Thanks for the Memory: Part 2

My Uncle Bill’s mother, known as Aunt Emma to the kids in my family, was a lovely lady. She was very gentle and kind, and was extremely loving to her grandchildren. Aunt Emma fell victim to Alzheimer’s during middle age; young enough that I think it would now be considered early onset. She slid so rapidly into dementia that she was placed almost immediately into long-term care. Alzheimer’s patients display a wide variety of symptoms, and Aunt Emma’s disease manifested in the form of extreme agitation and rage anytime she saw a man. She would rant and rave so intensely at Uncle Bill when he came to visit that in fairly short order he stopped going altogether because he couldn’t bear to cause his mother such distress. He had to rely on reports from his sister concerning their mother’s welfare for the last few years of her life. My cousin Cam (Uncle Bill’s middle son) was especially close to his grandmother and insisted on visiting her despite his father’s cautions. Cam later told me with his eyes brimming that Aunt Emma had begun screaming and spitting at him almost as soon as he walked into her room, and had then proceeded to chase him out of the building in the same manner.

I would guess that his mother’s terrible experience with Alzheimer’s was the first thing that came to mind when Uncle Bill received his own diagnosis many years later. He privately told his son Greg that he would rather quietly step off the end of his boat at night and drown than to suffer the torturous fate he had watched his mother endure. My dad had no such precedent to draw on when he learned he had Alzheimer’s, but early in his disease I saw panic in his eyes on more than one occasion when he came back from one of his increasingly frequent dissociative states. Alzheimer’s is a terrible sentence for both its victims and their families. Dad and Uncle Bill both got to a place where they were physically present but mentally pretty well gone; like the human husks in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”. I don’t want to dwell on the pain of the disease as it has already been well documented in books, movies and articles. I would much rather remember the small mercies my dad and uncle encountered during their decline, and the extremely funny things they said and did as their memories failed.

My father was an excellent guitar player, and one would think that the requisite dexterity of his profession would have carried over at least in small part into his everyday life. This was decidedly not the case as he was one of the clumsiest people I have ever known. He was very fond of Old South frozen concentrated orange juice, and therefore made a pitcher of it about once a week to ensure there was consistently some in the fridge. This was my father’s routine for years, yet somehow he almost always cut his thumb when he opened the juice can despite the vast number of times he did it. I think his ineptitude was due in equal parts to his miserable manual dexterity and extreme impatience, but whatever the reason he almost constantly sported a bandaid on his left thumb protecting the latest wound he’d sustained while opening his Old South. What a klutz.

One time my sister Susan was visiting our father in his assisted living facility. The deterioration of his mental state had by this time rendered it functionally impossible to carry on a conversation with him, and it had become customary when visiting to turn on his TV in order to drown out the deafening silence. On this occasion Susan had tuned in to a figure skating competition. My father was looking at the screen which was no guarantee that he was actually taking in what he was seeing since he simply stared straight ahead most of the time regardless of what was in his field of vision. Susan was adding commentary here and there, oohing and aahing at the athletic feats of the skaters, reminding Dad that he wasn’t alone and trying to illicit some kind of response. After a skater had performed a particularly difficult combination of jumps, my father suddenly pointed at the screen and said, “I used to be able to do that.” My sister had just taken a sip of coffee and it almost shot through her nose as she reacted to this patently absurd statement. Here was a man who always called “a guy” when he needed something done around the house, who hadn’t strapped on a pair of skates in at least 70 years, and who was so extraordinarily uncoordinated that he consistently injured himself when opening a can of orange juice, claiming that he used to perform quadruple jumps on ice. You have to laugh to keep from crying.

My Uncle Bill never served in an actual war, and yet as his illness progressed he began to insist that he had been wounded in battle. He ended up living with his son Greg in Seattle the last several years of his life. My sister Lisa and I were visiting them when one afternoon, apropos of nothing, Uncle Bill announced how very lucky he was to have survived after being shot three times in Korea. Lisa and I both looked at Greg in surprise as this was the first we’d heard of it, and he rolled his eyes to let us know that his dad was spewing nonsense dreamt up by his failing brain. Greg then gave us a mischievous smile and said, “Watch this.” He walked over to where Uncle Bill was sitting and said, “Hey Dad, can we take a look at the bullet wounds?”, and Uncle Bill, a consummate bullshitter his whole life, didn’t skip a beat as he replied, “Oh, there’s nothing to see because they were all flesh wounds.” Pretty slick for a man slipping into dementia. The number of wounds he sustained continued to increase after he was put in care. When he claimed to have been “winged” 12 times, another resident in his facility who actually had been wounded in action took exception to his ridiculous story. He picked Uncle Bill up by his lapels and slammed him into the wall, and a fight would definitely have ensued if the nurses hadn’t intervened.

It is impossible to know exactly how Alzheimer’s disease is going to manifest in any diagnosed individual, but those afflicted usually experience confusion about the details of their current lives. For at least the last year of his life my father would often say that he had a gig later that night, although by then he had been retired for decades. He also thought that his parents and my mother were still alive despite all of them having been dead for many years. My siblings and I would correct him when he first started having these misperceptions, but as time wore on we stopped. There was no point in trying to change his mind because even if we succeeded, he would only be able to hold the truth in his head for a short while before defaulting back to his original delusion. More importantly he took great comfort in thinking he was going to see his parents later in the year and that my mother was just upstairs making dinner. Where’s the harm in letting him substitute warm memories for grief?

My Uncle Bill’s greatest confusion about his current life during the course of his decline concerned where he was living. He had lived for over 30 years in the same condo in Boston, and during that time had visited Greg in Seattle on numerous occasions. As Uncle Bill became more muddled, Greg and his brother Matt decided it would be best for their dad to move in with Greg on the west coast. Uncle Bill navigated his new city pretty well his first few years there, but eventually started occasionally getting lost when he was downtown. Greg put a card containing his phone number and a description of Uncle Bill’s condition in his dad’s wallet, and Uncle Bill knew enough to present it to strangers when he became unsure of where he was. Many was the time Greg had to leave work and pick his dad up after a concerned call from a kind bank teller or bartender.

Greg was at work one day when he received one of these calls only this time it was his father on the other end of the line. When Greg asked him where he was, he replied, “Charleston.” Greg began racking his brain trying to think of a bar or restaurant in Seattle with that name. He finally asked Uncle Bill where Charleston was (meaning on which street or what was the closest intersection) and his father replied, “In South Carolina, of course.” You can imagine the panic my poor cousin felt as he realized that his greatly confused elderly father was currently halfway across the country with no chaperone. Luckily Greg still had some family in Boston, so he calmly got the number and arrival time of Uncle Bill’s flight. Several frantic phone calls later he and his brother had bought Uncle Bill a direct ticket back to Seattle, arranged for someone to meet him at Logan airport, and found someone else to put him up for the night and get him on the flight home the next day. My cousin Matt made this into a very funny story in the retelling, but this scary incident was the catalyst for Uncle Bill’s admission into long-term care as he could clearly no longer be left home alone. He still had the faculties to book a ticket, pack a bag and get himself to the airport, but was unable to recall that he no longer lived on the east coast.

During my final visit with Uncle Bill he didn’t say a single word, but he held my hand throughout and it was clear to me that he knew who I was. That was enough. The last time I saw my father, my brother Michael and I were visiting him together. Our dad was slumped down in his wheelchair and looked worse than usual. At the end of the visit my brother left the room before me to speak with the nursing staff about our father’s alarming condition. For the whole of my life my dad had kept himself emotionally distant. I always assumed this was a defence mechanism he put in place to ensure he would never again feel the intense fear, guilt and sorrow he experienced during the war. Whenever I would express my love for him he would inevitably respond, “Thank you.” When I was leaving on that final day I leaned down, kissed him on the cheek and told him I loved him, fully expecting his usual reply. Instead he grasped my wrist and tugged on my arm with more strength than I thought he possessed, stopping me dead in my tracks. I looked him in the face and he gazed back, fully present behind eyes that had become progressively more dull and distant over the previous few years. He earnestly looked at me and clearly said, “I love you”, pausing slightly between each word to underline his intensity of feeling. Perhaps he said it because he knew this was our last meeting so it was finally safe for him to admit it, or maybe it was simply a case of a father giving his daughter a precious gift to remember him by. I choose to think it was the latter.

Thanks for the Memory: Part 1

Both my mother and her only sister Carolyn married Americans. My father was from Fall River, Massachusetts, and my Uncle Bill was born and raised in New York City. Both men enlisted to serve their country, but in different wars. Dad joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, eventually completing 31 missions as the navigator of a B-29 bomber in The Pacific Theatre. Uncle Bill enlisted as a Marine a decade later and was just about to be shipped overseas when the Korean war ended. Throughout my childhood they got along famously anytime they saw one another which never made sense to me given how outwardly different they appeared to be. My father was a musician in Toronto and consequently had friends and colleagues of every creed and colour, worked incessantly and had no set schedule. In contrast with this more cosmopolitan lifestyle, Uncle Bill was a 9 to 5 salesman in an overwhelmingly white area of New England. He had been an excellent athlete in his youth and consequently pushed his three sons into sports, accepting nothing other than excellence from them. My father’s approach to parenting was more in line with the hands-off fathering predominant amongst men of his generation.

There was one place however where they really came together. Uncle Bill’s family always visited us at Christmastime, and at some point during their stay he and Dad would inevitably play gin. This wasn’t just a casual card game though, there was a ritualistic procedure which had to be followed. After banishing us kids to the basement, the two men would silently clear one end of the dining room table. One of them would pour two glasses of scotch while the other ceremoniously took the plastic off a new deck of cards. The cards were shuffled and cut, the score pad was marked with their names, and the battle began. There was always a little money at stake just to make things more interesting, and they played for hours. During the game they would periodically rap so ferociously on the table that the eight of us in the basement would startle as though we’d all simultaneously received a jolt of electricity. I wasn’t yet aware that knocking was a part of gin and therefore attributed these noisy outbursts to an expression of frustration or anger on the part of one of the players, as opposed to simple excitement at the prospect of winning a hand. As the afternoon wore on and their knocking became progressively louder – a fact I now put down to increased drunkenness rather than growing hostility – I thought they were demonstrating a uniquely American quality: extreme competitiveness. Anyone who has met rabid Canadian hockey fans or seen an Italian soccer riot on TV can attest to the fact that competitiveness is a human trait which supersedes borders, but to this day I feel that growing up in the good ol’ U.S. of A. was the main reason for the ferocity of their contest.

