More Secrets from East Van-

In the Voice of Dad

2012-01-02T20:58:00.000-08:00

I was a bad boy.

I was a choir boy until two months before they caught me.The church pastor, my parents, even a teacher from high school came to myhearing, but that fuckin judge still gave me 12 months plus two years’probation.

I’m not a big guy, that’s true. But I was lucky. Us guys from the Soo we ran the laundry. I don’t know if youknow what that means, but there were only twenty guys working in there and morethan ten of em was from the Soo. So no one touched me, no one touched even thesmallest guy from the Soo.

There were some guys who tried to jump me, when I was livingat the hotel. They knew I was dealing and that’s what happened to smalldealers, bigger guys robbed them. I kept my Winchester in the bar for threemonths, waiting for them to come see me. So I guess yeah, it’s a good thingthat I never got sent down for murder because I was waiting for those guys. Butthey got wind of it, and they didn’t come downtown for a whole year. Causeyeah, people knew even then I was just a little bit crazy and they knew I’d doit too. So yeah, no one ever bother me, even though I was dealing for a coupleyears after I came back to the Soo.

Yeah, I was a bad boy and I knew if I didn’t get married,and do the things that a man is supposed to do, you know, have a family, contributepositively to society, I’d be going back there to Guelph, or maybe even worse.

And then one day, your mother, she was back in town, and shecome into the Four Winds when I’m in there and I thought, okay. And two monthsafter we started going out, I brought out the ring and asked her. And she saidno, and pushed the ring away, but I kept asking, and two weeks later she saidokay.

Snow

2011-12-26T20:17:00.000-08:00

There was the time we walked from downtown
along the tracks.
The snowy owl perched on the fence of the sugar refinery
was an omen that I missed.
We made it to my house, toes numb but not frozen.
He reached for me, and made me bleed,
But I still thought nothing of it,
until he thought better of it,
and left.

Musical Boyfriend AA Bondy

2011-09-09T19:27:00.000-07:00

I have a lot of musical boyfriends. The downside to this,aside from the obvious one-sidedness of the romance, is that you cannot slowdancewith a man who is already playing a mournful guitar and lead singing.

My boyfriend AA Bondy will be in Vancouver next month, at asmall venue where the performers are so close to the audience, you can smellthe smoke on their clothes if you stand up front. This man could sing pagesfrom the phone book and you would love it. The phone book itself would puckerits pages together in shy delight to hear the way he can sound meaning intoanything.

I’ve seen him before, and he is no Sufjan Stevens all wideeyed and bedazzled. He is slim, his adam’s apple as bulgy as his eyes. His skinis pale and his eyes are dark. What makes him so attractive is the stillness heis capable of, even in front of the eyes of the audience.

In his previous work, he has sung a lot about god, andvampires, and all the other fearful creatures they conjure in the South to keepchildren honest and get full grown men off the bottle. His new record, just nowon NPR’s first listen page, is called Believers.It will officially release next week. I will buy it promptly, and memorize the words.And on Oct 7^th when he plays at the Media Club, I will likely takemy lesbro, and hold his loving, platonic hand, and there will be noslowdancing. But I won’t mind.

Persistence

2011-07-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

As a kid, I tried to be a tomboy. Maybe because I wanted to please my mother. My mother loved to tell stories of her own tomboyhood. She told the story of her short hair and shorter temper like it was the fastest route to safety. For her, I slicked my hair back into a ducktail, and fought the boys at school. For her, I played with cars instead of dolls, and got crushes on my best friends.

Paper Bag Princess

2011-05-29T19:11:00.000-07:00

In my father's inventory of who has done him wrong,
He lists everyone he's ever loved, except me.
For me, he builds a throne of ice to sit upon,
And sets candles in my palms to keep them warm.

If he wins the lottery, there are plans for a castle,
Made of matchsticks with a mote of gasoline;
His list of those not welcome posted.
A fire-breathing dragon to guard the door.

Vancouver- city of dates

2011-03-27T19:39:00.000-07:00

In a city the size of Vancouver, you can go on dates forever; not only is Vancouver a large city, but it is transient with a vast number of people coming a going means there are always unrecognizable faces on the street. Since I became a single person at the age of 31, I have dated a hundred of these strangers. Most were only first dates with no follow up, but in some cases it took more than one drink or movie to figure out I hadn’t found the One. And in one case, I’m still wondering.

I realize that a hundred dates is a lot of people. But I was making up for lost time. A four and a half year old relationship with a woman whose mojo waned and then vanished had left me hungry.

I remember when it first started to happen. The waning began at eleven o’clock one night, when I took her hand and invited her to come to bed and she said “I’ll be there in a minute,” before she turned back to the tv, “after the sports highlights.”

I dropped her hand and went to bed without her, masturbating quickly and then faking sleep when she came to bed an hour later, her hands roaming as I rolled away and pushed her hands away, a phony sleepy grunt covering up my seething resentment.

We continued, I am embarrassed to say, for another two years after that moment, the sex getting less frequent as we learned to hold our desire against one another. For awhile she said she was just tired, then she began to suggest that maybe she had a hormone imbalance or some other kind of pathological damage. I cried in jags in the bathroom, feeling cellulite stretch across my thighs, feeling uglier than I had felt as a gap toothed preteen in my training bra.

But we wanted “it” to work, so we built a home together, even bought a dog that was meant to fill the cavern between our interests. But the gap grew, as did the dog, getting bigger as she added golf to her sports roster and I became involved in civic politics.

And then we began discussing moving from our loft in Yaletown. It wasn’t a practical place to live, and the growing tension and fights couldn’t be contained by the small studio space, with no doors to slam and no living room couch for either of us to sleep on.

I wanted her to break up with me. I wanted her to admit that it was her lack of desire that killed our relationship, but she would not concede. So a few days before we were to give notice to our landlord, I told her very plainly “My feelings have changed.” I could have explained more, but I didn’t. I was angry with her because she had stopped loving me, and I wanted to punish her lack of courage.

I blinked back my tears, the walls of the studio getting closer, and within days I was gone.

And then I was single. I bought new clothes, date clothes. Shorter skirts, bright colours. I built an internet dating profile, I volunteered at events. And I had sex.

My first date was with a woman. At first, I wasn’t even aware that it was a date. My social circle had dwindled during my domestic period and I was eager for friends and lovers, so whatever my intentions were, I was grateful when we bumped in to each other at the grocery store and she suggested we might hang out sometime.

She was taller than me, with darker hair and skin. She had the physical confidence of an athlete, but not the boyishness many lesbians play up. In fact, she was quite feminine, despite the fact that she sometimes wore dress shirts and ironic white loafers to match her leather tie.

I guessed I was on a date with her only at the very end, just as we parted ways to catch our respective busses home. She hugged me good bye, not so unusual for two women who have just spent time gabbing about our ex’s and dissecting film. It was how she hugged me that let me know, her hands going around my waist and squeezing me firmly.

To test my theory, I called her a few nights later. “I have cramps. Can you bring chocolate?”

“Yes,” she said. “And movies.”

The movie was black and white, a classic. I don’t recall the title or whether it actually played at all. I think I had just loaded it in the player when she kissed me. Her lips were supple, in stark contrast to the tight lipped rejection I’d settled with for years.

“You’re so tiny,” She cooed as she peeled my dress from me.

Later, she ground her clit into my hips, then shuddered on my finger tips, her back beaded in sweat. “You’re beautiful. You deserve pleasure.” She said aloud, and it felt like she was saying it for herself as much as for me.

the end of apathy

2011-03-07T19:24:00.000-08:00

I have five minutes until my hair dye should come out. Right now, my head looks like an Exxon mistake, a syrupy blue black swirl to the ends, an erratic hairline of an eerie indigo.

It's seven thirty, and my mascara is already gone. Tonight, the National makes me weepy. I have no reason to be weepy, except that maybe I have feelings again, and this is what happens with emotions. I feel tired, and therefore fragile, and suddenly Matt Berninger singing go ahead throw your hands in the air tonight makes me tear up. Itunes tells me I've listened to this song fourteen times since I bought it, but it wasn't until this evening that I heard that lyric as permission to surrender.

I'll go braving everything
Through the shine of the sun

If I lived in New York city, I would want to be Matt Berninger's pal. I think we are similarly neurotic, Type A and then floundering in private. We could sit on cafe patios tsking at people walking by and then confess to each other feeling guilty for the time we'd wasted.

Oh, you wouldn't want an angel watching over, surprise, surprise, they wouldn't want to watch
Another uninnocent, elegant fall into the unmagnificent lives of adults

Some Confessions

2011-03-01T21:28:00.000-08:00

I sometimes give myself tarot card readings... on the internet. My questions have not evolved since my teen years.

When I was thirteen, I went to a New Age conference at UBC. At the merch table, I became a dowser. I bought a pearly white ball that hung on a short string, the end of which looped over your finger. If the ball swung in circles, the answer was yes; if the ball moved back and forth, the answer was no. I could have looked for water. But always, the first question I asked, does he like me?

Nice Lady

2011-02-08T21:06:00.000-08:00

It's because of seeing him on the metro. That's why he has crept back into my thoughts. That, and a play he indifferently inspired that's been repping down the street.

On the metro, he was wearing a fedora and a suit jacket. He had his legs crossed, rather like a woman, one might say. I thought for sure he saw me, and I tried to meet his gaze while elbowing my friend bedside me. He looked out the window, either too busy in his head to notice, or trying to avoid me -either seemed possible. He had not aged at all, or, I guess the truth is, that men his age are now a regular part of my life, and so he did not seem old to me anymore.

It was more than ten years ago that I knew him. I've said a lot already, zined him, spoken publicly about him. I've come to see him as a symbol of all the stupid things I've ever done. He made me resent my naivety, even as I mourned its loss. He kissed me a few times, though I think it was the talk of how I inhabited his thoughts that shook me hardest.

He writes still, more than me, and about pop culture things like news headlines and television programs. His prose retains his trademark airy, cerebral quality, like the most offhand observation is ready for the pages of the Globe and Mail.

I'm not sure how to exorcise him from my thoughts. I don't understand why that brief encounter on the train stays with me, why I feel again like a 22 year old girl with a problem she can't manage.

He wanted to write a book about me, at one point. He let me call him Nice Lady, which was a joke only he and I understood. He confided he'd once done drag with a CBC celebrity. I knew enough small details about him to love him. And I did.

Green

It’s very hot. The air feels close and sticky, like the palms of my hands, and I think that Michael is right. “Such a metabolism!” he says when he rubs them, making me feel like my greatest insecurity is a testament to my power.

And so, yes, I think it is about metabolism, because yesterday there were only buds on the trees and today, a tentative green yelps from the tree branches. Tomorrow, there will be leaves. There are very few blossoms here. There isn’t enough time, because the growing season is short. The people respond by staying up until three, clogging the streets, absorbing all the stickiness and looking for others like them.

I feel the urgency too. I think maybe it is closer to my internal clock. I wake up knowing there can’t be time for everything, and the people on the street say, “Yes, you’re right. Depeche."

Michael loves the brave yellow-green of new leaves, but I prefer the heat and deep summer hues. I don’t mind the scent of death in them. I see the cyclic nature in full blooms. I like determination.

Someone wants me to describe him; because the world isn’t just about feelings and opinions. But I never really bother with the visuals. They are important, but they don’t really get in me like his voice. It’s old, sort of womanly, like a lady who knows the ropes. Like a lady who knows how to tie things down and shakes her head at the new girls who can’t walk in heels.

He has the voice of a drag queen, dresses like my grandpa, stares like a lion. He loves an audience; trouble. He’s most dangerous when he’s bored, and I’d have given up my baby teeth in a dirty deal with the tooth fairy, thrown in my wisdom teeth as a bonus, to have found him first. Or, I would’ve transplanted my baby teeth into him, to give him my irreverence for the sanctity of marriage. To have him say “I fuck her and I fuck you.” And have him mean it, without guilt.

He expects me to be harsh, to be all the alienating things about the future that magnetize him. But he knows too about the times when I can crawl into his lap. He wants the lickbitepurr that he deserves.

He can’t say it. So he creates to exorcise the guilt.

“Not like Lolita,” his fiction begins, “a non-sexual obsession.”

“No,” I whisper to the back of his neck, “Not like Lolita”.

When I see him next, I will be old, ten years past a Lolita. I will stand behind him while he sketches her, listing all the ways that I am not his Lolita. Once in a while, he will turn to face me, for a visual reminder of what she is not to be. I will see her unfolding in his eye, a translucent green slip of a girl with a mean look on her face.

He will turn back to his work, before he sees that I’ve been sketching too. A girl, no a boy, who looks just like me, we are so much the same, and underneath it
says:
I fucked him I fucked him.

That is what I think when he sends a message, “work is going too well, not returning calls from anyone.”

Ingesting the hollow comfort of being included in Anyone, I apply alternating streaks of avocado and moss eye shadows. I'm just anyone, so I go out to look for others like me.

It’s what I think about when the punk boy says he wants to kiss me. I smile, stifle a laugh and pull him by his studded belt onto my bed. It’s like we’re making a rock video. He takes my pants off to an emo band, removes my bra to a rock ballad, and kisses down my thighs to something hardcore but with violins. The camera angles shift, from over his shoulder, to close ups of my face. There’s a pause in the music.

“I have a condom if you want it.”

I smile and say yeah yeah yeah, losing myself in a chorus I’ve been singing since I was four. It goes na na na nana.

Then he gets ready to put it in me, and I expect it to be Slint, or Engine Kid, something fast and then slow, then hard and then soft. But it’s pretty much three chord punk. There is enough melody to warrant the pain, and it’s building to something, even if the surprise in the ending is just that it’s over.

The boy runs his fingers through his bleach blonde hair “I’m teething,” he says, swishing water in his mouth. “My wisdom teeth are coming in.” I laugh and tell him that he should try to keep them. Maybe we’ll need them when we’re old.

He falls asleep, twitching and thrashing, and holding on to me. When he leaves, I pull the covers back to see if there are stains. I know you’re supposed to bleed on the sheets. But the only marks are from the lube, still damp, making the flannel sheet a darker green.

Family

2010-12-27T17:15:00.000-08:00

I say this as an artist,
because it isn't so bad that I can't have empathy;
My family is a pride of lions,
each with a thorn in one paw.

Guido And Grandma

2010-12-02T21:34:00.000-08:00

His birth certificate says Anton,
but he’s sure there was to be a y on the end.

He’s bought one headstone for their double plot, he tells me,
with his name and her maiden one already engraved.
He has asked her to go there to see it, but she refuses.

I imagine he wants to stand there with her, holding her hand,
like he has since he was twenty.

A Translator: Chapter Two

2010-12-02T21:02:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two: Wombs

This is a memoir of my body and because I am a woman, I guess you could say that it is the story of a life framed by two wombs, the one I came from and my own.

When my mother was pregnant with me, she was chubby. It would be almost impossible to imagine her this way if not for one photo is our family album. In the photo, she is hardly pregnant. It is late October 1975 and her skin is a brown somewhere between carmine and cinnamon. Her cheeks are rounding already. She is wearing high waisted white pants and a red and white striped top. The white is a shock against her skin tone and her long black hair. Posing in a doorway, one hand on her hip, she is a knock out.

It was my mother’s third pregnancy. Her body knew what to do. She was impatient. She managed a long winter and the taunt of spring. Now it was early June and the weather was hot. When her doctor said it would be another two weeks before the baby arrived, she likely waited until he turned to his notes, before flipping him a low slung bird. When she left the doctor’s office, she marched past the bus stop. The bench was hot from the hard sun, she couldn’t imagine sitting on it, and she began the long walk to the house on Lake Street.
I call it the house on Lake Street, not our house. It had a definite article, like the train station or the mall, but was never truly in our possession. My parents met there for a few hours each day, long enough to eat a meal, start a fight, and storm out to the garage.

No one in her small town walked anywhere. The bus system was pretty much for decoration, some civic vanity project to make the town appear more cosmopolitan than Bruce Mines or Wawa. Not many rode it, but it was there, as proof that the small town might someday be a city. Along with the Steel Plant, and the two paper mills, they made this town significant.

But she had lived in Toronto. She’d taken streetcars to work and subways to parties. She knew more about the world than most of the people around her. She’d even been to Detroit once.

Some bus stops had weather shelters. They were made of wood, had a roof and two sides. In the rage of a blizzard, depending on the direction of the wind, you might feel protected while waiting for the glow of the bus’ two wide set headlights to break through the curtain of white. But the shelter did not keep out the cold, and it was just as likely that the wind might come from the same direction as the bus, and in those times, you were brushing the flakes off your eyelashes, worried that in blinking them away, the bus might pass you by.

It was funny to be thinking of blizzards during this hot spell. It was early June, and it had been hot for enough days that the last of the snow banks, those ancient sooty ones that rimmed shopping mall parking lots and school grounds, had finally succumbed. Now it was hot and muggy, the humidity coming off the lake making the green in the world become bolder.

She tied her hair into a pony tail, feeling the weight of her belly as she lifted her arms. She shook her head at the foolish doctor who said two more weeks.

She counted the bus stops along Queen Street, one every couple blocks, and counted twenty before she was certain that she was in labour. She finished the walk home, pausing when she had her first good contraction. When she arrived, her son and her mother were in the backyard pulling rhubarb from the garden. Her mother looked up and saw the pause, the grimace, and knew it was time to get the suitcase.

The birth itself was easy, relatively short, but I am lucky to be alive. My parents had only wanted two children. My mother’s first pregnancy was almost twins, but something happened, and instead of two babies, there was only my brother. Then, in another year, she was pregnant again, and she and my father agreed, this would be it, two kids and they were done, she’d get her tubes tied. But then she miscarried.

By that point she was sure she wanted to be a mother. She had already been transformed by the love she felt for her son. The miscarriage was a loss for her and my father.

It’s odd to think of how fertile my mother was. By my age, she had a child in kindergarten. By my age, she was one more separation away from a divorce and single motherhood.

I hope it doesn’t sound like I can’t imagine being a mother, because I certainly can. I think I’d make a good mother, though the downsides of parenting seem pretty clear to me. What a risk, to make a promise with your body to be tied to another human for a lifetime, and that this promise should manifest as a third person that you will carefully bring into the world together. To break that promise, seems the most profound failure anyone can make. And yet I am proof that it is survivable.

My body might not want to make that promise. A doctor once told me I have a heart shaped uterus, like a Valentine heart was drawn between my ovaries. It seems an even better place to find this cartoon symbol than in my chest. My heart might be ready to do its proper function, though my uterus may be inhospitable for procreation, it is a perfect host for love.

In some ways I think it’s fair to say I’ve already been a parent. Helping a frail parent has a lot of similarities to parenting. There are triumphs, the times you coach or advocate for your parent, and they learn or are protected, or maybe even flourish. There are brutal epiphanies when the limit of your influence becomes clear, when you fail to protect them. Caring for a dying parent is very similar to parenting, minus the hope.

When my mother was dying, the stages of withdrawl from this life were incremental and seemed infinite. A few hours after she told us it was time, she slipped from consciousness. At least that is what I thought, though it was hard to tell, because her eyes never closed. Her poor muscle control combined with the lid lift, meant she’d slept with at least one eye open for years. As she entered into the labour of death, her eyes remained open. Her mouth also moved, in soft round shapes, it was like watching someone croon “Moonriver” on mute. The thought crossed my mind that she was trying to say something, but also I was quite certain that she wasn’t.

Very young infants make these same mouth shapes, as they learn the muscle control necessary to communicate emotion. Eventually, it results in a smile, maybe just by fluke, but then the delight in their mother’s face rewards it, and then mirroring begins. I noticed this when looking into the face of my friend Linda’s two month old daughter. The baby’s eyes widened, her eyebrows lifted, her mouth stretching to oh shapes. I couldn’t be sure that she saw me, that her actions were anything more than muscle twitches.

But it seems to me, that each small development that baby makes, each element of humanness she acquires, has to be practiced, borrowed, and then at the end, it will be given back.

