Monthly Archives: November 2008

Missing Her Moments

I’m writ­ing this in my head
some­where between Belleville and Oshawa
as Leonard Cohen croons to me
on the stereo about miss­ing some­thing.

I’m try­ing to put this
togeth­er in verse;
it’s the only way that makes sense.
Maybe because the songs he sings are too good,
or I’m still affect­ed by the last time I had
strep throat and we read
Susan Musgrave poems in bed.

So much for swear­ing
that I’ll nev­er write like this again.

I won­der why she ends her phras­es
the way she does,
about whether her titles come from
those clever lit­tle moments,
or vice-ver­sa.

Maybe I can fig­ure out how they do it
and I can express what it felt like to hug
her before leav­ing,
about how I did­n’t real­ize how hard I was
doing it until I let go and felt her
breathe again.

She would­n’t admit that she’d miss me
until I did it first. She had
said it more than me, last time, you see.

She had paid it for­ward,
now it was time for me to pay it back.

Someone To Take Care Of Me

It’s times like this I wish I had some­one to take care of me1, because I’m tired of tak­ing care of myself.

  1. Pat once told me there should be a per­son in every group who’s always con­trolled, calm, and togeth­er (in case of emer­gency, or oth­er­wise), and he tries to be this per­son. It must be true, because he’s my rock, the friend who has nev­er let me down. I once asked him if this idea extend­ed to his mar­riage, and he told me that it applied to 90% of the time. But for the oth­er 10%, when he’s tired, unmo­ti­vat­ed, and does­n’t care any­more, Jenny takes over, and he admit­ted to me that he’s become depen­dent on this. [↩]

Birthday Surprises

My friends know I don’t cel­e­brate my birth­day, because I don’t believe in rit­u­als1. I went through most of Thursday with­out any­one men­tion­ing any­thing, aside from Louise call­ing me from the road, remind­ing me that we were going out for lunch the next day — which the three of us do on our birth­days at work.

So when I got home around 9:30 that night — tired and hun­gry after Tai Chi — I was sur­prised to find a let­ter taped to my front door. This let­ter lead to my birth­day game:

Then, before I went to bed, I real­ized I had two phone mes­sages:

Hearing Dan and his fam­i­ly singing was awe­some, but hear­ing my dad’s voice was some­thing else. He had nev­er called to wish me hap­py birth­day him­self; it was a day only my mom would remem­ber, and she would always pass the phone to him.

It seems like every year I expect noth­ing to hap­pen, but I end up being sur­prised in one way or anoth­er.

  1. And this was before I dis­cov­ered Taoism [↩]

Synergy

I’ve been blessed with friends who paint, sculpt, carve, design, sing, and com­pose, and I’ve been for­tu­nate enough to find a print­er and framer who are artists them­selves in what they do. Even though they have dif­fer­ent medi­ums and ways of express­ing them­selves, they’re all dri­ven by a sense of pas­sion. Some can explain where it comes from, some can’t, but you can tell it’s root­ed deep with­in their beings.

Passionate peo­ple have always attract­ed me. When you talk to them, you become filled with ebul­lient ener­gy. You feed off each oth­er, like a dia­logue of ideas and inspi­ra­tion.

It’s warm­ing. It’s mov­ing.

Together, you become some­thing that’s greater than you are by your­self.