My dad was the second youngest of seven children so we had masses of aunts, uncles and cousins in Fall River. As it happens a few years before I was born my Uncle Bill got a job in Massachusetts and moved his family from New Hampshire to the small town of Raynham, less than an hour from Fall River. This fortuitous bit of happenstance allowed us to easily visit with both sides of our extended family when we made our yearly summer sojourn to the States. I always enjoyed these trips because my dad’s siblings and their spouses were all colourful characters and extremely loving and welcoming. My Aunt Lida, the eldest of the group, was wisely cynical and had an accent strikingly reminiscent of Bugs Bunny, both traits largely attributable to her many years living in Brooklyn. Aunt Mary was sweetly soft spoken, Aunt Lucky was kind, and Uncle Cesar was hilarious, possessing an almost encyclopedic knowledge of corny jokes. My Aunt Alice was a gregarious cut-up and her husband, my Uncle Barber, was the most calm and centred man I have ever met. He could get his cat and dog (who hated each other) to silently sit nose-to-nose until he released them with a clap of his hands. It was like magic. I liked and loved all these people but there were no kids to play with in Fall River, so by the end of my time with there I was always anxious to leave and meet up with my cousins in Raynham.

My Uncle Bill’s sister Mary Jane and her family lived in a house just around the corner from his in Raynham, so we had her kids to play with when we came down as well. It was traditional that we would visit Horseneck Beach once or twice during each visit, and if Aunt Mary Jane’s crew came along we had a grand total of 18 people in our party – six adults and twelve kids. My Uncle Bill always had a station wagon for work and on beach days a whole giggling gaggle of us youngsters would pile unrestrained into the back. Mandatory seat belts were still some years off so we would roil about and randomly pop up like bubbles in simmering water during the hour-long drive to the beach, our appendages hilariously intertwined. The noise and movement in the back would intensify as we hit the rutted dirt path that led to the beach parking lot; the increased bumping along with the blossoming tang of briny water in our nostrils serving to amplify our anticipation and excitement.

Horseneck Beach was perfect for families given its gradual slope into deep water, fairly calm surf, and large expanse of pristine sand. One time when all 18 of us were in attendance some of the cousins and I decided to play tag in the water. I was not (and am not) a very strong swimmer. My mother had taken me for lessons but I have always hated putting my head under water so never really learned how to do a proper crawl. At one point in the game I heedlessly swam away from whoever was “it”, and when I stopped to take stock of where they were I realized I had swum far enough out that I could no longer touch bottom – farther out than I had ever been. I began frantically swimming towards shore but didn’t appear to be making any progress. As it turns out I had unwittingly found myself an undertow and no matter how hard I swam, I simply couldn’t pull myself free of it. I could see members of my family dotted throughout the water and on the beach and began waving and shouting to get their attention, but my voice got lost in the sound of the surf and the squeals of the happy bathers. I was starting to run out of energy at this point and began to panic. With so many kids to supervise the odds of any adult in my family noticing my distress were slim to none. The undertow periodically pulled me into the depths before allowing me to desperately claw my way back to the surface and the air, forcing my young mind to the realization that I was completely at the mercy of natural forces beyond my control and I could easily drown right here and now. I had almost given up hope when suddenly someone grabbed my outstretched hand and yanked me up. As my head cleared the water I looked up and saw Uncle Bill’s face, backlit by the blazing summer sun like a bronze Greek hero. His strong arms enclosed my shivering body and I clung to his chest like a barnacle to the hull of a boat. He only needed to swim for a few seconds before his feet could touch down, and then he walked me to the beach and deposited me on a towel next to my mother. He didn’t scold or tattle on me, he simply put me down exactly where I needed to be. He sent me a quick wink then turned and walked away. We both knew that a special bond had just been forged between us although neither of us said a word.

Uncle Bill came to my rescue again some years later but in a radically different setting. My grandmother, my Aunt Carolyn and my mother were all avid patrons of the arts. Mom regularly took me to ballets and to the theatre, and she owned a host of cast recordings of Broadway musicals which I listened to with and without her – to this day I can flawlessly sing “Jesus Christ Superstar” from start to finish. One of my favourite albums was “Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.” Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Bill had relocated to Boston by the time I was a teenager, and one year when I went to visit with a friend, “Jacques Brel” was playing at a local theatre. I was overjoyed when Aunt Carolyn told me she was taking us to the show. “Jacques Brel” is not a musical but rather a cabaret, meaning the performers dramatically present the songs but there is no over-arching story to tie them together. The only thing they have in common is that they were all written by the same person. The production therefore took place in a dinner theatre setting, with the audience seated at individual tables around the stage enjoying drinks (but not food) during the performance.

When we arrived at the theatre we were seated in the second tier with one final row of tables in back and slightly above us. There was a flamboyantly gay couple sitting in the third tier directly behind us and they insisted on singing along with the performers in a most unrestrained manner. While I have always been a person who likes to sing along, I have sense enough to know not to sing when at a public performance, regardless of how much I would like to or how familiar I am with the songs. After enduring two or three songs of this couple’s unwanted accompaniment, I turned and politely asked if they would please stop. We had all paid good money to hear the cast sing, not them. They were somewhat subdued at the beginning of the next song, but quickly began singing out loud once again. After a couple more songs of quietly simmering closer and closer to his boiling point, Uncle Bill had finally had enough. He stood up so abruptly that his chair went flying and then climbed up the small railing that separated the tiers, leaned across the men’s table and getting right in their faces. He hissed in a quiet, menacing tone that his niece had already politely asked them to be quiet, and that if they hadn’t understood, perhaps they could all step outside and he would make it clearer to them. The men paled and offered profuse apologies. My uncle climbed down, righted his chair, sat down, and sent me a quick wink. We didn’t hear another peep from the table behind us for the rest of the night.

The original thesis I had in mind for this piece was a rumination on the intrinsically American qualities exhibited by both my father and uncle. It wound up morphing into a love letter to my uncle, possibly because I lost him much more recently than my father and because he was the last of his generation to go. While my initial hypothesis largely failed to bear fruit, it did lead to the realization that the most logical focus for an article about the lives of Henry Monis and Bill Gannon is not how or where they grew up, but rather the horrific affliction they shared at the end of their lives. My next piece will explore the final chapter for each of these men and the heartbreaking malady which led them to slowly disappear even as their physical beings lingered on – Alzheimer’s disease.

Ladies on Top

Yesterday I read an article in Forbes magazine concerning the countries which have mounted the most effective responses to the coronavirus pandemic. All of them have female leaders. According to the latest WHO figures, only 4,404 Germans have died from the illness as opposed to 20,453 Spaniards and 23,660 Italians. This despite the fact that Germany has 36 million more people than Spain and 23 million more than Italy. The likely cause of this enormous discrepancy is that Angela Merkel responded promptly to the first sign that the virus was in Europe, immediately ordering an enforced lockdown, social distancing and widespread testing. She simply skipped past the denial and hesitancy exhibited by most of her male counterparts whose inability to lead decisively has come at a terrible cost to their citizens.

Tsai Ing-wen acted so quickly and effectively that her country of Taiwan never needed to lock down and has only experienced six reported Covid-19 deaths to date despite being one of the first countries infected after China. New Zealand and Iceland, (two other countries with female Prime Ministers) have thus far also only experienced single digit verified fatalities due to the virus.

This situation raises the question, “Why are the outcomes in female-led societies so vastly different than those where men are in charge?” My experience of female leaders is that they tend to be less concerned with pride and appearances than their male counterparts and are generally more focused on the greater good. What is best for one’s constituents is vastly more important than that which enriches one’s own reputation. I’ve also noticed that male leaders frequently appear more interested in the acquisition of power for its own sake than in pursuing the greater good, whereas women in command often seem to view authority as simply a necessary part of effective leadership.

I have maintained for years that the world would almost certainly be a better place if more women were allowed into positions of power in all arenas. A common rejoinder to this claim is that women could hold more leadership roles if only they would act more like men, to which I respond, “How would that help?” The many dire global problems which exist today were created, and are allowed to continue, by male leaders in all spheres of society. There is no logical way to deny this fact given that men have been almost exclusively in charge for all of recorded human history. Women acting like men would only perpetuate this dismal record.

I recently came across an article in the Harvard Business Review entitled “7 Leadership Lessons Men Can Learn from Women”. Like me, the author of this article questions the validity of suggesting that women wishing to advance in any given profession should follow the example of men, many of whom ultimately prove incompetent or ineffectual. The article sites numerous examples from the business world where companies with female leadership have experienced higher productivity and happier workers. The clear indication of these findings is that leadership would generally be more effective with an improved balance between the two genders. That sadly seems unlikely for the foreseeable future, but clearly a gradual incorporation of female values into male dominated hierarchies would almost certainly improve outcomes.

The article went on to enumerate examples of stereotypically feminine traits which have repeatedly proven to be advantageous in the business world compared to the more masculine traits which currently prevail. Women tend to be harder on themselves than men, probably because society tends to judge them more harshly and frequently than their male counterparts. They generally display an ability to take criticism less personally and are often more willing to take advice from experts, making it easier for them to put their egos aside and collaborate with others when faced with difficult choices. This almost certainly ensures that better decisions are made in the end.

Female leaders often lead more through example than through fear. They tend to bring people in line by highlighting similarities and common goals rather than by using a carrot and stick or – as is the case with many male leaders – a stick alone. People tend to be happier and more concerned with the greater good when leaders appeal to their sensibilities and values rather than attempting to coerce blind adherence to arbitrary rules or expectations. Men tend to be more narcissistic and personally motivated when pursuing and performing leadership duties than women with commensurate levels of responsibility and authority. Leaders who put the welfare of their subordinates ahead of their own are generally more effective, and their selflessness tends to ripple out through the population in positive ways.