I hear that demystifying death, talking about it, facing it as a fact of life, is supposed to make us more courageous. I think it might be my only regret of my mother’s passing that I did not come through it less afraid of death or more certain of why we are here.

I can guess that is what makes parenthood so much better than what I have experienced; the truth that each day, things get better, children become more independent, giving hints they may be better than us. A small bundle of the future you can hold in your arms.

The Translator- Chapter One: Eyes

2010-08-24T20:05:00.000-07:00

My brother lies in a hospital bed in the peri-operative care unit of Vancouver’s General Hospital.
He has not shaven today, so a thick shadow has settled across his cheeks and the slight jowls that he can’t seem to lose.

He’s wearing the standard blue gown with ties at the back and snaps down one shoulder. The sleeves are short. A skeleton riding a motorcycle peaks out from his left sleeve. By this point, someone has already told him to put on the head cap.

A nurse comes to verify his chart and begins the usual questions. He’s flirty with her, trying to make jokes when he can. She laughs and keeps on with her questions. Any crowns or partial plates, birthdate.

“Have you ever threatened to hurt anyone?” she asks.

I laugh nervously from the chair beside his bed.

“No,” he says with a relaxed voice, with no tension in his brow. He doesn’t touch his nose or shift away from her gaze.

She doesn’t ask how he got here, or how the faint scars on his knuckles can be explained.

What he means to say is that he certainly has threatened to harm people, many people, even his shit heel father, but this fight wasn’t his fault.

And also that yes, if you, as a youngish Asian woman who’s used to getting hit on by suddenly vulnerable men in nightgowns, if you feel a tingle that this one might grit his teeth when you put in a line, or come out swinging from the anaesthetic, you’re on the right track.

I’m not a confessor here. I don’t have to tell her what he means. I’m not an interpreter. I don’t have to warn her. But I will.

“Just a sec,” I interrupt as he spins another one for her, answering “Five ten,” to her height query.

“I think you’re asking that harm question because sometimes people react badly to anaesthetic and become violent, right? Our mother had that reaction.”

I feel better for saying it, some degree of relief from warning them without giving away his secrets.

The nurse turns to me, “How long ago was this?”

I sneak a look at my brother, expecting to see an I told you so face, but he doesn’t even look at me.

“It was about five years ago. Our mom had anaesthetic, and she struggled, you know.” I gesture like someone fighting to get away. “I just mention it in case it’s hereditary.”

Don’t ask anymore. God, move on.

I’ve never personally seen anyone react badly to anaesthetic. When my mother was sedated, I’m not entirely sure what came first, the anaesthetic or what the resident had described as “combative behaviour”. It was the only time she ever went to the hospital without me, so I missed the show, how she fought against the paramedics and told them to just let her go home and die. When I arrived at the hospital, she was unconscious and being dialysed. I was not allowed in to see her for hours.

“How long ago was this?” the nurse asks again.

“Oh I don’t know, five years ago?” I say. Five years sounds better than three for some reason.

She closes the chart and places it on my brother’s bed, then releases the foot break. I wonder if my confession means that they will restrain him.

I lean over the bed and kiss the part of his brow left exposed by the too generous cap. His forehead is cool and clammy with nervousness.

While he is in surgery, they will make a small incision in the perpetual bag under his right eye. Through the incision, they will insert a plastic shim on the floor of his eye socket, to prevent his eye from sinking further into his head. The shim will prop his right eye up, hopefully even with his normal eye. The surgeon describes it as cosmetic, which I guess it is, if you consider wanting to look like you did last week to be a definition of cosmetic.

“Have it done,” I’d told him when he was hedging. “Let’s be honest, dude, you’re kind of a vain guy, and if you walk around looking like Igor for the rest of your life, you’re going to be unhappy.” He’d nodded, but it took the resident surgeon assuring him that no, they don’t take your eye out of its socket during the surgery, before he’d agree.

It’s our family phobia; you go in for eye surgery, and the doctors take your eyeball right out of your head. Like a leechee nut popped out of its skin or a hardboiled egg freed from the false promise of its protective shell.

Almost ten years ago, when my mother had cataract surgery, she had been terrified. Not a very serious surgery, just a trading in of a failing lens for a synthetic one. But as doctors love to say, it was not without risks. For my mother, whose degenerative nerve disease had already robbed her of the ability to hear, the risk of losing another sense was terrifying. I tried to sell her on the idea: only local anaesthetic on the surface of the eye itself, no need for glasses anymore! Home in hours!

But you are awake throughout it.

She came out of surgery shaking and crying. Drowsy grannies twenty years older than her lay quietly in the surrounding beds. “They took my eyeball out of my head!” She nearly shouted. “I felt it on my cheek, it was terrible. Oh my God.”

I asked the nurse if this was true and she said it’s not part of the surgery at all. I spoke slowly and deliberately so Mom could read my lips. “Mom, they did not take your eyeball out of your head.” This didn’t seem to calm her, the dream or hallucination held more sway than I could.

The family phobia might be my fault. When I was born, my eyes were weak. I had poor muscle control, one eye doing most of the work, while the other gazed vacantly in another direction. The layman’s term is “lazy eye”, though I don’t think that is fair. Neither of my eyes was lazy, more like co-dependent. When one eye tired of doing all the work, the other eye took up the task of focussing and let the tired eye rest. I had amazing control, and could switch eyes at will. It was only when I got upset that my eyes became uncontrollable, crying taking all precedence and both eyes sliding to the outer edge of each ellipse. My mother never let me cry long, setting us up for a parent-child dynamic that promised, at least for my early years, I would be protected from grief as much as motherly possible.

I suppose the problem of my lazy eyes was seen as more than cosmetic, because I was taken from our small town in northern Ontario to the Sick Children’s Hospital in Toronto three times in attempts to have the problem fixed. I saw eye specialists who ran tests and as my mother liked to tell neighbours, I was written about in medical journals. The first child of my age group to be given a new, more radical surgery to correct my strabismus, a surgery that promised quicker recovery time, but required that instead of simply rotating the eye and making an incision in the top muscle of the eye, the entire orb be taken out of its socket and the extra-ocular muscle be shortened.

I don’t know for certain that my mother had the story right. She did not get copies of any medical journals with stories of my surgery. I am doubtful that any doctor, having to repeat the same surgery three times, would want to publish results that must be seen as a failure.

I don’t remember the surgery, though I have foggy memories of hiding behind my mother’s legs while she spoke to a woman in a white coat. Across the hallway, there was small playground with a plastic slide shaped like a dinosaur, but no children played on it. I remember later being extremely thirsty and convincing another child to sneak into the kitchenette on our floor to get me some apple juice. I recall a sign being placed around my neck that read “Please do not give me any food or drink”. These are my only memories of surgery.

But my mother is gone now, and I have no more chances to challenge her on this story of my life. So for now, the family story goes that I had my eye taken out of its socket and placed on my cheek while they snipped and then sewed my eye muscles back slightly tauter and therefore easier to control.

The family story is etched in both me and my brother, and explains why he needed the resident surgeon to assure him that for a broken orbital, there was no need to put the eye out of its socket.

While the surgeons are shimming my brother’s eye, I kill time near the hospital grounds, shopping for a sweater because the day has grown colder. When I’d left my apartment at five this morning, I was sure that the cloud would burn off by noon, as is often the case in this city. Instead, the cloud lingers, and is now joined by a cold wind that seeps through my spring jacket.

In a clothing shop on Granville Street, a posh portion of the street called the Granville Rise, a young sales clerk interrupts my browsing by asking me how my day is going so far. I’m irritated because I know my answer will dampen her morning and I’m old enough to think she needs to learn a lesson in reading body language. So I tell her I am waiting for my brother to get out of surgery. She apologies and I leave the shop, the perfect black sweater still on the rack, further education for the sales girl on the consequences of prying.

When I return to the hospital, my brother is already awake. He is sitting up in his hospital bed, his eyes wide as he can make them through the swelling. Under his eyes, the bags have gone blackish. He’s leaning forward slightly, like his head has more intention than his body is yet capable of executing.

“I slept for a while, but now I can’t.” He sounds puzzled and worried.

“What time is it?” He asks me, even though he seems focussed on a large wall clock. “They said I have to stay here until two. But I just want to get the fuck out of here.”

He is breathing heavy, the beeps of his heart rate picking up. His blood oxygen is rising and falling every few breaths.

If I was a nurse, I would give him some Ativan. But the nurse chuckles at my suggestion. Ativan is for quitters, I imagine is the subtext of her tongue click. This nurse, a blond woman in her mid-forties, doesn’t know our family history. She removes the nasal prongs from my brother’s nose and he relaxes.

My brother and I know Ativan. When our mother was officially dying, she moved to a hospice. My brother and I packed her entire apartment, even her medicine cabinet. She had blister packs jammed full of pills, small windows into a medley of pain medication and anti-emetics. We found an assortment of half-finished weeks that were empty until Wednesday or Thursday, each unfinished pack a pharmaceutical document of a week when the hospital’s pharmacy took over. Since her Ativan was only for “as needed”, it couldn’t be put in the blister packs with her Prozac and heartburn medicine. So my brother and I split the bottle of Ativan before we dropped the rest off to the drug mart for safe disposal. We left a bottle of T3s untouched as further cover for absconding with the Ativans.

On my mother’s last day of consciousness, she asked for Ativan. As the world closed in around her and she told us that it was time, my mother took at least three doses. It was given freely, as any comfort measures are in palliative medicine. Many hours later, as her body slowly shut down, and her breathing became primal, like a baby bird in a shoebox, the bright green of the Ativan lined the cracks of her mouth. It formed bright green bubbles over her lips.

My mother did not die quickly. From the time she said to my brother, “it’s time, call your sister back,” to those final foamy green gasps, she laboured toward her death for almost twenty four hours. Not to make that sound quick, it was twenty four hours of nearly any minute now. It was thousands of minutes of don’t leave, don’t sleep, after all this, don’t miss the end.

But she was a bit early. She had a goal we had all come to believe in; my mother was intent on leaving this life on the anniversary of her own mother’s death. So when she said “it’s time” and it was just one day before Grannie’s deathday, we said ok, she pretty much made it, and when nine o’clock came, and my mother had been breathing only once every forty five second for hours already, we congratulated her on making it to midnight Eastern Standard Time, like her body was wise to time zones and knew that she’d made it to Grannie’s anniversary.

Her sisters sang Koombaya and other camp fire songs and held her limp hands which had become oddly warm. We lay down beside her in shifts, someone always at her side to press the pain medication dispenser as soon as it would allow another dose.

In the morning she was still with us. Still the slow breath. By now her eyes, which had remained open and unblinking, were foggy like a fish left in the seafood case too long. My brother sent her sisters home, promising to call if there was any change.

But we were selfish too. We wanted to be alone with her when she died. Her sisters had known her as a girl, but it was me and my brother who had raised her, made her an adult, and we wanted to be alone with her.

More hours passed. Sleep was an old memory for me. I begged the nurse to describe any changes to be watching for, “I need to know she is actually dying, that this is going to end”. She told me to watch for my mother’s extremities to go cold, as the blood retreated to the core and circulation shut down. She said that we could expect her arms to start to blacken from poor circulation.

Aside from vigilance, we coached her. “Come on Crazy Lady, let go. Go to the light. Your mother is waiting.” I reminded her of her hippy stories of astral travelling, that she should just start to disengage from her body. I told her to start with her feet.

In her final breaths, I held my hand over her heart and pressed. My brother stared at me in wonder, or maybe horror. I didn’t press hard enough to stop her breath, but just enough to give her chest something to resist. It had occurred to me that she probably needed to fight, even now.

They made us wait five minutes before they would call her time of death. Those moments were terrifying. Why would they wait? What if she did start breathing again? There are no heroic measures in the hospice. No ventilators or paddles to shock a person back to life. But what if through her sheer will, she just gasped again and announced she would not leave until she saw grandchildren, until we sorted out world peace?

When I got home from the hospice, my mother’s belongings gaping from more bags than I could carry, I took two of her Ativans and went to bed. It was four in the afternoon. My friends told me later that there was a terrible thunderstorm that evening. One friend who loved my mother well, told me he took it as a sign of her passing. But I heard nothing. I slept for fourteen hours without waking.

Less than a year later, I didn’t expect to be beside my brother’s bedside, helping him repair the damage of a very bad bar fight. I thought those pivotal experiences had changed us both. I expected he would take better care of himself, and avoid hospitals whenever possible.

When I’d called my brother days before, I was calling to invite him out for dinner. Maybe I had also called to tell him that my boyfriend had just dumped me. But this matter seemed more urgent, and so he received neither piece of information, just an offer to go with him for his surgery. His voice was muffled. It sounded like he had a mouthful of marbles. He explained there were stitches in his lower lip, but no teeth were lost. He said I could come with him to the hospital if I wanted.

After I hung up the phone, I looked around my apartment and it seemed in disarray. I walked to the closet with the intention of grabbing the vacuum, but found myself crumple to the floor in self pity. Too much loss. More loss than I can bear; I thought, my bare feet absorbing the cold of the tiles under me. Why would my brother make me risk more?

A day after my closet breakdown, I was feeling buoyant, the morning having given me some purpose; my brother would be fine, my dumping was now days old. It now felt like a fact, not a fresh wound. I was already tiring of telling the story, and people were telling me I looked great, despite whatever I was going through. It was something I was proud of, but also it made me afraid. How could I recover this quickly? Was tragedy really a skill I could learn? Wasn’t suffering what made us human? If I became immune to suffering, would that then bring my humanness into question? I thought of the plastic shim under my brother’s eye, unnaturally performing a task that bone once did. Were parts of my emotional range being replaced in a similar fashion? Under a microscope, would my heart appear a patchwork of scar tissue and plastic shims?

There is one more family eye story. I don’t remember what year it happened. It was after the cataract surgery, and at least a couple years before my mother went to hospice. Her health was getting worse. She needed a cane for balance. Her legs were like sticks and she couldn’t walk as far as she used to. You could see the deterioration in her face. Her cheek bones protruded as her body wasted, and her eyes looked heavy, like a stoner. She had little muscle control in her eyes. The doctors, especially the residents, were fond of asking her to track their fingers, up and down, side to side. Inevitably, she would move her entire head to follow the finger, and everyone would see that she could not stop herself from doing it. It made her embarrassed and after some time she refused to demonstrate her limitations anymore.

Then her eyelids started to sag. The doctor explained that we have muscle in our eyelids, of course, and as she lost muscle, her eyelids were opening less and less. It was recommended that she have a lid lift, to increase her optical field as much as possible.

My mother and I laughed at the idea. It seemed such a rich lady thing to do, get your eyes done. But she’d gotten through cataracts, and I think she hoped that if she had this done, the doctors would stop asking her to follow their fingers.

On the day of surgery, she was not convinced it was a good idea. Like cataract surgery, they need the patient awake through a lid lift. To let you sleep might mean unevenness. In matters of the face, symmetry is very important. We arrived at the eye clinic and sat in the waiting room. There was a video for my mother to watch explaining what would happen to her. It did not have subtitles, and she began to cry when the nurse turned it on. She begged us not to make her watch it, and so we turned it off.

I helped her change into her gowns, remembering the rule; the first one ties in the back, the next one in the front. “Tell them to put me under. I don’t care if I’m uneven!” She was nervous and spoke too loud.
I made the gesture of turning down the volume dial of a radio, but she ignored me.

The surgeon came by her bed to give her some instructions. He spoke into her medical chart, hardly looking at her. “You’ll need to say good bye to your daughter here, Patsy.”

“She’s deaf.” I said and he looked up from the chart.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Can you hear me now?” he leaned into her ear and shouted.

My mother flinched and looked at me to explain what he’d said.

I put my open hand to the side of my mouth, in the sign for Mom. “He didn’t know you are deaf. He thinks you are hard of hearing.” I said, over-articulating in a way that I hoped made the doctor feel foolish. Then I made the gesture for stupid, and then doctor.

“She’s totally deaf.” I said to the doctor.

“Oh, well that is a problem.” He said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“We need to give her specific instruction during the surgery. To make sure we do an even job. She needs to understand when I say look left or look up”.

“I can teach you the signs for left and right,” I offered.

The doctor shook his head. “We’ll need you to come in with her.”

“What? What’s going on?” My mother interjected.

I signed apology to her and explained. “The doctor says he needs me to come in with you. You will need to look up, look left look right. He needs me to interpret.”

She nodded along with each of my phrases, “Tell them to put me under!” she wailed.

My brother and I sometimes played a game with our deaf mother. One of us would talk to her for a full minute, she would nod, and agree and say oh, at all the right places, totally keeping up her side of the conversation. Then we would pause. Narrow our eyes and say, “What did I just say?” She would then tell where she thought you were in the story.

“Your boss retired”.

And you’d discover that five minutes ago, when you’d thought you were breaking the news that you’d been fired, Mom had gotten it wrong. It meant the last five minutes of conversation were invalid. She’d pull out her notebook, and I’d write the real story out for her in caps. “I GOT FIRED. I HAVE NO MONEY FOR YOUR SMOKES.” And she’d say “Oh! I thought you said your boss had retired to the Okanagan.”

“Mom,” I signed as the doctor grimaced. “Give me your book.” She handed her notebook to me, and I wrote out the doctor’s instructions. I would suit up and come into the operating room to sign the instructions.

She squeezed my hand tightly, “Tell them to give me something.” I nodded and went looking for a nurse.

The nurse promised to give my mother something to calm her down, but not put her under. She handed me a cap, gown, and pointed to the box of face masks.

As I changed into my OR gear, I thought about what I was about to see. A surgeon was going to move towards my mother’s eye with a needle, and then a scalpel. I was to stand over his shoulder and sign to my mother his directions. There would be blood, my mother’s blood. The surgeon would narrow her lids enough to make her appear alert and maybe so much that they would be difficult to close. She might need drops everyday to keep her eyes moist.

As I walked into the operating room, my mother moaned and yelled ‘Put me under, Dear God, Put me under!” The nurses closed the doors to the operating room. “I gave her something to calm her down,” the nurse defended herself.

“I know”. I said.

My mother’s eyes were swabbed clean, and the doctor began his instruction. I signed along with him.

“OK, Now I am going to tell you to look left, look right”. I signed what he’d dictated. “OK Mom, the doctor will say look left look right.” I said it out loud while I signed it so the doctor would know where I was in the translation.

“What? What are you saying?” she cried. “Take off the mask so I can read your lips”. I looked at the doctor,

“No, you have to keep the mask on in an operating room,” he said.

I tried again. I signed I can’t. Her eyes went wild.

“Take it off!” she pleaded.

I pulled the mask down to my chin and said “I can’t. I have to wear it.”

“I think she’s too freaked out to read my signs.” I told the doctor.

“It’s okay, you can leave. We’ll be fine without you.”

I left the operating room, my mother shouting for sedatives, and took a seat in the recovery area. A nurse came by to check on me. “Thank you for trying.” She said and patted my hand.

“I’ve been signing to her for ten years.” I said as it sunk in. “But I don’t know if she has learned a single sign. She’s just reading my lips.”

When the surgery was done, my mother was wheeled out and helped in to a recovery chair. Other patients looked at her, wondering what had made this woman’s surgery so much worse than their own.

Without making the signs I said slowly, “You have to stay here until the sedative wears off and then we can go home.”

“They didn’t give me anything,” she said, her voice full of accusation.

“Yes Mom, they did.”

“You call that a sedative,” she scoffed.

In comparison, my brother’s surgery was uneventful. His eyes were more swollen that they’d been before the operation, but not by much.

“Does it look better?” he asked, and I shrugged, not willing to tell him how black his eyes were. There were mirrors in the bathroom and he’d see soon enough.

Tea Biscuits and Miracle Whip cake

2009-11-15T12:32:00.000-08:00

In the division of family heirlooms, my brother took the large box of unsorted family photos, and it seemed fitting that I would take the accordion file of her recipes.

Tomorrow is November 16th, which would have been my mother's 62nd birthday.

If she really liked you, when your birthday came around, she would make you a chocolate cake with Miracle Whip in it. I suppose I could post that recipe here, but the decadence of it gives me pause.

