LOOKING AT MY SHOES...

i have always taken photographs of my feet...of late i have puzzled over why...i was struck with a revelation while walking the other day...i was recalling my childhood...a strange foggy place full of images and sensations but very few memories... i recall being dressed for church in my hat and proper coat...my patent leather shoes with the strap...a child of 5 or 6 going to church with my father....

our church was in yorkville, in toronto, the posh spot to be in the toronto of today...in those days it was yorkville, the hippie haven...gogo dancers in windows, musicians playing on the streets and the smell of weed everywhere...i would hold tight to my father's hand as i passed by these strange and curious people, feeling quite over-dressed and foolish...the hypocrisy of church not lost on such a little girl..

my father was a soloist in the church and i would want to stay and listen to his songs and feel compelled to clap at the end, instead i was dragged to sunday school in the scary basement of the old church with the musty smell and the many closed doors....i would study the bible and get stickers of crosses and jesus...and at easter time...bunnies and eggs and pretty sparkly pastel crosses...i didn't understand any of it...my mind always a confused swirling of mixed emotions and many unanswered questions...the story of christ of no interest to me..my own life so painful and puzzling...i had no time for this man who was nailed to a cross...i felt imprisoned in my own life...without the nails...but enslaved and chained in my own way..

after this tradition of sunday worship i would then follow my father to someones' apartment...always different...i would sit like the good girl that i was...colouring book and crayons...in some unknown living room at some strange coffee table...while strange sounds would disturb and confuse me coming from behind a closed bedroom door...i knew my father wasn't with my mother...these women were patronizing and sickly sweet to the little girl with the bouncing curls and the fancy hat...my patent leather shoes looking back at me...

i would colour in the lines...wishing i could just scribble all over the page and continue scribbling until i had covered each and every surface of the womans apartment...whore...

i would look at my shoes and see my reflection...i would make faces at myself in the shiny black surface...i would wonder what my life meant and why i was here when i would rather be anywhere else...digging for worms in my backyard in my sneakers...getting my hands dirty...earth beneath my fingernails....

the shiny clean girl...dressed in her sunday best...looking in her patent leather shoes....looking for salvation...looking into the future...my shoes were my crystal ball and i searched in vain for better days that never came...

spring flowers, swine flu, canadian hockey and my love...

it has been a strange couple of weeks for me, most of which i spent flat on my back in my daughters' bed with the worst flu i have ever had...if it wasn't swine flu, i wouldn't want to know what that feels like...i could barely lift my head from the pillow to eat the condensed chicken noodle soup that my mom lovingly made, forgetting to dilute it with water...basically soggy noodles and salt...desperate for nourishment, i ate it...

i would awake in the bed, soaking in sweat, almost delirious with visions of  things i couldn't grasp as reality or make-believe....strange dreams and nightmares left me wondering day after day if i would ever recover from this crippling illness...

...one of my dreams was of my boyfriend and i marrying in a beautiful outdoor celebration..i was wearing a lacy short dress and a strange headgear made by famous hat designer philip treacy...my groom was all in white...so handsome...and our friends' dogs, slim shady and kitty were the best man and maid of honour complete with matching outfits....there were rose petals and champagne and the sound of the ocean and much kissing and dancing...when i awoke from that dream i was so disappointed to find myself still

 lying unable to move..

on the heels of this illness, my love visited me for a week...it was a blissful time of walks and talks and dreams....our love is beautiful and passionate...our age difference is un-noticed by either of us...i am young for my 56 years and he is wise beyond his 39....age means nothing...and when you truly fall in love it is irrelevent....

and then there is the vancouver canucks...the last canadian team left in the playoffs...i am still hoarse from screaming at the last game of their season that they lost to the chippy chicago black hawks...frustrating that 4 of the hawks are from vancouver originally...so actually...they are not an american team...most aren't...the majority of nhl teams are still made up of good canadian boys with a spattering of russian, swedes, finns and so on....so when the chicago arena erupts at the singing of the american anthem...they should take note...most of their team spend their summers at cottages in canada and drink canadian beer and say 'eh'.....and what about another team in southern ontario???   mr. bettman.....we can fill the stands...and we are the original hockey country...give us a break...whoever believed a hockey team could survive in the desert in the first place...no one with a brain and knowledge of our favourite sport...i wonder aloud if he paid off the refs to help chicago eliminate the canucks....why do you hate us canadians so???.....go back to the n.b.a.....we need an ex-n.h.l.er in charge of our game...a hockey man who knows that putting 'bums in seats' as they so crassly put it, isn't about expanding into cities who need to hire cheerleaders and special effects to instill excitement about the game, it is about placing teams in cities that are passionate about hockey...give the coyotes back to winnipeg, or saskatoon, or hamilton, or kitchener ontario...