Male leaders have historically ascended and maintained their grip on power through dominance and fear, whereas the few women who have managed to reach the same heights have by and large embodied an ethos based on empathy and altruism. Studies have proven people are more compliant and willing to follow those who show a genuine interest in their welfare. Men have proven likely to exhibit reticence in acknowledging excellence in their subordinates as they view it as a threat to their station. They similarly have a hard time publicly owning up to mistakes. Women leaders are often able to buck this trend, and there is empirical evidence that businesses are more effective when employees feel appreciated by their bosses, and that productivity and morale improve in companies where leaders humanize themselves by acknowledging their own shortcomings.

It seems to me that the difference between the way men and women wield power comes from their motivation to acquire it in the first place. In most cultures boys receive praise more frequently than girls and are also conditioned to view the world as a zero sum contest where aggression and dominance are paramount. This encourages them to believe they have earned every benefit they reap and that they are intrinsically qualified and entitled to lead. Girls, on the other hand, are expected to serve others and have to prove excellent at anything they attempt in order to receive any positive feedback. Women therefore tend to view leadership not as their right but rather as a way to take care of people, and largely don’t expect or need to be lauded for their efforts. They never have been before.

The Harvard Business Review is right to suggest that things would almost certainly get better if men adopted a more feminine approach to being in command. That not withstanding, I would argue that the traits which make so many men bad leaders – pride, narcissism and the desire to amass power for its own sake – are the very ones which preclude them from even considering the viability of making changes to the way they view and carry out their duties. Humanity will not reap the benefits of female leadership (eg. the astonishingly low Covid-19 fatalities noted in the opening of this essay) until the demographics of leadership more accurately reflect those of society.

There Will be Blood

The Olympics which were slotted to take place in Tokyo this summer have been postponed until 2021 because of the pandemic, and that’s okay by me. I’m not really interested in the games although I do occasionally tune in when they are being aired. One time during the Rio Olympics I happened to hear a Chinese swimmer being interviewed after coming in fourth in the women’s 4×4 medley race. When asked why her team had lost the young women replied that she was off her game because of exhaustion brought on by her period. That was the first and only time I have ever heard a female athlete mention menstruation as a hindrance to her performance, although I’m sure it often is.

That got me thinking about all of the women who uncomplainingly forge ahead despite experiencing terrible menstrual symptoms. How often do lawyers win a difficult case while fighting excruciating cramps, do bank tellers appear cheerful despite suffering from a blinding hormonal headache, or do ballerinas enchant an audience all the while battling extreme menstrual fatigue? Why is menstruation never an issue for female characters in movies and on TV? I can think of only two times I have ever seen a woman’s cycle figure in the plot of a TV show, and both times it was used as a comedic device. I would speculate that the reason this elemental part of female life is ignored and disparaged is because most cultures cast menses in a very negative light.

I have always taken exception to the way society views menstruation as though it were something gross and contemptible. Menarche marks a girl’s entry into womanhood, a perfectly natural and necessary development for the procreation of the species, and yet girls are made to feel unclean and ashamed from their first period on.

The most stark example of this phenomenon occurs in Judaism. Jewish mothers typically slap their daughters in the face when they experience menarche. No one knows the exact origins or meaning of this tradition – perhaps it is meant to prepare the girl for the years of painful cramps ahead, to awaken her to her burgeoning womanhood, or to indicate that she should be ashamed of her menses and therefore deserves punishment. An article I read noted that despite not knowing why they are doing it, many Jewish women continue slapping their daughters to this day.

In many Islamic countries women are barred from entering the mosque while menstruating. They also must perform ritual bathing after the bleeding stops before being permitted to resume religious duties or have sexual relations. The implication I read into all this shunning and scrubbing is that women are unholy, untouchable and unclean during menses, and that only prescribed techniques can render them fit to rejoin human society following the cessation of their period.

Even in our own relatively progressive country there is still a stigma around menstruation. Women hide feminine hygiene products in their pockets or purses when in public, and are embarrassed and apologetic if a stray tampon or pad falls out and is seen by others. There are countless euphemisms to describe a menstruating women – as “visiting with Aunt Flo”, or experiencing “that time of the month”, or simply “on the rag” – as though calling menses by its real name were naughty or forbidden. Equally bad, pads and tampons were taxed like luxury items until just a few years ago, financially penalizing women for having a period as if they had a choice.

Women frequently get dismissed and shamed for emotional issues which arise around and during menstruation. Displaying seemingly illogical and disproportionate emotions was historically called “hysteria” in psychological parlance, and for millennia was thought to be an illness connected to female genitalia. Freud and his ilk admitted in the late 19th century that men could become hysterical as well, but the pernicious and misguided perception that women are more likely to experience ungrounded emotions than men persists to this day. I fully admit that sometimes a woman’s reaction can be overblown due to hormones, but the idea that women have a monopoly on irrationality is inherently offensive and empirically untrue. Despite this, men often accuse women of being ridiculous even when their annoyance is absolutely warranted. Every woman I know, myself included, has had a man dismiss their righteous anger by attributing it to hormones. He’s not being an asshole, she’s being unreasonable. How convenient.

Which brings me to P.M.S. and the very real and often uncontrollable emotions it generates. I’ve known many women who suffer from angst and depression at the onset of their periods. I myself was extremely blue the day before my flow began. These may sound like small inconveniences, but arbitrarily experiencing intractable sadness and/or anxiety every month has a cumulative negative effect on one’s mental well-being.

Some women’s P.M.S. symptoms are bad enough to put their relationships in jeopardy. I worked at a public library in Toronto in the early 1980’s and one of my favourite colleagues was a woman I’ll call Anya. Anya was very bright, thoughtful, compassionate, and extremely good at her job. The cornerstone of Anya’s personality was her coolness under pressure; the comments of irate patrons merely slid off her back, and she worked best when given a short deadline. I was therefore surprised one afternoon when I came upon her weeping uncontrollably in the staff washroom. I asked her what was wrong and she replied through her sobs,

“I’m getting my period tomorrow which means I’m just about to turn into an absolute bitch. Every month this happens – like Jekyll and Hyde but in real life. I’ll go home tonight and ream out my husband and son for no reason at all. They don’t deserve that! It’s like I’m possessed and there’s nothing I can do to stop it.”

Most women menstruate for thirty five to forty years. If Anya’s period made her an unhinged screaming harpy one day a month, then over the course of her menstrual life she was irrationally angry for at least four hundred and twenty days. That’s fourteen months of being held hostage by uncontrollable rage; more than enough time for a family to incrementally fall apart. I hope Anya’s husband and son were understanding and loved her enough to stay, and that she learned to forgive herself for treating them so badly.

Menstruation also brings many unpleasant and sometimes debilitating physical side effects; bloating and cramping are the two which immediately come to mind, but there are a host of others. I have one friend who suffered from excruciating migraines which laid her low once a month. Another friend had a condition called menorrhagia which caused her to bleed so profusely that she was chronically anemic, and which made the flow on her first day sufficiently heavy that even wearing a full-sized tampon and maxi pad combined couldn’t contain it. Women also have to live with the annoyance of perennially blood-stained underpants and sheets, and just about all of us at one time or another have to endure the enormous embarrassment of having blood leak onto our clothing in public.

The first few years of menstruation are often amongst the most difficult of all. During her teen years my niece had a hormonal imbalance called dysmenorrhea which would cause her to repeatedly vomit at the onset of her flow while simultaneously creating such severe pain that she would basically pass out for a few hours. This horrible condition persisted until she was 18 and began taking a birth control pill to regulate her hormones. My menses started when I was 13 and my cycles were so short in the beginning that I developed an iron deficiency which left me constantly exhausted. My period was also very irregular and I consequently became reticent to make plans because I never knew when it was going to hit. It was so bad that as soon as I turned 16 my mother instructed my doctor to put me on the pill in order to chemically ensure that my period came at the same time every month. You know your situation is bad when your mother insists you get oral contraception.

The complications outlined above frequently intensify as a woman approaches the end of her reproductive years – to misquote T.S. Eliot, “This is the way menstruation ends. Not with a whimper but a bang.” Millions of women, myself included, suffer through years of crazy symptoms during perimenopause, the medical term for the phase leading up to menopause when one’s period finally stops. My perimenopause lasted eight long years and I endured a host of unpleasant health problems throughout. First came heart palpitations, a sometimes terrifying fluttering sensation in my chest. Hot on the heels of this delightful development came insomnia, mood swings, anxiety, digestive issues, hot flashes, weight gain and – the craziest of the bunch – a burning sensation in my tongue. Type “perimenopause symptoms” into a search engine and you will generally see 35 listed. 35! They are all considered common and are uniformly unpleasant to varying degrees.

Human females are tossed about by menstrual hormones like small boats on a stormy sea – sometimes we’re up, sometimes we’re down, and sometimes we’re just wrecked. As long as society perceives menstruation as gross, private and shameful, women will never receive the credit they deserve for stoically persevering through all of the extremely difficult physical, emotional and psychological symptoms it entails. My Nana used to say, “Growing old is not for the feint of heart.” To that I would add, “Neither is being a woman.”

Prison Life

I have had many jobs over the course of my life, but the one I liked most was at the Peterborough Public Library. I spent half my time on the adult reference desk and the other half in the children’s department, allowing me to work with patrons of all ages. I liked the staff and the environment, never took my work home, and got to help people on a daily basis. Perfect.

In the midst of all this perfection I had my second child, and I really missed her and my son when I returned to work after my maternity leave. The library wouldn’t allow me to job-share so I began looking for part-time work elsewhere. It just so happened that the librarian at the prison in my village was retiring after twenty six years on the job. I don’t believe in divine intervention or fate, but it did feel more than coincidental that the perfect job opened up right when I needed it to. I had full benefits and a pension plan, didn’t have to work weekends or evenings, and I was making more for twenty five hours a week than I previously had for forty.

