Delivering gold…
If you believe in the work you’ve put in you’ll get the results…
Jon Montgomery, Canada’s Skeleton Gold Medalist
The night before the Opening Ceremonies for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games I had a dream that I was washing the morning dishes,
in front of this fabulous big picture window…
As I looked out the window,
admiring the beautiful garden,
I could hear the sound of Canada Geese with my bird ears…
The honking amplified,
and then all of a sudden the skein synchronized itself into a vertical flyby,
flashing the underside of their tail feathers to show me,
that each one of them had been stenciled with the image of a Canadian flag,
as I stood at the sink with my hands in warm soapy water…
I have no idea what it means but I woke up happy,
and with a sense of everything being in perfect alignment…
Calling a name that's lighter than air...
After cleaning the fridge,
and vacuuming under the couch,
I rode my bike to work on some pottery for the late afternoon…
At the intersection of Quebec and Terminal,
I waited for pedestrians to pass and I noticed that the Great One was sitting in the passenger seat of a Buick Enclave…
A police officer in charge of civilian security approached me…
He said,
If you step up onto the curb with your bike,
in just a moment you’ll get to see Wayne Gretzky go by…
I flipped the bird and said,
You must mean that Wayne Gretzky is going to get to see me…
Tell him that if he rolls down his window,
I’ll clean his clock for him…
Free of charge…
Mr. Policeman wasn’t sure how to take in the information and direct traffic at the same time…
Not everyone can Crosby a Hiller in a shootout…
I quickly reassured the constable before things got defensive,
Don’t worry,
it’s hands free technology…
He won’t even know what hit him,
but he’ll definitely feel it,
later…
With a word she can get what she came for...
I’m with you…
Last Sunday I was cleaning up the house,
as per the usual,
and I found a book under the bathtub…
I watched a critical thought cross my mind…
A thought like,
What is this GD Double-Daring Book for Girls and why is it under the bathtub???
I considered a rant and a rave,
and then remembered that I’d put it there after I used it as a surface,
to paint my nails…
I sat in my pink velvet chair and opened the book to a page about the Underground Railroad…
What I found on the page were some clues to what I’d been feeling in my body,
but didn’t have the words for…
I read about Harriet Jacobs,
author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl published in the 1850’s…
When I got to the part about how Harriet lived in a tiny attic barely big enough to hold her,
for seven years,
and how she watched her son and daughter grow up through a peephole in the floor,
I lost my mind and fell into a tunnel,
of unrequited love,
clearing karma for about seven minutes of Pacific Standard Time…
That evening Starshine and Little Gem were back from their other home,
and while we sat on the couch together Starshine looked at me intently…
I asked her what she could see…
She said,
The skin on your neck looks like the twisted lines of a rope…
And as soon as I said,
That’s interesting because I feel like I’m gagging,
the sensation lifted and was gone,
like yesterday’s news…
She makes it work out...
I had a dream a year or so ago that a woman brought me a juicy delicious baby boy…
She handed him to me and said,
He needs to be fed…
I put my nose in the folds of his baby-fat neck,
took a deep inhale,
and knew that he was mine…
I asked her if the boy had a name…
She said, Not yet…
I told her what his name was,
as clear as day…
And I asked about Starshine…
The woman told me that she was with a different man than the one who had the boy…
I cried out loud,
Why do these men keep taking all of my babies away???
and I woke up with the weight of an anvil on my chest…
We think that these are stories of yesterday,
but they are not…
They’re still with us in the here and now,
locked away in the blood and bones of our aching bodies,
until we are still enough to listen to what they are trying to tell us…
And what they’re telling me is that this time it is going to be different…
Time slows down whenever you're around...
