"A wonderful bird is the pelican. His bill can hold more than his belican."

“Anyone with quiet pace who

walks a gray road in the West

may hear a badger underground where

in deep flint another time is”

from Walking West

by William Stafford

I should never have stopped updating my blogs. They serve as a valuable resource to supplement my faltering memory. They improve my grammar, spelling and vocabulary. They are a wonderful way to share my photos, And they send me back to my many poetry books to find snippets to adorn my posts. 

We came to the cabin June 7th this year, our trip delayed by some medical tests, an all to  familiar consequence of aging. We had just finished packing the car when Helen got the alert telling us of the major water main break in Calgary, a situation that is still not resolved. So we are missing that. However we have to go back to Calgary in early July for a week or more and they may still be working on it. It is interesting how fragile our cities and our societies can be.

The first day here we had an adult and immature White Pelican exploring the slough directly in front of the cabin, they could easily be photographed from the cabin. They worked their way around the edge scooping through the weeds with their nets, filtering up, I assume luckless salamanders and frogs.The slough seems too shallow for fish. We have never seen any in this slough before. Unfortunately their search and our enjoyment of it came to an abrupt end when they entered the territory of a Red-winged Blackbird who drove them both off. 

As for the summer this far it has been exceptionally cool and very wet. The rain is welcome as many parts of the prairies have had years of drought conditions. However it has brought a huge number of ticks a pest that has only moved into the area in the last few years. I have required antibiotics several times after tick bits so this has reduced my wandering around the property despite bug spray and special insect repelling clothing. So we cutting back grass, checking bedding, clothing, the dogs, who are on medication for ticks, and each other on a regular basis. Today we plan on dragging one of the canoes down to the near slough thru the call grass so that will be interesting.

My late father-in-law John who always quoted this snippet by Ogden Nash would have loved to see them. Whenever one of the family sees Pelicans he springs to mind. A wonderful gift.

"A wonderful bird is the pelican.

His bill can hold more than his belican."

 

Musings and nostalgia

 

"So you speak to me of sadness

And the coming of the winter

Fear that is within you now

It seems to never end

And the dreams that have escaped you

And the hope that you've forgotten

You tell me that you need me now

You want to be my friend

And you wonder where we're going

Where's the rhyme and where's the reason

And it's you cannot accept

It is here we must begin

To seek the wisdom of the children

And the graceful way of flowers in the wind"

Rhymes and Reasons 

John Denver

Jaime Royal "Robbie" Robertson[1] OC (July 5, 1943 – August 9, 2023) Sixto Diaz Rodriguez (July 10, 1942 – August 8, 2023) I felt these.

Last night in bed while listening to their music I read these words. RIP fellows.

"Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:

I'm a martyr to a motion not my own:

what's freedom for? To know eternity.

from I Knew a Woman

Theodore Roethke

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/10/robbie-robertson-obituary

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2023/aug/10/rodriguez-obituary

 

Ivan Kenneth Eyre (15 April 1935 – 5 November 2022)

  I finished school and moved to Calgary to join Helen in the summer of 1988. We were both at the U of C that summer just in time to see Personal Mythologies/Images of the Milieu a solo show by the Canadian artist Ivan Eyre at The Nickle Gallery. One day a week admission was free (we had little money) and I was there every lunch hour. Later the library I worked in in Calgary  held Eyre's large painting Floodwood, a strange merger of still life and landscape typical of the artist. Another library and I shared my office with a print of his landscape Red Hill. Since my first viewing of his work Eyre has not just shared my personal space through his works but also my imaginative space through his oft repeated images of wheeled horse, giants shapes in the sky and hornblowers. I have collected show catalogues, books and a few works. He has influenced how I view the cityscapes and the landscapes of the prairies in which I have spent most of my life. As Helen once said after seeing his cityscapes one learns to look up at the tops of the tall buildings to catch a glimpse of the Eyre hornblowers silhouetted against the prairie sky.