I began working at the Millbrook Correctional Centre almost a year after my daughter was born. In my capacity as librarian I maintained the small prison library collection, supervised two inmates assigned to work for me, and provided readers’ advisory when inmates came in to find books. The bulk of my job entailed getting the mail ready for distribution to the inmates. First I quickly perused it in the front office, reporting any contraband I found – usually badly concealed drugs – then I brought it to my office in the library for a closer read. I would contact a member of the social work team if I came across a letter containing particularly upsetting news. The social worker would then bring the recipient into their office to read the letter in private, offering support should it be required. Lastly I sorted the mail into piles by wing, ready for the guards to hand out later in the day.

You may be wondering what a wing is. The prison had two levels, each of which housed different sorts of offenders. The first floor was called general population (known colloquially as genpop) and contained men guilty of theft and physical or verbal assault – the sort of tough guys one generally sees in prison movies and TV shows. The second floor was designated protective custody, or PC for short. It accommodated rapists, pedophiles, and anyone else who would be at risk in general population. There is a pecking order amongst inmates, and at the very bottom are rapists and pedophiles (known respectively in prison slang as “rape hounds” and “diddlers”). Men who have committed these crimes must be segregated or they would be regularly harassed and/or brutalized.

The two floors were each divided into about twelve ranges, or wings, each containing at least thirty individual cells. Millbrook C.C. was a provincial maximum security facility with massive amounts of video surveillance and locked doors everywhere. The doors that opened to the corridors where the inmates were housed, and those that opened to the ranges themselves, were operated electronically by a guard safely ensconced in a bullet-proof booth at the end of the hall. The library was located at the far end of the second floor, meaning that I had to pass through four electronic doors every time I came or went. This journey always reminded me of that taken by Don Adams in the opening credits of “Get Smart”.

I supervised a series of rapists and pedophiles because inmates assigned to the library were always chosen from the PC population. Most of these men were guilty, but two had been falsely accused. One was a grade eight teacher whose life completely imploded when a disgruntled female student claimed he had sexually harassed her. He was from a small town and when his story appeared in the local paper, the backlash from the community against his wife and daughters was so hateful and persistent that they had no choice but to move. He was found innocent and paroled about six months into his sentence, but by then the damage was done.

The other wrongfully incarcerated inmate had been incriminated by a 14-year-old boy from his local church. Stu (not the inmate’s real name) had been counselling this boy and was completely blindsided by the accusation. He was found guilty and was heading to his sentencing hearing when the Crown Attorney pulled him aside and informed him that if he pled guilty now, they would release him on parole and he wouldn’t spend a single day in jail. Stu responded,

“Let me get this straight – if I maintain my innocence I am looking at serving at least 18 months in jail, but if I tell you that I’m guilty you’ll let me walk out the door today?”

To which the attorney replied, “That’s the deal.”

Stu decided he’d rather spend time in prison than admit to a crime he didn’t commit, and that’s how he came to work for me in the library. The boy who had accused Stu was found to have been lying about a year after Stu’s release, and the crown apologized and made reparations for the mistake. Stu wrote me soon after this turn of events. He told me that the worst part of the whole experience, worse than being found guilty or having lost a year and a half of his life, had been the day he attended his grandfather’s funeral. The superintendent kindly granted Stu’s request to go to the memorial service, but once there he suffered the incredible public humiliation of having to wear shackles for the entire afternoon. He felt he could never fully forgive the boy or the system for putting him in that mortifying situation.

The most disturbing crime I encountered in my five years at the prison was committed by a teenage boy from a private school in Toronto. This boy’s offence was sufficiently heinous that although he was still a minor, the Crown charged and sentenced him as an adult. He initially came to Millbrook because he was underage, but was transferred on his 18th birthday to serve the bulk of his sentence in a federal institution. Len (not his real name) attended Upper Canada College, a prestigious institution educating the sons of Canada’s most influential and affluent families. He was tremendously charismatic and had been the ring leader of a select group containing the most popular boys in grade 10. I envisioned his entourage as resembling the group in “Dead Poet’s Society”, only more deviant.

Len and his cadre met regularly and had strict rules about who they would accept into their circle. A Pakistani boy had recently joined their class and was desperate to be accepted by the “cool” boys. Len strung the boy along with the promise of eventual acceptance provided he acquiesce to their every request. The boy faithfully held up his end of the bargain, but Len, who never had any intention of allowing the boy in, soon became tired of the whole thing. After stringing the Pakistani boy along for a few months, Len had one of his acolytes tell the boy that he had made the cut and should therefore join them that night in the woods for his initiation ceremony. The overjoyed appellant showed up as requested, but instead of being inducted into the group he was stabbed in turn by each of the boys, with Len providing the coup de grâce by slitting his throat. The boy fell to the ground and began to gurgle and sputter, noises which Len quickly found so annoying that he chose to stab his suffering victim in the heart to shut him up. Needless to say I steered well clear of Len while he was in residence.

The weirdest behaviour by a prisoner during my tenure behind bars was exhibited by a resident of the treatment wing. T-wing, as it was commonly called, was where they housed inmates with psychological problems. Every cell in T-wing contained a camera to facilitate constant surveillance of its occupant, and the guards took a walk down the range every hour in order to look into each cell and ensure the prisoners were all okay. There was one inmate in residence, who I’ll call Orson, who was crazed and brilliant at the same time. I saw samples of his poetry and it was amazingly original and well- written, but he was profoundly unwell and had committed his crimes while in a fugue state.

One day Orson decided that he no longer wanted his penis. He managed to chip a small piece of a razor blade out of its holder, and proceeded to sever his member with it. You might wonder, as I did at the time, how he managed to accomplish such a feat without being discovered considering that he was being constantly watched. He only had a little bit of razor to do the job so it must have taken some time to cut through his entire shaft, yet he was wholly finished by the time the circulating guard saw the pool of blood at his feet. He had simply turned his back to the camera and completed the entire excruciating operation without moving or making a sound, attesting to the incredible power of the brain, however diseased, over the body. They rushed Orson and his penis, now on ice, to the hospital, and the first thing he did upon waking after the reattachment was to try and yank it off again. He spent the rest of his recuperation handcuffed to the bed and did not return to Millbrook C.C. I hope he was sent to a facility better equipped to deal with his extreme illness.

Perhaps the most memorable event that took place during my tenure at the prison was a riot. Ontario licence plates were manufactured by inmates at Millbrook C.C. and they were paid $10 a week for their efforts – a token sum at best but better than nothing. Mike Harris decided to cut that wage in half shortly after becoming premier, and several months later determined that inmates didn’t deserve any pay at all for their labour. Prisoners I spoke to felt that they were now basically slaves of the state, and I tended to agree with them. They decided en masse that this situation was untenable and went on strike. I worked deep in the heart of the prison, a location usually rife with sound and movement, but with the inmates refusing to work the entire institution became eerily quiet and still. One of the more seasoned guards warned me that silence in a prison always preceded an explosion. He was right.

About a week after the work boycott began, the prisoners rioted. I came in to work on the morning after the event and heard the whole story from officers who had been on duty at the time. It all started on the yard with inmates refusing to come inside at the designated time. There was one guard on the far side of the grass who was in a very precarious situation with dozens of inmates between him and safety. The prisoners could have held him for ransom and/or given him a sound beating, but instead he was allowed safe passage into the building. He had always treated them with respect, and they now returned the favour. As soon as all the officers had left, a group of rioting inmates proceeded to storm the medical wing in hopes of scoring drugs. They stopped along the way to trash the social workers’ offices and defecate on their desks. Those still outside decided to torch all of their athletic equipment and some enterprising individuals began to pile up the picnic tables against an outside wall.

There is a protocol in place for prison riots. The OPP S.W.A.T. team is called to maintain the perimeter, and the I.C.I.T. (Institutional Crisis Intervention Team) is employed to handle the situation inside the grounds and building. I.C.I.T. members are correctional officers who have had special training in firearms and various techniques designed to quell riots. Prison uprisings usually run their course in several hours as the participants get tired, hungry, and generally come to realize the futility of their efforts. The Millbrook riot was true to form and petered out later that night without anyone being hurt.

At lunch the next day an I.C.I.T. lieutenant relayed one incident from the riot that really made me laugh. He was the designated liaison with the OPP commander patrolling the perimeter and radioed him when the prisoners had piled up sufficient picnic tables to scale the wall. The next thing he heard was the police commander’s voice blaring out of a megaphone,

“Okay men, we have information that the inmates are about to climb over this wall. I’m offering a case of beer to the man who hits whatever body part comes over the wall first.”

Then all of the OPP officers simultaneously cocked their rifles, creating an unmistakable and ominous sound. The inmates on the tables immediately froze and turned pale, frantically scurried down as quickly as possible, and ran clear to the other side of the yard without so much as a backward glance. The lieutenant relayed this reaction to the OPP commander, and roaring laughter erupted from the other side of the wall.

I didn’t realize how stressful my job at the prison was until, after a five year sentence, I left. It felt like I was shedding pounds of anxiety from my head and shoulders in the months that followed my departure, until one morning I woke up and realized I had come back to myself. The last few years of my teaching career marked a huge escalation in the amount of violence, disrespect and verbal abuse aimed at education workers by students. I sensed the invisible weighted armour I had shed all those years ago silently creeping over my body as these incidents increased, and I decided to retire rather than to yet again pay the physical and psychological price of prolonged stress and fear. Once was more than enough.

Déjà vu all over Again

There are many strange and scary things happening in the world right now which have caused a ball of anxiety to take up residence in the centre of my ribs. Sometimes it gets quite large and obnoxious, amplifying the sound of my heartbeat and making it impossible for me to take a deep breath. At other times it shrinks into the background, not forcing itself into my conscious mind but always there if I inadvertently happen to think about it.

The pandemic is undoubtedly unfamiliar, but the tense and unsettled feeling in my chest is not. There have been two other times in my life when I have felt this level of protracted anxiety. The most recent happened in 2014 when I endured two years of searing nerve pain, unrelenting nausea and intractable insomnia. I was mostly convinced these were all side-effects of my cholesterol medication, but nervousness and dread became my constant companions since there was no way to be absolutely sure that this was the case.

