She said duh!!

This is the ninth of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

This champagne cork is from February 14th, 2009. We had something to celebrate.

I held Dave's present behind my back. I don't know why I bothered, because he was still in the bathroom, getting dressed after his shower, and he couldn't possibly see it yet. I waited, sitting at the foot of Mom's bed with my legs hanging over the side. She always took the couch and let us sleep in her bed when we visited, and didn't split up the unmarried cohabitating sinners by making Dave sleep in another room. She knew he wasn't just some guy I kept bringing over, and I was grateful for that.

He came in, closed the door quietly behind him, and stood at the mirror to brush his hair into place. I watched him. Mirror-Dave caught me watching, and smiled.

When he turned to me, I brought my hand around and handed him his present - a small photo book I'd put together. With hours of care and effort, I'd assembled a photo timeline of our whole relationship to that point, from our first email exchange to the latest event we'd attended together. I'd called it "The Book of Dave and Jen". At the last moment, before sending the final version to be printed, I had taken a deep breath and added "(volume 1)" to the title. I had worried a little that I might be tempting fate, but it was done and stayed done.

"Happy Valentine's Day!"

I held my breath as he looked at it. He flipped through a few pages, looked at a few pictures.

"This looks great, thanks!" 

That was it? I wanted to take a minute to look through it with him, to talk about the moments I'd included, to reminisce about all our adventures and how much we'd done together! I wanted acknowledgement of all the work and mushy romantic thinking that went into it! But he was distracted. Preoccupied. He put the book down on the bed beside me.

"It's your turn," he said. "Are you ready for your present?"

I nodded.

He put a hand in his pocket. He left it there, and took a deep breath.

"We've known each other for 4 years now, and I can't imagine my life without you." He took his hand from his pocket and opened up a small velvet box to show me a delicate ring. "Will you marry me?" So very simple. No speeches, no fireworks, just a man with a question and his mother's ring in a velvet box.

My eyes danced between his hopeful expression and the little box he held out in front of him. I was entirely unprepared for what was happening. I'd been hoping, for months, that he'd finally make up his mind and ask me, but I didn't expect it to be here. In my Mom's bedroom. On Valentine's Day. Before breakfast.

I was so stunned, so surprised, that I couldn't even figure out what I was supposed to say. So I blurted out exactly what the voice in my head was saying:

"Duh!"

He didn't respond immediately, so in the quiet bewilderment of the moment, I said it again.

"Duh!"

"What does that mean? I don't think you're German."

I laughed. As cool and cucumbery as he was trying to be, his mistake revealed the true state of his nerves. "Da is Russian, not German, silly!"

He threw his arms wide in mock frustration. "I still haven't gotten the answer I'm waiting for!"

I stood up and wrapped my arms around him.

"Yes, of course, yes yes yes!"

"Oh, thank God."

Reindeer prints

This is the eighth of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

Potatoes make good reindeer hooves. This is something my parents taught me.

I must have been 7 or so, because I was sharing the purple room with my sister then, and my parents had moved their bedroom down into the half-finished basement space. Before that, all three of us kids shared one small room, with bunk beds for my sister and me, and a crib for my brother. In the purple room, our bunk beds were taken apart and put against opposite walls. I had the window side.

Christmas morning, we woke up excited, as all kids do, and rushed to see what Santa had left us. But there was more than just a pile of presents waiting in the living room. On the floor, making a wobbly circuit from the porch door to the tree and back again, was a set of muddy tracks. Santa's stack of cookies was reduced to stray chocolate chips and crumbs, and a carrot stub sat by the plate. Santa came in for his cookies last night, my parents explained, and one of his reindeer must have come inside with him because he smelled the carrot we'd left him! How exciting!

I smiled and played along, but I knew the truth.

Sleeping was never one of my favorite things to do, so I was still awake when my parents quietly moved the wrapped presents from their hiding place and stacked them under the tree. I heard the noise and tiptoed to my door, inching it open just a crack. That's when I saw Mom on her hands and knees, pressing something carefully to the floor. She crawled backwards a few inches and pressed it down again. One by one, she laid down a trail of reindeer hoofprints, crawling backwards across the floor so as not to disturb the fresh paint. Dad stood by the tree, crumbling a piece of the last cookie onto the plate. 

The next morning, after we opened all the presents, I went to throw out the carrot stub. In the trash sat half a potato, cut to look like a reindeer hoof, stained with paint.