Obituary

https://www.dignitymemorial.com/obituaries/winnipeg-mb/ivan-eyre-11003438

Wikipedia entry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivan_Eyre

A lovely youtube clip of Eyre in his studio.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4URm0196QjM

When I look at a painting it isn't only the painting I see but the thing that I am. If there is more in the painting that I am, then I won't see it.

Ivan Eyre

Thank you Ivan.

Spring back/Winter Wonderland

 

  "Today we woke up to a revolution of snow, 

     its white flag waving over everything,

      the landscape vanished,

      not a single mouse to punctuate the blankness,   

      and beyond these windows"

      from Snow Day

       by Billy Collins  

And let's remember.

It's been an odd summer

 

It has been an odd summer. Broken up by trips back to Calgary, heat domes, the drought, wasps and some personal matters I will not go into, we did not do many of the things we had planned. We did not make paths around the back slough, hook up the water system and install the grey water tank. We never got the canoe to the slough though whether the water level was high enough anyway is questionable. We did manage a lovely week in Grasslands Park which is another post or two.

It seems when we leave in a few weeks we will have again cancelled our travel plans but that is fine. More time to fuss with dogs and books and craft projects I really mean to start this time.


It is fall now, a couple days of rain mean the water tanks are full for the first time this year. All but one or two of the Franklin's Ground Squirrels have turned in. But we also had our first Thirteen-lined ground squirrel under the feeder. The White Throated Sparrows that have been lurking in the grass all summer are now jostling there with the chipmunks. Chickadees now seem to outnumber everything else but the drought has also meant we have shorebirds skirting the edge of the slough. This morning I started a fire to take the chill off before the family was up, caught the sunlight thru the smoke and startled a heron eying the ducklings. 

"one side so far from the other

it is impossible

to see across

without stepping out

                              onto a slick, tight rope,"

from (Re)conciliation by Cindy Clarke

Within These Lines

"Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

 "And that is why artists keep trying—to speak to something beyond the confines of the page, to move the stars to pity."

from "Nothing There: The Late Poetry of John Koethe" by Robert Hahn

https://kenyonreview.org/reviews/the-swimmer-by-john-koethe-738439/

 I am thinking about poetry and that can only be a good thing.

I read a New Yorker article and something struck me.

 

"I’ve lived my adult life so far away from my childhood, away from whatever madeleines might return it to me, and yet here I am, in some sense having never left this neighborhood. Time has and hasn’t wrought its transformational power."

from Living in New York’s Unloved Neighborhood,  by Rivka Galchen

New Yorker,   Feb. 8, 2021

The New Recute

 It started innocently enough. I had one nutcracker that looked like Santa. Then I saw others and well the die was cast. As of Wednesday that number has grown to 22. I am sure the collection really expanded once we began buying ornaments for our tree from Pier One Imports. They tended to put their Christmas merchandise on sale before Christmas and the temptation was too much. While I purchased a few elsewhere most of them came from Pier One as well as many of the nicest ornaments on our tree. 

“Marley was dead, to begin with ... This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate.” 

Pier One was a store we enjoyed, it was close and did not require a trip to a big shopping mall. We bought everything from bedroom furniture to candles but is was an especially important part of our life at Christmas. We could also get lovely Unicef cards there. 

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” 

When they closed earlier this year we dropped by and picked up a few candles. But we also realized it was one less place we would go simply to browse. Online shopping is convenient but rarely a shared experience. The last time I purchased a nutcracker at Pier One I was retired and had been to lunch with a group of friends from work. I was walking by with Manuela a lovely lady who had been telling us about a vacation home she was building in Mexico. The two of us wandered in and well the nutcrackers were on sale.  I realized when Pier One closed this was one yearly ritual that was no more and I decided the collection was complete. But recently we were watching a program on the Nutcracker and I knew there was one character missing. Yes I bought it online and yes I am now content with the collection as it is. 

“It is required of every man," the ghost returned, "that the spirit within him should walk abroad among his fellow-men, and travel far and wide; and, if that spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so after death.” 

