.S. election returns. Then in the morning I planned to throw on my Hillary Clinton T-shirt, take my cake to work, and celebrate the election of the first woman president of the most powerful country on earth.

Obviously, things did not go as planned.

The cake was baked anyway. I brought it in to work as a consolation cake. And I couldn’t put on the Hillary T-shirt (which I’d ordered online and arrived yesterday, just in time to wear triumphantly the day after the election. Sigh). Going through my extensive collection of graphic tees, only one seemed to have the message I needed today: my rainbow-hued shirt with the Jack Layton quote about love, hope, and optimism.

As a Canadian, I could be taking the position of many of my fellow citizens and saying “Thank God that’s not us.” Certainly, the worst excesses of a Trump presidency, backed with a Repulican House and Senate and at least one Supreme Court vacancy to fill, will be borne on the backs of U.S. citizens — people of colour, Muslim-Americans, Latino immigrants, LGBT people, women who need safe legal abortions, and the millions of middle-class and working-class people who inexplicably believed that a billionaire’s tax plan would benefit anyone other than himself and his billionaire cronies.

But some of Trump’s policies (or rather the policies of those with whom he surrounds himself; I’m not sure the man himself has any beliefs at all, other than that he wants money, power and adulation) will affect the whole world. Even short of the chilling image of a volatile, childish personality with access to nuclear codes, there’s the tiny detail that Trump, like most of his party, believes climate change is a hoax and ignores the consensus of 97% of the world’s serious scientists on that topic. Unless he’s planning to build a roof to go with that wall, the act of pulling America out of the Paris Accords and refusing to move forward on renewable energy is going to mean that the inevitable climate change will be more severe than it would be if America were to lead the way on renewable energy, and that’s going to have consequences for all of us. So yes, it’s our business too.

And there’s a way this hits on an emotional level for a progressive-minded Canadian like me, too. It’s a second blow coming after the UK’s Brexit vote in the summer — another thing I did not believe would happen. Am I just naive? I see the rise of far-right parties and ideologies around our Western world, and yet I continue to believe that people are essentially good, that we are moving in the direction of greater love, inclusion, and openness. The only way the world will survive the pressures that will come with the above-mentioned climate change is if we move towards greater openness and sharing — if we focus on defending “us” against “them” as “their” lands become increasingly unliveable, we will descend into a dystopian nightmare of bloodshed and chaos.

I keep hoping we will be able to be our best human selves, and then spectacles like the Brexit vote and the Trump vote remind me that there are politicians who are deeply invested in appealing to our worst selves — our prejudices, our fears, our selfishness. The dark side of human nature is very real, and there will always be powerful people who want to exploit that to increase their own power. I firmly believe Donald Trump is such a man, and so are many of those who surround him. They have unleashed the forces of the alt-right, the very worst in American (and  human) society. And everyone, not just Americans, will reap the consequences.

So, what’s a Canadian to do today? Put on her rainbow Jack Layton shirt, bake a cake, and hope for the best? It seems a facile response. My wish for everyone, especially Americans today, is that we can all be loving, hopeful and optimistic, and bake each other some cakes. Be kind and compassionate. The most bizarre thing, to me, is that I know genuinely kind, compassionate, decent people who I also know voted for Trump, for reasons that made sense to them (though not to me). People in the US still have to live next door to each other, go to work in adjacent cubicles, sit down to their Thanksgiving dinner with family members who voted differently. A little love, hope, and optimism will go a long way in the toxic atmosphere created by this election. A little cake can’t hurt either.

Here in Canada, our last election went against the tide that we seem to see rising around the world. We rejected the candidate who tried to incite xenophobia, in favour of the one who preached inclusion and openness. We invited in 30,000 Syrian refugees while Trump, in the US, thundered about closing the borders and not letting in even one.

I feel like it’s up to Canada now, and up to the European nations who haven’t fallen prey to their right-wing nationalist parties, and up to any other democracies in the world who have voted for inclusion, for progressive policies, for caring for the environment — it’s up to us to lead the way. Even for small countries like Canada. It’s up to us to show that love, hope and optimism aren’t just naive ideals — they actually work. And all the while Trump will be providing the US with a blueprint for what doesn’t work, we can direct our efforts towards being a small but shining light, an example of how to do it right.

That’s a tall order, Canada (and Mr. Trudeau, and the rest of our governing party). But it seems like all we can do in the face of this devastating US election.

I’ll be here baking cake.

A Comfortable Pew

This is a conversation (reconstructed, I can’t remember the actual words except for the three key words in the title of this blog post) that  I heard reported to me years ago. It took place between two people of my parents’ generation, both of whom had grown up in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. One had stayed in it; the other had left:

Person Who Left: I’m quite happy with my decision to leave the church; we find a great blessing from attending our local Anglican church.