The most worrisome of these symptoms was the pain. I was diagnosed with small nerve neuropathy by a doctor of internal medicine and he warned me that nerves which had been damaged as extensively as mine, with persistent burning over my entire body, would take at least two years to repair themselves. The doctor’s words became my mantra as I waited for the pain to lessen, reminding myself to be patient and trust that my nerves were truly on the mend. The knot of anxiety above my sternum meanwhile had formed a feed-back loop with my amygdala. My brain would float the idea that I actually had fibromyalgia and was doomed to suffer the rest of my life, signalling the ball in my chest to tighten, which in turn strengthened the perception that my pain would last forever, and round and round it would go. This horrible cycle eventually dissipated along with the pain, and I was overjoyed the day I noticed them both gone. As terrible as this experience was, it did leave behind one lasting gift – I now consciously feel grateful for my good health every single day I feel well, which thankfully is most of the time.

The first time I experienced persistent anxiety in my chest was some twenty three years ago when my marriage fell apart. I began dating my future husband Douglas when I was an insecure 17 year old, overjoyed to be embarking on my first adult relationship. In the beginning he was highly attentive and admiring, drawing me in with flattering words and fond looks. Soon he had me completely besotted, and then his true nature emerged. Like all narcissists he became controlling and manipulative, often withholding his affection and heaping me with scorn, but eventually doling out just enough kindness to keep me hooked. I was like a fish on a line and he the master angler, repeatedly giving me sufficient slack to fool me into believing I was autonomous, then violently reeling me in if I become too independent in thought or action. Being the victim in an abusive relationship is like being held hostage; you simultaneously love and fear your captor, and they keep you in this unbalanced and enthralled state by continuously undermining your sense of self, making the mere thought of leaving seem impossible.

Douglas and I eventually had two children, and as they got older I began to have concerns about how he treated them. He would play with them when he felt like it, but if they approached him when he wasn’t in the mood he became disproportionately annoyed and dismissive. Over time I began to notice my children, Max in particular who was 6 at this point, looking more and more dejected and upset as their innocent requests for attention were rejected with increasing aggression. Eventually I came to recognize that the pain I was seeing in their eyes was a reflection of my own, and I decided I needed to save all three of us from this man.

I didn’t come to this decision all at once, but rather over time and with the help and support of my therapist and some very good friends. Douglas petulantly moved to another bedroom when I finally worked up the courage to suggest we should divorce, and then began an aggressive campaign to try and convince me to stay. It wasn’t that he loved me or couldn’t live without me, he was simply furious that I had made a decision without him and that he would now have to suffer the humiliation of a broken marriage. Narcissists need to be perceived by everyone, friends and strangers alike, as commanding, competent and above all, absolutely in charge. The dissolution of a marriage is a highly public and totally undeniable failure.

His strategy was to badger me into submission using dire predictions of how horrible my life would be without him: I was too stupid to make it financially, I was too fat to ever attract another man, and I was too inept to effectively raise two children alone. When I remained resolute in the face of this abuse, Douglas decided to change tack. Up to that point he had mostly made sure our children were out of earshot when he yelled at and belittled me, but now he began doing so right in front of them. I assume he thought I would agree to stay if he would just stop traumatizing the kids, but this new behaviour only strengthened my determination to get the hell away from him. I quietly endured his fury knowing that eventually he would realize the futility of his vitriol. At some point he would turn the whole situation around until it seemed as though the idea of getting a divorce had been his in the first place, a maneuver I had seen him employ numerous times throughout our marriage.

That is exactly what happened a few months later, and now that he had gained control of the situation things began to move forward. He decided to keep our marital home which was fine with me because I couldn’t wait to get away from a place laden with years of unhappy memories. He got the house appraised by a friend who undervalued the property by a good $10,000, but I was so desperate to get out that I took what was offered and used it as downpayment on a small bungalow. By now I was emotionally exhausted and decided to visit my cousin in Seattle for some R and R, and to try and alleviate the angst and sadness that were crushing my sternum. On the Wednesday of my week away I got two phone calls; the first was from my real estate agent saying that my new house had closed and I could move in at the end of the month, and the next was from Douglas telling me that he had gone to the hospital the previous day suffering from severe shortness of breath and the doctors had found a grapefruit sized tumor behind his heart. As soon as I hung up on that second conversation the fear and tension which were just beginning to dissipate again took up residence in my chest, crashing in like a pair of obnoxious and unwelcome houseguests .

It turned out that Douglas had Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, a form of cancer which is highly treatable in children but pretty well a death sentence for adults. He never told me his prognosis but my sister-in-law, an oncological nurse, advised me that most people with A.L.L. usually died in less than a year. Unsurprisingly this information caused my anxiety to ratchet up several notches.

I moved out of Douglas’s house shortly after returning from Seattle, and no sooner had I left then he started dating an eccentric new-age woman named Brenda. She liked to do weird things like lie in holes in the yard to get closer to mother earth, and stand outside on clear nights and howl at the moon. My 4 year old daughter Hannah took an immediate shine to Brenda because she smelled nice – she reeked of patchouli, a scent I cannot tolerate to this day – and wore brightly coloured chunky jewelry.

My son Max on the other hand instantly disliked her. He found all her new-age antics off-putting and embarrassing, and was annoyed and confused that a strange woman was sleeping in his parent’s bed mere weeks after his mother had left. I think he also sensed that his dad was dying and resented having this odd woman hanging around when any visit with his father could be the last. Douglas insisted on having Brenda there whenever the kids came over despite Max and I both asking him not to, (“No 7 year old’s going to tell me who I can have in my fucking house!” were the exact words he shouted at me on the subject) and over time Max decided he didn’t want to go. I then had to determine whether it was better to honour Max’s request to stay at my place even though he might later resent me for denying him precious moments with his dying father, or to make him see his dad in the limited time that was left despite how uncomfortable he felt with Brenda hovering about. Eventually I chose the latter. I experienced terrible guilt and doubt whenever I left Max on his father’s porch, with the coil in my chest tightening a little every time I drove away and watched his sad figure receding in my rearview mirror.

Things continued in this fashion for the ten months it took for Douglas to succumb to his disease. I had always assumed that facing the end of one’s life would bring a person clarity and make even the worst among us realize the error of their ways, like Ebenezer Scrooge after his night with the spirits. The truth is that people become exponentially more like themselves when they are dying, so rather than transforming into a man displaying compassion and a generous heart as I had hoped, Douglas simply became unabashedly selfish and mean. He rebuffed in the most callous and unkind way anyone who questioned his decisions or behaviour, including his brother, his parents, and my brother, who had been his best friend since boyhood. My heart bled for each of them as they were successively dismissed and discarded by a man they loved. In his last few months Douglas surrounded himself with an entourage of toadies who were willing to bow to his every whim, most of whom he neither liked nor respected – the narcissist demanding absolute compliance and adoration to the bitter end. I was of course sad for those who loved him when he died, my children in particular, but my overwhelming emotion on hearing the news was one of relief. He could never hurt me or anyone I loved again.

It took many years and a great deal of hard psychological and emotional work for me to fully get past the trauma of this experience, but in time the anxiety it caused did dissipate and in its wake left a more compassionate and open heart. My hope is that things will resolve in a similar fashion when this pandemic is over, only rather than just awakening one individual to the over-arching need for love and forgiveness, it will bring millions to this realization. Imagine if our shared fight as a species lays bear the stupidity of tribalism and the absurdity of prejudice. Imagine if we finally learn that every life is precious and we are all in this together. Imagine.

Toro, Toro, Toro!

One of my all-time favourite children’s books is “The Story of Ferdinand”. This tale of a peaceful bull who prefers smelling flowers to butting heads was written in 1936 by Munro Leaf and features beautiful pen-and-ink illustrations by Robert Lawson. Despite its great age, Leaf’s story has endured sufficiently well that an animated retelling of it was released just last year. During my career I read “The Story of Ferdinand” to kids in the library annually and was always delighted that even in this age of frenetic video games and apps, a book with a minimal narrative and monochromatic pictures can still enthral and entertain them. The moral of the story is wonderful as well; the introverted Ferdinand resists social pressure to conform, goes his own way despite parental concerns, and in the end his individuality literally saves his life.

I had this happy ending tucked away in my psyche when my husband and I went to see an actual bullfight in Madrid. There are two sides to every bullring, sol and sombra, the Spanish words respectively for sun and shade. The tickets are separated into these two categories and priced accordingly, with tickets in the shaded section costing more as people are willing to pay extra to avoid baking in the searing Spanish sun. I was glad we splurged for the more expensive option because there are six individual contests in an afternoon of bullfighting so the whole event takes quite some time.

There was a parade into the ring before the fights began just like in “The Story of Ferdinand”. First in was a trumpeter playing a pasodoble, or two step, a famous type of Spanish music and a passionate dance style performed in ballroom competitions. The audience shouted “Olé” when the fanfare was done, and everyone taking part in that afternoon’s proceedings then passed in a long line through the ring with the matadors triumphantly pulling up the rear. No sooner had a big set of double doors shut behind the last matador than a somewhat smaller door opened on the far side of the ring and out charged an enormous bull.

Everyone again shouted “Olé” as the bull began to walk around the ring, looking at the audience and trying, I assume, to figure out where the hell it was. A man on horseback called a picador then rode into the ring behind the bull, the first of two men whose sole purpose was to taunt and torture the poor animal. He carried lances with colourful ribbons on the end which he proceeded to thrust into the muscular expanse of the creature’s neck, angering and weakening it. The dexterity and synchronicity of horse and rider was admittedly quite breathtaking, but skilled horsemanship alone wasn’t enough to distract me from the ever-increasing suffering of the unfortunate beast.

The picador exited and was soon replaced by the banderillero, who deked and swayed on foot around the confused bull, all the while thrusting barbed darts into the animal’s neck to further enrage and exhaust it. Last of all came the matador himself. He was wearing a beautiful outfit known as a suit of lights and strutted and preened as the audience shouted in adulation. Everything got quiet as he turned toward his now frantic and spent adversary. What followed is the part of the bullfight with which most people are familiar. The matador goaded the bull into charging with the fluttering of his cape, then deftly stepped aside at the last moment, the horns of the creature missing his body by mere inches. After several passes, each one eliciting a more full-throated “Olé” than its predecessor, the matador decided the fight was over. Instead of simply dodging the beast this time, he drove his sword into its head as it passed.