In lieu, I'd like to offer my mother's tea biscuit recipe, which is lighter, and easily made as organic or nondairy as a west coaster might like:

Tea Biscuits

2 cups all purpose flour
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
scant 1/2 cup sugar
scant 1/2 cup lard (Oh my gawd lard??)
1 egg
1/2 cup raisins
enough milk to make a nice drop dough

There aren't any further directions as far as to what order to mix things, but if I remember correctly, mix the flour, baking powder and salt together. Cream the fat and egg into the sugar, then add to the flour. Toss in the raisins and then add milk until you get a good drop dough consistency. Make them as big or small as you like.

Bake at 400 F until edges are golden.

Lifesaver

2009-11-05T20:36:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom,
Tonight I was reorganizing my kitchen cupboards, throwing out ancient spices that Chef Tony says are too old to be any good- you shouldn't keep anything longer than a year.

And I came across the box of Lifesavers you put in my stocking last Christmas. I don't know how old I was when I stopped liking those candies and the schmarmy "storybook" that held them. But it was your tradition, like the stocking itself, and the mandarin orange tucked into the toe.

I didn't want the candies, didn't have the heart to throw them out or give them away. But seeing them now, just a month and a bit until my first Christmas without you, I look at them, and I miss you. And I am afraid to think of how much more I will miss you when there is no stocking from you on Christmas morning. And this rising shaking breath in my chest is because I know that things will never be the same again. And I'm mourning the epiphany that sameness is a gift that I'll never have again from you.

And you were crazy, and made me so crazy sometimes that I wanted you to be gone, but I loved you, and you are missed.

love trish

Paper Tigers and Mud Masks

2009-10-13T21:13:00.000-07:00

It is intended to pull the toxins out of your body. Through your skin. Gross.

It's so primal and basic, we've probably been doing it forever, first to cover our scent from our prey or to cover our scent from our enemies, then to paint symbols and stories on our bodies.

I do it because it makes me feel alive; the coolness of it as it slides on, the way it makes me see every pore in my face, and then as it dries tight across my skin, my pulse throbs under the taut surface. Vital. Maybe it makes my skin look nice, or softer, I'm not objective enough to say. But I can't ignore this truth, my heart beating under my skin, alive.

Sometimes that is all the reminder I can handle. Sometimes that's the only lucidity I really want to ponder. A heart, some blood, a delicate tissue containing me and so making me into something.

And then the tension gets to me, and the mud is dry, and like I did the very first time my mother let me play with her mud when I was a child, I wrench my face into an inaudible scream, and then a supreme pout, and finally a brow furrowed by no describable infraction. And I am instantly ancient, and falling apart. And thirsty for water.

The Corner Grocery

2009-10-04T19:35:00.000-07:00

When I was a child, my father's parents owned a corner store. It was supplemental to my grandfather's electrical company income. Some family member has explained it to me that he wanted a business for my grandmother, to keep her occupied and earning, but I'd never dare say that to her. They had a Canada Post wicket, a penny candy counter, and for a brief and wonderful time, a soft ice cream machine.

My brother and I were often recipients of last season's hockey cards, the stick of gum hard and dusty like a veteran defenseman, and Toblerone chocolate gone stale, the cocoa fat rising to the surface and making them unsellable but still edible.

Once or twice, I was tasked with wiping the canned goods of their dust, my youngest aunt, who was just a teen herself, declared I was no good at it, but Grandma packed a #2 paper bag with candy for me anyway.

On rare occasions, I accompanied my grandfather to the wholesale cash and carry where he bought his inventory. Essentially a warehouse with cash registers and dollies at the front, I was awed by the height of the shelves, and the idea of buying my favourite chips by the case. I wouldn't have been more impressed if he;d taken me to a country club.

Along with the postal counter, the store offered a brief selection of greeting cards and a wall at the back of the store displayed Ukrainian coffee mugs and traditional blouses, like the ones me and my aunts wore to Ukrainian dancing classes each weekend. As word traveled through the local church, the store became a destination for Ukrainian Babas looking to buy their granddaughters their costumes. Much to the disappointment of me and my brother, who were now approaching the age where we could appreciate the concept of working for candy, the gift ware section grew, and the candy counter and ice cream machine were replaced with jewelery cases and porcelain dolls.

My grandparents still live above the store, though the bustle of Babas looking for tablecloths and dance wear is over. The front is locked, a sign posted advises patrons to ring the doorbell to summon assistance. Inside, the store is a museum of giftware stretching back two decades, Hummel figures and Robert Bateman collector's plates sit in cases, the original price tags evidence of the inflation we've experienced since the early eighties.

The store may have passed out of fashion, but my early experience working the counter with my grandmother never left me. Now fifteen years in to a career in food retail, I think back on those early days and see them as formative. The vision of a corner store as community hub and place for convenience still inspiring.

The End of the Great Lake Swimmers

2009-08-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

It is true, I don’t know him. I’ve seen him a few times, his hair some soft sandy curls coiffed like a gentleman from the frontier, his beard carefully trimmed in consideration of a line between the civilized and the wild.

I’ve heard him speak, and was surprised by the confidence in his voice, that he wasn’t shy or full of apology. I don’t know him, so I can’t say whether he spoke his mind, or played devil’s advocate. I could imagine him being comfortable in either position.

I have even heard him sing. How many of my friends can I say that about? We’ve known each other for years, but I have no idea if their singing voices match their speaking voices, if that thin whisper that breaks and fades over a phone line might come to life in song. But I know this of Tony; his singing voice is lonely and wise, like an echo in a canyon. He sings of a place I miss, a hard place, a place made real by the people who live in it, by the reaching out across darkness and cold landscape.

Tony is a landscape. He is here and he is there. There is time before him and there is now.

Someday I will tell him these things. After I read the books I need to, and after I consult a map and find the place that is the most perfect to invite him to, the place that is most him, I will tell him that he is my landscape. Upon his spine I will install cottages, and I’ll wind alpine strawberry runners up his legs. I will save his modesty with bits of peat and some carefully placed chips of ice. I will nuzzle fruit trees in the warmth of his whiskers and curl a bear cub into the crook of his arm. Then I’ll hold him until the sky cracks open and water rushes to form great lakes in the small of his back, the dimples of his buttocks. Then I will go, knowing my only act was seeing his premonition as more literal than most, and having faith that it is meant to be.

If this says nothing, but invokes a mood, I am okay with it. Because I too have been frozen under a heavy weight for an age, and the retreat across my body was not a gentle melting away of responsibility, but a harsh scraping that changed my topography, pushing some parts of me deep down to my core. But parts of me became more buoyant too, springing up and I think something beautiful and deciduous is coming. I want to embrace that, I want to welcome the opportunity to cast off what is no longer needed. Even if it means cyclical grief and rebirth.

New Project Alert! Is it creepy or inspired?

2009-08-17T20:56:00.000-07:00

Inspired by seeing them play three times this year, I am beginning work on a short story collection called The End of the Great Lake Swimmers. I'm trying to work with more structure than my usual confessional style nonfiction. So I've mapped out a series of short stories that take the first line of a Great Lake Swimmers song, and use it as the final line for a short story.

Having grown up in Sault Ste. Marie, on the river that connects Lake Superior to Lake Huron, I am excited to blend my own experience and comprehension of the area's mythology with the narratives evoked by the sounds and words of Tony Dekker and his Great Lake Swimmers.

I'll be posting snippets here.

Dear Mom, What Holds us Back

2009-04-24T10:33:00.000-07:00

This time we nearly lost you. It wasn't so different from other times, still you listless and with a rattle in your chest. But worse. More dire, that's how I thought of it. I called the aunties, sent ripples of panic through all your sisters and even your sister in laws.

The doctors and nurses said you might rally, but they shook their heads discouragingly when they said it.

The social worker they sent said that sometimes even when gravely ill, a patient will rally because they are holding on for their families. A certain gentle look on his face when he said this, like the notion might crack me, like I haven't tried a hundred ways to take responsibility for your suffering. "Have you told her it's ok for her to go?" he asks and I nod and fling my hands open and stare briefly at my palms. What more can I give?

I'm not a reason for you to hold on. I am the good kid. I spent my entire childhood proving my self-reliance, letting you know it's ok not to worry about me. Why worry about me? No, I am no reason to stay.

In your worst moment, I was alone with you. You grasped my hand. Yours was feather weight and cool against my skin. "Don't leave me," You said. "I want to die, but I don't know how."

I am always alone with you when you get this kind of clarity. Am I your confessor, do you really find yourself best when you look in my eyes? Or do you I just listen extra hard when we are alone?

You don't know how to die. But your body does. Let it do its work. Pass out of this world. Let go.

Me and the World of Food Writing

2009-04-12T20:58:00.000-07:00

Hi friends,

I have not updated this blog in a long time and a few things have happened... Shared Vision, home of Fresh Greens, my food column,changed it's name and then stopped publishing.

In the meantime, I became an advocate for Backyard Chickens at the civic level, and penned some research and recommendations for a bylaw change. I pitched a piece to Edible Vancouver about my family history and chicken farming. It's in the Spring issue, available now.

I am currently pitching an issue for the Fall edition as well, and hope to woo them into allowing me to write more for this gorgeous magazine.

I'm also blogging for the Vancouver Food Policy Council of which I am a member.

Also, still eating and trying to come up with alliterative shirt tails.

A Slippery Slope at West

2008-10-27T21:17:00.000-07:00

A free lunch, at the finest restaurant in the city. Who wouldn't say yes? Who wouldn't, given the opportunity, put on their best locally designed hipster dress and hosiery and take the bus to West restaurant to spend an afternoon tasting recipes from West: The Cookbook?

A testament to how deeply I've fallen in to the foodie lifestyle, I can not resist such an offer. But also a testament to how far I have to fall, I must confess that I really didn't consider how many animals I would be eating.

Fresh Greens- October 2008

2008-10-04T20:20:00.000-07:00

Eat In

Wheelhouse Seafoods doesn’t exactly qualify for spring chicken status (husband and wife team Catherine Jones and Trevor Yamamoto opened their doors at 2605 E. Hastings more than seven years ago). However, its commitment to providing fresh, local, and sustainable meats and seafood has been a passion since day one. In the summertime, the store revolves around fruits de mer, but in the fall, tasty land animals take centre stage. Heaps of research and face-to-face meetings with ranchers have resulted in a butcher’s case of free-range bison, free-run ducks, grass-fed beef, and, at this time of year, non-medicated turkeys. Call to reserve your ethical protein of choice for Thanksgiving dinner. 604-215-5562

Eat Out

If you don’t feel like cooking those sustainable meats or mussels yourself, Subeez Café (891 Homer St.) will do it for you. Executive chef Leigh Power, who helped open the eatery and stayed on board till 2002, has returned to Subeez with a local and sustainable agenda. It isn’t the first time that Leigh’s had a vision of infusing this casual and super-hip restaurant with organic and local items, but he admits that the recent renos to the menu prove it’s getting easier to do the right thing. Subeez has signed up for the Ocean Wise program and is sourcing its beef from a medication-free Albertan ranch. For more options, check out their menu online. subeez.com

Check Out

With sophisticated flavours like lavender, kumquat, rhubarb, and lemongrass, DRY Soda’s offerings wouldn’t seem out of place in a high-end wine shop. These subtle and refined “culinary sodas” are lightly sweetened with pure cane sugar and housed in elegant, minimalist bottles. They might be a tad hard to spot on the shelf, but will look oh-so-classy on your dinner table (or in some Hollywood socialite’s manicured hand.) They’ve been available in the Seattle area for three years, and have finally made it across the border to land at Capers Whole Foods. DRY sodas are great on their own to serve to teetotalling guests, but for those who prefer a tipple, check out the tantalizing cocktail recipes on the company’s website. drysoda.com

Fresh Greens- September 2008

2008-09-04T20:22:00.000-07:00

BY Trish Kelly

Eat Out

Now in its fifth year, Passions 2008 brings culinary wizards from 18 of Vancouver’s top restaurants to the West End to raise funds for the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation. Taking place Sept. 14, from 6 to 9 pm, Passions will be hosted by CBC news anchor Gloria Macarenko, and will feature delectable dishes from C Restaurant, Chambar, Provence Restaurants, and Tojo’s, among others. The event happens at the Dr. Peter Centre (1110 Comox St.), the only HIV/AIDS day health program and 24-hour care residence in B.C. Take this opportunity to take a peek at the facilities, which include a kitchen and café, as well as a nap room and art therapy studio. Tickets are $200 and of a limited number, so snap yours up before it’s too late: 604-331-3452, drpetercentre.ca

Eat In

Geez, it isn’t easy being green sometimes, especially if you’re a pepperoni pizza. You can search the supermarket freezer for an organic version of ’za that includes this most famous topping till your glasses fog up, but no go. According to Dominic Fielden from Rocky Mountain Flatbread, it’s a Canadian labelling issue: you can call it “organic spicy sausage,” but without the tasty zip of added sulfites, it’s technically not pepperoni. The coded description doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but RMF’s Spiced Sausage & Tomato pizza will melt in your mouth. This new addition joins the company’s three veggie pizza options in a freezer near you. Get yours at Choices, Capers, Whole Foods, or Famous Foods. (Sorry, no delivery.)

rockymountainflatbread.ca

Check Out

Foodies and moviegoers are rejoicing over the opening of a second Meinhardt Fine Foods location, at Arbutus and 16th Avenue, next door to the Ridge Theatre. The great programming at the Ridge has tempted many to make the trek across town for a brilliantly paired double bill, and now indie film lovers can hop next door after the show and stock up on the darndest things, from organic eggs to black truffle oil. The store has a lot going for it, even in comparison to the Granville location: 100 parking spots, 15,000 square feet, and a whole whack of Meinhardt’s select private label. With a floor-to-ceiling glass facade, a bounty of fresh flowers, and bold graphics, the store would be like Trader Joe’s if Joe swapped his Hawaiian shirt for a tux. meinhardt.com

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She likes literal labels, passionate chefs, and alliterative retailers. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s contributor fee to a local food-focused non-profit organization. This month’s recipient is Vancouver Fruit Tree Project (vcn.bc.ca/fruit ), where neighbours come together to harvest and distribute fruit for people in need.

Fresh Greens- August 2008

2008-08-04T20:26:00.000-07:00

by TRISH KELLY

Eat In
Barb Langford’s edible flowers are legendary to those who like to nibble on marigolds and geraniums. But in order to get your hands on her line of biscuits and cookies, you’d have to order online or make a special trip to her petal gardens in Langley. Until now. This month marks Barb’s first foray into retail when Langford Three-Fig Biscuits will appear at Choices Markets and Planet Organic Market. Made with organic canola and whole wheat flour, the Three Figs are a blend of Smyrna figs from Turkey, black figs from Mission, and white Calimyrna figs from California (all organic). While baking cookies may seem like a strange choice for a woman who grows edible flowers, get ready to learn from your bickies: who knew that figs were actually inverted flowers? langfordfoods.com

Eat Out
Inspired by the success of Slow Food Cycle Sunday Pemberton (and an excellent excuse to reuse the cycling snail logo from their spring Bike the Blossoms event), Slow Food Vancouver and the farmers of Agassiz are hosting a self-guided bike-tour-cum-culinary adventure Aug. 9. Five bucks and pre-registration gets you the map. SFV is encouraging folks to come for the day or the whole weekend; check out their website for great tips on where to stay and how to get there. If you’re looking for less cycling and more food, consider volunteering as a personal assistant to one of the vending farmers. Not only will this make you feel useful, it’ll allow a farmer to say—perhaps for the only time in his or her life—“Have your people talk to my people.”slowfoodvancouver.com

Check Out
Unless you walk down Victoria Drive to avoid the crowds on Commercial, you may not know that the wee storefront at the corner of Grant and Victoria is now home to a second location of South China Seas Trading Co. That’s the gorgeous store in Granville Island Market you can count on whenever you need fresh turmeric or Thai ginger. The opening makes Victoria Drive a foodie crawl just waiting to happen: start at the Trout Lake Farmers Market, where the month of August is local veggie heaven, then make your way to South China Seas for whatever seasonings or dressings you need to make those carrots and beans really sparkle. The new store also has a kitchen—perfect for hosting co-owner Don Dickson’s cooking classes, which kick off this month. southchinaseas.ca

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She likes petal pushers, pedal pushers, and farmers with entourages. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s contributor fee to a local food-focused non-profit organization. This month’s recipient is Farm Folk City Folk (ffcf.bc.ca), which hosts the Vancouver foodie tradition Feast of Fields Sept. 7 at UBC Farm.

Haiku for Tina Asato

2008-07-27T18:01:00.000-07:00

How Tina Heals a Cold

Chest tight from sickness
A warmth spreads into her lungs
Menthol cigarette

Music Review #2- Portico

2008-07-27T17:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Portico,

Regarding the song "sincerely".

Wow, I never thought I'd look forward to my next break up, but even though I am currently happy, I now know what song I'll cry to when I next get dumped.

Thanks for pretty sounding foreshadowing. The dutiful military drumming is a very nice piece of irony, and will help me from hyperventilating whilst I have my future crying jags.

Music Review #1- Death Cab For Cutie

2008-07-26T16:02:00.000-07:00

I slow danced with my hot date to Talking Bird on Friday night. In his living room. He seems a little skittish, maybe he's been done wrong a couple times by girls, and we haven't had enough dates yet for him to spill his guts about all that. But I can feel it. So I sent him this song, thinking, by the time he falls in love with it, by the time he lies in bed, closes his eyes and listens to the words, he'll already know I'm not the clingy type, that the windows and door have been open the whole time- like the song says.

But in case he turns out to be stilted and never gets there, I'm also posting it here, so someone else listens hard to the lyrics and can enjoy the way a pop song can alleviate commitment issues.

Fresh Greens- July 2008

2008-07-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

by TRISH KELLY

Eat In

Though soup isn’t normally a mainstay of summer menus, once you’ve tasted Happy Planet’s new line of natural and organic soups, you’ll be looking for any excuse to pick them up. For instance, you can throw a pot of Berkeley Butternut Squash on the stove and, while it’s heating, call the family back east and rub it in about the line’s exclusive West Coast launch. That means you’ll have two months of delicious lunches behind you before HP’s Moroccan Chick Pea, Armenian Red Lentil, and other choices hit the rest of Canada in September. Other good reasons to pick them up include their low-sodium, low-fat content, and the promise that small batches produced in the HP “souperie” (the cutest franglais word ever to make it out of Quebec, by the way) will keep the flavours fresh and vibrant. happyplanet.com

Check Out

If you aren’t lucky enough to call the Hastings-Sunrise neighbourhood home, taking the kids to the PNE is a great excuse to visit one of my neighbourhood haunts: the Schokolade Café at 2263 E. Hastings. Not only will you find a wide variety of artisan chocolates made with B.C. produce including blueberries, raspberries, and hazelnuts, but the Black Hole Milkshake (with 70 per cent cocoa), will thrill you the way the Corkscrew at Playland did before you discovered cocoa nibs. Alternatively, if you feel like putting the kids to work, Schokolade offers chocolate-making workshops throughout July and August for children ages 5 to 12. And let’s be honest: that’s a skill set you’re bound to appreciate way more than finger painting or macaroni art. schokoladecafe.com

Check Out

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She believes in dark chocolate, recipe swapping, and the magic of a corkscrew. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s writer’s fee to a local food-focused nonprofit organization. This month, two children in the Kiwassa Neighbourhood House’s Breakfast Club for Kids program (www.kiwassa.bc.ca) will receive scholarships to Schokolade Café’s chocolate-making workshop.