Person Who Stayed: You’re just happy belonging to the Anglican church because it doesn’t demand anything of you — it’s a comfortable pew.

How those words have stayed with me … the phrase “a comfortable pew,” spoken with a mixture of censure and envy by someone who was a lifelong member of the Adventist church but often found its demands burdensome. Coded into that phrase was the tension — so prevalent in my extended family growing up, and in my circle of friends and acquaintances even now — among those of us who grew up in our tight-knit community: the tension between those who left and those of us who stayed.

The implication in that phrase was that if you left the church, it was because you found it too hard and you were looking for something easier, more convenient. A comfortable pew on Sunday morning in a less demanding church, or maybe no pew at all … maybe your own sofa on a Sabbath morning, drinking coffee and doing the crossword instead of subjecting yourself to the hard discipline of going to church.

***

After 51 years attending church (and I mean that quite literally; I was born on a Saturday and I think my parents took me to church pretty much the next Sabbath), I finally got tired of sitting for over an hour on hard pews, and made myself (and Emma, who reached this decision much earlier in life) a couple of comfy pew cushions, pictured above. They’re great. They have increased my enjoyment of church and my sermon tolerance about 100%.

I am still sitting in the same pew I have been sitting in virtually all my life, more or less. It is now, at least literally, a more comfortable pew. In some ways it’s a more comfortable one metaphorically, too; in other ways, less so.

I’m still trying to pick this metaphor apart. How comfortable are we supposed to be in church? I’m long past thinking, if I ever did, that the raw rubbing of hard wooden pews on a bony bum like mine adds any spiritual benefit. But what about the raw rubbing of hard doctrine on the bony soul of a spiritual questioner? Sorry, I may have just hammered that metaphor into the ground.

I sit on my comfortable new pew cushion and think about this, week after week.

***

When the person I’m quoting above used the phrase “a comfortable pew,” I know it was shorthand for “a religion that demands less of you.” The Anglican church, after all, didn’t require its members to worship (and abstain from work) on a day that was out of step with the rest of the world. It allowed them to drink in moderation, even smoke if they wanted to. Dancing, playing cards, wearing jewellery, eating pork — all these things were forbidden; all these things made our Adventist lives “hard” (despite the fact that we’d chosen to belong to this group freely). The comfortable pew down the road didn’t make any of those awkward demands. It was, presumably, much easier to be Anglican, or United Church, or some other, less weird religion.

I personally think that religion should be demanding, though maybe not in those particular ways. Actually I’ve never found most of those things to be all that difficult, probably because I grew up as one of the “peculiar people” so drinking, eating pork,etc., were never part of my culture. (I could go into quite a diversion here about these “Adventist distinctives,” and how some of them make great sense to me and others no sense at all, and what my attitude towards them is, but that’s not really the story I want to tell here).

Sometimes I think it’s easy to focus on the superficial aspects of our distinctive denominations — whether that’s an Adventist focusing on not eating bacon, or the aforementioned Anglican getting all tied up in knots over whether the priest is wearing the correct liturgical dress for the event and whether their church uses the BCP or the BAS. I think the things that make our pews uncomfortable should not be these surface details, but what Jesus called the “weightier matters of the law.”

Why should our pews be uncomfortable? They should be uncomfortable enough to

force us out of our comfort zones to love and help those who are different from us.
question our assumptions about who “deserves” God’s grace (hint: it’s nobody).
do something active to help others rather than just tsk-tsking about how bad things are in the world, or in our community.
learn to pray, worship and love people whose personalities and politics are very different from ours (this is a tough one!)
give us some of our own wealth, means and comfort to help people in need.
speak out against injustice and cruelty.

If your religion doesn’t challenge you to do at least some of the things on the list above, then maybe your pew is a little too comfortable!

On the other hand, as a lifelong churchgoer, I think there are ways in which we should be comfortable in church. Our pews should keep us comfortable enough to:

share our hurts and our joys with the people in the pews around us and know that we’ll be heard and loved.
say what we really think in a discussion or Bible study, even when we’re struggling with doubts, and know that we won’t be condemned.
and, yeah, sit through the service without our bums hurting.

I respect that there are people who will never find that kind of comfort in their church, or my church, even if I wish that weren’t the case. And I respect the decisions of those who’ve left, understanding that it’s not always about “comfort” but a myriad of other things (reasons which are interesting in themselves, but, again, would make this blog post even longer than it is!).

For myself, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether church is making me comfortable and uncomfortable in all the right ways. When it’s not, I might wish the church would change — I might even try to nudge it in the direction of change — but I also need to look at what I can change in myself. It’s probably not going to be as simple as sewing a couple of pew cushions, but they’re as much a symbol as they are a butt-saver. They represent the fact that despite some discomfort, this is where I am and where I’m staying, and I have to make it work for me as well as for those around me.