now...back to the point of this entry...spring flowers...this spring is astoundingly beautiful...the colours of the tulips are endless and delicious...it is a 

slow spring and the blossoms are taking their time to bloom, the sun is letting them shine before taking away their vibrance with its blinding rays....i am delighted as a photographer by the endless beauty that surrounds me....

i read a line in a book of short stories by Harold Brodkey entitled ' first love and other sorrows'

' are flowers vain?  are trees?  are they consumed with vanity during those days when they are in bloom? '....

the girls in their summer dresses...

the droning sound of a lawn mower has silenced the robins' song as it rejoiced at the start of a new day...proudly sitting upon its nest in the tree outside my balcony...the smell of newly mown grass tickles my nose and i sneeze...three sneezes...the voices of people are loud and intrusive as though if they speak louder someone will notice them and the mating ritual will begin...what is this thing...this spring??...were it based on nature and the glory of miraculous buds blooming and blue robins' eggs, i could also partake in the celebration...instead it is a mania that inflicts the human race...not a happiness...a desperation...

the long winter months silenced their vulgar sounds and kept their necks inside car windows, it muffled the drunken debates and kept them away...the parade has begun and i don't like parades...clowns upside down and right side up...costumes and floats and screams of 'look at me'...the childishness of peoples' needs is nothing short of pathetic...

i remember a short story by Irwin Shaw entitled ' the girls in their summer dresses ' and how i marvelled at his ability as a man to notice the depth of the pain suffered by a woman in love with a man who is always looking at the passing parade....

the male character Michael says to his wife Frances...'you don't have to listen to this'...'.but i like the girls in the offices, neat with their eyeglasses, smart, chipper, knowing what everything is about..i like the girls on forty-fourth street at lunchtime, the actresses all dressed up...i like the salesgirls in the stores, paying attention to you first because you are a man, leaving lady customers waiting...i got all this stuff accumulated in me because i've been thinking about it for ten years, and now you've asked for it and here it is...'....i think of all of the girls on parade in the city...i don't know whether it's something special with me or whether every man walks around with the same feeling inside him, but i feel as though i'm at a picnic in the city....and when the warm weather comes...the girls in their summer dresses.'

.....his wife cries silently into her handkerchief, bent over so that nobody would notice...'at least do me one favour', she says...'keep it to yourself.  i'm not interested.'

i truly believe that women are motivated by their need to hurt other women...that their power is achieved by displacing a woman who threatens them, intellectually, physically or by simply being in love with a man...they are devious, envious, manipulative creatures incapable of true friendship and loyalty...they are the problem..not the men who strain to look at the parade the women create...their power is displaced and basic...whatever their career or their position in society...something never changes...the game of competition and the game of deceit...we have not been emancipated...women have remained enslaved by the very nature of their being...equality is not possible...man is superior...woman has much to learn.

a shack in the woods, a dog and a shotgun....

i have a saying when i am weary of this life, the city and its human traffic, the pretention and the jostling for position, the power struggles and intimidation...i tell those close to me that i will live out my days in the country in a shack with a dog and a shotgun...okay...maybe not the shotgun...the sentiment being that i need the simplicity of life...a wildflower garden...vegetables growing in my front yard...a place to lay my head and a fire to cook my food...

i think i could turn and live with animals

they are so placid and self contained 

not one is dissatisfied not one is demented

with the mania of owning things.

walt whitman

a friend who makes salt sweet                               

and blackness bright                                    

john masefield                                                                         .

                                                                                  

                                                                                 

                                      

spring, april is the cruellest month....and other noteworthy poetic quotations...

'April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.'

t.s. eliot.....

from the Burial of the Dead....

while the world celebrates the warmth of the sun and the shedding of winter clothes, i wonder why i feel this desperate feeling of having lost control...the security of scarves and mittens, hats and parkas...the quiet world of the cold...there is a comfort there...hiding in layers of fabric unseen by the eyes of the world, always judging, always watching...

one of my favourite short stories written by Conrad Aiken entitled Silent Snow, Secret Snow is something i have read and re-read so many times in my lifetime...i can feel the cold wind on my face when i read his words...he describes the magic of the winter in such an ethereal way...