In an ideal world that one clean thrust would swiftly kill the animal, but that only happened once in the six fights we saw. The odds of the matador hitting the exact right spot on the bull’s head are pretty slim considering that he is simultaneously dodging the charging beast and aiming his sword at a moving target. The one matador who did manage to make a clean kill that afternoon leaned over the bull immediately afterward, drew a knife from his belt, and used it to saw off the dead animal’s ear. He held the bloody trophy aloft – a fitting tribute to his masterful work – and the audience roared its approval.

The other five fights ended horribly, and of those the first is seared in my memory because it marks the only time in my life when an animal was killed right in front of me. The matador planted his sword in the bull’s head as expected, but the wound proved less than fatal. The injured creature sank down to the ground making a noise so piteous that I immediately began crying in response to its suffering. The matador grabbed his dagger, came up beside the tormented beast and thrust the knife as hard as he could into the base of its brain, grinding the hilt around in circles as one does a spoon handle when stirring a stiff batter. The bull made one more strangled cry and died. The audience shouted “Olé”, my tears redoubled, the matador bowed and exited, and the corpse was ignominiously dragged from the ring, leaving a trail of blood and gore in its wake. My husband refused to leave despite my obvious distress so I had to close my eyes and cover my ears for the coup de grace of the remaining fights, peeking only once when the matador displayed the bull’s ear.

After Spain our next destination was Portugal where I agreed to see a bullfight once I had been assured that they did not kill the bull at the end. The first part of the fight was reminiscent of what we’d seen in Spain except that the Portuguese matadors, called cavaleiros, fight the bull while mounted. Sometimes female riders or cavaleiras are used, something that would never happen in Spain and which made me prefer the Portuguese style of bullfighting right off the hop. Riders of both genders use horses specially trained for the task, and the precision of movement displayed by rider and steed throughout the fight is so fluid and refined as to resemble a choreographed dance. I truly enjoyed everything about this part of the performance except for the very end wherein the cavaleiro planted a bunch of small spears into the bull’s back.

The second part of the fight marked a complete departure from the Spanish style. A man appeared just outside the ring’s wooden enclosure, standing high enough to be visible from the chest up. He banged his hands on the wall and yelled at the bull, drawing it over so that it was facing away from the ring. With the beast suitably distracted, eight men called forcados ceremoniously entered opposite the bull. They marched in with military precision, stopping as one when their leader reached the centre of the ring. The first four men stayed in a straight line while the last four moved to stand side-by-side, reminiscent of soccer players defending against a penalty kick. They all stamped their feet, pushed their chests out, and firmly planted their fists on their hips as though staking a claim and daring the bull to even attempt to take this patch of ground from them.

The first forcado then called out, “Toro, toro, toro!” and the bull turned. A few very tense seconds passed as the animal assessed its new situation, then put its head down and charged. The forcado at the front of the line adjusted his position as the beast approached, readying himself to perform a move the Portuguese call pega de cara, or face catch. This maneuver entails the forcado allowing the bull’s head (but not horns, ideally) to contact his torso, and at that very instant wrapping both arms around the horns to secure his hold. The forcado successfully performed the pega de cara, and dangled limply and ornamentally from the face of the great creature as it continued to barrel forward. Each of the remaining forcados in turn threw himself onto its charging body, jockeying for position like suckling piglets fighting at a sow’s teats.

Even an enormous angry bull knows when it’s been bested and this one was no exception. Before long it stopped trying to move under the weight of the men, thus allowing time for one of them to remove himself from the pile, walk to the back of the beast, and grab its tail. The bull was allowed to calm down for a moment, then on a signal from the forcado at the rear the others disembarked. Now it was just one man holding an enraged bull’s tail and impudently pulling it to make sure he had the animal’s full attention. The irritated beast began twisting his body in an effort to gore his tormentor. You can picture exactly how this looked if you’ve ever seen a dog trying to bite its own tail – the bull racing in crazy circles with the forcado being pulled along behind like a waterskier on land. The creature soon recognized the futility of its actions and came to a stop. The man then let go of the tail, dusted his hands, turned his back on his frustrated foe, and slowly exited the ring without a single backward glance. A group of oxen were then led into the ring and a couple of men herded the spent beast towards them. The bull – whether due to exhaustion, instinct or a combination of the two – placidly fell in beside the oxen and the animals all exited the ring together.

The Portuguese have six bullfights in an afternoon just like the Spanish, and the tail-pulling forcado made it safely out of the ring in five of the contests we saw that day. The sixth wasn’t so lucky. Everything had gone to plan in his fight and the oxen had entered the ring as usual, but the bull clearly had no intention of leaving just yet. Instead it turned to face the retreating forcado and took off towards its unsuspecting target. The audience jumped to its feet as one and multiple voices rang out alerting the young man to the danger thundering up from behind. The forcado didn’t even have time to turn around before the beast was on him, forcibly knocking him facedown into the dirt and grinding his prone body forward against the hard-packed earth. The bull then flicked its head up and sent the now unconscious man flying, his flaccid body spinning over and over in the air and landing like a rag doll amidst a cloud of dust. The men herding the oxen had been frantically trying to get the bull’s attention this entire time, and thankfully they now finally succeeded. The beast turned towards them and passively allowed itself to be led out. It had gotten its revenge and was now ready for some social time. I never found out how badly that young man was injured, but he was completely inert when they removed him from the ring on a stretcher.

Portuguese bulls are usually butchered after leaving the ring, but those that put on an especially good show – like the one we saw attack the forcado – are often put out to stud. Both Spain and Portugal still allow bullfighting, though it has become a divisive issue in the former. Those who want it to continue argue that it is emblematic of their culture and a huge tourist draw, while those opposed are outraged that such a shameless display of animal cruelty is condoned in this day and age. My experience watching bullfights makes for a good story, but I was appalled when I witnessed them three decades ago and continue to be so in the face of their continued existence.

Rapid Acceleration

I am a very good student. I’m not bragging, I just happen to have been born with exactly the right traits to excel at school; I am interested in learning and do so quickly, I am a facile reader, writer and speaker, and I have an excellent memory. My father was a very talented musician and although he claimed he was only as smart as the next guy, his mastery of the daily Globe and Mail cryptic crossword belied his mental acuity. That notwithstanding, the bulk of my intelligence clearly came from my mother who was off-the-charts smart. She didn’t make a big show of her I.Q. in everyday life, nor did it manifest in her chosen profession. She was an emergency room nurse, highly capable and respected, but competence at her job didn’t require extraordinary intelligence. Every once in a while one would get a glimpse of how truly smart she was, but mostly she kept it under wraps.

My school was of course aware of my scholastic abilities, and consequently just before Christmas in the fourth grade myself and five of my peers were led into a seminar room off of the office. We had no idea what we were doing there. Eventually a woman we didn’t recognize came in and placed a stack of stapled papers facedown in front of each of us. She explained that we six had been selected to take the tests she’d just distributed because we were deemed the smartest students in grade four. We were handed pencils and instructed to give our completed tests back to her before returning to class. No explanation was given as to the purpose of the test, we were simply told that we were expected to finish it and could take as much time as necessary. So I did the test and put it out of my mind.

I didn’t think about it again until just before March break when Mr. Ling, my grade four teacher, called me to the front of the room. He announced that I, along with three students from the other grade four class, had done sufficiently well on the test to merit acceleration. The class was then directed to clap in recognition of my accomplishment, and a half-hearted smattering of applause ensued. I would be placed in Mrs. Jay’s grade five class for May and June, and come September would move on to grade six. I felt some trepidation at the thought of starting the sixth grade so soon as I was already small for my age and not nearly as developed as the grade five girls, but mostly I felt deeply proud at having done so well on the test.

It was time for morning recess not long after this announcement, so I put on my snow gear and headed out with my classmates. There was an ice rink in our schoolyard which was built and maintained by parent volunteers. This strikes me as something which could never exist in today’s climate given the pervasive perception that children are much more fragile now than we were at the same age. I immediately made my way over to the rink because my friends and I had an ongoing game of ice tag and I wanted to get there early to call, “Not it.” I had only just begun gliding along on when I was pushed hard from behind. I put my arms out to break my fall and the middle finger on my right hand hit the ice at an odd angle and broke at the second knuckle.

I was stunned and hurt as I righted myself into a sitting position, cupping my injured hand as I tried to work the mitten off to assess the damage to my throbbing finger. When I finally looked up to see who had pushed me, I experienced a revelation which hurt far worse than any physical pain could. My best friend Andrea stood glaring down at me with a look of disgust and triumph on her face. She furiously spat one word at me, “Browner!”, then turned around and slid away with the rest of my recess friends dutifully following behind.

By the time we reassembled in the room my finger had become markedly swollen and turned completely black and blue. I showed it to Mr. Ling who said I could still write if I adjusted my grip on the pencil or, better still, used my left hand. So I struggled through the rest of the morning, my physical discomfort proving much less upsetting than the mean-spirited whispers all around as classmates muttered support for what Andrea had done. In a split second I had gone from being just another kid in the class to a reprehensible traitor to the entire fourth grade.

Eventually we were dismissed for lunch and I managed to hold in my tears until I got home, but dissolved into helpless sobs as soon as I stepped through the front door. For some unknown reason my father, who was never home during the day, happened to be there. He gave me a hug and looked at my finger, asking why the school hadn’t called home when it happened so he could have come and picked me up. I explained what Mr. Ling had said and my dad, clearly furious at this point, told me that he was going to drive me back to school after lunch. I wouldn’t have to stay for the afternoon, but he needed me with him while he spoke to Mr. Ling.