Interdit

This is the seventh of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

We selected a small bottle of Bordeaux with a screw cap, because we didn't have a corkscrew in our backpacks. I knew that we probably weren't supposed to drink wine in the park, despite the fact that we were in Paris, and we were planning lunch in a Parisian park. As far as I was concerned, wine seemed compulsory for the occasion. Europeans drink wine like water, right? France practically invented the stuff! They give it to their kids! Besides, we could claim ignorance of the rules if anyone declared our bottle was interdit.

It was a perfect day. Not too hot, and just cloudy enough that we could look up at the Eiffel tower rising into the sky beside us without blinking at the sun's glare. I pulled the baguette from its crinkly paper wrapper and tore pieces off for us while Dave opened the package of Brie with his utility knife. With the beautiful Bordeaux poured into paper cups, we started our lunch. It was the best Brie of all time.

A moment later, Dave poked me and motioned for me to look up. When I did, I saw a very large man in a military uniform walking purposefully towards us. He made no effort whatsoever to hide the M-16 rifle hanging at his side. Oh boy, I thought. Here comes the interdit. The man stopped a meter away from our picnic and looked at Dave.

"As-tu du feu?"

Dave, somewhat unnerved by the giant armed man asking questions in a foreign language, looked to me for help.

I smiled at him and shrugged my shoulders. "Desolee, Monsieur, je ne fume pas. Lui non plus."

The giant man nodded. "Ah. D'accord. Merci." He turned and walked towards a small group sitting a few meters away.

"What was that about?" Dave asked.

"The guy wanted a light. I told him we don't smoke."

"I am very glad you speak French."

The Chocolate Moose

This is the sixth of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

Moose on a motorcycle

In Grandmaman's living room, under the squat black-and-white TV, was a shelf that held a small collection of books for the grandchildren. Two hardcover Tintin comic books, one Asterix comic book, an Ou Est Charlie (Quebec's translation of Where's Waldo), and one English book - Too-Loose, the Chocolate Moose.

I have to think that the book was purchased with my siblings and me in mind, as we were the only grandkids who spoke enough English to enjoy an English book. It's funny how, so many years later, I remember the physical book itself more than the story it contained. All I can remember about the story is that it was about a moose who was made of chocolate, and who didn't fit in because he left chocolate drippings everywhere and it made him really easy to find when he played hide-and-seek. The poor moose in the illustrations looked like he was dripping with mud, not chocolate, or at least I thought so at the time. Actually, if I'm being really honest, I was sometimes suspicious that he was made of poop. Hey, I was young. Poop was funny.

The book was square, thin, with a hard beige cover and thick paper pages. It smelled funny. I thought, as a child, that maybe they had tried to make the book smell like chocolate and failed miserably. Years later, a walk through a used bookstore, with its musty bookish smell, still brings back memories of the Chocolate Moose. It brings me right back to being small, sitting on Grandmaman's compact square ottoman, the one with the four hard buttons that made divots in the deep brown faux-leather, quietly flipping through that book while the grownups laughed about grownup things in the kitchen.

The best game you can name

This is the fifth of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

Hockey jersey from local New Brunswick team

Hockey doesn't feel real here. Sure, there are tons of loyal Capitals fans around, judging by the personalized license plates, but this isn't a hockey town the way Montreal is. I miss my Canadiens. I miss listening to the games in French, and I miss watching them with my brother.

We loved making jokes out of the players' names. Plekanec was one of my favorites. Good ol' Pleck-a-Neck. Zednik and Kostitsyn were pretty good too, because of the high consonant concentration. And when the team gives you someone with a name like Bouillon, they're asking you to have fun with it. If he looked strong during a game, he was Bouillon de boeuf - beef broth. If he was playing badly, he was Bouillon de poulet (chicken broth). Inevitably, when Bouillon scored, we'd make his name into "Boo-yah!" like a couple of dorks. As for the player named Bonk, every time he scored a goal, we'd bonk heads. Naturally.

The year before I moved to the States, the Canadiens made the Stanley Cup playoffs. My bro and I put on our team jerseys and settled in his room to watch a game on his TV. He sank into his big green easy chair and I flung myself onto the unmade bed. The music at the arena drowned out the TV announcers' voices. Spotlights tracked across the surface of the ice. Player after player was introduced over the loudspeaker to the roar of the crowd. The Molson Centre* was packed with excited fans who'd been lucky enough to score themselves expensive and hard-to-get playoff tickets. It seemed as though everyone, in every seat, was waving a white towel emblazoned with the team logo. My brother stood up and left the room for a moment, returning with two white washcloths. We whirled them for all we were worth every time our guys rushed the opposing net.