Fresh Greens- June 2008

2008-06-04T20:31:00.000-07:00

by TRISH KELLY

Eat In
When two foodies meet and fall in love, beautiful things can happen. Take the Corazon (“Heart” in español) Bar from lovebirds Marisa and Kent Goodwin-McKay. A standout from their fair-trade product line, Organic Fair, this dark chocolate treat marries vanilla from Madagascar with cacao nibs, honey, and rose essence to make the most romantic chocolate indulgence imaginable. And they had a pretty inspiring motive: Kent, who lives with Marisa on their organic farm in Cobble Hill, B.C., calls it their “wedding bar”; they dreamed up the formula for guests who attended their nuptials. Lucky folks who visit the farm (yes, it’s open to visitors) may get a chance to try Kent’s latest concoction, the “Canadiana,” a chocolate bar resplendent with the sweet grit of maple crystals and a touch of smoked sea salt. Eleven bars, a line of fine spices, plus fair-trade organic teas are available at organicfair.com.

Check Out
Grave predictions about this season’s B.C. sockeye run have some chefs hemming and hawing over whether we’ll see it on sustainable menus this season. You can still plan that special grill fest for Father’s Day, though, because the Iron Maiden Seafoods company has lots of sustainable choices on offer for barbecue season. Troll-caught pink, coho, and spring salmon will be available, as well as sashimi-quality B.C. albacore tuna, known for its low mercury content and relatively healthy stock levels. You can meet Iron Maiden owners Daryl and Gigi Egan at the Trout Lake and Kitsilano farmers’ markets this month. For info on retailers/delivery, visit wildseafoods.com.

Eat Out
With kitty-corner cafés in Vancouver catering to our collective java addiction, bringing your own mug is just the sustainable thing to do—and now it can even save you a few cents. Last month, Salt Spring Coffee’s three Vancouver cafés began charging patrons a five-cent green tax whenever they bought a drink in a disposable cup. Funds collected will go towards local sustainability initiatives. Coffee drinkers who bring their own mug, on the other hand, receive a 15-cent discount. How much more motivation does a caffeine freak need? Well, Salt Spring has a few other ideas, one of them an online quiz, the Carbon Cool Challenge, that tests your global warming IQ. Developed in partnership with the Sierra Club of B.C., this game might even give Al Gore something to ponder. saltspringcoffee.com

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She likes gritty chocolate, green coffee, and trolling vessels named after metal bands. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit organization. This month’s recipient is Pacific Salmon Foundation (psf.ca), an organization dedicated to rebuilding healthy, sustainable, and naturally diverse Pacific salmon stocks.

Fresh Greens- May 2008

2008-05-04T20:34:00.000-07:00

May Fresh Greens

by TRISH KELLY

Eat Out
From nature walks with Andrew Weil to tasty feasts like a beachside oyster barbecue, a visit to Hollyhock, the educational retreat centre on Cortes Island, can be a life-changing experience. In the Hollyhock kitchen, a commitment to organic growing and using local ingredients whenever possible stacks the cooking philosophy with integrity. Moreka Jolar, former head chef at Hollyhock and co-author of Hollyhock Cooks: Food to Nourish Body, Mind and Soil, will host a five-day workshop called “The Passionate Cook” at the retreat this summer on meal planning, knife skills, and how to create a balanced vegetarian diet. The course is $455 (meals and accommodation extra), so start saving your pennies. And book early, because space is limited. hollyhock.ca

Check Out
Like Santa’s elves getting ready for Christmas in late November, you can bet the folks at East Vancouver Farmers Market Society are clocking late nights in preparation for the Trout Lake market, opening May 17. And, like small children, Eastside foodies are counting the sleeps—even if they got their fix all winter long thanks to the very successful Winter Farmers Market every other Saturday at the WISE Hall. But Westside folks didn’t have it so easy. And unless they’re willing to cross that magic east-west divide and journey to Trout Lake, they’ll have to wait until June 1 for the Kitsilano market to open. By then, the Riley Park market will be mere sleeps away from its opening June 4, while West End market groupies will get their first fix June 7. eatlocal.org

Eat In
Tea oil is the oil of choice in China and Japan for everything from stir-fries and tempura to setting the hair of sumo wrestlers. And now Treasure Green invites you to try its Camellia Tea Oil right here in Vancouver. High in antioxidants, tea oil also has a very high smoke point—240 C—which means it can withstand high-heat frying. It’s also believed that oils that go past their smoke point may contain more free radicals, so tea oil pulls double duty in both contributing to a smoke-free kitchen and possibly reducing your risk of cancer. So the next time you feel like cranking the blue flame for a quick stir-fry—or slicking back the hair of your favourite sumo—a bottle of Treasure Green should do the trick. Available at Whole Foods, Capers, Stong’s Market (4560 Dunbar St.), and treasuregreen.com.

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She likes sumo fashion, arriving to market fashionably early, and retreating with a good book. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit organization. This month’s recipient is RainCity Housing and Support Society (raincityhousing.org).

The Harem -3

2008-05-02T20:24:00.000-07:00

Lunch and a crossword puzzle in front of him,
he scratches his whiskers and pulls out his wallet.
From the folds he takes a tiny piece of paper,
maybe the size of a gum wrapper,
in a tight scrawl, it reads
POGONOPHOBIA- fear of beards.

He says he's been holding on to it for weeks.
Saw it and thought of me.

2

2008-04-28T20:33:00.000-07:00

Blue eyes, nose ring, black tshirts
a goth girlfriend with a braying laugh
he confesses a love of dolphins.

1

2008-04-28T20:30:00.000-07:00

Even the oil fields,
with all that coke and sludge,
couldn't kill the boy in him.

He sings to himself in a motown falsetto,
smiles like he just told a dirty joke
to the queen.

Reference Check

2008-04-28T20:11:00.000-07:00

The other day on the bus, you sat beside a man who smelled of booze and piss. He talked to you about his mother until his eyes welled up, and you had to turn away, but he wouldn't let you disengage. He had dark skin and blue grey eyes that were shocking, and suggested his life had never been simple. He asked you where the nearest place to get a drink was, where was the liquor store, and when you answered he said he didn't believe you. Then his eyes went hard and he told you to get off the bus.

You hadn't noticed how quiet the bus had gotten, not even when your own voice rose to tell him that no, you wouldn't get off the bus, but your fist was clenched and your face was bracing for some kind of contact. Then the bus driver appeared and made the drunk man get off the bus.

Another man sitting beside you said "You were way too nice to that guy," and you realized you had lost track of any options. Why hadn't you just moved to another seat, or told him to fuck off?

A few days later, raw from an argument with your mother, you took your dog for a walk. When you rounded the corner to return home, the hedges by the front door rustled, and two teenage boys jumped out, yelling Boo! or Ar! or some other frightening noise.

You screamed, the dog barked, and the boys laughed.

Before you were even sure they weren't going to rob you, you were asking them why they did it.

What will this compassion save you from? Loneliness?

In the face of violence you always seek the humanity; the liquid in his eyes, the giggle of boys waiting to scare a girl.

What do they see in your eyes? Does your compassion transport them? Or does it make you seem weak to them?

And you wonder how long your luck can last, before brushes with danger become blows.

Fresh Greens- April 2008

2008-04-04T20:35:00.000-07:00

Eat In
New World Provence: Modern French Cooking for Friends and Family by Alessandra and Jean-Francis Quaglia is a love story as much as a cookbook. The husband and wife team from Provence Mediterranean Grill and Provence Marinaside met in a kitchen in Nice, France, where they cultivated their love of Southern French cuisine—and each other. Now, after more than 10 years in the Vancouver restaurant scene, they mark their continued commitment to Provence-style cuisine with this gorgeous cookbook. A focus on seasonal, sustainable choices puts a West Coast spin on classic dishes. The book is also a tribute to their mothers, who bestowed their foodie passion on their children. In turn, Alessandra and Jean-Francis are passing it on to their two sons. arsenalpulp.com

Check Out
The name of this Whistler company is a clever play on the French word for “tea” and a Sanskrit greeting. Namasthé Tea Co. features organic, whole-leaf teas with blends concocted by company founder Isabelle Ranger, a yoga enthusiast and registered herbalist who creates teas for her patients. While Starbucks-owned Tazo Tea’s slick branding suggests their teas are based on ancient recipes and modern-day savoir-faire, Isabelle’s teas really are steeped in herbal lore and an understanding of the times. Flavours including Fresh Tracks, a breakfast blend inspired by the crisp mountain air, the unique EchinaChai, and the calming herbal Savasana are helping Isabelle fulfill her dharma: to change the world one cup at a time. Available at Whole Foods. namasthe.ca

Eat Out
Quick—get your bike out of storage and in for a spring tune-up, because if this event is half as cute as its poster, you won’t regret it. Slow Food Vancouver gets in the cherry blossom spirit April 19 and you and your two-wheeler are invited. Bike the Blossoms promises a self-guided bike tour of the pinkest streets, with neighbourhood pit stops at community centres and eateries where you can sample artisan foods from Fraser Valley farmers. For further assurance of the “darling” factor of this free event, check out their website for details of a treasure hunt, brought to you by the Slow Food Vancouver Scavenger Hunt Subcommittee. Pre-register on the website, and pick up your route map at VanDusen Garden on event day. slowfoodvancouver.com

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She loves crème brulée, keeners, and safety-conscious escargots. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local foodfocused non-profit organization. This month’s recipient is Quest Food Exchange (questoutreach.org), whose zero-waste policy redistributes donated food to 60,000 people a month.

Dear Mom, What We've Lost

2008-03-23T14:09:00.000-07:00

Today was not a good day for you. You came over to help me bake Easter bread, but neither of us had the energy. I'd forgotten that bread takes four hours to make, and you hardly slept a wink last night.

Instead of making bread, we had tea, and looked through catalogues for furniture you'd like for your new apartment. When you walked from the living room to the kitchen, you were wobbly and your face was sunken more than usual.

Last night I was at a party and this man Colin was talking to me about caretaking his elderly mother. He is very tall and handsome, with white hair and a beard that makes him look like a sea captain. He's probably about ten years younger than you, Mom. And yet, in this way, he is my peer. We can talk about the way that the weakness we see in our mothers makes us angry.

During tea you looked like you might fall asleep. You flipped listlessly through the catalogue, stopping on the closet organizers to marvel at all the options. After staring at a page, you pointed at the baskets of socks and towels. "Oh I don't like how they've put my towels there. I'd rather have them in the linen closet in the hall." I looked you hard in the eye, and you didn't seem to even notice your transgression. Even when I signed "what are you talking about?" you didn't answer.

"Mom, you're really out of it. You need to go home." You said ok, and I decided to walk you to the bus. I was ready first, and sat on the couch while you put on your jacket and shoes at a snail's pace. As we left the apartment, the lock on the door confounded you, and you turned to me for help opening the door. At the street corner, you picked a piece of lint off my scarf and told me I looked very nice in my spring coat. It's a habit you've always had, an eagle eye for the tiniest flaw, so maternal.

It's only three blocks to the bus stop, but it took a long time. When we were nearly there, something in a neighbour's yard caught your eye. You lifted your cane off the ground and teetered down a small flight of stairs. I heard the sound of a bird's wing flapping against the ground. You'd spotted an injured pigeon, one wing flapping, while the other seemed magnetized to the ground. And you reached down to pick it up, talking reassuringly to it, and even as it backed away from you, you still pursued it. It tried to get away from you and you picked it up first by the wings and then tucked it under your arm. "What are you doing?" I shouted in a frightened voice I didn't recognize. And you walked back down the stairs and put the bird on the ground where you found it. "I was going to take it to the SPCA," you said sheepishly. "I've always been like that, since I was a little kid, I've always brought home hurt animals."

Colin said his mother has dementia, and that he feels angry because in a way she is dissappearing right in front of him, but she's still there.

Mom, sometimes the present is so overpowering, I forget who you were. Then you find a piece of lint on my sweater, or have compassion for a rat with wings, and I have to reconsider which one of has lost more of our humanity.

Bromance

2008-03-09T20:29:00.000-07:00

Under a bridge, with beers.

Singing about hos and bitches, hand on your own cock to gesture your hugeness.

Girlfriend out of town.

Excellent friendship.

Fuck.

Just too drunk to care.

Taking the double dare instead of telling the truth.

Dear Mom, Eight Bottles of Sunlight

2008-03-05T17:20:00.000-08:00

You look up at the flashing of the lamp.

When I walk into your apartment, there is the smell of bleach.
You are standing on a chair, hunched over the top of the fridge, scrubbing cupboards.

Two hours of packing a day,
towering stacks in corners and in the short hall.
You're doing it all yourself.

An apple box filled with Sunlight and Palmolive,
A carton of small latex gloves, scooped from a doctor's office,
and a box of medium too- I think you use them to dye your hair.

You watch me carefully,
because you know how I like to pare things down.

"Aren't you proud of me?" you ask again.

Fresh Greens- March

2008-03-01T20:42:00.000-08:00

from Shared Vision March Issue

March Fresh Greens

by Trish Kelly

Check Out
If you’re heading north up Nanaimo Street in East Van, the hairpin turn will take you onto McGill, and soon you’ll spy McGill Grocery. The store, owned by the Mah family, is stocked with lots of nifty products, but the best find is the jars of Russell Godwin’s UrbanSweet Honey on the counter. Godwin, a local beekeeper, manages two beehives in the neighbourhood. Godwin is passionate about producing a honey that tastes like Vancouver, which he says is informed by the foods grown by the backyard gardeners in his multicultural neighbourhood. Each summer, only two “pulls” of honey are completed, the first in June and the second in August. Exact pull dates, Godwin says, depend upon “the vulgarities of weather.” Watch for the sandwich board at 2691 McGill St. announcing the 2008 crop’s arrival. urbansweethoney.com

Eat In
If you secretly harbour Iron Chef fantasies, don’t miss the Serious Foodie Culinary Basics course at the Northwest Culinary Academy. The class is taught by the academy’s founder, Chef Tony Minichiello, who says the class is about learning to think like a chef, not follow a recipe. You’ll learn proper knife-handling skills, how to prepare classic stocks and sauces, moist and dry heat cooking methods, and how to shop for quality ingredients. Classes are very hands-on, and though you won’t get quick and easy meal solutions, you’ll gain a keener sense for flavour pairings and ingredient selection on your next trip to the farmers’ market. The next course starts May 5 and runs Monday evenings for eight weeks. nwcav.com

Eat Out
Last month we introduced you to Raincity Grill’s newly imported chef, Aussie transplant Peter Robertson. And now West, another great restaurant serving regional cuisine, has brought in talent from abroad. Warren Geraghty, whose resumé includes several Michelin-starred restaurants in the U.K., has been appointed executive chef at West. We’re flattered our city’s homegrown restaurant scene has developed enough of an international reputation that high-calibre chefs are relocating here. But is anyone else feeling a bit protective? After all, the 100-Mile Diet only really took off two years ago, and we’ve had just one season of the Kits Farmers’ Market—yet already our regional cuisine is up for interpretation. What can we say? When you’re hot, you’re hot. westrestaurant.com

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She loves apiculture, appetizers and a good apple tart. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit. This month’s recipient is the Downtown Eastside Neighbourhood House, (501 East Hastings) which this spring will officially become our city’s ninth neighbourhood house.

Dear Mom, These are Yours

2008-02-27T22:10:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom,

It is February now. On Friday, we went to see the place where you will be moving. It is beautiful, kind of farther out than you would want, but there is a skytrain nearby. The building is not finished yet, but it’s clear that the place is state of the art. There is a nurse on staff, and a pharmacist. And a restaurant style dining room for lunch and dinner.

It’s hard to write to you today mom, because I feel like it’s time to really tell the story of how we got here.

Mom you’re broken. You were broken a long time ago, and in some ways we came from broken people. But we were all pretty used to it, I thought.

But I guess you weren’t. Or it was just worse for you, and you got quiet about it.

It was summer. You had a clogged artery. We went to see a doctor and he said you needed surgery. You were kind of pouty. I looked at you and from behind my eyes I sent you telepathic messages scorning you and your smoking all those years.

At the hospital the morning of your surgery, you were so scared. Our cousin came too, her hair platinum blonde and her nose ring shining like a disco ball. It was only 5 am. She was still drunk and hadn’t been to sleep yet. I almost cried, so divided between pitying you and hating you for your hand in this. I filled out the forms for you. Birthdate, social insurance number, past surgeries. Your niece held your hand and cried while you held her hand and told her you’d be okay.

In the surgeon’s office, while we waited for him to see us, you had whispered to me, “Well, what would happen if I didn’t have the surgery?” Incredulous at your naivety, I said “You could have a stroke.” “That’s not such a bad way to go,” you said, and then I pointed out that it was just as possible that you would have a stroke and be paralyzed or a vegetable. What kind of life would that be for you, to have no hearing and no speech? “Good point,” you said.

Am I starting far back enough? That’s where the story starts for me, but by July, you’d already begun. Maybe as far back as May, you’d started rationing your pain meds, cutting your daily dose to make a stock pile.

I could tell this story in the chronology of my discovery. In that case, we start at my apartment in early August, when I get a call from the Social worker in St Pauls Emerg.

Or I could start it when the resident doctor walks me toward your room, but stops outside the door, and I decide I can’t see you the way you are right now, in a medically induced coma, a dialysis machine cleaning your blood of what they can’t say.

In the morning, I arrived to sit beside your bed in the ICU, and I stared at you and cried. You were still and corpse-like, tubes and monitors blinging you out. What got me was your skin. My rake thin mother with leathery skin, the veins and bones in your hands always visible, but now, the extra fluids to dilute the drugs in your system, hid your veins and bones. You looked fleshy and round, a pale moon. If it wasn’t for the bruising and obvious trauma, a person would have thought you were just slightly chubby, not frail.

Let her die like this, I prayed. Let me remember her fuller than she’s ever been. Just quiet and at peace.

And then, the intubation tube choking you awake and the pleading in your eyes that I knew was you saying I’m sorry and please kill me at the very same time. And me trying to sign to you that they’d have the tube out shortly. Just hold on. Your living will with its do not resuscitate order burning a hole in my wallet.

Or just before, when I went to feed your cat, and I looked through your bottles and bottles of pills, looking for what hurt you this bad, and finding a bottle of generic aspirin, sitting in the place of your usual Tylenol 3s. I counted the pills- 20 left in a bottle of 200.

I remember when I was eleven or twelve, you would send me to the drug store to buy these for you. You’d write it down for me, a shopping list of cigarettes and Tylenol 3s, with your signature at the bottom so they wouldn’t think I was buying them for myself. The generic name acetaminophen made me nervous. I didn’t want to say it wrong to the pharmacist. I wanted to seem adult and professional about this. You pronounced it wrong, acetametafiend, I’d heard you call it, and it embarrassed me. But that was twenty years ago. You’ve been taking this stuff for twenty years. How could you make a mistake?

“But she wouldn’t have aspirin in her house. She’s allergic to aspirin.” I’d said to the doctor in Emerg. ”In order to overdose on aspirin, she’d have had to go out and actually buy it. She has no money for that.”

Or I could start the story in February, just yesterday. I stopped by your house. I was downtown, and I wanted to check my email. Through the window I could see you had company, so when I rang the bell, I didn’t insert my key right away. I waited a second. Smoke seeped into my nostrils as I opened the door, and I heard you say to your friend “These are yours! These are yours!” I felt outrage for just an instant, and then I thought I am not the mother of a teenager. She can do what she wants.

But what are you doing?

Mom, I am so tired. Please, stop killing yourself slowly.

After the tube was removed, you croaked I’m sorry, I’m sorry. Your voice hoarse from the violence of the breathing tube. You rasped loud enough that if any other patients in the room had been conscious, they would have been able to hear you. “I’m sorry.” I shook my head. But you wanted to say it, over and over again. Every time you said it my heart sank deeper. Sorry for what?

I showed you the bottle, and you looked sheepish. The story that spilled out was incredible, but so detailed I had to believe you. You went to the pharmacy. You walked six extra blocks so you could go to one where they didn’t know you. You ordered a bottle of generic aspirin because the bottle was identical to the house brand T3s, except for a few block letters in a chemical name. And then you started to take it.

Your plan did not include a suicide letter. You did not give away your most precious possessions. You did not fold the linens and call Goodwill. You began to take the aspirin. It was your hope that you would die, and I would find the bottle. That we would decide that the pharmacist had given you the aspirin when you’d asked for acetaminophen. Your death would be determined accidental, and there would be an insurance claim. We’d have millions.