On Tuesday after my meeting with Coyote,
I went to the school gym to get out the hula-hoops…
One of the Kindergarten teachers brought a little girl to me…
She was crying and her teacher thought that some hula-hooping would help her feel better…
I held her hand and we took our hula-hoops outside,
into the bright sunshine…
Other children joined us…
Many of them were more interested in rolling the plastic hoops down the hill,
in a real exploration of gravity…
Exploring the possibility of knowledge that one just can’t get at on a worksheet…
I asked the little girl her name…
She said,
Je suis Promis…
And the little girl twirling beside her said,
Je suis Amour,
and we come from Africa…
I said,
I am so happy that you are here…
Thank you for coming…
If you ever see a mother with children whom you suspect has just come from Africa as part of a refugee claim,
watch what you’re thinking,
and feeling…
And be aware of the fact that you may well be in the presence of a growing miracle of freedom…
An evolution of her story,
and our story all mixed up together…
And be aware of your own power to strengthen people,
by tending to human miracles with ribbons of love and promise…
I remember someone asking me,
seven and a half years ago,
Where is it that you learned to endure so much???
I said,
I don’t know…
It’s just the way that I am…
I have loved you for so long...
The 11th hour…
Healing is a slow process…
Steve Yzerman on Team Canada’s walking wounded…
Sometimes,
when I find myself in a wormhole,
I want to let my fingers do the walking on my super old cell phone and call Eckhart Tolle,
because I don’t know how else to reach him…
I want to ask him some of my big questions like,
Mein freund,
Vat are you zinking about???
But he might find that confrontational,
or inappropriate…
The other more serious,
heart of darkness questions I’d pose to him are:
Where exactly is NOW???
and
How would you suggest that I stay there???
I’m not so sure that Eckhart’s NOW,
and mine,
are in the same core sampling of time…
Or that,
despite the theory of a dead man,
we are of seminal work…
On the other hand,
that Übermensch Jeff Paterson and I,
are so on the same page when it comes to Alex Burrows,
that I’ve sent him a message to get the H.E. double hockey sticks out of my head,
or I’ll charge him with trespassing…
And more importantly I’ve sent an invisible memo to Steve Yzerman,
with a suggestion that he rectify the Ex-lax move of not putting Number 14 on stand-by,
for Team Canada,
Pronto!
before someone loses an eye,
or a firm grip on reality…
I don’t give a rat’s ass what anyone has to say about whining,
and being a Mama’s boy…
It takes one to know one,
and I anticipated that after Burrows dropped some well-deserved mustard gas on NHL officiating,
he would stay quiet and buckle down to business…
As Paterson concurred in last week’s Georgia Straight,
Alex did exactly that,
with the unbridled enthusiasm,
and honour,
of a truthful hockey player,
who sometimes gets confused about whether he’s on an ice rink,
or at the edge of a swimming pool…
Believe me,
I’ve been there…
Tiny bubbles in the wine...
While Alex has been working with his team,
I’ve been working with mine on some multi-dimensional house cleaning….
Last Fall some adult and infant bones were discovered in the dirt,
under a thick cement foundation,
during a house renovation across the street,
in preparation for a high-stakes olympic rental…
After reading The Man Game I’m getting more specifics about what really went down in this city’s whitewashed history,
and what the cracks and flashing lights in my house are requesting…
Making Spirit bright,
and reuniting lost souls,
is going to take a lot more than some dancing in the streets…
We’ll all need to go coyote and make this a cooperative effort,
by feeling everything…
Bearing witness to all of the forgotten stories who are sitting at the banks of the underground streams,
and in the bedrock from Surrey to Whistler…
Characters seeping up through storm drains,
and into Skytrains…
They’ll tell you exactly what you need to do if you’re willing to listen,
with the careful whispers of a good friend…
I’d like to see Yzerman pulling strings,
so that we can see one corner of our Bermuda Triangle make mincemeat out of Sweden on home ice,
and ensure that C.T.V. cameras aren’t panning for Fool’s Gold on the day of the closing ceremonies…
By applying our second brains to the project,
we may be able to get some gentle,
dependable,
over-night relief without moving a muscle…
You know what they say about the size of a man’s Harvard education…
It isn’t what he knows,
it’s what he does with it…
And in flamenco,
when a man is all about a loud fast desplante,
it’s enough already…
You just want him off the stage,
to make way for a performer who knows how to use his first mouth with real duende…
At the end of February,
visitors to Vancouver will be leaving with more than five rings worth of souvenirs in their luggage…
They’ll be returning with memories that will slip right through homeland security,
washed with germs of yesterday,
today,
and tomorrow…
And you steal right under my door...
Canuck'd 