I can't quite get myself as psyched when I'm watching a Capitals game. Even when the Habs make the playoffs and I have a chance to see them play on TV, I don't pull out my jersey. It feels silly when it's just me. I hereby declare that the next time the Canadiens make it to the playoffs, I will pack my jersey and a white towel, and head home to Montreal to watch a game with my bro.

*It's the Bell Center now, but I can never seem to remember that name.

Night Owl

This is the fourth of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here. Note: it's entirely possible some of these memories are inexact, but I'm sticking with them anyway.

 

I surveyed the yellow options and selected "Dandelion" from the pack. Slowly, I drew a neat circle, filling its middle in with even pressure. The orb of my sun completed, I reached for blunt-tipped "Orange". It took a sharper point to get the rays just right, so I peeled back the thin paper and twisted the crayon carefully in the sharpener embedded in the back of the box. Humming, I swung my feet back and forth as I drew.

"All right, honey, bedtime." Mom approached the table, cradling her coffee mug in both hands. "Go brush your teeth."

I looked up from my paper.

"I can't, Mom. I have homework."

"In kindergarten?"

"Yeah, Mrs. W wants us to draw pictures and then we're all going to bring our pictures to class tomorrow and show them to the class and talk about them to everyone."

"Well, you look like you're almost done. Five minutes, then teeth."

"But Mom, I have to do more."

"More? How many more?"

"TEN!" I held up both hands, fingers spread, to show her just how many.

Mom put down her coffee cup. The spoon rattled. She sat in the chair next to mine and spoke at my level.

"There is no way your teacher wants you to do ten pictures tonight. You must have heard wrong."

I panicked.

"But I'll get in trouble, Mom! I need to do my homework!" A lip trembled. Tears threatened.

Mom looked over at Dad, standing in the kitchen doorway. He shrugged. Mom shook her head. I sniffed, put a white page on top of my drawing, and started my next picture. A nice juicy red, for an apple...

Three pictures past my bedtime, Mom pushed her chair from the table and stood up.

"This is insane. She's six." She walked across the living room to where the phone hung from the wall. She flipped through the little notebook on the side table, picked up the handset, and dialed. My legs stopped swinging.

"Hello, Mrs. W? I'm Jennifer's mother... I'm calling about the homework that Jennifer's working on tonight. I realize she's taking some classes with the first-graders now, but this seems an excessive amount for her age."

A pause.

"The drawings... she's doing the ten pictures she has to talk about in class tomorrow."

A longer pause.

"Oh."

Mom turned to look at my father, raised an eyebrow, and turned to me. I shifted uncomfortably and looked down at my pile of crayons.

"I see." Mom turned back towards the phone. "Well. I'm very sorry I bothered you."

She hung up and crossed her arms across her chest. I looked really hard at my crayons. I tensed, ready for some yelling. Instead, incredibly, I heard Mom laugh.

"You got me, kiddo. Now put those crayons in the box and we'll talk about this tomorrow. Teeth. Bed. Hustle."

Bonjour, hi.

This is the third of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here.

Grenouille/Frog

I'm a Frenglish-Canadian.

You see, I was raised with two first languages, and have never been quite sure which box to check for "mother tongue" on official forms. I have a very English first name and a very French last name and have consequently had my name impressively mangled by both English and French speakers over the years. One French co-worker called me "Jane" for the two years I worked with her, because she just could not wrap her speech centers around "Jen".

I've never been comfortable defining a spot for myself along the language continuum. In Quebec, you're Francophone or Anglophone, and your social world will change according to your label. You read The Gazette, or Le Journal de Montreal. You either went to McGill or to UdeM. You spent Saturday nights at the bars on Crescent Street, or on Rue Saint-Denis. There were some who crossed into foreign territory, of course - it's not as though there were language guards at the doors - but those people were definitely in the minority.

As a kid, I never really understood that there was an unspoken divide. We spoke French with Mom's side of the family, and English with Dad's side. It was English at home for the most part, but from kindergarten onward, I was in a French Immersion program, speaking French half the day. We didn't just have French class, we had classes in French. Maybe one year, history and ecology would be in French, with math and music in English, and the next year it would change.