30 and not-yet-out

Me in my first teaching job in 86-87 — a snap from the Kingsway yearbook

I started teaching in September 1986, three weeks before my twenty-first birthday. I taught high school English and History at Kingsway College, a Seventh-day Adventist boarding school in Oshawa, Ontario. I was young and naive and did everything wrong, but it was the beginning of a lifelong journey as a teacher.

When I walked into my classroom at The Murphy Centre this September, it marked the thirty-year anniversary of the first time I stood in front of the classroom as a teacher.

For a teacher here in Newfoundland, that anniversary has some weight. For a long time the set-up for teachers with the public school board here in the province has been “thirty and out,” meaning that after 30 years of teaching, you can retire and draw your full pension.

So, this would be it. I’d be done, finished, retired with a full pension while I’m still young and healthy enough to do lots of writing and travel, or even take up a second career. I’d be livin’ the dream.

Except I’m not. Not living that particular dream, the one where I retire at age 50.

In order to get “thirty and out,” you’d have to have been teaching in the public school system here in the province for all those years, consecutively. I think if you take maternity leave, that time counts towards your years of service, but other than that you have to have been working all that time. And that’s not what my career path has looked like.

First off, I started teaching outside my home province — and in a private school, where the years I worked weren’t even eligible for any kind of buy-back scheme. After teaching outside the province for five years, I came home and taught for a few years in the school system here, racking up 5.5 years of pensionable earnings.

Then I had a baby. And instead of taking my (then) six months of allowed maternity leave and going back to work, I decided to put off going back to work. Jason had just graduated from Engineering and gotten a job, and we were used to living on one paycheque anyway, so I took some additional time without pay. Then I had a second baby. When I finally had to decide whether to go back to the school board that was still holding a position for me after three years of unpaid leave, I chose instead to give up the coveted full-time position. I spent seven years at home with my kids, earning a master’s degree part time, writing, and being a stay-at-home mom.

When I did go back to work, I didn’t apply for a job back in the school system. Instead, I went to work teaching young adults at The Murphy Centre — again, a private institution outside the public school system, where my years of service don’t count towards a pension from the Newfoundland government.

So I started teaching 30 years ago this fall, but I’ve only actually taught for about 22 years. And of those, only 5.5 years were pensionable. So there’s no question of me retiring with a full pension this year. (I do have other retirement savings, in case anyone’s worried. Just not enough to retire this early).

That’s not a huge loss, because I still love my job. I love this time of year, a month into the school year as I’m really getting to know new students, finding out what their abilities and challenges are. I love the organization I work for, and my co-workers. Yes, as I said in my last blog post, I do sometimes think wistfully about being a full-time writer, but that’s a dream for the future, not what I want to be doing right now. 

But here’s the thing: I do not have one second of regret for following a twisty, turning career path that did not lead me to the obvious goal. I know there are some teachers who put in 30 years in the public system and still manage to be both engaged and engaging in their final year of teaching, and they are wonderful, gifted human beings. I’ve also known some who drag themselves across the finish line in those last few years, with little energy to spare for their students or their subject matter. I’m afraid I might be in that latter category if I’d stuck with the same job in the same system all those years. It’s a stressful job, and it wears a lot of people out. 

I don’t regret starting my career at Kingsway — not only did I get the valuable experience of living on my own far from home at 21, but during those four years I met some of the best friends I’ve ever had. I don’t regret a minute of the seven years I spent at home when the kids were small. I’m thrilled to have had those years with them, and I’ve always been grateful that our financial situation allowed us to do it. And the job I’ve held longest, the ten years I’ve spent in adult education, is the richest and most rewarding teaching I’ve ever done.

I guess my take-away here, the advice I’d given any young person starting out, is that you don’t have to commit yourself to decades of doing something you’re not enthused about, just because it promises financial security or a pension check or whatever at the end. It’s OK to take side roads and unexpected turns, if life offers them to you.

Yes, financial security matters. And I recognize there’s a huge amount of privilege involved in even talking about choosing between the career path that’s most fulfilling versus the one that gives you the best retirement plan. Lots of people don’t have that choice; they just worry about finding the job that will enable them to pay today’s bills.

But if you ever are in the lucky position where you can make these kinds of choices, remember that a pension cheque is nice, but loving what you do matters, too. And I am grateful for every working year (both working at school, and working at home) that I’ve put in since September of 1986.

I’m looking forward to seeing what this year will bring.

Celebrate and Mourn

Yesterday, two young women in their twenties captured the attention of Newfoundlanders. 23-year-old swimmer Katarina Roxon returned home from the Rio Paralympics with a gold medal to a hero’s welcome and a highway named in her honour. And 20-year-old Hailey Baker took her own life several months after a highly-publicized car accident that was clearly no accident but a cry for help.

I’m not sure why these two young women’s faces are juxtaposed so strongly in my mind, except that their names frequently turned up within a few minutes of each other in yesterday’s news. And maybe because I teach young adults and I’m the parent of two young adults, I never stop thinking about both best-case and worst-case scenarios.