'...at last his steps were curiously different, they were softer, 

they had a new secrecy about them,

they were muffled and indistinct;

and while the rhythm of them was the same, it now said a new thing- 

it said peace,

it said remoteness,

it said cold,

it said sleep...

snow growing heavier each day, muffling the world, hiding the ugly....

the hiss was now becoming a roar-the whole was a vast moving screen of snow-but even now it said peace, it said remoteness, it said cold, it said sleep...'

i often wonder why Canadians cannot embrace the winter and the pureness of fallen snow...i realize they are so automobile oriented that the arrival of the snow presents a problem for them in terms of tires and anti-freeze and traffic jams...therein lies the problem...we have lost sight as a society of the simplicity of life and have complicated it to the point where we are incapable of happiness without perfection...a sunny day and dry roads means easy....clouds and snow or rain means difficult...in a language so simple and childish...this is how people conduct their lives ... it saddens me...the hedonistic world that we live in...the sun worshippers have deprived themselves of a world of peace and beauty by denying the climate for half of every year they live ....

to quote poet Thomas Carew from his poem, The Spring...' she doth carry June in her eyes...in her heart January...'

women friends, unicorns and other mythical creatures..

perhaps i learned too early in life that women can't be trusted...maybe my fathers philanderings with me by his side taught me something i should never have had to learn...or maybe it was my so called best friend baking all of my cakes for my 'easy bake oven' on christmas day while i sat by innocently dumbfounded by her audacity...my mother screaming at me later as to why i did nothing to stop her...

whatever i did, i could never win with women...old, young, related, strangers...i always thought that women were cats and men were dogs...the cunning, manipulative nature of the feline so suited the dishonest deceit of the women i observed in my life...

i truly believe that women are incapable of true friendship and are solely motivated by their own selfish needs and inadequacies....to recall the x-files mantra..'.trust no one.'..especially if they are wearing heels...and what of those heels???   we all know they aren't comfortable, nor practical...have we truly advanced to achieve equality with men and yet insist on teetering on shoes that one cannot walk in?  the whole notion of the heels shifting the stance of the body to alter the buttocks into a mating position....are we human or are we chimps?  or the theory of helplessness achieved by wearing heels and seeming vulnerable and unable to walk without the help of a knight in shining armour....is this equality...no...it is manipulation, and women are not capable of functioning without it...

power...the chant of the 'modern woman'...power suits, power heels...the loud clattering noise of high heels on the concrete....why do they want power?  and what of motherhood?  of nurturing and love...of creation and compassion...i truly believe that the downfall of our modern society is the fact that women want to be men but still fulfill their biological need to create children...ironically then to enslave another woman to raise them....they are hypocrites....their woman power can only be achieved by using another woman to perform their daily tasks...that is not equality...

and the ultimate irony as we see in today's world...they can't conceive...perhaps they are becoming men and require drugs, implanted embryos and fertilization techniques in order to do what should come naturally by loving a man...or are they capable of loving a man...they are versed in the mating rituals, the trapping  and sacrificing of their mens dignity and masculinity...but where is the love???

women claim to have men friends and men claim to have women friends...that is a misnomer...it doesn't exist...the balance of friendship is always tipped one way...what the man may see as friendship, the women perceives as the possiblility of romance...especially if the man is already involved and in love with another woman...the enemy...it is a game that intensifies when a woman perceives a threat, and the larger the threat, the more she will persist....pathetic...basic...uneducated scholars...as transparent as the window to their empty souls...

i have never had a manicure, pedicure or had my eyebrows shaped...i have never had a 'girls night out' or a posse of female friends...i have never felt the need nor the want as i know they are threatened by something they don't even understand...fire...passion...depth...the unknown aura that surrounds me...i am a real woman...my births were natural, i breast fed my children much longer than the recommended 3 months...i love with great passion and desire...i don't need to discuss the man that i love...i don't share my innermost thoughts...my love is too precious to be the fat they chew to gossip and deceive...

women are no further ahead than they were in the days before womens' so called liberation...they are wearing the disguises and playing the roles of politicians, business moguls and executives, but they are basic, and boring and predictable....they have taken away body hair and sprayed themselves with perfume chemicals disguising their natural pheromones that attract a mate...they are immersed in on-line dating sites and desperately searching for a man to enslave with promises of carnal pleasure...it is part of their plot...well executed and discussed with their female counterparts...it is never about the man...the posse of pussies are a threat to all that is good and true...it is the ultimate betrayal...and men are the casualties...

i have often thought of the drag queen as the ultimate definition of my theory...in order to convincingly portray a 'woman' they exaggerate the breasts, the hair, the makeup, the nails, the high heels, the tight clothing....leading me to wonder why supposedly 'real' women have to do the same???.....are they unsure of what it truly means to be female?  do they understand what a woman is as undefined by desperate measures to be noticed?....

have we really evolved or will we ever...Shakespeare brilliantly used his character Hamlet to scold his love Ophelia...' if thou wilt need marry, marry a fool; for wise men know well enough what monsters you make of them.....i have heard of your paintings too, well enough.  God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another.  You jig, you amble and you lisp, and nickname God's creatures, and make your wantonness your ignorance...go to, i'll no more on't, it hath made me mad....