So much planning, maybe months of it. So much fucked up planning, and no good bye.

And then really no good bye, because you changed your mind at some point.

Days into the self-medicating, after you’d started upping the morphine too, the doctor called me because you’d said you weren’t going to make your appointment and your words hardly made sense. Typos and syntax errors, so unlike you. And then you wouldn’t pick up the phone, you’d stopped answering emails. My coworker drove me downtown to your house. You were in your apartment, looking confused but not terrible, and you said you were fine. But I took you to the hospital. We sat there for hours while they tried to figure out what was wrong with you, and then they sent you home. You were quiet. You gave no clues. You went home and continued to try killing yourself.

It was two days later that I was sitting on the couch and a social worker from Emerg called me. “Oh thank god I found someone,” she said, and I began to shake.

What made you do it? You have never really said exactly, like you don’t know yourself. What made you change your mind, pick up the phone and dial 911? What convinced you to crawl out into the hallway so they could find you?

You spilled the story to me, in ICU when you woke up, and then you forgot.

The memories of how you did it, of the calculation and how much you had shut us out, burned into me so you’d never have to think about it again.

These are yours. These are yours.

Premonitions without Tarot Cards

2008-02-27T21:03:00.000-08:00

So you know how they say when you find the clasp of your necklace has moved to the front, that means someone is thinking about you?

What does it mean when you're just sitting still, and you feel your necklace just slip down your chest, the chain fine, but the clasp just gives?

Last week I got a letter from Revenue Canada that was addressed to The Estate of the Late Trisha Chornyj.

Dear Mom, You took his name

2008-02-10T13:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday you came over to my house and taught me how to make nylesnyka, the apples crepes my Baba taught you all those years ago.

When you married in to the Chornyj family, learning the food was how you earned their respect. I know you felt like your husband's family didn't accept you, that they were hard on you. But your cooking skills and your ability to learn any cuisine you wanted got you into the kitchen. No passive observing in this kitchen, just straight to work, peeling or mashing, while my grandmother, who lived in the shadow of her own mother in law, checked the skillet's readiness. And Baba hovered over your shoulder to check your progress.

Baba has a different meaning than Grandmother, she wasn't just her grandchildren's Baba, she was her sons' Baba, her daughter in law's Baba, and any woman in the family slotted herself in the hierarchy according to Baba. Baba would be Baba until she died. And though Grandma would then be the oldest woman of the family, she would never be Baba. Neither would you. That should have been a point of communion in the kitchen, but instead it just made the relationship seem tentative, the future of the Chornyj's not quite sure.

But it must have been a refreshing change from your own upbringing. Here was a family, already rooted in Canada for three generations, but adamantly tied to their culture. "We're Ukrainian," your father in law insisted, fully committed to a country he'd never seen, that didn't even exist anymore.

He insisted on keeping the silent j at the end of your new last name, which stretched the surname from something easily phonetic in English, to a name everyone would stumble over for the five years you were married to it.

Your own last name was somewhat contentious. Listed in church records in Saskatchewan, your family would sometimes appear as Gunville instead of Gonneville. Maybe it was also a translation issue, the French accent of your Métis grandfather throwing off the Anglos at the catholic mission, or indifference on their part to keep all the Indian names straight. It mattered little to you, as your siblings and mother told everyone the last name was simply French, skipping the reserve completely, drawing family trees that traced you back to fifteenth century France to prove it.

You married my father to give your child a name. He wanted a family so badly. He wanted to show his family that he could be a man, a successful father, a businessman, a husband.

You weren't ready for any of it. You were still the fuck up your family told you to be. You drank and popped pills, had boyfriends with no last names at all, just hippie nicknames given to them by their roommates. You were a camera girl who spent evenings at the Balmoral or Penthouse, offering to take polaroids for a fee, and dreaming of becoming an airline stewardess.

And then you woke up in Sault Ste Marie, with a strange feeling in your belly which you guessed was an ulcer, and then you were at City Hall in a dress with an empire waist, signing papers as Patsy Chornyj.

These were the upsides: the arrival of my brother, then me, and excellent instruction in holubsti, pedahe, and nylesnyka. It makes sense, I guess, that the best things about your time as a Chornyj, are the things you still have today.

Five cups of flour.
Five large eggs.
more than a quart of milk,
a pinch of salt.
5 lbs baking apples, cinnamon, and sugar to taste.

It was simple, repetitive to the point of boredom, but if you kept the end result in mind, the deliciousness, the nod of satisfaction from Baba, you could do it.

You didn't marry well per se, but you married well enough to shake yourself free of your family's expectation of you for a while. You became a mother, a wife. You learned how to love someone and entertain the idea that maybe you deserved it back. And you became a great teacher with your son, who helped you bake pies from the time he was two and a half. Mostly he made a mess, but he felt like he was helping, and he loved it. You learned to give praise and gently correct mistakes. You learned how to secretly fix his work when he wasn't looking, so that the turnovers didn't leak their filling. And you loved how proud he was of helping you.

I see it today, when you point out my crepes are a bit too thick. Only one time through, and then you're confident I can finish them on my own.

Sometimes I ache to claim my place in that succession plan of babahood. You always marveled at my hips, told me I would have an easy time of it when I gave birth someday. It was an antiquated compliment, but in the context of my lineage, it made sense. Now the fourth generation born in Canada, and just as much of me Cree as Ukrainian, but I know I would make a good baba.

But, a few years ago, I learned I am barren, or worse, maybe able to conceive, but without the room to host a baby to full term. I could probably get everyone's hopes up, holding on until I was wearing empire waists and painting pastel walls in a small room, and then losing the baby. Who could take that disappointment?

There is a little boy I do not know. He is the son of a friend. He loves perogies, and so when you and I made ten dozen pedahe last month, I sent some home for this little boy. He left me a message on my phone to thank me, and the aching returned. He is five and a half years old, much older than when you started teaching us. Then just yesterday, as I was waiting for you to come to my house and teach me the nylesnyka, he called again, to say he wants to come over and make perogies with me. He wants to make some with onions. And I offered to buy blue potatoes if he wanted.

The first thing I will teach him is to call them pedahe, like Baba taught you. Then I will teach him to feel the dough's texture, and how to pinch the half moons together around the belly of potatoes and cheese.

I will wear my apron, with the strings tied tight around my slim waist, and when it is time to take a break, I will pour small glasses of ginger ale for everyone. And when he is not looking, I will check the seal on his dumplings, so that they will survive the boiling water, and make it to the pan of fried onions. And if I am lucky, when he leaves, with a large bag of pedahe for his freezer, he will want to come back, and my ache will be a little less.

Trish Kelly will...

2008-02-04T21:21:00.001-08:00

screw up some courage.

spill her guts.

take a hiatus from immediacy.

Trish Kelly is...

2008-02-04T21:18:00.000-08:00

creating a love song playlist that includes Nana Mouskouri, Corey Hart, Belle and Sebastian, and Air Supply. It's almost V Day.

avoiding going to dark places.

pretending that craigslist is not a dark place.

ready for nice things to happen.

Fresh Greens- February 2008

2008-02-01T20:54:00.000-08:00

from Shared Vision Magazine February Issue
by TRISH KELLY

Eat In
When Raincity Grill’s newly appointed chef de cuisine, Peter Robertson, launched his first 100-mile tasting menu back in November, I was so looking forward to meeting him that I forgot I was vegetarian. It was a delicious oversight on my part that was rewarded by a dinner one cold and rainy night that included a hay-baked celeriac, four different types of locally raised animals—and the end of my meat-free era. Robertson, an Aussie import who was once junior sous chef to Tony Bilson, the godfather of Australia’s eat-local movement, landed in Vancouver via London, England. There, several Canadian chefs convinced him Vancouver’s dining scene was where he belonged. This growing season will mark the second year of Raincity’s 100-Mile Menu, and Robertson, who took over from Andrea Carlson during the height of the fall harvest, will no doubt whip up something even more tantalizing come spring. (We can start talking about spring now, can’t we?) raincitygrill.com.

Eat Out
The Vancouver Playhouse International Wine Festival kicks off Feb. 25. There are several trade-only events that focus on helping wineries lighten their eco-footprint, from how to go carbon-neutral to developing tree-free packaging. But if your interest lies in tasting the best of what our province has to offer, the Grazing Lunch at Goldfish Pacific Kitchen on March 1 is the hot ticket. Discover food-friendly B.C. VQA wines at a dedicated food and wine pairing station, while William Tse, Goldfish’s executive chef, creates an exciting, reception-style gourmet lunch of B.C.’s best cuisine. You definitely won’t leave hungry! Featured wineries include Burrowing Owl, Cherry Point, Gray Monk, Jackson-Triggs, Lake Breeze, Mission Hill, Prospect Winery, Quails’ Gate, Sandhill, See Ya Later Ranch, Sumac Ridge, Summerhill, and Tinhorn Creek. You can also meet the winemakers and proprietors who craft these intoxicating bevvies. Tickets went on sale Jan. 22, so get yours now. playhousewinefest.com.

Check Out
Many women (myself included) have been “self-medicating” with chocolate for most of their adult lives. For us, Vancouver’s Zazubean gourmet chocolate seems like the natural evolution of the antioxidant-rich treat. With the addition of its two newest flavours, Hottie and Flirt, Zazubean takes you one step further in your chocolate prescription. Both bars have a blend of organic herbal extracts with aphrodisiacal properties, including the aptly named horny goat weed, maca, and damiana root to balance the endocrine system. Hottie also has capsicum (from chili pepper) to really heat things up. All Zazubean bars are made of high-quality dark chocolate, double certified as fair trade and organic. So when you pack your snacks for that chick flick matinee you’re planning to attend solo Feb. 14, don’t agonize over choosing between Flirt and Hottie—just grab one of each! Available at Capers and Famous Foods. zazubean.com.

Trish Kelly eats and writes in Vancouver. She loves lunches too generous for a corset, herbal extracts with naughty names, and saying yes to new protein sources. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit. This month’s recipient is Terra Nova Schoolyard Society. Based in Richmond, the project coordinated by Chef Ian connects elementary school children with the earth, the community around them and agriculture at large. www.myterranova.ca

Dear Mom Recipes and Photographs

2008-01-22T19:22:00.001-08:00

Dear Mom,

Today was like how I want it to be for us.

You came over to teach me how to make pedahe. It was easy but took hours.

You saw my photo albums on the book shelf, and while we let the second batch of dough sit, we flipped through them together and you told me the stories for each photo.

I don't think you noticed that many of the best ones of you are missing. They sit in a pile on the shelf, waiting to be made into a slide show for your memorial.

We didn't talk about that. We still haven't. But you said you'll give me your photo albums. You said they'll be mine someday anyway so I might as well take them.

Are we talking about it without talking about it? Or has our chatter always been so morbid?

You made a joke about how just your luck, you'll move in to your new assisted living unit, get settled in, and die. And I laughed, tried to laugh, like we can still pretend that isn't what we are all hoping for. Not that you'll die, but that you will wait to die, until there is support in place, until it doesn't have to be me who finds you.

Mom today, again today, I really loved you. You were the wise person I would tell my friends about. And I was the kind of person who could write about you with tenderness.

Dear Mom, You Promise not to Make a Habit of it

2008-01-15T22:18:00.000-08:00

In the heyday of my caregiving, I would see you every other day. Were you so much better behaved then? Why did I not get this sad every other day?

Dear Mom, tonight you promised not to make a habit of it. I came home because I am seething.

You are habits. And a rake thin body that needs and pleads and I can't say no. Because my pity is a bad habit that you know about.

And if I can't say no, then I am nothing. If I can't say no then I am only this seething anger.

I feel like a poison that no one should stomach.

I don't know where you have gone, but now you are only habits, like a skeleton slipped into your clothes, with lines to read and a hand outstretched.

Pop bottles on the living room floor, a fridge full of food, a pot roast in the oven, but you need two hundred dollars.

You have no idea what is enough. If gold dust flowed into your palms you would not close them.

Dear Mom, For you what is Sleeping?

2008-01-13T22:08:00.000-08:00

Today when I arrived at your apartment, the tv was on, the cat sitting on the couch, like she was watching it. I found you in the bedroom, and I wondered if you were sleeping. You looked broken, like a marionette quickly cast off, your limbs bent at odd angles on the bed. Your mouth was open a crack, as was your left eye. I shook you and you were not soft and pliable like Juliette in Romeo's arms. You were stiff and I thought it had finally happened. But then you grunted, and I lifted you up, and you were still so stiff and I wondered how you could still be alive. You growled that you were fine, and curled on your side and went back to sleep.

I sat on the couch beside the cat, praying you would wake up, praying you wouldn't.

Dear Mom The Music I Will Listen To

2008-01-08T21:33:00.000-08:00

Tonight I baked a blueberry pie, and it got hot too fast and the juice boiled over the edge, smoke billowed from the crack in the oven door. Just like you used to do. We never figured out how to make it not happen.

I am also starting work on your memorial set list. But I can't remember anything from growing up, except Marianne Faithful singing about how Mick Jagger betrayed her. You sang along, and you had her bitterness down pat. Your own voice sort of strangled from cigarettes and an anger I wouldn't understand for years. Cuss words made the skeleton of that song, and you spat them out like marrowless bits of bone.

The rest of the music so far is stuff I want to include, and you've never heard any of it.

I fell in love with a song that Michael gave me, by Sufjan Stevens. After several listens, I discovered it is about John Wayne Gacey, the serial killer. I wondered at its appropriateness,but for now I have decided that it will stay. You've read hundreds of true crime novels. I can't see why you wouldn't want a song about one.

For your son, I am including a Tragically Hip song, about the Prairies, because you are from there, and because I love Canada, and how earnest Canada is. And because he is 33, and he probably still loves the songs he listened to on his walkman when he took the greyhound home to Ontario.

I am including three Belle and Sebastian songs, because I can't think of anyone I would rather cry with than the twee singer Stuart Murdoch. He is fair and thin. He lives above a church in Scotland. I don't know how he ever survived adolescence in a hard place like Glasgow. It is a gentle miracle.

I am including two Songs: Ohia songs, because Jason Molina's voice is pure midwest grief.

And Great Lake Swimmers for my swimmers itch and love of alpine strawberries, black bears.

And Ben Kweller singing to his Mama about killing people and robbing houses.

And maybe I will write you a song. About how I wish you'd traveled outside of Canada, about how I don't know if you ever fell in love. And how good you made people feel for any decision they made. About my knobby Metis fingers that I got from you and how I think of you every time I look down, and that's what forces me to keep my chin up.

Fresh Green- January 2008

2008-01-01T21:03:00.000-08:00

from Shared Vision January Issue

by TRISH KELLY

Act Out
When the Vancouver Food Policy Council hosted “Using the Vancouver Food Charter in your Neighbourhood” at Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House in November, school nutritionists, passionate gardeners, and even a man named Garlic converged to do some food brainstorming. The room buzzed with ideas: attendees germinated a community kitchen, garden, and a monthly tea party to engage aging gardeners in their area. Last year, Vancouver City Council passed the Vancouver Food Charter, as a sort of manifesto describing how we can create a just and sustainable food system. To learn more about how the charter can help your neighbourhood, attend one of the two Food Charter workshops hosted this month: Jan. 23 at Mount Pleasant Neighbourhood House (800 E. Broadway), or Jan. 30 at Kits Neighbourhood House (2325 W. Seventh Ave.)

Eat Out
As retailers limp through the dark days of post-holiday credit card burnout, Vancouver foodies are frantically securing reservations at the best restaurants in town to enjoy special three-course menus complemented by fabulous B.C. VQA (Vintner’s Quality Alliance) wines. Dine Out Vancouver 2008, which this year runs for three glorious weeks from Jan. 16 to Feb. 3, doesn’t release its official list of participating restaurants till after SharedVISION goes to press. However, I persuaded Tourism Vancouver to tell me which Ocean Wise restaurants will be taking part. In the $15 menu category, you’ll find Green Table member Rocky Mountain Flatbreads. False Creek’s Aqua Riva has whipped up a $25 menu, and Trafalgar’s Bistro menu is a steal at $35. Not only is this year’s DOV longer, there’s also a Facebook group you can sign up for, which gives you the latest news, plus an extensive network of other food enthusiasts to salivate with. Info: tourismvancouver.com .

Eat In
I have to admit, I’ve never had a crush on a coffee company before. But I’ve fallen hard for Victoria’s Level Ground Trading. Not only does Level Ground sell exclusively fair trade beans, but they also hawk the best dried mango—also fair trade—this side of Manila. If you have a soft spot for stories about women overcoming adversity, you’ll love Level Ground even more. The mango, branded as “Frutos de los Andes,” is grown and dried in Colombia by marginalized women from the township of Cazucá. The majority of these women are the sole wage earners in their families, supporting both their children and aging parents. Level Ground ensures they get fair wages, health care benefits for their families, and school scholarships for their kids. Level Ground sees their Frutos program as a chance to help women get a leg up, and fully supports their future career aspirations, offering micro credit loans—among other benefits—to Frutos employees. Available at Whole Foods, IGA, and Capers, . Info: levelground.com.

Trish Kelly eats and writes in Vancouver. She loves homemade perogies and fancy dinners in Kits, and will eat a stomachache’s worth of dried fruit on a dare. At her request, SharedVISION donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit. This month’s recipient is A Loving Spoonful, a volunteer-driven organization that delivers frozen meals and snack packs to people with AIDS who are housebound.

Dear Mom Today I Hated You

2007-12-30T14:13:00.000-08:00

Walking down a quiet residential street, trying to find the flattest route up Hastings Sunrise because you are unsteady today.

I said you should go home, or lie down for a while but you said you wanted to go for a walk instead. Need something from London Drugs.

You seem to lose your focus and start to veer down an alleyway, and I have to take you by the arm and lead you back to the sidewalk. You laugh at something neither of us has said.

My arm is tense as I support you, and my guts are a roiling mix of anger and grief.

Today you look like a drug addict. We're walking to London Drugs because you need Tylenol 3s for your breakthrough pain. You say they've upped your morphine which is why you look so tired. I don't know if I can believe you.

You stumble on a curb and I can't hold you up. You crumple on the curb like a beach chair. It seems practised. I'm sure you do it all the time.

In the store you are swaying and digging in your wallet for your ten dollars you say you put in there. Your cane lands on the floor. We stand in line at the pharmacy and I feel like I'm bootlegging for an underage kid. You can't find the money and hand me your bank card, and say your PIN number out loud.

I make sure you get on the bus ok, but I am not certain you will get home.

There is no happy ending or moment of levity. You are an addict. You take more medication than you should. The morphine is killing you slowly, and I hate it because I have to watch.

Dear Mom, It's really my story

2007-12-27T20:51:00.000-08:00

Dear mom,

Christmas Day and no visit to Emergency. But you're tired.

Sad songs go through my head. We watch violent Cronenberg movies and you doze on the couch.

You say it is the best Christmas you remember.

We are so few now. Just me, you and my brother at the table. No partners, no orphans. No neighbourhood strays.

On the drive home, my brother will talk to me about how thin you are, and we will resolve to start planning your memorial. I feel relieved, like this is something we can do, instead of just watching you dissappear. We can plan how we will remember you.

The sad songs are getting louder, and I realize I am planning the set list for your funeral.

After I am dropped off, me and my small dog walk forty blocks in the snow to a friends house for another dinner. They have just started eating and they squeeze in another chair at the table for me. The room is warm and people are laughing. There is just so much life here.

My friends have no children yet, but under their tree are over a dozen handsewn stockings still full of gifts. After dinner, my friends hand one out to each of us around the table.

My name is on the one in my hands. Inside there are so many treasures, a book of essays about food, a can of sustainably caught salmon, preserves, local chocolate and mittens with felt tomatoes on them. All fourteen of us are opening stockings filled with handmade gifts, that speak more like talismen or medicine bundles than Christmas gifts.

I am sitting on the floor, looking at all these things. And I rest my head in Charlotte's lap and I cry, because I know in that moment, that when you are gone mom, I will be okay.