Best case: your child, born with a physical disability as well as a stunning natural athletic talent, overcomes all hardships, perseveres through difficulties, and brings honour to her country while achieving personal success.

Worst case: your child, struggling with mental illness, spends years seeking help and support through the health care system, and finally dies by her own hand, one more victim of mental illness.

Two young lives: both beautiful, valuable, full of potential. Like so many others. One an inspiration, the other a tragedy.

What’s the takeaway here? Why does the image of those two faces side-by-side haunt me so much? Is the lesson that maybe it’s easier, maybe society offers more support, if you’re born with part of an arm missing than if you have borderline personality disorder? Maybe. Some people have both physical disabilities AND mental illness. Some have neither, and still struggle.

I also know you can’t simplify people into representatives of groups. Not every physically disabled person is going to win a Paralympic gold medal, and why should they? Katarina Roxon is an athlete and presumably would have been a great swimmer with or without a left arm. As a disabled person, her job on earth is not to be an inspiration for the rest of us. She’s living her life: it just happens to be one that involves having a gold medal around her neck.

Not every person with mental illness dies by suicide (thank God). But too many do. And too many of those, like Hailey Baker, feel (and their families and friends feel) that they’re not getting the help and support they need when they go looking for it in our health care system. There’s a message for the rest of us there, for sure, and it seems that Hailey Baker, after media attention focused on the story of her car accident, wanted to share that message the world. But again, Hailey didn’t live her life intending for its end to be a lesson to the rest of us. I’m sure that’s not what those who loved her wanted for her.

Young lives lost too soon break my heart. Young people accomplishing great things inspire me. But everyone lives out their own story, and almost everyone has a team of family, friends, teachers and others supporting and cheering for them. Some stories feature mountaintop moments like Olympic medals — most don’t. Some stories end tragically and too soon — most don’t (again, thankfully).

I guess my only lesson here is: cherish the young people you love, whether they’re your kids, grandkids, students, neighbours, whatever. Help and support them when they need it. Cheer for their successes and share their struggles, if they’ll let you. We can’t always know why one person’s story is an inspiration and another’s is a tragedy. Maybe most of us, at any moment, have the potential to be either, especially those who are still young with so much of the tale still unwritten.

This week we celebrate Katarina,  and we mourn Hailey. And we celebrate and mourn the young people we love. We hope for the best; we fear the worst. We don’t stop loving and cheering and crying.

The (Part-Time) Writing Life

It’s the second of September. Summer holidays are over and new school year begins next week.

So, that happened.

I have mixed feelings about September. I regret the passing of warm summer weather, which I love so much. Long afternoons for hiking. Weekends swimming and canoeing at the cabin. Being able to walk at night in a short-sleeved T-shirt, eating ice-cream. I love summer.

That said, I also love teaching, and I look forward to seeing last year’s students and meeting new ones. I like my job enough that I don’t dread September, but I always want to hang on a little longer to summer.

I think most teachers feel that way. But for me there’s the added twist that, from September to June, writing novels is my part-time gig, sometimes downgraded to my hobby. Teaching’s what I do full-time, the job that occupies many of my waking hours and brings in a steady paycheque.

In July and August, I’m a full-time writer.

That’s not to say that I write eight hours a day. Does anyone? I don’t think I could even imagine writing eight hours a day! I don’t have the attention span for that. But during the summer months, I define myself primarily as a writer. It occupies the space in my time and thoughts that normally gets filled up with teaching.

Now that my kids are older teens with their own activities and summer jobs, my summer mornings almost all started the same way. By eight o’clock most mornings, I’d be in my favourite chair at my favourite coffee shop, enjoying this view.

Most days this summer, the work that occupied me was editing the manuscript of my novel Most Anything You Please — either in hard copy or on the computer. Sometimes the task of the day was research or writing new sections — or even writing a bit on a whole new project.

Usually in the afternoon I’d go do something else, like running messages or going for a hike, but there were some lovely afternoons in July when the weather was perfect and I had a hard-copy manuscript to go through (meaning I could work outdoors without worrying about computer-screen glare). Then I moved my office to the back yard and enjoyed this view.

As September brings cooler temperatures and more rigid schedules I often find myself wondering: would I enjoy being a full-time writer year round? Would life without a day job be as appealing when the afternoons involved cold winds and slushy sidewalks instead of scenic hikes and backyard lemonade? A life in which I have leisure to write as much as I want is always linked, for me, with sunny days and long warm evenings. It’s much more appealing to get away with writer friends for a four-day retreat to put in some intensive final edits on a book (which I also did this summer) when you’re enjoying a lovely country house with sunshine pouring in through the windows, or working on deck with the sight, sound and smell of the ocean to accompany your efforts.