So my dad brought me back to school in his enormous V8 Marquis Brougham, a car so massive that riding in it felt more like sailing than driving. Mr. Ling shot up like a jack-in-the-box when my dad entered the room and the two men shook hands as I introduced them to one another. Pleasantries accomplished, my father absolutely lit into Mr. Ling the moment they unclasped hands, demanding in his scariest dad voice what kind of idiot would expect a child to do work with a clearly broken finger. I don’t remember his tirade verbatim, but somewhere in there was an unvarnished threat that Mr. Ling would seriously regret it if anything along these lines ever happened to me – or any other kid in the class for that matter – again. My father then turned on his heel and stomped out with me in tow as I beamed with love and admiration for my new found hero.

The glow of that experience wore off when I went back to school the following day and found that Andrea had poisoned even more kids against me. I started to experience frequent “accidental” pushes and shoves, but was otherwise shunned entirely. The pressure on children to conform is so enormous that even my nicest classmates felt compelled to ostracize me, although they usually did so with apologetic looks on their faces as if to say, “What else can I do?”. The next two months were tremendously sad and lonely for me, so needless to say I was very happy when May finally rolled around bringing with it the promise of a new beginning in grade five.

I soon learned that the grade fives hated me for showing them up as much as the grade fours hated me for betraying them. I meekly came to class every day hoping someone would reach out to me. Surely there had to be at least one kind soul in the whole bunch who would recognize that I had neither chosen to be as smart as I was nor to have been placed in their grade. It turned out that the kids in Mrs. Jay’s class were just as loath to go against the tide as were those I had left behind in Mr. Ling’s, and I was once again ignored and subtly bullied until the summer break.

I spent the entirety of July and August friendless, and it was undoubtedly the most miserable period of my childhood. I am a baby boomer and consequently there were always dozens of kids out on the street, playing red rover, tag or my personal favourite, hide-and-seek. All of the kids made it clear early in July that I was no longer welcome in their games, so I would often go on solitary bike rides just to get away from them. Other days I would jump rope on the driveway while they played up and down the street without me. It was torturous to watch them having so much fun knowing I could not join in, but children are notorious for their thoughtless cruelty.

Finally September rolled around. I dreaded going back to school because I knew it would prove to be a continuation of the summer’s ostracism only in closer quarters. I was assigned to Miss Bonk’s class (yes, that was her real name.) Miss Bonk had been teaching since the time of the dinosaurs and was best known for three things; her ancient yet pristine powder blue Cadillac, her penchant for showing films instead of teaching, and her love of smacking students who displeased her with whatever object was close at hand. I saw her hit the same unfortunate lad with a ruler, a board eraser and a dictionary before we even got to Christmas. The three students who’d also accelerated were in the other grade six class so I didn’t have anyone with whom to share my misery, nor any other potential targets to syphon off some of my classmates’ cruelty. I swear I felt more alone in Miss Bonk’s class than I did by myself in the backyard of my house.

The year proceeded and it became clear in pretty short order that Miss Bonk really liked me. She had no patience at all for students who struggled, but she loved me because I was quiet, compliant and did extremely well on all my schoolwork. She made a habit of standing at the front of the room, brandishing my latest A+ paper above her head, and declaring in round tones,

“Children, Margaret has once again received the highest mark in the class and she didn’t even go to grade five! I think we could all learn a thing or two from her example.”

I would inevitably receive extra bullying at recess after such praise and over time I began to really hate Miss Bonk. Imagine being so bone-headed as to be completely oblivious to the nasty looks and shoddy treatment I received every time she held me up as some sort of academic beacon. After a couple months of this, a mantra would form in my head whenever she stood up with a piece of my work,

“Shut up, you stupid hag. Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”

I think it was November when I finally had enough. Miss Bonk had just finished her latest ode to Margaret and turned to me, glowing with approval and adoration. She came over and carefully placed the paper she clutched in her bony hand on my desk as though it were a delicate flower. My rage at her stupidity finally boiled over, compounded by my ongoing resentment of the intrinsic unfairness of not having been consulted before being thrust into this situation in the first place. Almost involuntarily, an unbelievably disrespectful and rude comment escaped from my mouth. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I do remember it evoked precisely the desired response. Miss Bonk physically recoiled as though she had been hit, and her face crumpled into a look of hurt disbelief. Bullseye!

I was sitting there feeling naughty and triumphant at the same time, unsure of what would come next but aware that my feelings at that moment would make any consequence bearable. In that silence I began to get a sense of some movement and murmurings around me, and as I shyly scanned the room I saw smirks and looks of appreciation on my classmates’ faces. Several even gave me a nod or an eyebrow raise acknowledging their approval of my outburst, and later at recess a couple of girls came up to talk to me and invited me to join their game. I regularly sassed my teachers from that point forward, questioning their authority and undermining it whenever possible, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that I also never went friendless again.

When I look back at my report cards there is a definite point where my teachers’ comments completely change in tone. I was a pleasure to have in class until grade six, and from then on I was an undeniably good student, but that mouth! It’s amazing how one incident in a lifetime of incidents can be absolutely seminal in forming a person’s character. That moment in Miss Bonk’s class accounts for my ongoing deep distrust of authority and my notoriously smart mouth. Those who know me can decide for themselves whether or not they should thank Miss Bonk for that.

Fire Walking

Bali is one of the most beautiful countries I’ve ever seen. It has crystalline blue water, deep green terraced rice patties marching off into the distance, and almost every street corner holds a Hindu statue sporting a hat and a red gingham skirt, with offerings of colourful local fruit strewn at its feet. The people are kind and welcoming, and the food is delicious.

You would think given all this that I would have enjoyed my time there, but two other Balinese constants made that impossible; its extreme humidity and malarious mosquitoes. The air in Bali is so laden with moisture that it’s almost visible. Every day, whether cloudy or sunny, it seemed as though the weight of the entire sky was resting on my head and shoulders, leaving me feeling sodden and enervated. As to the mosquitoes, I was taking malaria pills but I still felt extremely uncomfortable whenever I heard one buzzing in my vicinity. There was one place we stayed that had neither screens nor mosquito netting, forcing me to cower under the sheet all night long while mosquitoes hovered ceaselessly over the bed, looking for a means of ingress. My husband was not bothered by such things, or almost anything at all for that matter, but I managed to convince him after two sleepless nights that we needed to find another hotel. The new place at least had netting around the bed, but my nights were still fretful.

We arrived in Bali after a month-long stay in New Zealand and Australia bunking with my husband’s extended family. The plane ride from Darwin, Australia to Kuta Beach in Bali was among the scariest I’ve ever taken. The plane was delayed on the runway and we passengers all sat sweating profusely for the better part of an hour as the flight crew scurried up and down the aisle carrying wrenches and screwdrivers. Finally the pilot came out of the cockpit and smashed the flat of his hand against the roof of the plane about half way down the fuselage, a motion reminiscent of how my dad used to bring our recalcitrant black-and-which TV into focus. This seemed to do the trick and we were soon taxiing down the runway with the pilot offering apologies over the p.a. system. Needless to say none of this inspired confidence in the viability of the plane, and the flight itself was extremely choppy, but we eventually touched down safely in Bali. It was one of those times when the passengers spontaneously break into heartfelt applause after landing.

Kuta Beach is well known in Australia as a holiday destination, with beautiful pristine sand and perfectly warm water. Despite this my husband and I were soon driven away by two annoying factors: multiple times a day, pushy Balinese women on the beach would offer to braid your hair or give you a massage, and come nighttime the streets were overrun by obnoxious, drunken Australians. We decided to visit Ubud, a renowned artist colony situated deep in the jungle at the centre of the island. I currently have a painting, a charcoal drawing and three masks I bought in Ubud hanging on my walls.

One evening while there we ended up conversing with a friendly Swedish couple at a local restaurant. They were a very sporty pair and spent most of their time doing outdoorsy things. Before the evening was over they recommended more than once that we should visit the Batur volcano located about an hour north of Ubud. It was best to go up early in the morning to catch the sunrise, and as I had made it clear through the course of the evening that I was not an athletic person, they suggested we would be advised to take a guided tour. My husband was very keen, so I reluctantly agreed and we booked in for the next available spot.

Two days later at 3 a.m. we were roused by an obnoxiously cheerful Australian guide banging a pot in the courtyard of our hotel compound, calling for us to get a move on. Soon my husband and I, along with about ten other bleary-eyed tourists, gathered outside and piled into the bus, ready for our volcano adventure. I was relieved when we got to the bottom of Batur because it seemed neither overly steep nor high, but we were not long into the climb before I realized how truly shitty my ability to judge such things was. The pitch of the incline seemed to increase the more tired I became, while the summit appeared to move further away with each subsequent step. It’s funny how fatigue and attitude influence perception.

After a nearly two hour vertical slog through increasing heat and humidity, we finally reached the edge of the caldera. The sun was just cresting the horizon as we stood, sweaty and out of breath, trying to leave the difficulty of the climb behind so we could truly appreciate the wonderful experience at hand. I had only made a little headway in regaining a normal temperature and pulse when I noticed some movement on the outer edge of my vision. It was hard to make out exactly what I was seeing because the ever- brightening sun was directly in my eyes, but it looked like a person walking towards me. No – that didn’t make any sense. Ours was the only group making the ascent that morning so there was no way anyone else was up here.

Presently the wavering blur began to solidify before finally coalescing into the shape of a young lad. He was wearing a box reminiscent of those carried by cigarette girls in old movies, only this box was made of rough-hewn wood and rather than containing cigars and cigarettes it was filled with ice and bottles of pop. The boy cooly sauntered over to our group and said, “Fanta?” Are you kidding me!? How the hell did this kid get up here before us and why wasn’t he sweating and panting like a normal human being? Also, how quickly would one have to ascend in order to ensure that the ice was still intact and the pop was freezing cold when one got to the top? These thoughts briefly filled my mind but were soon eclipsed by the overwhelming joy of watching the sun rise over a breathtaking landscape with ice-cold orange soda coursing through my system. That was the best pop I have ever had in my life.