Because I am loved by my friends and they know me so well.

And it is okay for you to go.

I am so lucky to have known you.

dear mom, can I tell your story?

2007-12-23T17:25:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom, tomorrow is christmas eve.

The tarot cards say my future will be "cruel reality ennobled by art". Why can't tarot cards ever just say have a nice day? Tomorrow will be partly cloudy with sunny periods.

Dear Mom. I'll tell your story

2007-12-18T21:28:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom,

It is Tuesday and I should probably just call you and say these things, but I am listening to a song that reminds me of you. And I don't want to make you sad.

You've never heard the song. It was not recorded while you could still hear. It is a song about waiting and the bitter hopefulness you hold for what seems like the final moments, when you are waiting for bad news.

The final lyrics are:

"And then the nurse comes in and everyone lifts their heads,
But I'm thinking of what Sarah said,
'Love is watching someone die.'
Who's gonna watch you die?"

How close are we now Mom?

It's almost Christmas. Two years in a row we've been at Emergency on Christmas Eve. Will this be year three? Will I sit in that run down hospital with too many beds, reading old magazines, wondering how much longer you will go on? Will you argue with me and tell me to just go home, you're fine?

How much more can you struggle Mom? And do you really want to do it alone? I'm tired, but I don't want to take away what makes us human.

Love is watching someone die.

Trish Kelly will...

2007-12-12T20:24:00.000-08:00

write a five year plan and then completely revise it in six months. Isn't it the thought that counts?

sit in her chair until her dog bites her pant leg to remind her of 'work-life balance".

dance in her kitchen whilst dishwashing or stirfrying. Life is a series of tiny moments of possible pleasure.

Trish Kelly has...

2007-12-12T19:58:00.000-08:00

a set of spare keys on a black bra strap. there simply were no key rings in the house.

KY jelly in her hair. not even her fault! True, the hairstylist said "I have a new secret hair product," before applying the clear gel, but having never bought lube from Costco, Trish did not recognize the bottle. Don't most hair stylists get a commission for their product sales? But true, it does dry fast and has less perfume than most hair gel... now there are doubts about the peppermint hair oil used for the pre-cut scalp massage.

(Once, Trish went to a leather dyke sauna night. She brought lotions and a pumic stone, so she could at least make a spa night of it if there were no hot people to cruise. After an hour in the sauna, she took out the peppermint foot lotion and applied it to her legs and arms. And within seconds, even in the hot hot sauna, she was shivering and her teeth were chattering. Total mind fuck. She thought, this must be what dying feels like. Your body adamantly disagreeing with reality, and yet absolutely certain it knows what's happening. At least it distracted her from the operatic climaxes emanating from the changing stalls.)

crushes on a lot of people. Some of them are musicians with good lyrics, like Tony Dekker, from Great Lake Swimmers, and Alex Kapranos from Franz Ferdinand. She also has a crush on Mary Louis Parker, who plays the most facetious drug dealer on cable television.

a video on Youtube where she monologues about being single. It is old, but she is too, and single again, so maybe it is relevant. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hu5yhqTyhIA

Trish Kelly is...

2007-12-12T19:06:00.000-08:00

eating an artichoke without any assistance.

fifteen pounds lighter than three months ago. At this rate, weight will be zero in two years and one month.

making pizza for four, because there is always someone who needs lunch.

plotting ways to get noticed on facebook.

RSVP

2007-12-06T22:31:00.000-08:00

Or, Things We Should Never Do Again(if you don't want to fuck me)

Enough with the eating of fruit platters! No more studding of pomegranate seeds that we then have to place, unaided, on our own tongues. You can no longer clean mango skins of their flesh with your teeth while I tell a story.

Never again touch the new stainless skillet, or show me the water beads dancing and breaking like mercury when the pan is finally hot enough to sear. Keep your ropey forearm with its expert grip out of my kitchen.

Also advisable, no more quiet moments of locked eyes when the meal is nearly done.

Please, no more bottles of red wine that go empty with laughter and then full with dark secrets.

In fact, before the meal, do not, without a recipe, make an impressive salsa off the top of your head.

And after the meal, do not linger. For everyone’s sake, do not offer to do the dishes. Do not apologize for not doing the dishes.

If you can’t stand the heat we are making, just don’t come for dinner.

Instead, come for cold cereal and iced tea. Talk to me about your mother.

Otherwise, nothing is safe.

The clicks of recognition will be more prolific than the pilot light on the gas range.

The heat will come back.

Our eyes will lock.

And because I have eaten well, and you are so good with your hands, I will want to fuck you.

Fresh Greens- December 2007

2007-12-01T08:46:00.000-08:00

from Shared Vision Magazine Dec 2007

www.shared-vision.com

by TRISH KELLY

EAT IN
I discovered Rhizome Café during the civic strike. My group’s usual meeting place was behind picket lines, and we were looking for alternative locations. Rhizome is as much a community-gathering place as it is a restaurant. The night I popped in, a craft collective was being seated in Rhizome’s all-glass meeting room just as a group of antiwar activists spilled out after strategizing over pints. The menu is organic and local whenever possible, and offers very strong vegetarian options, but enough meat to keep carnivores happy. The coffee is fair trade, and though you won’t find a high-profile chef in the kitchen, Rhizome just oozes goodness. Make sure you get your meal to stay—creative energy is nurtured in this space, and it’s bound to get your juices flowing. Whether you’re brainstorming about the end of global warming or just looking for a great rice bowl, eating at Rhizome will make you feel like you’re doing something worthwhile. At 317 E. Broadway, rhizomecafe.ca.

CHECK OUT

Yves Potvin is a hometown hero, and Vancouver vegetarians have long built shrines to his culinary brilliance. His first company, Yves Veggie Cuisine, gave vegetarians back their space on the barbecue. With burgers and dogs close enough in texture to the real thing, YVC fooled cynical meat-eaters in a way the much-mocked Tofurky never could. Now Chef Potvin has a new line of meat alternatives called It’s All Good. The texture is dead on (if you’ll excuse the carnivorous metaphor), and the high-end flavours like Herb Dijon and Tuscan Tomato bring vegetarian wholesomeness to a new foodie high. First marketed to restaurants and food services, It’s All Good went retail in 2006, and this month launches two new flavours. Available at most grocery stores. More info: itsallgoodfoods.com.

EAT OUT

Hectic shopping malls and huge family dinners do not make for good digestion. Nor does agonizing over which part of your diet can be ditched till January. But eating during the holidays doesn’t have to stress you out. To find out how to enjoy the culinary delights of the season without the anxiety, register for Victoria Pawlowski’s “Mindful Eating Through the Holidays” seminar. Somewhere between a meditation and an education on tasting, Mindful Eating can give you something to hang onto during the strain of the holiday season. With a little encouragement, you too can learn to slow down, tune in, and enjoy the moment. Pawlowski is a registered dietician and nutritional therapist with more than 20 years’ experience. Pre-register with Pawlowski for the Dec. 13th seminar at the Roundhouse Community Centre—just a hop, skip, and a jump from at least two hectic shopping districts. More info: capersmarkets.com.

ramping up

2007-11-14T18:51:00.000-08:00

If I said, I am in need of a treble reducer,
but for my head,
would you know what I mean?

Leading Men

2007-11-09T20:48:00.000-08:00

He sounds like friction without talking. He's running a finger along his jawline. The scratch of very short fingernail against five o'clock shadow. And he'd feel that way too, I remember now, and then the brutal rash from too much kissing. A cost for everything.

He breathes like growing fire. In the dark of the movie theatre, when the audience is quiet for a sad part, his breathing is absolutely visceral. Is his heart working that much harder than mine? I hold my breath now, so I can hear him better. Think of deeper breathing and release.

In the absence of light, or eye contact, my peripheral vision catches him in profile only when the screen grows bright for a winter scene. But it seems like he chose this row, these seats, to best catch those flashes. How else to explain such beauty.

I wish I knew how to catch the light.

Hiring Fair

2007-11-04T19:43:00.000-08:00

Desperation dressed up as a party.
The elephants and midway were already booked,
at least the pens are free.
But please, only one per person.

fully exfoliated. very soft. school of hard knocks makes pretty

2007-11-04T18:39:00.000-08:00

dear diary,

It's November. There is fuschia nail polish slouching its way across the second half of my big toes.

I painted them in August. I hate August. I don't know why it is always such a cruel month. Is it because it was the name of my grandfather, the angry man always with a bottle in his hand? Or can August's nasty disposition be chalked up to the determination and finality it holds? All things out of bud and growing toward harvest or death? You can ask, but it doesn't answer. jerk.

All July and August the bad just piled up, and I could hardly breathe. In August, I sat still long enough to reach a shakey hand down to my feet and bring some colour to their bleak, neglected existence. And like a femme shaman, I made a pact with the universe, as the nail polish flakes away, my bad bad luck will dissolve, and I will be reenergized and happy.

In September, all the little toes shed their shiny coats, but the Momma toes were stubborn.
And still, remnants of pink. ruin, destruction, and every bad card of the tarot deck on my head. Call it divorce. Call it midlife crisis. Call it parent-minding with pneumonia and suicide.

Numerous emotional drop kicks later, October. God gets literal on my ass, sends two plagues upon my house, an exile, and an angel.

November 4th, and I looked down to see still pink. fuck.

But it feels like life is getting better. I am cooking, I am wearing new pants. I have a home, and a lot to be grateful for. I'm wondering if the universe would mind me taking a little help from Cutex.

God means something different when life is terrible. I have a hard time believing in anything, but when the world sours and you don't know if you want to make it to 35, it helps to have a scape goat, to think that there must be something working against you. How could complete randomness be this stacked against you? How can the universe be absolutely random, and yet focussed intention have no influence?

If the universe is anything, and if it is not malevolent, then it must be amnesiac. No memory of the terror it wrought only yesterday, no tally sheet to ration good and bad luck. No interest in capital Gs or proper nouns.

What doesn't kill you, makes you stronger? Well if it kills you, we'll never know if it made you stronger. So it's a hard theory to prove.

How To Replenish

2007-11-04T17:36:00.000-08:00

After the telltale bites appeared, all in a row,
known as Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner,
I purged,
the wooden bowl, the couch, my bed.
I scalded my tshirts
and lingerie from Victoria Secret, thinking,
if it can't survive this, I don't want it.
Then wondered what god must be writing me off just like that.
What god demands I give up all my softness, all that is delicate about me,
stripping away wood and texture, to leave only bare bone?
Does that same god then marvel at my resilience?

Fresh Greens- November 2007

2007-11-01T08:51:00.000-07:00

From Shared Vision
http://www.shared-vision.com/

November Fresh Greens

by TRISH KELLY

EAT IN
Looking for a caterer to make your Christmas party green? At the Capers Living Naturally Fair, food lovers got to see Culinary Capers chef Jonathan Chovancek’s commitment to sustainability—in the flesh. After his appearance, I chatted with him as he stripped off his chef whites and showed me his new tattoo of the lilies at Sooke Harbour House. It’s a tribute to his formative years at Sooke, and a colourful reminder of how deliciously edible B.C. can be. This new addition (which graces the better part of his arm) joins a smaller but no less emblematic tat of the Slow Food snail, another key influence on his philosophy. If he’s willing to ink it onto his skin, you can bet it’s reflected in his menu. Info: culinarycapers.com.

CHECK OUT
If you’ve had a latte at Caffe Artigiano, you’ve experienced the quality milk from Meadowfresh Dairy. Om Natural Lassi is the local, independent dairy’s first foray into retail. Founder Rahim Talib was working another trade show, trying to win over new restaurant customers for his locally produced milk and yogurt. To make things a bit more interesting, he whipped up a batch of traditional yogurt lassi using his family’s recipe. Not only did he win new customers, he created a waitlist for the lassi drink itself. Om Lassis come in traditional mango, vanilla chai, and an über-trendy pomegranate-and-açai combo. As a bonus, the probiotics in the yogurt culture are good for digestion—something Indian moms and Ayurvedic doctors have known for generations. Find Om Lassis in the drink cooler at your favourite natural foods store, and at omnaturalproducts.com.

EAT OUT
Andrea Gray-Grant had a great family recipe and the conviction her mother’s Maritime pickles could sell. With a background in natural foods, she was also prepared for all the hoops she’d need to go through to get her product on the shelf. But finding a cuke farmer to supply her business put this local foodie in a real pickle. “We’re losing our farmers,” she explains. Why? She chalks it up to a shrinking agricultural land reserve, farmers retiring, and some growers’ lack of marketing savvy . Happily, Gray-Grant eventually discovered Bill Zylman of Richmond’s W&A Farms, and now her Tarragon Foods is in business. Part of Tarragon’s mission is to help local farmers find ways to stay in business and thrive. Gray-Grant is starting with cucumber farmers for pickles and relish, but plans to begin working with local carrot growers in the near future. It’s an ongoing project that should keep local on our lips until next year’s farmers’ market. Info: tarragonfoods.com.

Fresh Greens October 2007

2007-10-01T08:56:00.000-07:00

from Shared Vision

http://www.shared-vision.com/

by TRISH KELLY

Eat Out

To the outside eye, the food media’s love affair with C Restaurant must seem like overkill. A Critic’s Choice award every year since the restaurant opened in 1997 and more nods than you’ll find at a head-banging Kiss reunion show don’t begin to explain why C is so crush-worthy. This month, executive chef Robert Clark and chef de cuisine Quang Dang offer a greatest-hits tasting menu with signature dishes from the last 10 years. Centre-stage in the menu will be many of the sustainable seafood choices C made sexy, including B.C. abalone and sablefish. Need more reasons? Check out the headshot of Clark on C’s website at http://www.crestaurant.com/. You’ve never seen a conservationist look better in chef whites.

CHECK OUT

The year that James MacKinnon and Alisa Smith lived the 100-Mile Diet, they learned to cherish grain flour. In B.C., you’ll find pockets of organic spelt in Armstrong and some Red Fife wheat on the Island, but a completely local diet isn’t exactly bread-friendly. According to Andrea Gunner from Anita’s Organic Grain and Flour Mill in Chilliwack, much of the local wheat she’s found isn’t up to snuff (yet). But concern about food miles is at the forefront of its procurement. As a result, Anita’s makes excellent quality, certified organic grain flour, stone-ground and sourced as close to home as possible. Sometimes that requires going all the way to Manitoba, but it also means nurturing relationships with farmers in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and microclimates in the B.C. Interior. Available at Capers and Whole Foods, or visit anitasorganicmill.com.

EAT IN

When you find yourself pondering the eggs in your favourite supermarket, which do you choose, the organic, the free-run, or the cheapos? If you give in to the lowest ticket price, you’re likely buying eggs laid in a battery cage. (Visit chickenout.ca to find out about that; it’s enough to make you skip breakfast.) B.C.’s concern for chicken welfare stretches back to 1994: the appropriately named Steve Easterbrook of Rabbit River Organic Farms has been producing certified organic eggs since that year. Located on Richmond’s Agricultural Land Reserve, Rabbit River was one of the first commercial farms in Western Canada to explore organic, free-range egg production. Easterbrook’s ability to balance animal welfare and human food needs also won him an Ethics in Action Award in 2001. Rabbit River eggs are available at Capers, Choices, and Whole Foods.

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She loves pumpkin tarts, pink lady apples, and people who call her Sugar. At her request, SharedVISIoN donates Trish’s freelance fee to a local food-focused non-profit. This month’s recipient is Cooking Fun for Families(communitykitchens.ca), a program that helps children and their families build community and food security in the school environment.

The Beginning of Fall

2007-07-27T21:42:00.000-07:00

Hi. My brains are crazy. From estrogen or boredom, or the heat of summer. Fuck.

Sitting here at this dark desk, with the lights of the mall bedazzling the studio, I realize I am lonely, and that the portal I had from loneliness is being closed in painful increments that I avoided seeing.

Did I stop trying? Did I run out of ideas? Am I really less interesting than golf, or an empty net and a hockey puck. If I want to flatter myself, I can think that I am doing this to myself. That it's self sabotage.

What am I? I am not hockey or golf, or a skateboard, or even a smooth surface for any of those activities. I am sex, and words, and sharp humor and food. I am fisting and the top floor of a tall building. I am lipstick, I am stupidly high heels and boys on their knees.

Who really admires the taming of the shrew? I thought it was a horror story.

What To Eat by Marion Nestle

2007-07-22T13:32:00.000-07:00

I received this book from editor and due to a rushed deadline I had to submit my blurb about the book before I actually had a chance to read the whole thing.

I look back at those days of ignorance fondly, as What to Eat by Marion Nestle is a true eye opener. Essentially the book takes you on a tour of your local supermarket, aisle by aisle, and behind the scenes to expose the food politics, corprate greed, and general naiviety that comprises our retail food experience.

I have to say, that as someone who has worked in the natural foods industry for almost 15 years, I didn't expect to learn much about nutrition from this book. Bt I learned two essentia things from thsi book; first, that teh essence of teh natural foods lifestyle, don't be dependent on meat, eat lots of fresh fruits and veggies, and whole grains, is still very good advice. But secondly, that much of what I have considered nutritional fact, is actually spin, courtesy food companies, supplement marketers and lobby groups. In such a well intentioned inductrty, where customers and store clerks develop friendship, and anecdotes and customer testimony are basic units of how a store works, and most training for staff comes in teh form of anecdote and custoemr testimony, I guess I shouldn't be so surprised by the amount of nontruiths I have absorbed. But I am.

Nestle calls into question such cornerstones of natural foods product knowldge as "Prescriptions for Nutritional Healing", the book that I will testify helped my mother conquer osteoporosis. And all her points are good. She points out that though prescriptions gives detailed supplemental plans for every disease from Acne to AIDs, with brand names on soem products, there is no footnoted evidence to substaniate their claims.

My New Shared Vision Column

2007-04-15T18:49:00.000-07:00

In case you aren't already an avid Shared Vision magazine reader, maybe you should pick it up for the sole purpose of seeing my new column, "Fresh Greens". I'm shocked and pretty delighted that someone has given me a monthly column. Each month, I'll be writing about what's new and novel in the world of sustainable food.

It's a pretty sweet deal. In my day life, I work at Horizon Distributors as a sort of in-house cheerleader, and part of my job is to keep up to date with new food trends and products so I can report exciting news to my coworkers. Now I can pull the best stuff, and use it as material for my column.

Last June, I took a writing class at UBC, with the very talented Don Genova, of CBC fame. One of the most valuable tidbits I got from that class, was that no one gets rich writing one offs. Smart artists, whether they're dj's or food writers, recycle. First it's a column, then it's anthologized into a book, then a podcast and audiobook.

While sitting in a doctor's office, I read an out of date magazine that said the singer of Franz Ferdinand had a food column in the Guardian newspaper, and that he's made it into a book called Sound Bytes. Smart man. In trying to research this, I also read on Wikipedia that Alex Kaprano identifies as bisexual and was in Vancouver producing someone's record. So many of my favourite things, like a train of my pet causes!

I love the the music of Franz Ferdinand. I love Alex's saucy mouth and the pelvic thrust that is their percussion section. I love bisexual indie rockers. And now that I am wiser, I love people who can get paid twice for the same piece of work.

My Caffeines

2007-03-09T19:51:00.000-08:00

It has been four months since I have written anything on this blog. A lot has happened in that time, some of it food related, and a lot that isn't. I quit my job in food retail, and took some time to get my mental health back. I got a puppy, which has been an incredible amount of energy. I gave up dairy and caffeine for two months.

If my naturopath is reading this, she might be disappointed that I only lasted two months. Any human who has ever given up caffeine in all its forms, knows I actually deserve a medal. Not only does it require extreme stamina to give up all caffeine for 60 days, but the amount of Krakus coffee substitute I consumed embarrasses me. "Hey, this doesn't seem so bad!" I chimed, while my girlfriend shook her head in disgust Freeze-dried chicory and beet root only tastes bad when you could have a mocha with chocolate whipped cream. If your only alternative is peppermint tea, you are grateful to have something opaque to drink.