I also wonder if I’d have the focus and discipline to make my time productive if I were writing full-time, year round. It seems like a no-brainer that more time to write would produce more and better writing, but maybe the discipline required to cram my creative work into my spare time ten months of the year, with just two months to focus on it full-time, is actually the only thing allowing me to get any work done. I’m very easily distracted and I’m a great time-waster, especially since they went and invented the internet. Maybe with more time to write, I’d just waste more of it on social media, or playing games of Lexulous online.

It’s not a decision I’m likely to face anytime soon. Maybe in six years or so, when both these teenagers have gotten themselves some kind of a college education and (perhaps) moved out, I’ll think about life as a full-time writer — but for now, that paycheque is pretty essential, so I think I’ll keep showing up to work from September to June, and writing in the moments in between.

Summer, I’ll miss you.

Seven Things Newfoundlanders Say in Summer

We have lots of summer traditions in our beautiful province. Some people go camping, some people go trouting, some go out cod jigging during the food fishery, some go to the cabin and drink, some just go to the cabin (like us). But the one tradition that unites all Newfoundlanders throughout the summer months is talking about the weather.

Of course, this tradition also unites us all the rest of the year. But summer weather offers some unique things to discuss.

It was a large day when I went hiking in Maddox Cove earlier this week. And who’d want to live anywhere else?

First, some terms and definitions:

Summer: Never mind what the calendar says: if a Newfoundlander tells you something’s happening “in the summer” they mean it’s happening during the months of July and/or August. June does not count, although some may stretch the definition to include the last week of June after school gets out. And if you were going to do it during the summer, it had better be done by Labour Day. September is nearly always a very pleasant month here, but nobody considers it part of summer.

Hot: This term has a different meaning in Newfoundland than in some other parts of North America. In other places it is common to complain about “the heat” or “how hot it is,” usually when temperatures get above about 32 degrees Celsius (90 Farenheit). As this never occurs in Newfoundland, “hot” weather is not something to complain about (with rare exceptions noted below). “Hot” means any temperature between 20-30C (about 70-85 F) and it is what we hope for, long for, plan for, enjoy when we have it and curse when it doesn’t come.

There are numerous other terms relevant to Newfoundland summer (e.g. mauzy, RDF, “a large day,” etc.) but those will have to wait for another entry.

There are some comments you’ll hear accompanying particular weather patterns during the “summer” months here. To understand these comments you need to know that while statistics will tell you that 59% of Newfoundlanders are Protestants, 37% are Catholics and 4% either have no religious affiliation or follow another recognized world religion, there is a deeper reality. 100% of Newfoundlanders also practice a more ancient, atavistic religion. We do not exactly worship, but we certainly acknowledge and fear, the Weather Gods. We rarely speak of them, but these nameless, faceless deities control our lives, and much of our conversation is directed towards appeasing them, praising them, and, most importantly, assuring them that we never take their rare moments of generosity for granted.

“It don’t look like we’re going to get no summer at all this year.” This statement is made during any stretch of cold, foggy or rainy weather that occurs before we get a stretch of warm, sunny weather. Newfoundlanders can start saying this as early as mid-June, conveniently forgetting that every June of their entire lives has been cold, foggy and rainy. If this pattern, also known as “caplin weather” after the small fish who allegedly like it for spawning, persists into July, this comment will become more frequent and doleful, reflecting the deep-seated belief that some year, summer will actually not arrive.The phrase suggests a fatalistic acceptance of the Weather Gods’ whims, assuring them we will be able to handle it if they withdraw summer entirely. If the fear that we’ll get no summer at all persists for most of July, we will likely make news headlines across North America with our tongue-in-cheek response (see the “arrests” of weathermen Snodden and Sheerr in July 2015).
“Well, that was our summer.” Invariably said by someone on the evening of the first July day the temperature hits above 20F and the sun shines. See above-noted deep-seated fear that summer will not arrive. This is immediately followed by the fear that it will only last one day. Again, the goal is to make it clear to whatever shadowy powers control the weather that we know we’re lucky to get even one good day.
“This is our one good week, I s’pose.” Any stretch of good weather (i.e., sunshine and temperatures above 20) will elicit this response. Again, it is considered bad luck to express any optimism; we must always assure the Weather Gods that we know they are capricious and their favour is fleeting.
“Sure the summer is over after Regatta Day.” Regatta Day — to the best of my knowledge, the only weather-dependent civic holiday anywhere — is the first Wednesday in August, or the first fine day after that. (Two caveats: this only applies to the St. John’s area, and in this case “fine” means not sunny and warm, but calm and windless, which is even less likely in St. John’s. The Regatta is a rowing race, although the attendant carnival on the lakeshore is a bigger attraction than the races for many townies).