We had to go back to Kuta Beach to fly off the island. It seemed exponentially more crass and loud after the serenity of Ubud, so we decided to walk along the beach until we were far enough away that the noise could not reach us. We headed out after lunch and had walked a fair distance when we noticed a strange undulation in the air ahead of us. It looked like the warping one sees above hot pavement on a summer’s day, but what could be putting off sufficient heat to create this effect in the middle of a beach? We then spied a crowd of people standing at the tree line about ten metres from the source of the heat, all facing towards it and talking in hushed, excited voices.

We finally got close enough to see what they were all looking at; it was a pit, about three metres wide by ten metres long, filled with white-hot stones. A man in the crowd explained to us that a yogi was about to demonstrate his amazing powers of concentration by walking the length of the pit without sustaining any burns. At that very moment, as if on cue, a man in a white sarong emerged from the trees accompanied by a boy. The man went to one end of the pit, closed his eyes and began breathing deeply. Meanwhile, the boy explained to the crowd that his master was preparing his mind for this extraordinary feat, and begged us to be absolutely silent as any distraction at this point could result in dire consequences for the yogi.

We all stood spell-bound, equal parts disbelieving and hopeful as the yogi began to circle his arms around, always ending with his hands pressed together in prayer pose. He did this several times, almost as if he were literally winding himself up. He then opened his eyes, undid his sarong and dropped it on the sand, revealing what looked like an adult diaper made from swaths of white fabric circled around his pelvis with the end tucked in at the front. Without hesitation or even a scintilla of fear, the yogi stepped onto the burning hot stones and walked at a normal pace to the other end of the pit, then turned around and walked back. He then sat down on the sand and pointed the soles of his completely unburned feet towards the crowd.

We all gasped in astonishment except for one man in the front row who crossed his arms and rolled his eyes indicating that he suspected a trick. I’m pretty sure this guy was a plant but it certainly added to the drama of the moment when the seemingly indignant boy confronted him. They had a heated exchange which ended with the boy enlisting our help in getting the man to come directly beside the pit to verify its hellish temperature. The man finally agreed but only if others would volunteer to go with him, so in the end about six people made their way down to the edge of trench. They held their hands out several feet above the fiery stones and called back to the crowd that the temperature even at that distance was truly unbearable. No normal person could possibly follow in the footsteps of the yogi without suffering severe burns as a result.

We all realized that this last part of the act was planned to drive home the truly extraordinary nature of the yogi’s feat (and feet) in the hopes that we would drop more money onto his discarded sarong as we dispersed. My feeling was that he more than deserved whatever he got. I don’t believe in miracles, but what I saw that day certainly attests to the astonishing ability of a well-trained mind to override hard-wired responses of the brain and body to external stimuli.

Have a Nice Trip

I am a member of a local choir and four years ago we had the great good fortune to sing for a week at the cathedral in York, England, locally known as The Minster. There has been a church on the site of The Minster since the 7th century, while the cathedral as it stands was finished and consecrated in 1472. We took a guided tour of the building and learned that its Great East Window is the largest expanse of medieval stained glass in all of England, and that it owes its existence to one man: Thomas Fairfax, a peer of the realm and commander-in-chief during the English civil war.

Henry VIII ordered the destruction and looting of Catholic churches and institutions during the Reformation, and Elizabeth I continued in the same vein after her father died, demanding that all traces of Catholicism be eradicated from places of worship. One of the things that therefore had to go was the stained glass. Lord Fairfax, who was in charge of the northern armies, was expected to get the job done in York. Fortunately for us, when faced with the transcendent beauty of the Great East Window as well as the other glorious medieval stained glass around the building, he decided that he would cheat. He ordered his men to shoot one cannonball through a window (the guide showed us the resulting perfectly circular patch job), then went back to London and declared he had fired on the glass at the cathedral. Times being what they were there was no easy way for anyone to check, so he was taken at his word as any gentleman would be. It’s amazing how one act of courage (he would surely have been beheaded for treason had his lie been discovered) can ripple across the centuries.

I found a lot of the material we had to sing in the cathedral off-putting at worst, and ridiculous at best. I am an atheist and find belief in God, and religion in particular with all of its concomitant rituals and dogma, to be completely incomprehensible and oftentimes quite silly. Every time we sang I was reminded of the chapel scene in “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life” wherein the prayer is,

“Oh Lord, oooh you are so big. So absolutely huge. Gosh, we’re all really impressed down here, I can tell you. Forgive us, oh Lord, for our dreadful toadying and barefaced flattery, but you are so strong and well, just so…super.”

To which the congregation enthusiastically replies,

“Fantastic!”

Then they all say “Amen” and sit down. And next comes the hymn,

“Oh Lord please don’t burn us, don’t grill or toast your flock. Don’t put us on the barbecue or simmer us in stock. Don’t braise or bake or boil us, or stir-fry us in a wok. Oh please don’t lightly poach us or baste us with hot fat. Don’t fricassee or roast us or boil us in a vat. And please don’t stick thy servants, Lord, in a Rotissomat.”

I know this is taking the whole thing to its absurd extreme, but it does get to the question I always have about worship: why would an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent being need constant attention and adoration? Also, why would he require service and obedience when he gave us free will, and how do the concepts of sin and guilt help when you can simply be forgiven if you are contrite? People who do believe in such things tell me that I would have to take a leap of faith in order to understand, but I am not willing to do so because that feels to me like taking a large step away from rational thought.

I am happy to report that I did not give any indication of my deep distrust and incomprehension of faith and worship while I was singing in the cathedral because it was clear that those in attendance, including most of my fellow choristers, really believed in Christianity and found comfort therein. My ethos is that you are entirely welcome to give validity to and act on any credo you wish, as long as so doing makes you a good person and you don’t proselytize to me.

The gathering place for the choir in the cathedral is up a set of winding stone steps and consists of two rooms. The first of these is quite large and holds a piano, and the second is a much smaller change-room lined with hooks and containing a small washroom. The daily routine was to gather around the piano and rehearse whatever parts of that afternoon’s repertoire needed extra work, then change into our choir robes (a bright blue cassock topped by a snowy white surplice.) Next we’d line up in a room just off the chapel, ready to process (a Britishism which describes the act of walking in a procession, pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable) into the choir stalls.

We were all very excited, if still somewhat jet-lagged, as we prepared in the choir rooms for our first performance. Everyone had put on their robes, we all lined up, and down the stairs we went. When I got to the bottom of the stairs, age-worm and exactly the same colour as the stone floor beneath, I thought I had hit the lowest step when I actually had one more to go, and I fell. My glasses and music went flying as the floor rushed up to meet me. Winded and disoriented with pain in my nose and a definite throb beginning in my right knee and elbow, I was immediately helped into a sitting position by those around me. I learned at that moment that three of my fellow choristers were doctors, and while I did feel grateful for their ministrations as they fussed and fluttered about, the main emotion I felt was embarrassment.

We have all had the experience of falling, or even just tripping or sliding but staying upright, and the thought which immediately follows such a misadventure is inevitably, “Did anybody see that?” Even if you are hurt and bleeding, as I was at the bottom of the cathedral stairs, the overriding feeling in that moment is one of shame. Why is that?

Whatever causes this reaction, I spent enough time on schoolyards watching kids take incredible headers and then get up as if nothing had happened to know that it is not innate. Young children always sprint out of the school when the bell rings, whether they have a particular place or game to get to or not. Chins up and arms pumping with a look of sheer joy on their faces, they race into the yard at top speed, unaware of anything other than their destination or perhaps just the unbridled pleasure of running as fast as they can. This means that when they fall, as regularly happens, they fall hard, after which even the meekest kid will just get up and start running again as if nothing had happened. I never once saw a kid look around to see if their tumble was observed nor appear the least shamefaced as they picked themselves up and continued on their reckless way.

As an aside, it is the case that kids also race back into the school when recess is over. When I was on yard duty and the end bell rang, I would position myself on the pavement facing the oncoming tide, standing like a boulder in a swift coursing river as the children streamed around me, bubbling with excitement and energy as they passed. Mostly I would just observe them, giving the evil eye to any passing kid who was misbehaving, but otherwise still and silent. Sometimes I would imagine myself quickly sticking my foot out, so fast that no one would notice, and sending someone flying. I didn’t always have this fantasy and obviously I never acted on it, but it was immensely satisfying to picture some little shit – my imagined victim was always a rotten kid – brought low in front of their peers. Not injured, at least not badly injured, but humbled. Vengeance is mine, sayeth the librarian!

So, if we are not born with the impulse to feel ashamed after falling, then where does it come from? I was thinking about other times when I’ve been ridiculously embarrassed and/or apologetic in my life, and it has always been at times of vulnerability or lack of bodily control. When I’ve thrown up in front of others, when someone has accidentally walked in on me while I’m on the toilet, or when I’ve been dizzy or faint and needed to sit down. Such occurrences roll off my back or even make me laugh when I’m alone, but if there is even the possibility of a witness to my completely accidental misfortune, I feel ashamed. Even more inexplicable is that I feel compelled to apologize profusely if I happen to have witnessed a similar fate befall another.

At first I wondered if this reaction is Darwinian in nature: weakness is definitely not an evolutionarily advantageous trait and surely one is showing weakness in all of these instances. Shame and embarrassment do not live anywhere near the primal part of the brain however, so it makes more sense that this reaction is not evolutionary but rather cultural. We are expected as adults to be capable at all times – upright (in both senses of the word), self-controlled and intentional. I think we can all agree that laying spread-eagled on a church floor after a major fall is about as far from these things as one can get, so to be seen in this way naturally engenders humiliation. Furthermore, when we see another in such a compromising situation, one which removes the carefully constructed mask of competence every adult wears, we are immediately sorry because there is an unspoken understanding between us that such a revelation should be the prerogative of the wearer, not the observer. Perhaps it’s also because we feel empathy for that person, knowing from personal experience how mortifying it is to be caught in a vulnerable position.

We inhabit bodies which sometimes poop or fall or vomit or faint, and we recognize that everyone else’s bodies do the same, so there really is no point in being embarrassed or apologetic when such unavoidable occurrences happen in front of others. These reactions are simply social constructs, and I am going to make an effort from now on to cast aside shame and contrition when such things happen to me. I’m not saying I’ll be successful, but one can only try.