I didn't feel like an Anglo, but I didn't feel quite French either. That lack of specific language identity never bothered me until I got a little older and get a taste of bullying and language discrimination. I know, right? White girl in Canada, who am I to talk about discrimination? But when you're walking to the city pool with your sister and a friend, and some French kids no bigger or badder than yourselves throw gravel at you because you're speaking English, and tell you to "Go home, fucking English"*, what else can you call it?

The kids were idiots, obviously, and we ignored them and continued on to the swimming pool. I wasn't traumatized by the event and I'm not crippled by it now. But it stayed with me. Every time I ask myself whether I'm Anglo or Franco, I remember sting of the gravel and the bite of their words. I'm both, and I'm neither. I can never remember the French word for peacock or the English word for pamplemousse. I stumble over the gendered nouns of French, and yet I'll "put my coat" or "pass the vacuum" and not see a damn thing wrong with what I'm saying, despite the funny looks I get. My accent comes out when I drink, and when I'm really mad, or watching hockey, I curse in French.

I'm just going to define myself with my made-up "Frenglish-Canadian" and if you don't like it, you can piss off, câlisse.

*One, I was home. Two, they insulted us in English. If you're going to insult me, do it right.

It's not real, but it's spectacular

This is the second of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here.

This is not an ornament. I am totally cheating.

For my family, the only acceptable Christmas tree was a real one. Not that we ever trekked out into the woods with an axe and hauled back a fir, of course. We were suburbanites in the 80's, which meant we would go to one of the places that popped up in grocery store parking lots in December, pick out the perfect specimen, and crawl back home with an 8-foot tree strapped to the minivan roof. Every turn on the trip home was exciting, as the tree strained against its twine restraints and the trunk shifted slightly left or right, just barely visible through the rear window if you were looking for it, which of course we kids were.

My husband recently talked me into switching to an artificial tree. A "7.5ft lighted Grand Fir with 400 warm white faceted LED mini-lights", on sale at Target and with excellent reviews online, naturally. It's nice. It fits the space. It doesn't need daily watering, or daily chasing the cats away from the nasty tree water. It doesn't drop needles everywhere. It never has any gaps between the branches, because we can fluff them up however we like. We don't need to saw off the bottom of the trunk to make it level and to let it take up water. There's minimal risk of harassment from cartoon chipmunks stowed away between the branches. Most importantly for my husband, it's pre-lit, which means that he doesn't need to fight with strands of lights, untangling them and stuffing them deep into the tree.

I think I'll always prefer the idea of a real tree, but because my husband does most of the work involved with putting it up and taking it down, I felt that I should back down and let him get us a tree that would be easier for him to deal with (I have a similar policy when it comes to purchasing tools or yard equipment). I'm allergic to Christmas trees, unfortunately. Two years ago when we had a real tree and I decided to do the hard work of jamming light strands into place, I ended up with scratches on my arms from the sticky branches. The scratches quickly puffed up into angry welts and my arms itched for three days despite the Benadryl stupor I placed myself in. I guess you could say we bought an artificial tree for medical reasons.

I miss some things about real trees. One is the annual family outing to select the perfect tree. Doing that as a child, I felt like Charlie Brown or Linus, wandering through the brightly-lit tree lot, looking for just the right tree to bring home. We needed one that wasn't too small or too tall, one that wasn't too skinny or too fat, one that had branches in all the right places and that was pliant and fresh. It was a family quest. Each of us branching out, hunting, bending thin branches to test their flexibility, and shouting to the others when a good candidate was found. It's difficult for me to imagine the annual trek to the garage to drag out the Christmas tree box becoming a treasured tradition for our future children.

More than the hunt, more than anything, I miss the smell of a real tree. All through December, arriving home and opening the front door used to mean walking into Christmas. Even before the decorations or tree were visible, the fir smell would get up into my nose and push familiar buttons, making me feel warm and excited for the holiday. My Christmas spirit, it seems, is tied to my sense of smell more than I realized. Maybe a real fir wreath, placed near the door, will awaken that side of my Christmas spirit again.

The tree is beautiful, though, regardless of its chemical composition. A huge part of its beauty, for me, is our precious collection of Christmas ornaments. We each have our own favorites from our younger days (thanks, Moms, for keeping them for us), and we add to them every year as we move through the world together. Every vacation, every new adventure, beings us a new ornament to tie to those memories so that we can revisit them every year as we decorate the tree. And now that our tree is up, and our dear memories are on display, we've got Christmas in the house. No humbugs for me this year.