The common belief that summer ends on Regatta Day insulates us against disappointment in case of a cold, rainy August, and assures the Weather Gods that any nice days we do get in August will be treated as a gift rather than a right. No sense of entitlement here!
“We’ll pay for this next winter.” This is said anytime three good days have occurred consecutively, and reflects the believe that the Weather Gods, as vengeful pagan deities, will exact payment in the form of an unusually harsh winter.
“My blessed, we’ll die with the heat.” While some Newfoundlanders, myself included, refuse on principle to ever complain about our rare hot days, others will utter this type of statement as soon as the temperature hits 25C (77F) — or the humidity makes it feel like it’s above 25. Vigorously fanning themselves and moaning as they toss about in bed, they will profess themselves anxious for the chilly weather that will be back all too soon.
“Sure, who’d want to live anywhere else?” A perfect Newfoundland summer day is one where the temperature is in the low to mid 20s (that’s the 70s for you Americans), the sun shines in a cloudless sky, and a gentle but steady breeze blows, keeping the air fresh. (Here in St. John’s that kind of day is always accompanied by a breeze from the southwest; I’m not sure if different wind directions bring good weather in other parts of the province. I didn’t do Geography in high school).

That probably sounds idyllic to those of you who live in hotter climates, doesn’t it? We get maybe (in a good year) 21 days like that a year — that’s three weeks, but not three consecutive weeks. 21 or so days scattered throughout the months of July and August. Sometimes one comes early, in June, or lingers late in September. So that perfect summer day sounds idyllic to us, too, during the other 49 weeks of the year when it’s cold, rainy, and foggy.But here’s the great thing about Newfoundlanders: we have terrible memories. When that one beautiful day comes along, even if it’s been preceded by two solid weeks of fog, we forget that we were ever miserable. And we get out and enjoy it. You will never see more happy people outdoors in shorts and tank tops than you will on a warm day in St. John’s. And at the end of a perfect day, whether we’re around the campfire or the barbecue, sitting by the lake or on our back deck, we’ll sigh and say, “Sure, who’d ever want to live anywhere else?”The Weather Gods may hate us most of the time, but at least they can’t say we’re ungrateful.

Things Newfoundlanders Say in Summer

We have lots of summer traditions in our beautiful province. Some people go camping, some people go trouting, some go out cod jigging during the food fishery, some go to the cabin and drink, some just go to the cabin (like us). But the one tradition that unites all Newfoundlanders throughout the summer months is talking about the weather.

Of course, this tradition also unites us all the rest of the year. But summer weather offers some unique things to discuss.

It was a large day when I went hiking in Maddox Cove earlier this week. And who’d want to live anywhere else?

First, some terms and definitions:

Summer: Never mind what the calendar says: if a Newfoundlander tells you something’s happening “in the summer” they mean it’s happening during the months of July and/or August. June does not count, although some may stretch the definition to the last week of June after school gets out. And if you were going to do it during the summer, it had better be done by Labour Day. September is nearly always a very pleasant month here, but it doesn’t count.

Hot: This term has a different meaning in Newfoundland than in some other parts of North America. In other places it is common to complain about “the heat” or “how hot it is,” usually when temperatures get above about 32 degrees Celsius (90 Farenheit). As this never occurs in Newfoundland, “hot” weather is not something to complain about (with rare exceptions noted below). “Hot” means any temperature between 20-30C (about 70-85 F) and it is what we hope for, long for, plan for, enjoy when we have it and curse when it doesn’t come.

There are numerous other terms relevant to Newfoundland summer (e.g. mauzy, RDF, “a large day,” etc.) but those will have to wait for another entry.

There are some comments you’ll hear accompanying particular weather patterns during the “summer” months here. To understand these comments you need to know that while statistics will tell you that 59% of Newfoundlanders are Protestants, 37% are Catholics and 4% either have no religious affiliation or follow another recognized world religion, there is a deeper reality. 100% of Newfoundlanders also practice a more ancient, atavistic religion. We do not exactly worship, but we certainly acknowledge and fear, the Weather Gods. We rarely speak of them, but these nameless, faceless deities control our lives, and much of our conversation is directed towards appeasing them, praising them, and, most importantly, assuring them that we never take their rare moments of generosity for granted.

“It don’t look like we’re going to get no summer at all this year.” This statement is made during any stretch of cold, foggy or rainy weather that occurs before we get a stretch of warm, sunny weather. Newfoundlanders can start saying this as early as mid-June, conveniently forgetting that every June of their entire lives has been cold, foggy and rainy. If this pattern, also known as “caplin weather” after the small fish who allegedly like it for spawning, persists into July, this comment will become more frequent and doleful, reflecting the deep-seated belief that some year, summer will actually not arrive. 

