SPARE CHANGE


In a conversation with a real estate investment company president the other evening (my, but don't I just keep THE best company) he actually, in 2005 -- (some two millenia, and half a decade after whatshisname came to save my ass and seemingly nearly as long since the following phrase was first stolen from the Japanese by an American change consultant only to be gobbled up and spit out in a trillion corporate speeches over the past 30 years), [insert big breath here after that considerable aside] -- told me that:

--> "change is the only constant."

It was the absolute sense of profundity and novelty with which he used the old, horse-eaten, shat-out chesnut of a phrase that really made me want to reach out and smack him. He really thought he was saying something that few have ever heard before. (What made it worse is that he was recounting the lessons he was instilling in his children.)

Change, of course, is what makes modern society the hellish emotional, psychological home-of-Beelzebub it can be and is often for us erect homo saps (or however the latin is spelled). Stress is its other name. Progress is another. The fucking fax machine (the grandfather of all things rushed) and it's evil spawned demons (email and cell phones) are other aliases.

Not all stress/change is bad, of course. I would like the change, for example, of Stephen Harper moving from breathing to not. (But alas I fantasize into a digression, so let me return to my less-than-rich-with-clarity ramble.) For another word we give change is excitement. It's the fine line between excitement and forced slavery which needs watching, I suppose. But that's not where I'm going here today -- I'll leave the co-opting of the good-fairy aspects of change by my Bay Street pals to another blog, another day.

Moving is big change. I ain't talking switching houses across town, although move with someone who carries posessions, spatula by fork by tooth brush, to the curb and the pain of such geographical change can be evident (Hamish? Ms. Cope?). I'm really talking though about major jumps of geography. I once lived in 4 provinces (one twice) two countries and had 6 different jobs in 5 years. But even that amount of change became mundane in actual fact and no longer really constituted change as I mean to describe it here.

My mother is an immigrant and some near 60 years after coming to Canada just recently shook her head in amazement, still, at herself that she would pick up and leave her mother ("aye, and we were so close") and all she knew to come to Canada. (Although an immigrant she once famously denied it, through a misunderstanding of the meaning of the word I'm figuring, with a thick gutteral, Scot's "awwckh, Ah'm nahwt!")

I too often forget, surrounded as I am in my life with almost-Canadian citizens, near citizens and want-to-be citizens, what a major and profound decision and action it constitutes to take up residence in a truly new place. By comparison my move from Sarnia to Red Deer pales (despite the highly exotic nature of both those locales).

My mother at least had her new husband (a native of her new land), the same language (well, sort of!) and a very much, for the time certainly, shared culture and history. How much more difficult it surely must be for those that come here to a language that shares few phenomes in the mouth and looks not at all like language in the eye. Where thinking itself is composed differently, let alone cultural mores and the expected behavoural responses being quite foreign.

I'm in love with someone who wants to come to Canada (who damn well better get to Canada soon if I'm to avoid a DSB prompted explosion). I too often catch myself in discussion of his decision to emmigrate and the myriad of decisons reguired out of that, treating it as if we were talking what restaurant we might go to for lunch. I have another very good and intimate friend who is the written test away from getting his full citizenship, who has a wonderfully close relationship with his parents but must watch it erode in the face of no real and physical contact stemming from the result of the thousands upon thousands of miles that separates them due to his decision to become a Canadian. And I too often find myself thinking about his lonliness through my own filter that I can easily pick and choose to see my family whenever I want. I have another friend who is not even on the landed immigrant track (he can see his go home date on the very near horizon) who desperately wants to not return to the home of his birth but watches as opportunity after opportunity that would give him some chance to make Canada his home slip away, precisely because he's not a citizen. There's irony. And I too often try to respond to his plight in the normal course of job hunting strategies.

I don't really have a point to this blog, except I suppose, to put to words the sense of error I have in trying to be, but feeling I'm not being, as supportive and loving to my Lover and my good friends as they struggle with their individual plights with what is surely among the bravest personal changes to be undertaken -- to leave the comfort of (at least) the "known" for the possibility of "better" and "future," and in one case for, in part, me.

I've actually taken some notes on this for poetry, but since actually producing a poem these days would require writing a poem, I leave you with a photo I took of change yesterday.

In the long, dew-wet grass.

I won $20 in a bet arising from the onset of the Falklands War in the early '80s. Out of an argument in a radio newsroom I predicted (correctly, as it turned out) that there would be fatalities in that ridiculous conflict -- begun on one side by a woman who wanted a bigger, long ago, flacid empire-penis, and on the other by a country that wanted a bigger nation-state penis).

I still have the Pound notes used to pay the bet.

The argument that day in a radio newsroom wandered into the realm of whether wars come in two packages -- just and unjust. Simply, whether war can be an honourable thing, something that brings a powerful sense of accomplishment or meaning to combatants lives, versus the combatants being nothing more than instruments of a nation-state exercising its ability to unleash violence on another. One grain finer, whether a soldier feels s/he is fighting a just cause, can justify his/her violence, or whether s/he feels no more than a used pawn there simply to pull the trigger for someone, something else.

Take examples: Of course there was nothing honourable about the Falklands War -- people died for some sheep-shit covered rock, and sabre rattling idiocy -- while the Second World War, perhaps was honourable in that it worked (even if not its initial or actual aim) to purge a large chunk of the world from what would have been undeniable and lasting tyranny.