            

 

“No space of regret can make amends for one life's opportunity misused” 

Why a pickle? As a student, 40 plus years ago I spent several summers working at the H.J. Heinz Co. in Leamington, Ont. It has been an ongoing joke in the family ever since. This was long before the capitalists bought the plant to grab the brand, degrade the product, and break the union. May they wear the chains they forged in life, mankind was their business. Not as charity after the fact, when they have no further use for wealth, but as an ongoing part of a life richly lived.

Toots Hibbert died on September 12, 2020, at the University Hospital of the West Indies in Mona, Jamaica, due to complications of COVID-19

 

Toots and the Maytals - Take Me Home Country Roads

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeVRaxHtwuk

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toots_and_the_Maytals

Farm the Original House

"This book is a journal of certain experiences, not written in the experiencing moment, but rebuilt out of memory. As we age, the mystery of Time more and more dominates the mind. We live less in the present, which no longer has the solidarity that it had in youth; less in the future, for the future every day narrows its span. The abiding things lie in the past,"

from Memory-Hold-the-Door
by John Buchan

Alaska Days

"When we contemplate the whole globe as one great dewdrop, 

striped and dotted with continents and islands, flying through 

space with other stars all singing and shining together as one, 

the whole universe appears as an infinite storm of beauty"

                  from Travels in Alaska

                       by John Muir

In 2015 My wife and I took a round-trip cruise from Vancouver B.C. to Alaska with her mother. We decided that cruise culture was not for us, I likened it to going on vacation and not leaving the hotel. However the scenery was beautiful, and the staff unfailingly pleasant. So we were distressed when we observed how poorly the crews of the cruise ships were treated during the early stages of the pandemic. I think during this period of minimal travel that I will look back at some of the photos from that trip and remember some of those experiences. 

Shaun 2002 - Feb. 28, 2020

"I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief." Wendell Berry

Shaun and Wendolene came into our lives in May of 2006 from the Calgary Humane Society. Wendolene would have been around 7 and Shaun 4. They had to be taken as a pair which is something we wanted anyway. We lost Wendolene in Oct of 2012.

https://thatsjustthewildwood.blogspot.com/2012/10/in-may-2006-we-wanted-to-adopt-couple.html

https://sunisaxeman.blogspot.com/2012/11/blog-post.html

Today we had to say goodbye to Shaun. He had been coughing for 3 weeks but was good enough to go for a walk around the nearby cresent Sunday. But time caught up with him this week and this morning we had to make a difficult decision.

 

He was very old for a Shih Tzu but in very good shape and able to keep up with the younger dogs on walks. Last night at the vets may have been the first night he spent without either Wendolene or Whateley by his side. He was a black hole for blankets pulling them all into his orbit and then shuttling either Helen or I uncovered to the edge of the bed. Most days on the couch he would come for a chest rub, first licking (once or twice) nipping my nose and then sneezing in my face before growling ferociously the entire time. As we both grew older and greyer I used to joke that if we wore hats you could not tell us apart.  He loved pasta appearing in the kitchen whenever he suspected it was on the menu often eating spaghetti like an unnamed movie icon. 

He normally accepted the changes in his life stoically whether it was his new friend Max...,

or the younger more energetic playmate Whateley who would keep Shaun's face clean for the rest of  his life. And they could both rock the sweaters Rigmor made them.

Although he generally was not one for outfits

.


This walk did inspire a poem.
https://sunisaxeman.blogspot.com/2011/04/ice-once-you-folded-entire-continents.html

Shaun's reaction to the cabin was funny. The first year we stayed two weeks. We had a couple lawn chairs and some cheap lanterns. He was quite put out. When the somewhat tacky Brick sofa showed up he was somewhat mollified. He also hated that nettles grew on the newly plowed lane. Even in Calgary a fairly soft spruce needle was cause to be carried some distance. But eventually he became quite the explorer although the couch was best. In the last few years I have begun to suffer from insomnia and so get up at night to read or putz around. But eventually Shaun would appear, if the bedroom door was closed he would demand that it be opened so he could find me and bring me back to bed to unite the family. Because family was everything to him. You will always be loved, always be missed little man.