The phrase suggests a fatalistic acceptance of the Weather Gods’ whims, assuring them we will be able to handle it if they withdraw summer entirely. If the fear that we’ll get no summer at all persists for most of July, we will likely make news headlines across North America with our tongue-in-cheek response (see the “arrests” of weathermen Snodden and Sheerr in July 2015). 
“Well, that was our summer.” Invariably said by someone on the evening of the first July day the temperature hits above 20F and the sun shines. See above-noted deep-seated fear that summer will not arrive. This is immediately followed by the fear that it will only last one day. Again, the goal is to make it clear to whatever shadowy powers control the weather that we know we’re lucky to get even one good day. 
“This is our one good week, I s’pose.” Any stretch of good weather (i.e., sunshine and temperatures above 20) will elicit this response. Again, it is considered bad luck to express any optimism; we must always assure the Weather Gods that we know they are capricious and their favour is fleeting. 
“Sure the summer is over after Regatta Day.” Regatta Day — to the best of my knowledge, the only weather-dependent civic holiday anywhere — is the first Wednesday in August, or the first fine day after that. (Two caveats: this only applies to the St. John’s area, and in this case “fine” means not sunny and warm, but calm and windless, which is even less likely in St. John’s. The Regatta is a rowing race, although the attendant carnival on the lakeshore is a bigger attraction than the races for many townies).

The common belief that summer ends on Regatta Day insulates us against disappointment in case of a cold, rainy August, and assures the Weather Gods that any nice days we do get in August will be treated as a gift rather than a right. No sense of entitlement here!

“We’ll pay for this next winter.” This is said anytime three good days have occurred consecutively, and reflects the believe that the Weather Gods, as vengeful pagan deities, will exact payment in the form of an unusually harsh winter. 
“My blessed, we’ll die with the heat.” While some Newfoundlanders, myself included, refuse on principle to ever complain about our rare hot days, others will utter this type of statement as soon as the temperature hits 25C (77F) — or the humidity makes it feel like it’s above 25. Vigorously fanning themselves and moaning as they toss about in bed, they will profess themselves anxious for the chilly weather that will be back all too soon. 
“Sure, who’d want to live anywhere else?” A perfect Newfoundland summer day is one where the temperature is in the low to mid 20s (that’s the 70s for you Americans), the sun shines in a cloudless sky, and a gentle but steady breeze blows, keeping the air fresh. (Here in St. John’s that kind of day is always accompanied by a breeze from the southwest; I’m not sure if different wind directions bring good weather in other parts of the province. I didn’t do Geography in high school).

That probably sounds idyllic to those of you who live in hotter climates, doesn’t it? We get maybe (in a good year) 21 days like that a year — that’s three weeks, but not three consecutive weeks. 21 or so days scattered throughout the months of July and August. Sometimes one comes early, in June, or lingers late in September. So that perfect summer day sounds idyllic to us, too, during the other 49 weeks of the year when it’s cold, rainy, and foggy.

But here’s the great thing about Newfoundlanders: we have terrible memories. When that one beautiful day comes along, even if it’s been preceded by two solid weeks of fog, we forget that we were ever miserable. And we get out and enjoy it. You will never see more happy people outdoors in shorts and tank tops than you will on a warm day in St. John’s. And at the end of a perfect day, whether we’re around the campfire or the barbecue, sitting by the lake or on our back deck, we’ll sigh and say, “Sure, who’d ever want to live anywhere else?”

The Weather Gods may hate us most of the time, but at least they can’t say we’re ungrateful.

I Am Not Throwing Away My Shot

In my ongoing series of “Trudy discovers entertainment phenomena that everyone else already discovered ages ago,” I’ve recently become COMPLETELY OBSESSED with the soundtrack for the hit Broadway musical Hamilton. I’ve heard people online raving about this innovative hip-hop musical based on the life of American Founding Father Alexander Hamilton (lesser known than the other founding fathers because unlike Washington, Jefferson, Adams, Madison et al, he never got to be President). The musical is famous not only for bringing history to life and hip-hop to Broadway, but for re-imagining the key characters in the American Revolution as a more diverse cast made up mostly of people of colour. 

Like most fans of the soundtrack album, I won’t be seeing this famously sold-out show live in Broadway anytime soon … I will be seeing it in eleven months, as I managed to snare tickets for myself and my similarly-obsessed teenaged daughter for May 2017. By that time most of the original cast, including creator and star Lin-Manuel Miranda, will have moved on to other roles. But a similarly brilliant cast of musical theatre stars will take the show’s infectious melodies and intelligent lyrics into the future, and we will be there to see it, and I’m excited about that.

There’s so much to say about Hamilton— why people are so obsessed with it, why I’m so obsessed with it. The massive popularity of this show has excited a lot of comment regarding what it says about musical theatre, hip-hop, politics, American identity, diversity, and so many other things that I am interested in but may not know a lot about. So I’m just going to talk about the one thing I know: writing, specifically creative writing about history.