Something that has always bothered me is that I have an undeniable -- and I can only describe it this way -- nostalgic yearning to have been tested in war. And I realize I have the opulent luxury of feeling that way -- as gloriously distant is my longing and the chance of my ever having to go, or to have had to go. Still, it is with envy that I view war veterans -- at least those of "just" wars.

I have struggled to capture this feeling in prose and poetry before, and with great failure. So, I doubt I'll capture it here with much success either. Language fails and the position must appear as a paradoxical idiocy. The sense in me is best captured in those moments when stories of hell of war come from veterans, which most always seems to end with the "Of course, I hate war, I've been there, but I'd go again tomorrow if I had to."

And that's it, isn't it. The "if I had to." Perhaps my want is not to know war personally, but to be given the opportunity to know if I would go, given the chance. Still not there, is it.

I cannot recall what conflict or action made it possible that Canadians might be called into war, but there was that possibility (remote as it surely was) when I was near or at conscription age. I announced to my parents that I would go to war for my country, sure, that my war-veteran father and war-bride mother would be supportive, even proud of my decision.

The response was profound anger, especially on the part of my father, who suggested that (more than a bit ironically) if he had to he would physically restrain me to keep me from joining. My mother began to weep and my father joined her. Their little boy off to war. I argued that dad had said more than once that he'd go to war again even though by that time in his life he was quick to point out the war was fought for commercial interests. And he responded he'd still go again, that day, but no son of his was going into such hell.

I came across accounts of my father's regiment (Essex Scottish) and their campaigns in WWII. I discovered the Essex Scots suffered more casualties than any other Canadian regiment during the war. One particularly chilling account of engaging the Germans in France tells of enemy tanks lumbering into the regiment and firing at point blank range. Tells of men running and crawling for their lives through thick, wet, knee-high grass in retreat, while others stayed put firing useless round after useless round of ammunition against the tank armour.

My father was an incurable alcoholic and I hated him for it. It terrorized my childhood and robbed me not only of my father, but effectively my mother too. The single point in my father's life into which I can sink an anchor of respect for the man is that he volunteered to go to war. That and the the fact that folks in my small hometown lined up around the block for two evenings to file past him at funeral "viewings." From his war experience -- never shared in any real way -- and the experience of seeing all those people line up to say good bye to the man in death, I understand my father was more complex than the single frame my experience with him allowed -- complex enough that I might forgive him, or at least understand him.

The Essex Scottish were wrongly credited with reaching their objective (getting off the beach and into Dieppe) at the Dieppe landing and thus were not as quickly withdrawn as they otherwise should have been. They were thus mistakenly left on the main Dieppe beach where the they landed under the now historic killing fire in the Dieppe debacle for much longer than they needed to be. (Given what is now generally known about that battle, I wouldn't be surprised if the British command wasn't testing helmets by leaving the men on the beach.)

I will always wonder after those personalizing descriptions how deeply my father's military spats (all left now of my father's uniforms -- the rest, sadly, discarded only relatively recently!)sank into the sand at Dieppe, or what noise they made as they swiped the long, dew-wet grass as he ran from point-blank-range tank shelling.

I asked my father about bravery or heroics or I think it was about officers and non-officers -- the difference. In any event his answer was a story of being in a foxhole with a buddy and their Lieutenant (pronounced LEF-tenant, btw) when a "pineapple" dropped into the hole with them. My father said his buddy was making to climb out the hole with panicked noises and motions, while he (my father) was furiously trying to dig himself into a hole in the corner. The Lt. Meanwhile pulled my father's pal back into the hole with one hand and with the other grabbed and tossed the German grenade over the lip of the hole where it almost immediately exploded. "That," my father said, "is an officer."

On the anniversary of VE Day I heard a segment on CBC Radio One which aired interviews with men shipping home to Canada after the war. Asked what they would miss about Europe they all said the new friends they made, the fun they had with their buddies. Somewhere in those answers, wrapped up with honour and duty and some human want of challenge, is answer to the old yearning I have -- and of which, frankly, I find myself ashamed -- finding it regrettable that I won't have that experience of war.

Now, if you'll indulge me, a poem that fits this blog today:

November

What if memory lacked personal boundaries?
floated free like dandelion fluff, uncorralled
by grey borders, title-less until nourished
by curious, foreign soil
(and not some odd notion of collective
memory -- but
self in past-tense, roaming)

Would you finally be accessible?
Dieppe concussions, rippling
along the paths of my memory
as they did down your spine
French and German and Dutch dirt
under my nails
as you scrambled to die (but didn't)
Reaching to my own face
your scar pulsing
anger and Crown Royal, shards of highball glass

And what did you know
of me?


steven heipel

the sun lives under the sea -- Tubastraea coral

For those couple of people flogging me for not blogging, I point out with some horror that two are missing: a blog I thought I posted late last week (on my father's army regiment) and then one today about where the hell I will have to move to escape Harper should he win. I didnt' notice last week's gone until I went to post today and then I discovered I couldn't get the posting from earlier today to show up.

So, who knows if this will appear...

Just wanted to post a pic of my "sun coral." I have to hand feed each of the polyps of this coral bits of fish or shrimp meat. Well worth it though, as you can see!