Category Archives: magic

Why Colombia?

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Suppose you were told you couldn’t go out of your house, in my case because I was over 70?

Oh, you were told that too?

I had been stocking up my pantry ever since the plague hit Italy. China, that didn’t phase me. I didn’t actually believe in China even though people were literally locked in. Doors were chained shut. But I didn’t worry until they started piling bodies in cathedrals and ice rinks in Italy and Spain.

Then our provincial (state) premier (governor) announced that I couldn’t go out and neither could my sister, who had promised to look after me when I – inevitably – needed looking after. Trouble was she was over 70 as well. So I went to Colombia.

Now don’t make trivial protests about airlines and no-cross-em borders.

I had been to Colombia in the early 70s with Gabriel. I didn’t know him well and I was not sure it was a wise idea, but like him, I fell in love with the Magdalena River. We traveled up and down the river several times, in A Hundred Years of Solitude and in Love in a Time of Cholera.

I know that was a cheap trick, but how else could I convey the idea of that lovely paradise lying across the equator: a jungle, grasslands, hundreds of rivers draining from the second highest mountains in the world into the biggest river on earth, a place of snow and ice and fire, a country with more unique plant life than any other, a place of gold and emeralds, of coca, cocaine, poppy and heroin, of incalculable cruelty and death whose people still sang and danced.

A country where a 13-year-old girl could keep three young siblings, one a babe in arms, alive in the jungle for six weeks.

In March 2020, I read an article about Wade Davis, a Canadian cultural anthropologist and ethnobotanist, who had written Magdalena: River of Dreams. That was very early in the Covid Pandemic and it was hard to get delivery, except from Amazon. On that occasion, I had nothing more to read and would have had a full-on panic if my local library had not had the capacity of loaning out e-books. I summoned this book while sitting in bed and was a quarter of the way through it before I fell asleep.

When I finished it. I started it again.

At the end of second reading, grocery stores started opening at 7 a.m. for the elderly. By then, I was sizing up the kitchen chair legs which my long ago Newfie dog had chewed down to their marrow. My stash of frozen bread had given way to boxed crackers and I was eating way too much rice.

I had also discovered The Thief of Memory by Michael Jacobs, another book about the Magdalena River. Once again, the book was readily available over the ether from the library.

We were all sure that by summer the Covid epidemic would be over. I had made face masks from large hankies and the elasticized tops of socks, and I washed my hands like a fiend. Hospitals were more or less holding their own in my area and both Davis and Jacobs had written several books about Colombia. After all, wasn’t it nice not to have to keep appointments. I didn’t dwell on the idea of cavities or cataracts, or fibrillation or the recurrence of diseases that tend to recur. I was so happy reading that I thought that it might be fun to write my own book.

Pretty much everybody was talking about whether pandemics and climate change meant the end of the world. Why not write about that and set the story in Colombia?

Why Colombia? Colombia is lovely and has magic realism.

SOON BY ETHER OR PAPER – I Trust You to Kill Me by J.A. Howe

Thanks Giving in Buffalo Wallow

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Of course, I’m not really in Buffalo Wallow, which must be somewhere in flatland. I’m up here on a pine mountain in the ancient land of the Chumash, who regarded it as the center of the world. Apparently, a Chumash trickster spirit, Coyote, or whatever he calls himself has been toying with us, so my gratitude this day is a little skewed.

I am grateful that Ikea’s designated delivery company finally delivered the bed. I bought it on Oct 23 by phone while I was still in Canada. I was told the first delivery date possible on this remote mountain in California was Nov. 8. This remote mountain is 40 minutes up the I-5 from the Ikea distribution center in El Tejon. While I slept on a mattress on the floor, my bed sped past me down the I-5 and came to rest in a warehouse south of Los Angeles, where it sat in a tight roll and disassembled pieces. Meanwhile my 82-year-pld body lay in a tight roll trying not to disassemble in agony. I missed the delivery date – they had been phoning my Canadian landline, but I am grateful that they delivered it on Veterans Day. I am also grateful that my daughter’s good-man-good assembled it with only minimum  damage to his body. So he says. I try to believe him.

It is 10 days later, my body is beginning to unwind.

Meanwhile, Mr Coyote’s trick involved a whole raft of medical specialists – general surgeons, radiologists, ear, nose and throat fellows, urologists, neurosurgeons, pain specialists, and a raft of CT scans, x-rays, MRIs, blood tests, cell cultures and biopsies. The diagnosis was kidney cancer, then metastatic kidney cancer, then benign tumor and early stage kidney cancer, then two benign tumors, one kidney, with a dissenting vote from the radiologist, who’s still got his money on the big C.