Did I feel better living dairy and caffeine free. Physically, yes, but then again, I was also off work and doing tai chi every morning. I was watching an hour of the Space channel every afternoon. I felt great.

Mostly, I felt deprived, which is why I caved. It was Christmas, I wanted cookies. So I fell off the naturopath wagon and I just can't get back up. I missed all my caffeines. Yerba Mate, chocolate, Matcha, espresso, Guarana. So many ways to get excited! But so hard to sit still on a wagon.

Dairy Free Tapeworms

2006-11-21T20:07:00.000-08:00

What you need to know for this story:
1. In September 2006, well into my Saturn Return, I offically lost it and went on stress leave.
2. In October, I vowed to "start on some self-care"
3. On November 1st, my new naturopath and I decided that I would start an elimination diet excluding dairy, caffeine and white sugar from my daily diet.
4. Two weeks later, Vancouver's water reservoirs surrounding the city became turbid after a heavy rain storm.

Today is the third week anniversary of my new diet. It may also be an offical week that Vancouver proper has been on a boil water advisory. We're still being told to brush our teeth with boiled water, but Starbucks in serving drip coffee again.While it may seem a lucky break for me that I'd weaned myself off coffee two weeks before that cranky morning when the wind and rain blew down trees and power lines, the rest of the city is taking their demons back. I'm still drinking Krakus, a freeze-dried roasted root and grain beverage from Poland.

This isn't my first time denying the caffeine. when I was in my early twenties, and incredibly disciplined, I swore off choclate for an entire year. I'd drank coffee once, in Seattle on a red eye flight. I was so pure that I was able to feel a "lift" from the potassium in a dandelion root coffee. The sugar content in ice cream made me giddy.

To balance out for all my carefulness, I am, against health board advice, brushing my teeth with tap water. It feels pretty exciting to disobey Patrica Daly, the stiff woman who speaks for Vancouver Coastal Health. I'd love to prove her wrong, but I am wondering if they are testing for tapeworms in the water. I am ravenously hungry all day long.

The Garden is the Best Classroom -as seen in Shared Vision

2006-10-18T09:14:00.000-07:00

Kids' connection to the soil will sustain them in many ways for the rest of their lives.
Shared Vision Magazine, October 2006

When I was very small, and my parents still together, we had an enormous garden. Pea pods ran the edge closest to the house, and on the far side, rhubarb grew high enough to hide in. Time in the garden with my mother was peaceful and delicious. Before dinner, we snapped green beans off their vines and pulled glossy Swiss chard leaves from the black soil.
When my parents divorced, we lost the house and, with it, the garden space. My mother moved us into subsidized housing; a sandy front yard and a concrete patio were our only outdoor spaces.

For our relative lack, we lived well, thanks to my mother’s resourcefulness. Harvesting wild apples down the road and picking berries from undeveloped lands near our housing project, we filled our freezer with alpine strawberries, saskatoon berries and chokecherries. Our connection to the soil helped sustain us in many ways.

It seems many Vancouver groups are thinking of the healing possibility of gardens, as groups on many fronts turn their eye toward ensuring that children have a connection to the food they eat.
While Vancouver’s interest in teaching children about gardens is not new—City Farmer began working on a garden at Lord Roberts Elementary School in 1986, and even produced a teacher’s resource kit —it is exciting to see interest rising from so many areas.

One ambitious project that engages children in food production comes from the KidSafe Project’s Gardening for Growth program. The first garden, at Queen Alexandra School, is still going strong, thanks to committed community members including Master Gardener Sharon Hanna. The garden links classes at the school with volunteers from the Master Gardeners Association of B.C.

Having established a relationship with the Vancouver School Board, KidSafe now has gardens at several other East Side schools. Their most recent project, at Macdonald elementary on the corner of Hastings and Victoria, is a plan to improve the school’s green space, as well as to develop an organic food garden and outdoor classroom, with funding contributed by Nature’s Path and Capers Community Markets, among others.

Other community groups are getting organized, too. In September, Slow Food Vancouver put out a call to community members and hosted a meeting about starting a children’s garden. Slow Food Lions Gate and Les Dames d’Escoffier have expressed interest in a children’s garden as well.

Merri Schwartz, pastry chef at C Restaurant, spent this past spring piloting her Growing Chefs program at Champlain Heights Elementary in East Vancouver. The program matches volunteer chefs with classrooms of Grade 1, 2, or 3 students. Over the course of three and a half months, chefs visit the classroom, helping kids plant and then harvest an indoor vegetable garden.
“Growing Chefs grew out of a desire I had to engage with the wider community,” Schwartz explains. “…to pass on some of the wonderful ideas, products, and people I was fortunate enough to be exposed to as pastry chef at a high-end restaurant.”

At that level of cuisine, she explains, “You are working predominantly with individual specialty producers—people who are passionate about what they do, and the ethics behind it, whether it be salmon fishing, tomato growing, or herb cultivation.” Finding that these connections often ended in the kitchen, Schwartz says she saw a benefit to the community, if she could extend the links outside of the restaurant.

She decided to start with kids. “I wanted to start with an audience who would be open to the ideas we were discussing—namely the idea that you can grow your own food, even in the city,” she says. After a successful pilot phase, Schwartz is gathering resources and funding with an aim to publishing a resource guide, constructing a website, and spreading the Growing Chefs program to classrooms throughout the Lower Mainland.

Schwartz, like many who work on kids’ garden projects, is deeply committed. She will spend October in Europe, and when she returns to Vancouver, she plans to take Growing Chefs on full-time and skip the day job. She says the leap is a little scary.

“It’s not easy to leave a job that I love to step into the social and financial unknown. But I know that Growing Chefs will never succeed if I can’t give it a real chance, and the only way to do that is to take a risk.”

Trish Kelly lives and eats in Vancouver. She loves heirloom tomatoes, spaghetti squash, and people who call her Pumpkin.

I have a mate problem

2006-08-25T18:44:00.000-07:00

I think I might be the only person who can make it through an entire shop at Capers and end up at home without anything to eat.

I spent thirty dollars, on vitamins and meat for my partner, but the only thing I bought was a bottle of Guayaki Yerba Mate. On the upside, it's a bit of an appetitie suppressant.

I live by Tinseltown. The mall is curretly full of homosexuals, moviegoers, and homosexual moviegoers attending Out on Screen. I'm at home listening to Willie Nelson sing "Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)".

Cowboy fantasies are not my favourite gay daydream. If I'm homoeroticizing a traditionally macho subculture, I prefer to imagine hockey players soaping each other up in the shower.

My blood sugar is low.

It makes crass.

I will eat, and wash my mouth out with soap.

Losing my Veginity as seen at thetyee.ca

2006-08-16T19:52:00.000-07:00

So, this is a wee bit longer than the published version...

Beef, and Horse the other red meat

I owned a cow once. When I was a kid, my mother demanded my father stop buying me extravagant princess dresses, and start buying practical gifts. So he bought me a cow from my uncle’s farm. After a brief introduction, my hand reaching through the slats of the pen to pet the caramel and cream calf, I wanted to take it home with me. Months later, a honk in the driveway announced the arrival of our Christmas cow, tidily wrapped in butcher’s paper. There was also a horse gift from my father, but enough said.

Considering my emotionally scarring childhood, I hold relatively cerebral reasons for my vegetarianism. The ethics of meat consumption and the environmental footprint of its production have kept me veg all these years.

In my teens, I was so pure, I was plagued by meat nightmares. I remember a particular dream where I was trapped in the food court of a mall, and everything I put in my mouth, betrayed me with a meaty centre. I also suffered a masochistic vegan period when even milk and honey were forbidden.

But for any wavering, I’ve held onto my veginity for longer than most of my friends. I’ve watched with horror as hardcore vegans lose their edge over bacon and eggs at a greasy spoon; or fat beef burgers at a kitschy diner. It never happens at a potluck or family dinner where gloating family members are waiting for it. The fall usually comes at a restaurant; a desperate indulgent act with no accountability except my dropped jaw.

As I’ve aged, it’s become harder to hold onto my veginity. In my thirties now, I have become more refined in my tastes, and less concerned about my virtue. I drink wine now. I go to fancy restaurants. And I have realized that I can’t really continue down the slippery slope of enjoying life with such a long “don’t” list.

But if I’m going to lose my veginity, it’s going to be as a guilt free hedonist. I’m going to do my homework, and find an ethical way to indulge.

I start my research at Earthsave Canada, whose advocacy has turned many people towards an animal free diet. Earthsave’s web library has a section dedicated to the impact of large scale factory farming. For example, to produce a given amount of factory farmed beef requires more than double the water that soybeans do -not really conducive to guilt free hedonism. Could I consider eating pig? An animal smarter than the family dog?

Chicken requires much less water than beef or pork. While EarthSave warns against the health perils and cruelty issues of chicken and egg production, BC has many free range egg and organic chicken farms. Travelling a relatively short distance to market after having lived relatively happy lives, these birds seem a possibility.

But then I consider seafood, and I discover that a lot of my homework has been done for me. Programs like Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch and the Vancouver Aquarium’s Ocean Wise program, have the sustainability lens I am looking for. And it’s sexy. High end restaurants, with conservation minded chefs, tell you which menu items are sustainably fished. I call up Jason Boyce, Program Manager for Ocean Wise, and ask him to help me lose my veginity.

Losing my Veginity

The day has arrived and I am sitting alone in a $1000 custom-made restaurant chair, designed specifically to make a person sit upright or slouch intimately in conversation. The ceiling is covered in five thousand hand stamped brass tiles, and the black slate table is making my clammy hands clammier. Jason is not late, but I am nervous and early.

They say that in order to seduce a woman, you need to engage her mind as well as her senses. Appropriate then that Jason Boyce is the kind of man who can put a lady at ease even when he’s using big words and talking about the fate an ecosystem. It helps that the restaurant I’ve chosen, Vancouver’s NU, is so high style and expensive, just walking in the foyer makes you feel like you should put out.

Jason arrives, greeting me in his quick, warm voice, clearly as excited about the lunch agenda as I am. He spreads his menu flat on the table, and begins to throw out suggestions. We ease into the menu with some veggie appetizers and then Jason orders a salad.

I once ordered a Chef’s Salad at a pub, discovering the hard way that chefs, if given the option, may add ham chunks and sulphurous eggs without mentioning it on the menu. Our Salade Nicoise arrives; baby potatoes and curly endive peak out from under four distinct piles of seafood. I steel myself and Jason begins his sustainability story.

First, we try the honey mussels. Grown off the coast of BC, they have a small footprint. Very self sufficient little creatures, they strain their food out of the water themselves. The one on my plate looks like an apricot pit hiding inside a shell. As Jason suggests, I pair it with a bit of the curly endive. The bitter green offers me a familiar texture while bringing out the natural sweetness of the mussel. I like it.

I approach the Side Striped Prawns. I try to think of what this animal looked like when it still had its legs and eyes. But Jason distracts me with a story about the different kinds of prawns, how Spot Prawns are the sweetest, but side striped ones are almost as good. The melt in your mouth texture of the prawn is contrary to what every wheat gluten replica implied seafood would taste like. It truly tastes sweet; not like a sugary marinade imposing itself on flavourless soy protein. I think I could do this. I could be an omnivore.

Next, Jason introduces me to BC albacore tuna. The outside edge of the tuna steak is seared, but the inside, is essentially raw. So now I am eating cold, raw animal flesh. Jason suggests I try it with a little sundried tomato.

Then we come to the lobster. I know these creatures. They live in aquariums at conventional supermarkets. Elastic bands silencing their pincers, the only noise you hear is the rustling of the plastic bag, as they are taken on a tour of the produce section before going home for a hot bath. It’s the thought of the rubber bands that occupies my brain when I take a hasty bite without a pairing suggestion from Jason. And then I am gagging. The lobster flesh resists my attempts to chew it, and when I finally swallow it down, it is still one piece. Jason says “Oh, your face was hilarious!” As I turn bright red, he says, “You know, of everything you’ve tried so far, that’s the least sustainable one. The lobster fisherman do a great job, but there’s an issue of bycatch.” It’s good to know, if the texture wasn’t enough reason to never eat this again.

“You’re doing really well,” Jason comforts, and summons the waiter for our next dish. “This is going to ruin you for any other salmon.” He tells me Fred the Fisherman is a dedicated conservationist, who loses sleep at night thinking of the fishes. The Pink Salmon arrives, a tight roll of salmon filet surrounded by a moat of béchamel sauce. Jason transfers half the roll to my plate. He cuts the salmon into bite size pieces for me, as he explains this salmon was caught with barbless hooks. It was then transferred to a stress recovery tank, which is like a chill out room for captured salmon, before moving to the ship’s holding tank. When you’re eating fish for the first time, it’s a nice thought.

Before we leave, I ask Jason the hard question. What if vegetarians like me start eating fish? Can the ocean handle another mouth to feed? “People see the ocean as flat --one dimensional,” he gestures out the window. Little ferry boats chug from our side of the inlet to the other, darting around buoys as they go. Ferry passengers stand on the dock, gazing out toward the thin line of horizon. For many people, Jason points out, eating seafood is our only connection to the ocean. A deep connection reminding us to care for and protect what’s going on below the surface. It’s the kind of responsibility a righteous ex-vegetarian could get used to.

My head spinning from all the information and protein, Jason offers me a ride back to my office in the Aquarium’s shiny white hybrid car. It’s the deliciously guilt free end to our lunch, and my veginity.

A Deliberate Experience

2006-06-18T14:32:00.000-07:00

Nyala African Hotspot
4148 Main Street
closed Mondays

Wooden giraffes stand in relief against the bright urban landscape of Main Street. It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the deep burghandy interior of Nyala African Hotspot. A familiar face pops into view as our group of twelve trickles in from the four corners of the GVRD.

Nyala has been serving up African cuisine in Vancouver since before Ethiopia lost its Mediterranean coastline. The menu spans everything from land based woolies like goat and lamb, to a curried fish entree the menu boasts is the “seafood experience of a lifetime”.

Mibrat and husband are seasoned restauranteurs, with more than 15 years of business under their belts. From the extensive four page menu and their very portable décor it’s clear they don’t let things get boring. The menu covers virtually the entire latitude of the African continent; then meanders into more Mediterranean territory, with some brief jaunts into South Asian cuisine. The menu justifies these culinary digressions with such descriptive boasts as the Goat watt being “paradise… recreated”.

Dishes run upwards of ten dollars for a vegetarian stew of carrots and cabbage while meat dishes average fifteen per dish. The strictly a la carte menu is much better suited to groups and communal eating than solo diners.

We began with a round of drinks. My companions ordered an enthusiastic round of Hell’s Kitchen Ale, and various wines, and I chose the spiced tea. The tea arrived promptly, smelling of clove and the subtle menthol of black cardamom. The wine arrived soon after, but the beer drinkers had to be more patient, as a new keg needed opening.

Before our appetizers arrived, sanitized towels were delivered to each diner, a modernized version of the Muslim pre-meal cleansing, when a copper pitcher of water is poured over the fingers of your eating hand.

Our appetizers lead us through Middle Eastern favourites like hummus and tablouleh, with South Asian papadums, and pakoras making appearances on the table. The South African sausages which came skewered with vegetables are made in house. As a personal preference, I found the hummus to be a little bitter, the tahini overpowering the olive oil and chickpea puree but generally, the appetizers were accurate takes on familiar dishes.

All were served with the Ethiopian flat bread, Injera, but here Nyala takes a spin on the usual recipe. Nyala’s injera contains the traditional Teff flour, with whole wheat and barley flours too. The small yet mighty Teff grain, which is high in calcium, iron and amino acids, also happens to be gluten free. Desperate for any out of home dining that promises a gluten free experience, Celiacs and wheat-free dieters have a strong network and trade lists of gluten free restaurants. Nyala could easily carve a niche for themselves by offering a teff only injera.

Entrées came in their own serving dishes. This is a variation on the usual plate presentation, where the Injera bread covers the entire plate, and the stews and meats are then served on top. Traditionally, no cutlery is offered, and instead, the injera is torn off and used to pick up chunks or puree. Like learning chopsticks, it takes getting used to. By the mid-point in your meal, you can find the majority of your injera soggy and unhelpful. I was thrilled that Nyala serves the injera on the side, rolled up like tensor bandages, where it wouldn’t get soggy. Cutlery was also provided.

As the majority of Ethiopians are Muslim or Orthodox Christians, there is a tradition of meat fasting. This makes for a very vegetarian friendly menu. My vegetarian meal, served on segregated dishes, included a deep red lentil stew (Yemiser Watt) with the distinctive berbere sauce. Along with the chilis and cloves that give berbere sauce its distinctive heat, I also detected a good amount of cinnamon. The Gomen Watt, a sauté of spinach, green peppers and onions, was bright green and fresh.

If you’re looking for an accessible entry point into African cuisine, Nyala is an excellent choice. A confident menu with spicy watt stews and a generous kids menu, Nyala has something for every palate.

A Tale of Two Sandwiches

2006-06-01T22:13:00.000-07:00

Today is the last day of my vacation. Not really a vacation, as it is made up of days off I missed during the last insane month at my job.To distract myself from reading work emails or actually doing work at home, I have acquired a digital camera. This is a photo of my lunch from finishes, a very esthetics pleasing little cafe down the street. The place is only open business hours, and is closed on Sundays. They serve European style baguette sandwiches and good coffee. The music is hip enough that you want to sit at the table and mismatched chairs for longer than it takes to finish your lunch.You'll notice that my edam and balsamic sandwich was not served on a plate. In fact, I didn't even see a sink or kitchen in this hole in the wall establishment. Sandwiches are built on a small counter behind the cash register. The one door way seems to lead into a shallow closet holding the employees' jackets and bike helmets.All the servers are young, attractive art students, and the entire place has a feeling of artifice, as if the owner is actually Cindy Sherman, and there are hidden cameras recording this fake cafe.But the sandwiches are deliciously simple. The coffee is rich, and the tao water appropriately tinged cirtusy.My next day off, I will head two blocks into Chinatown for a Vietnamese sub, and give my report on that sandwich.In the meantime, there are books to return to the library...

Out of Season Strawberries

2006-06-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

It's early spring. The farmers market has just started, but I need to eat more than Anne Freisen's local lettuce. Yes, tasty as it, I have to anticipate the coming season by purchasing California strawberries so white on the inside, they seem to be glowing. I can't help myself! And what a jerk I am, I am adding mangoes to my basket of groceries. These mangoes are from so far away, a penny stamp for each food mile, and you'd replicate the 1-5 highway.
But I buy them anyways, and bring them home, thinking of summer, and the heat of Northern Ontario, where I picked wild alpine berries when I was a kid. Black flies buzzing, fire ant hills hiding behind ferns, I imagined I was in a prehistoric jungle, as my mother, crouched nearby,surrounded by large buckets, gathered the tiny, powerful little berries.
Berry picking frightened me. Ticks hissed in the forest trees and my reckless mother loved to recall stories of near-misses with black bears and their cubs. But the thought of the pies my mother would make, the feeling of ease when the freezer was full of a summer picked clean, won out over my fears.
I respect alpine berries, they never get as big as their Southern cousins, that's true. That they can survive a late frost seems to make them taste even better. Like the people of Northern Ontario, they are defined by their weather. What doesn't kill them, makes them delicious.
Wild blueberry bushes also grew behind the project housing we lived in. The four block bush area gave us blackberries, blueberries and strawberries- and fiddleheads if we'd known better. Farther out of town, we would go for more, and in a good year, my grandparents would make the drive to Northern Michigan to visit a U-Pick farm, or head to Saginaw and return with buckets of black cherries for special perogies.
Even back then, no one was supposed to move fruits and vegetables across the border, but the border was easier then. Our money was taken at par, and a blanket draped across your buckets was enough to get your fruit past the customs agents.
I want to take a trip down the coast, stopping in Seattle and Olympia, then down to Portland Oregon, to visit farmers markets. When the strawberries are in season, and I don't need to come up with schemes to make their albino interiors taste like what I am craving.
I clean the Californians and slice them thinly, an honest acknowledgement of their translucency, and then I warm a small amount of honey on the stove. The honey is from just outside Vancouver, from bees with a taste for blueberry blossoms, which I hope will influence the strawberries into behaving more like what they are. Into the honey I dip a fork into a jar of minced ginger and stir it in. I glaze the berries with my ginger honey and slice in some mango.
It can't replace the flavour of alpine strawberries, but the ginger invigorates the berries, and even brightens the mango up a bit. The salad is warm, if not spicy.
The real berries are on their way, weeks away. The freezer is empty, and waiting. In the meantime, I will distract myself with dull factory farmed imitations, and thoughts of black bears crawling out of hibernation, memory of last year's berries rousing them like a haunting.