The advantage of sensible shoes

This is the first of my "Advent Calendar" Christmas ornament posts. For some background information about this project and why I'm challenging myself to complete it, see here.

Big Ben

We rested for a while in the common room of the hostel while Marketa gingerly applied band-aids to her blisters. We had spent a full day hopping on and off a big red bus that looped past all the guidebook must-sees. Even with a double-decker covering most of the ground for us, hiking around the streets of London in plastic flip-flops was an unhealthy choice.

"Thank God we saw everything today!" Marketa pulled socks over her band-aids. "I need a break!"

I sighed. Maybe she needed a break, but the light was fading outside, the city was starting to twinkle, and I was going to miss it all, stuck in a cheap hostel with a bunch of loud Germans in bright pants.

Dave noticed my distress and spoke up.

"My feet are okay. Was there other stuff you wanted to see?"

I hesitated. I caught Marketa's eye and she waved me off with her hand.

"Go, I'm fine. I have tea and there's a TV."

"Are you sure?" I felt guilty leaving her behind, even if I craved some time alone with Dave. She had agreed to let him join us on our European adventure, even though I'd just met him two months before the trip, and I didn't want to make her regret the decision.

"Yeah, look, there's a soccer game on. My feet are dead. Don't let me stop you from going back out, if you have the energy."

I shot a grateful smile to Marketa, then a delighted smile to Dave. We studied our map and planned a bus route, then stepped back outside in our sensible walking shoes, ready to see London at night.

We found ourselves by the Houses of Parliament as Big Ben was chiming the hour from the top of the clock tower. Lights made the tower glow like warm gold, and across the Thames the London Eye was a brilliant silvery ring. I reached for Dave's hand. As he laced his fingers through mine, I pulled my hand back. He looked up at me, concerned. 

"We got it wrong." I told him. "Try again."

"Wrong? Holding hands? How can you get that wrong?"

"Your thumb needs to be the one on top or it feels all weird." I reached over again and wove my fingers in differently. I nodded, satisfied. "See, now your thumb rests on mine and it's much better. You get to be the dominant thumb. Not that I'm saying you're in charge in general, though. Just the thumb." I grinned.

"Riiiiight."

We walked for a while, but I don't remember where we went. We talked a whole lot, but I don't remember what we talked about. I know we ended up resting at Trafalgar square, sitting on a stone step beside the regal lions at the base of Nelson's Column. I leaned on Dave and we stared out at the city lights, enjoying the view and our moment together. 

Soon, the teenagers making out below us on the steps attracted the attention of a couple of police officers, and we decided to move on.

"What do you want to see next?" Dave offered his hand to help me up.

"I'd love to see the bridge. Do you think it's too far to walk?"

He smiled. "Nah, we can make it."

December blog project

I've spent a month talking myself into and out of attempting a blog project.

My writing class has been helpful, to a degree, but it's becoming clearer to me that what I really need right now is practice. I can write, sometimes quite well, but I don't do it often enough to feel like I'm a writer, which is where I want to be. Nobody can be a musician if they only play their instrument for three hours a week, and it's silly of me to think that writing is any different.

But I procrastinate. I find other things to do. Not because I don't enjoy writing. I love it. But I have so much self-doubt that I'm afraid to put anything out there. Recipes and home improvement posts are one thing, but the "real" stuff is harder. 

You see, I want to write a book. A real book, on paper. And Kindle, I suppose. I have vague ideas about what I want it to be, and I have some stories I need to build on. But I have no idea how to take my ideas and stories and make them into something people will enjoy reading. I need to find my voice. I need to learn to edit. I need a plan.

I got the idea, last month, to take some of these stories, as elemental as they are in their current form, and get them out of my head and into words. And I could build the stories around my beautiful Christmas ornaments, and make it an advent calendar of stories for the readers of my blog. 

The problem with this is it's already December, and I only have one story written. I can spit out a story a day for the month, but I know that without more time to play with them and edit them, they won't necessarily be very good. If they're not good, I don't want to subject my readers to them. You see my quandary? If I can't do it well, I don't want to do it. But I should do it.

So I will do it.

The stories might be rough around the edges. Some may be written more like a memoir, some more "novel"-ish, and some might just be the bones. I seem to have multiple writing voices, which I need to learn to melt into one clear voice. That's really hard. But I'll do my very best to get one story, as polished as I can manage it, out each day through Christmas. Keep in mind that these are mostly meant to be components in larger stories - they're rough drafts. Bear with me, and maybe, hopefully, enjoy.