Shaun feels I have gone on long enough so let's end with something short.

https://sunisaxeman.blogspot.com/2011/08/summers-hot-breath-small-dog-pants.html

Dr. Dale A. Russell (1937-2019)

 During a visit to the website of Caitlín R. Kiernan, one of my favourite writers and a paleontologist, I learned that Dr. Dale A. Russell had passed away in December. As dinosaurs remain a life long interest I wanted to remember him here. 

Wikipedia notes that 

"Dale Alan Russell (27 December 1937-21 December 2019 was an American-Canadian geologist and palaeontologist. He was Research Professor at the Department of Marine Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (MEAS) at North Carolina State University and Senior Paleontologist at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. Dinosaurs he has described include Daspletosaurus, and he was amongst the first paleontologists to consider an extraterrestrial cause (supernova, comet, asteroid) for the extinction of the dinosaurs.[1]

In 1982, Russell created the "dinosauroid" thought experiment, which speculated an evolutionary path for Troodon if it had not gone extinct in the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event 65 million years ago, and had instead evolved into an intelligent being. Russell commissioned a model of his dinosauroid by artist Ron Sequin, and the concept became popular." 

In fiction the British writer Neal Asher evokes Russell's dinosauroid reconstruction when describing the artificially created alien dracomen of his polarity SF series. 

 

I was surprised I could not find an obituary for Russell on a news service like CBC, but Keirnan offers a lovely tribute here. 

https://greygirlbeast.livejournal.com/1519682.html

A more recent take on the evolution of dinosaurs, assuming they had survived can be found here and Russell is mentioned. 

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170918-what-if-the-dinosaurs-hadnt-died-out 

“I have never listened to anyone who criticized my taste in space travel, sideshows or gorillas. When this occurs, I pack up my dinosaurs and leave the room.”

from Zen in the Art or Writing
by Ray Bradbury

Pelican 1

"A wonderful bird is the pelican
His bill can hold more than his belican
He can take in his beak
Food enough for a week
But I'm damned if I see how the helican "

by Dixon Lanier Merritt ( I guess the attribtion has changed )

But it was one of my father-in-law's favorite poems.

For the libraries they cannot touch.

A photo taken this morning of one of the many 

free libraries in our neighbourhood.

"One summer night several months later, a violent thunderstorm swept through the city, scaring all the dogs and burning up the sky in what looked like almost continuous threads of mad lightning. Her father used to call such storms real rock and rollers, and this one certainly was. The phrase and the memory of her father saying it was the last thing she thought of before falling asleep while the storm rocked and rolled the night world outside her window."

from Played Your Eyes
by Jonathan Carroll

full story here

https://www.tor.com/2018/04/04/played-your-eyes-jonathan-carroll/#more-351052

Saturday High Tea

We went to high tea today in our old stomping grounds of Kensington. We were married in the park there. We found a new (to us) shop selling Japanese pottery, clothing and paper products. It will merit a closer look. We also paid an expensive visit to Pages Bookstore, but we do like to support independent bookstores. (Great Stuff)

Turnips are turnips, and prunes are prunes.

Whether eaten with forks, or eaten with spoons.

            ADDEE GORRWY, 'THE POST CARD POETESS'

“The things that make us happy make us wise. ” John Crowley - Little Big

As an antidote to poor Marie Kondo, who just wants to bring us joy.

It's Never Too Late to Have a Happy Childhood" is Doktor's Leech's motto as he opens a haul of Creepy and Eerie Magazines, a forbidden delicacy from his childhood. Thanks to an on-line auction at Back to the Past Collectibles (http://gobacktothepast.com/) the Doktor is finally able to see what his mother warned him about.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BV1tpFqJnBU

While my childhood was not unhappy, I also never truly embraced adulthood.