Update: a neurosurgeon has removed one tumor and it seems as though years of sciatic pain and months of insomnia have been cured. So thank you, Dr. Liker and all those friendly nurses at Henry Mayo.

Next stop, the urologist.

 

 

 

Lead into Gold: contradiction to despair #10

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I made it around the little lake as dusk fell. My old legs wanted to give in, but then a piano started up a familiar intro on shuffle. What was this song? I knew it would play me home – Van Morrison Philosopher’s Stone. (See end note)

Years before, recovering from major surgery, I sat in the Starbucks across from Culver City Studio in L.A., listening to this song. The Harry Potter movie of that name had just been released from Sony, just down Washington Blvd. I still hadn’t emerged from pain and weakness of the operation and, it must be said, the terror of a second cancer diagnosis.

Was it really possible to be an alchemist and turn this lead of suffering into gold, I wondered.

Morrison sings that even his best friends they don’t know that he’s searching for the philosopher’s stone. He’s out on the highway and the byways in the cold and snow, alone and relentlessly searching.

In the years that followed, I caught glimpses of that magical mineral, but foolish me, I had no idea that, when it came to lead,  I was ignorant – I knew nothing.

A decade later, I got a crash course. It involved emergency rooms, sudden trans-continental flights, first responders on multiple occasions, several hospitals, many, many doctors and pharmaceuticals, bureaucracy enough to break your heart, intense fear and terrible despair.

It’s a hard road/It’s a hard road, Daddyo/ When my job is turning lead into gold.

Then this week nearly six years later, we raised our heads at last. That the patient would survive the ongoing disease, we had known for a while, That the patient had relearned how to function in the everyday world despite catastrophic losses, we also knew, What we recently discovered is altogether more wonderful. The person we almost lost, through the agency of this enormous suffering, has become the person she always wanted to be.

Concise Oxford Dictionary: The philosopher’s stone – supreme object of alchemy, substance supposed to turn other metals to gold or silver

One of a series of contradictions to despair 115journals.com

 

 

 

Son of a Trickster: Jared, a latter day Holden

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Woodstock was over by the time school started in Sept 1969. I was a veteran of the high school wars, 7 yrs. of strife and skullduggery, and an assistant head of English. Even so, I was not prepared for the grade tens that year. They communicated with each by semaphore, weird hand signals and actual gibberish. They treated me as irrelevant noise, a distracting presence.

Then the sweetest little black haired girl reported to her parents that drugs were being sold at the school. The papers got hold of it. We were apparently the only school in the city where drugs were available. This neat little pixie, I finally realized, was stoned every day, as were all of her friends – 2/3rds of the class.

Sweetie soon discovered that she was outed, hoisted by her own petard. Somehow, I got back a reasonable sense of order.

Even so, how was I ever going to teach them Catcher in the Rye? Holden was you know, like the squarest!

In Eden Robinson’s Son of a Trickster, we find ourselves learning to love grade ten-er, 16-yr-old Jared, the Cookie Dude. His only social capital is his ability to bake and supply ‘edibles’. He uses butter and not the very best weed, but the cookies are ‘da bomb’.

What does he do with the income? He pays his father’s rent; otherwise his booted-off-welfare father and his pregnant step-sister would be out on the street.

His mother can’t know this because she will kill him. She’s already had a go at her previous boyfriend. Something about a nail gun. She’s handy with revolvers and long guns as well.

We are on the west coast of Canada, in northern British Columbia. The town and the Rez are almost one. Jared and his mother are Native. His maternal grandmother refuses to see him because she says he is the son of a trickster and not the no-welfare man his mother is separated from.

Jared is a kind boy who helps out his elderly neighbors -butchering a moose, for example, drinks beer and hard liquor, does every drug available, hangs out with party-ers at the beach and frequently has to get out of his bedroom, next to the laundry tub, to avoid his loving but homicidal mother.

Then a raven starts talking to him and says, ‘Jared, I AM your Father.’ Then things get weird. Apemen, otters, grizzly bears, singing fireflies casually materialize sometimes through the floor boards. Jarred rejects his mother’s explanation that he has magical abilities and should learn protective charms.

Meanwhile Jared, unlike Holden, has beautiful girls, who may or may not also have powers, turning up to join him in his sleeping bag.

I do hope that Eden Robinson has The Further Adventures of the Son of a Trickster up her sleeve.

Jared would have been fine to have in class. Stoned or not, he had good manners.