Pie Stories

2006-06-01T21:52:00.000-07:00

She spent the summer baking pies and delivering them to the little health food store where he worked. He’d come out of the stockroom, his apron blushing from paprika or pale with pastry flour, and he’d apologize for being so dirty.
It happened so often that it felt normal, and he could stare down anyone who suggested otherwise; like his roommates who watched with envy as he carried down a horde of small plates and forks from his room every weekend.
She did it because she loved him. She always had.
The first time she saw him, he was leaning against his bike in the parking lot out back. She felt the entire world go slightly out of focus, like channel two with rabbit ears, but he was cable. He had clean features and wore a scruffy duffel coat in late May. He had a little boy’s name, and even through the bulky jacket, she could tell that he was on the skinny side.
And then one time, he played songs down at the café. They were all covers, and most of them she didn’t know well, but she started crying during his set because his raspy optimism overwhelmed her. She began to imagine her entire life without kissing him.
Afterwards, she whispered, “You have the voice of an angel,” and he packed up his guitar and walked her home.
On the way, she started planning their next pie. It was late June and she had a freezer full of local strawberries.
There were some silent moments, and stupid jokes, mostly his. She laughed, the staccato of her voice bouncing off the brick row houses and metal staircases that lined her block.
They stood outside her building for a moment, and she couldn’t think what to say. So she reached for the keys in her pocket and opened the door, hoping he was following. The door closed quickly behind her and she reeled to watch him sprinting across the street and then out of sight by the depanneur.
He left because he wanted to go upstairs, because he wanted to make an excuse like he needed to use her bathroom or the phone. But he’d felt longing and disappointment so many times, they felt like a cause and effect relationship. It seemed too fatalistic.
He started walking home, his hands in his pockets. He thought about the girl and how stupid she probably thought he was. He pulled his hands into the sleeves of the duffel coat. For a moment, he felt like a little boy again. Blameless.
She climbed the stairs to her flat and then lay in bed until the sun came up, trying to pathologize what had happened, thinking it would be better to be sick than at the mercy of such mystical forces as love.

Morning Insomnia

2006-05-26T18:48:00.000-07:00

I wake up at 5 am for no reason except worrying. This apartment is high ceilinged and large windowed and very cold because of it. But the expansiveness affords me the creeping distance I need in the morning. I slip out of bed, and close the bedroom door behind me. Every morning, as I sneak down the still dark hallway, I think, I feel like a ghost in this house. In the kitchen, I crank the heat and turn on the espresso machine, the door closed and the CBC on quietly. The register crackles to life, the smell of burnt dust touches my nostrils before the coffee grinder can drown it out.

Sometimes she notices I am gone, and once in a while she will come into the kitchen and take me by the hand, back to bed, because it is too early for anything besides sleep. But I lie there, judging the degrees of blackness, the slightest hint of street light making the curtains midnight blue instead of charcoal as the walls. The ceiling has a series of glow in the dark stars but they loose their light and fall asleep faster than I can.

Today, the darkness is getting to me. It doesn’t really go away, just curls back slightly, like the blankets during my fitful sleep. Things feel urgent, like I need to accomplish something with this time, so it isn’t a write off.

This time feels like betrayal, the time when she still sleeps, and thinks I am there beside her. If I slide back into bed before the alarm, she doesn’t even know I was gone. I could use this time to have an affair, or create hate letters to the Province paper. Instead, I make smoothies and elaborate coffee beverages. I check email. I think about my grandparents and their money.

I get it from my mother, this need to think about money, the cheque in the mail, a deus ex machina of upward mobility, dead grandparent, a lottery ticket to pay off my credit card. I want every job I take to give me more. A man I know died recently. I didn’t like him very much, but he was popular, and many people were sad. His family couldn’t afford his funeral, and I wondered what it is like to get saddled with that. Five seasons of Six Feet Under, and I never saw that one.

Why am I the only one that thinks this is funny? Stagnant air, and the smell of sadness.
I am in my Saturn Return. I make dinner, do the dishes, and when I cry, I swear I can feel the cellulite in my thighs stretching across my legs like fishnet stockings.

I grew up the baby in my family, thinking that age was the only thing keeping me from respect and power. Maybe that’s why I am so disappointed by life. I have not yet grown out of my vanity, but I am growing out of my youth.

Someone must have mentioned how quickly it fades. I’m sure someone warned how brief the years are when you feel like your body can never fail you, that your worst flaws are things you’ll grow out of. But perhaps they didn’t. Perhaps they were too busy mourning the absent arrival of wisdom. The funny thing about people who are older, they love to say I told you so. Maybe their mouths were frozen from their bridgework, and their arms too sore from the mole biopsy to explain that children are not respected for what they have not what they are missing.
So now I am thirty, and I love double negatives, and I think that RRSPs aren’t such a bad idea, because I’ve been working long enough to think working is a black hole for my creativity, that as long as I do it, work, that is, I will never feel done.

Weather

2006-05-26T18:39:00.001-07:00

For quite a long period of time, the weather in Ukraine has been growing worse. The only thing that prevents it from being really nasty, is the temperature which, at present, is some five to seven degrees above zero. -News From Ukraine, No. 49 1990
Some of my dreams are about eating Persian Food, and then I get up at 5 30 and make Eggs Benedict, which I am guessing is British, not just because of the name, but because the dish is so fattening and generally bad for you, it must be British. Next time, maybe I’ll try deep frying the bread.
My mother had eyelid surgery yesterday. Her eyelids are droopy from saggy skin making her look like a stoner, and affecting her vision. The receptionist at the clinic offered her a video to watch, so she would know what was going to happen to her, but she refused it. She was too nervous and thought that not knowing would be better. I said okay, because I forgot about her cataract surgery, and how she came out afterwards, crying about the terror of feeling her eyeball sitting on her cheek. “Mom, they don’t take your eyeball out to replace your lense!” I said. My mother is so afraid of becoming her mother. Of being coddled into ineffective living, but what does she do to herself now?
"My mom is deaf," I explained to the nurse. "I can help you set up some signals with her for while she's in the operating room."
In the chair, before they cleaned her face, she wouldn’t look at me or the nurse, her need to disappear was so strong, and it made it impossible to translate for her. I wanted to slap her. “Rich ladies have this done all the time!” I said, while they cleaned her face with a cold washcloth and then rubbing alcohol. Her eyes squeezed shut, she couldn’t see what I was saying, but I needed to say it. She cringed and groaned like it was Chinese water torture. I never want to be that much of a suck.
Sometimes I get so sad about being the only person in my family that isn’t a stoner or total space cadet, and how can it not be hereditary, and degenerative?
I had a book in my purse for the wait, but they asked me to suit up, so I could go in with her. I put booties and a cap on. The tunic they gave me was a wrap around, and I tied it tightly, a vain attempt to still look like I had a waist.
They offered to give her something to relax, and she nodded vigorously, "Put me under! I don't want to be awake!" She begged.
But you have to be awake, so the doctor can tell you look up, look down. Otherwise your eyelids might be uneven.
We went into the operating room, and my mom asked again for something to relax her. The nurse obliged. The surgeon touched a pen to her brow, marking where the muscle would lift to.
I have been through some pretty disgusting procedures with my mom. I've seen an ultrasound of her bowels, the shiny walls and lively muscles of her bladder when they inserted a tiny camera. I've explained to nurses which of her veins are better for drawing blood, and that’s its best to use the children’s gauge. I guess I was even there when she nearly died of an ulcer when I was four. I don’t remember her vomiting up her insides, but I’ve heard the story from her enough to imagine it like I was there. She had written my brother and I goodbye letters, on blue cardstock, in the same all caps font she signed Santa tags with.
At the touch of the surgeon’s pen, my mother started moaning. He turned to me and said “You know, this doesn’t hurt that much. I haven’t actually even touched her yet.”
“Put me under!” she begged again. With my mask on, I tried to sign to her and let her know, you have to be awake. That she would have known this if she’s watched the video or looked on the internet or asked her doctor. That if she wasn’t enjoying it, it was her own fault for not educating herself.
MOM. YOU. CAN’T. SLEEP. DOCTOR. NEEDS. TO TELL. YOU. LOOK UP. LOOK DOWN.
“What?” she asked. “I didn’t get any of that. Can you take off your mask?”
NO. I signed. I signed again, YOU. CAN’T. SLEEP. DOCTOR. NEEDS. TO TELL. YOU. LOOK UP. LOOK DOWN. OK?
The surgeon drew on her wrinkled eyelids and her moaning resumed. I held her hand, and she squeezed mine to numbness.
I wonder if I can sign to her without looking at her, I thought. We practised the signs for open and close, right and left once more, and the surgeon told me I could go.
I waited for her in the lounge. She came out an hour later. The surgeon said, “She’s fine.” And touched my shoulder as he left.
The nurse explained that we’d have to wait an extra half hour, because they had given her a sedative. “I didn’t feel anything,” she said out of the side of her mouth, like a snobby sedative connoisseur. She fell asleep in the recovery chair, her snoring was muffled by the ice pack on her swollen eyes.
In the care ride home, I felt tired. Of being generous, and patient, and seeing parts of her that I will probably never see of myself. Would I be less tired if she'd been brave and grateful?
It’s a dreary time of the year, and my house is cold. I am drinking cold water, which is not helping. I should have the phone in here, in case my mom calls, but I don’t.

The Smell of a Dead Body

2006-05-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

It's an unreliable elevator, and will sometimes take you to the basement, even though you pressed M for Main.
I don't know how to describe the smell when the elevator doors opened. I mean, it had always smelled. My mom's next door neighbour was a an old man who was keeping a tobacco company in business by himself. The edges of his door were batiqued with cigarette smoke seeping out into the hallway.
I don't know how to describe the new smell. Actually, I'd have to say it smelled like nothing, but the worst nothing I've smelled. Worse than freezer burn or an old basement.
Today my brother was over for a visit and he couldn't take the smell anymore. He knocked on the caretaker's door, just one door down on the other side of the hall.
My mother says she saw the man on Christmas Day. She knocked on his door, to give him a tipperware container of cookies she'd made. He never made it to the door. She's not well herself, and thought it might take him a while to get to the door. She waited. She left the cookies on the door handle.
Later that evening, the bag was gone, and she got a bitchy email from him, lecturing her on her impatience. "I was on my way!" he said.
That was on Christmas. It's now January 10th. Who knows when he died? I can't figure it out. I can't remember when the smell started. But I know it was around long enough for me to almost get used to it.

The Last Vegetarian Standing, Falling

2006-05-26T18:38:00.000-07:00

No one knows my name here. I am not like the people who sit at these long tables week after week, inhaling beer and barbecue chicken wings while sports broadcasters yell at them from the big screen TVs. I do not have friends who sit with me and then fight over who will pay the bill. I am alone.
My hands stick to the thick slab of the tabletop. I can’t decide if this is some sort of stylistic choice, a rustic lacquer, meant to emulate the tree sap this sequoia must have bled when they chopped her into tabletops, or if the waitress is just lazy. I spread my newspaper out on the table so I don’t have to think about it. The patrons of this dirty restaurant peer over their piles of wing bones and marrow-sucked ribs, and they know I don’t belong.
Now the waitress stands in front of me. She wears a dark polo shirt and waist apron, a notepad in her hand. Her skin is ruddy and loose. I consult the menu and give her my order. “And how do you want that?” She asks.
“For here, please,” I say. The look she gives me lets me know that I have made the wrong answer. “Can you repeat the question?” I ask.
“How, do you want it?” She says slowly, like I am a foreigner. “Would you like it,” she gestures as speaks. She looks like she is juggling imaginary balls. “Rare, Medium or Well Done?”
“Medium,” I say, because the middle is probably the safest answer. “You’ll have to excuse me, I’m vegetarian.”
I worry that she will kick me out, but she simply rolls her eyes to the ceiling and walks away muttering, “Another wise guy.”
In the dining section of the paper, there is a story about mushrooms. A picture fills the top half of the page, various mushrooms, their sinister skins of shadow and grime professionally lit and glazed in butter and garlic. The image makes me shutter. I hate mushrooms. They are invasive and deceptive. What people eat is only the fruit of an invisible, diabolic fungus. It can grow anywhere— in the dark, in shit, between your toes. When you put a mushroom in your mouth, it thinks hmmm, could I live here?
Why would you put this in your body? But really, mushrooms have brought me here.
My dinner arrives is less time than I expected. How long does it take to cook a steak? Having never cooked one, I do not know. As the waitress leans in with the platter, I smell her perfume, and something else. As the plate lands between my fork and very sharp knife, my nose fills with a dirty smell— earth, grass and dung. It smells wonderful.
On the plate, there is a garnish of two carrot sticks and a perfect globe of mashed potatoes. The brown slab of meat takes up most of the plate. Underneath, a red sea oozes toward the pristine potatoes and carrots.
“What’s wrong?” the perceptive waitress asks. “There’s blood,” I stutter, “on the plate.”
“If you wanted it well, you should have said so.” She says, swooping the back and heading to the kitchen. I leave.
My doctor says I am anaemic, of course. Doctors have always told vegetarians they are anaemic. It’s something they learn in medical school, tossed in after the final bell on the last day of class, “All vegetarians are anaemic. See you in September.” And the students nod, their blood alcohol levels rising in anticipation of summer vacation.
My family has been punishing me for my vegetarianism for years. Birthdays at the Fishhouse, Mothers Day at Swiss Chalet. Christmas dinner, the turkey or ham, passive aggressively parked in front of me. But I resisted, their antagonism made it easier.
On the way home from my steakhouse failure, I stop by the sushi shop. For my girlfriend, I order karage chicken. Agedashi tofu for myself. Agedashi tofu is never the same when you do takeout. Eating in, the tofu comes served in a shallow bowl, stacked like blocks of ice ready for igloo making. The blocks come surrounded by a moat of teriyaki sauce and are garnished with very delicate green onions and radish.
Once, in a fine restaurant, onion flakes thinner than paper were sprinkled on top. They were so light, that for the first few moments, they danced like underwater plants on the waves of heat emanating from the just-fried tofu. I imagine all this happens in the Styrofoam as it jostles in my panier all the way home. One more thought, will I ever know what karage chicken taste like?
Being vegetarian is not hard. I’ve been doing this for thirteen years. I know how to express it in four languages. Now, every restaurant has a vegetarian option. Soy is a bragging feature, not a secret filler in fast foods.
I was vegan for a year. Once, I abstained from chocolate for thirteen months because I wondered if it was ruling my life. After three months without sugar, carrots were the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted. I am trying to say, I have will power. I am disciplined. There is no explanation for my desire to eat meat.

On Purist Deterioration

2006-05-26T18:37:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, I was vegan. It seemed like the morally right thing to do, and it was also a good way to satisfy my food control issues without becoming bulimic. It certainly wasn't easy, but i managed it for a while. What pushed me off the vegan edge, was a research project at work. We were planning to write a cheese brochure, and I had to do the research. I read websites and books and pamphlets from marketing boards of European countries. It seemed a very elaborate mythology, with explanations for bubbles and waxy textures, uses for this mold or the quality of a certain pasture. We never made the brochure, but I couldn't resist the world I had learned about. I fell off the vegan edge.
I met a chef this weekend, and he told me he doesn't even bother to make soup without chicken stock. It got me to thinking about how many times I have eaten meat in my 14 years of vegetarianism. The problem is that I like restaurants, and unless it's a Buddhist vegetarian joint, you're never totally sure if a meatless dish is really meatless. How many sushi dinners have I started with a bowl of miso soup, telling myself that the fishy smell is seaweed? Until this year, i didn't even know that fish powder was a possibility.
Then this past year, I had another eye opening experience at work, learning about this new program at the Vancouver Aquarium. Local chefs subscribe to the Ocean Wise Program, and on their menus, indicate which items are sustainably fished and Ocean Wise approved. The aquarium provides the research and list of BC fisheries that are adhering to principles of sustainability, i.e., a fishery with a long term plan, caught with minimal by-catch, without damage to the ocean environment.
It's so ethical and seems harmless. All the reasons I said I am vegetarian seem to be addressed.
I am on another edge.

Granville Island Market

2006-05-26T18:36:00.000-07:00

My partner Mariko and I started out the day at home with a latte, smoothie and Mont Royal bagel.
The latte was more like a mocha without the whipped cream, and the smoothie was organic raspberry with Island Farms yogurt and soy milk. Organic peanut butter on the last bagel in the house, and I was out the door to a Saturday morning meeting. By 11:00 am, I was on my way back to the house to meet up with Mariko and my friend Helen for brunch. The plan was to meet a Lolita's, the new Mexican place in the Davie Village. It was pouring rain, and Helen gave up her bike ride just by our house, so when I arrived, she was hanging out in our apartment in her underwear while her pants finished in the dryer.
Mariko, generally quite shy, seemed very relaxed, playing host to my pantless friend. I know that they say if you feel shy, you ought to imagine folks in their underwear, and I guess it really is quite disarming. Fom now on, I think I'll enact a pants off policy for any guests.
Everyone got their pants and rain gear on and we headed to Lolita's for a tropical brunch. I had Huevos Reveultos, which was eggs and baby potatoes, served with warm flour tortillas, beans and green salsa. Helen had the Huevos Rancheros, which was similar, but with plantains, and Mariko's Mexican variation on the benny was eggs stacked on cornbread with chipotle hollandaise sauce. There was considerably less chatter as we devoured these very excellent meals. All had Vietnamese style coffee, which, oddly, did not seem out of place at this Mexican restaurant. The coffees came with a choice of coconut milk, or condensed milk. After sampling Mariko's condensed milk version, I regretted my coconut milk request, as it wasn't nearly as rich or sweet. Helen was not of the same mind and described the condensed milk as "sickeningly sweet".
We met up with mister Kim, and Mariko went on home, while I accompanied Kim on the aquabus to Granville Island for a shopping trip. We visited the South China Seas shop where I picked up some Thai Basil for a curry tonight-carrying through today's coconut theme. While browsing their selection of exotic limes and young gingers, I noticed that Torsten, my favourite video store employee from the now defunct Celluloid Drugstore, was behind the counter. Many times at Celluloid, I enjoyed lengthy discussions with him about the merits of new and foreign films. We didn't always agree, but he always had an opinion and a recommendation.
It turns out that he has been making a weekly appearance behind this counter for almost a year. He seems as passionate about good food as he is about film, and managed to upsell me on an entirely new leafy green, something similar to a kale, which he assures me will go well with my curry and rice.
I tried to headhunt him for Capers, and got his email address before leaving.
Kim had to pick up some things from his office, which was just up the street, and afterwards, we stopped in to Patisserie LeBeau for some genuine Belgian waffles. Kim tried the new Cheese and Green Onion savoury waffle, which he had warmed and wrapped in paper. I tried a bite and thought it needed some salt. Kim said it tasted like an omellette. As it was late in the day, and nearly closing time, they were out of their signature chocolate Liege Waffles. These waffles has imported Belgian sugar and butter. The bits of sugar are pebble sized and crunch. You eat them like pastries, and the counter person told us that in Belgium they are sold at stalls on the street.
I had the chance to meet Monsieur Lebeau last year. He was extremely committed to his bakery, and seemed to love to tell the story of each ingredient and why it was the best of it's kind. The waffles aren't health food, but the crunch of the sugar is really pleasing and is the perfect companion to a nice americano.
With waffles and Thai Basil tucked into my carrying bag, we made our way back to the little ferry and finally, home to the West End.
It's almost dinner time!