Hamilton, among so many other things, is a brilliantly crafted piece of literature, which is probably why Miranda won a Pulitzer Prize for writing it. The rapid-fire, often rapped lyrics are intricate and intelligent, and if (like me and most people) you’re introduced to the musical via the soundtrack album rather than via the stage performance, you have the luxury of listening over and over, replaying and re-hearing until you catch all the nuances. Musicals always play with musical motifs — a repeated thread of melody that accompanies a character throughout the story, used in different ways for different songs and scenes — but Hamilton adds an extraordinary level of literary motif, too.

Take, for example, the song “My Shot” (which is currently my alarm on my phone so I can wake up to its inspiring lyrics every morning). The real Alexander Hamilton is probably most famous for (possibly, depending on what you believe about the debated historical evidence) “throwing away his shot,” i.e. deliberately firing to miss in his fatal duel with Aaron Burr. In writing Hamilton’s songs, Miranda plays with this phrase in every possible way, spins its meaning in a dozen different directions as he builds a portrait of an ambitious young man determined not to “throw away his shot,” not to miss a chance either at personal success or service to his adopted country. Over and over, whenever given a chance to jump into the fray, Hamilton vows not to throw away his shot — at fame, at fortune, at leaving a legacy — and yet every repetition of that phrase points us forward to the inevitable conclusion, when he will throw away his shot, and leave that highly ambiguous legacy.

This sparkling literary dexterity highlights the other thing I love most about Hamilton — how it works as a piece of (staged) historical fiction. Writing engaging historical fiction about real people is difficult because most of the audience already knows how the story ends. We know that Caesar will get stabbed on the Senate floor, that Antony and Cleopatra will carry out their suicide pact, that Anne Boleyn will get her head cut off. If you’re even minimally familiar with the history of the American revolution, you know from the first time Alexander Hamilton says “Excuse me, are you Aaron Burr, sir?” that this is the guy who will someday kill him in a duel (and actually, if you don’t know even that much, Burr has already told you “I’m the damn fool that shot him” in the musical’s opening number). Yet a truly great writer can take a story whose outcome is already carved in stone and still make us care — even make us wish we could change the ending. The tension comes not from wondering how the story will turn out, but from knowing how it turns out and wishing it could be different.

The other thing I can most closely compare  Hamilton to is Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall, though the genres are so different: one a highly literary historical novel (which won the Booker Prize), the other a hip-hop infused Broadway musical (which won virtually ALL the Tony awards as well as the above-mentioned Pulitzer). The prizes prove that each is an outstanding work in its field: each one also takes a historical figure little-known to the general public and not always admired by the history buffs who do know about him, and moves him to centre stage. Miranda makes Hamilton, as Mantel makes Cromwell, the central character in his own story, showing us how events might have looked from his point of view.

This is, of course, an inherently biased way to tell the stories of history. It’s not the same job as a historian is supposed to do: weighing all the evidence and presenting, in as unbiased a fashion as possible, all sides of what most likely happened. The job of the writer of historical fiction, whether they’re writing a novel, a musical, a play or a movie, is quite different and complementary to the historian’s job: it is to bring history to life, to make us feel it as well as think about it. That requires a point of view, and a point of view is necessarily limited and biased. When Wolf Hall made it to TV, critics carped because the saintly Thomas More was portrayed as a tyrannical bigot. But, as I pointed out at length in a blog post at the time, that is exactly how he likely would have appeared to Thomas Cromwell, and the whole point of Wolf Hall is to tell the story from Cromwell’s point of view.

Likewise, it’s hilarious that the Thomas Jefferson of Hamilton — played with brilliance by rapper Daveed Diggs — is portrayed as a smug, self-absorbed braggart, but it’s probably jarring to the many Americans who view Jefferson as a towering figure in their country’s history. (I’m Canadian, but I went to college in the US, took several US history courses, and visited Monticello on a spring break tour, so I know all about the respect many Americans have for ol’ TJ). But while the rap battles (and the portrayal of Jefferson as a black man by the mixed-race Diggs) may not be historically accurate, Miranda and his cast have captured something essential in the scenes where Jefferson and Hamilton debate: the Founding Fathers, like all historical leaders, often were arrogant, insulting, and breathtakingly rude to each other (you could get away with saying things about a political opponent in the 18th century that you could never say today), and Hamilton probably did see Jefferson, at least some of the time, as a smug, entitled prick.

That’s why I love Hamilton — for the same reason I love Wolf Hall, and The Sunne in Splendour, and every other great piece of historical writing that has ever captured and engaged my imagination. If you want historical accuracy, if you want research, if you want to examine all sides of the debate, read the work of historians (like many Hamilton fans, I am currently absorbed in reading the 800-page biography of Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow that originally inspired Miranda to explore and write about Hamilton). But if you want to feel like you’re a part of history, if you want to feel as if people who lived hundreds of years ago are alive and breathing and speaking right into your ear … read a novel. Watch a movie. Or, if you can get a ticket, go see Hamilton (or at least download the album).