Random Keepsake #2 (and 3-8, technically)

My Grandma had all the dolls she was eventually going to give Mel and I, lined up, standing on her dresser. She had our names and date printed in shakey hand writing on surgical tape stuck to the bottom of the stands.

These porcelain dolls were the kind you ordered from the pages of a magazine. To me they were priceless and I would rip their images out of my mom's Canadian Livings, orderly filing them in my soft brief case.

Along with the collector's plates, fridges, stoves, and beds that I would research and preserve from the Sears catalogue, these were all things that I felt it important to have one day. I had the interior of my dream home, cut out and placed in this one bag.

I guess it was partly all the waiting for the doll that made it so amazing. She was a big doll too. They began to flood my room. Shelved, all seven of them with their stiff synthetic curls and bonnets.

Smaller versions of perfect people.
Ones you can't play with or change their clothes.
Just stare at them or lie awake at night in the dark, terrified by the street lamp's low light reflecting in THEIR stare.
Dusting their dresses and laughing at the fact that they EVEN had underwear.


Photo: Mel and I. One of my many dolls. This one was supposed to look like me, but had side buns that remind me of Bjork now.


This is where my random keepsake selection became evident to me this week...

A girl I knew growing up emails me today as part of her Living Better Virtue and uncovers some bones from her childhood closet.

I just talked to my mom and we jogged through our half memories and here's what we remember happening. Back when I was in grade three, I took my doll to school against my mom's wishes. I'm not really sure why I had the doll at school, maybe a show and tell or something. The doll went missing and was found in a fellow student Kathleen's desk. My mom seems to think Kathleen was blamed, maybe not officially, but this makes me feel awful because she never had the easiest time in school. Sue had scribbled an HB pencil into the cheek of my porcelain doll and left her for dead!

My mom remembers my grade 3 teacher calling her in a very emotional state. I was so upset taking it home to my mom, who managed to remove Sue's deep dark brand without any words to make me feel worse then I already did.

Over all these years I never really knew who did it and had completely forgotten about this traumatic experience! It feels very strange now, milling in my head.

Very clearly though, I remember now the order of the reasons why I cried and cried:

1. I was devastated that someone would hate me enough to do something so utterly awful to a personal belonging that meant a lot to me.

2. The thought of my Grandma's heart breaking in seeing the doll she had given me in that state of impairment.

3. Having to show my mom, disappointing her in what should have been a prevented situation. And a possible

4. I was actually a real tomboy and felt like such a girly baby sobbing in front of my entire class.

When I was a kid I hated letting people down or not showing respect and appreciation towards their kindness. I felt like I had ruined a part of my Grandmother's love.

This all reminds me of how awful kids can be to each other. Like the time Kathleen's hand got stabbed with a pencil by a classmate in grade two and the lead broke off in her skin.

Even though I didn't hang onto the feelings I had over someone doing such a thing, I definitely believe that on a subconscious level, these things contribute some damage! Like faltered self confidence! Mistrust of people in certain situations! And the feeling that I wasn't everybody's favourite girl.

I'm sure Sue understands these feelings from her own life experiences!

I guess her cry out for attention wasn't really about me, since I never really knew Sue. She was a year older and I had never talked to her. At least it wasn't a personal offense....I think.

It seems silly now obviously. The things from childhood that scar you seem in hindsight very small.

I suppose overall (with the help of my mom saying so) that it's very decent of Sue to email me after all these years in an effort to feel like a better person and do right by others. I only hope that the feeling my mom had about Kathleen being blamed was just a feeling, and that Kathleen wasn't wrongly punished for the doll being randomly found in her desk. I have definitely forgiven worse intentions from others, which we will never discuss on this blog! People that I loved and trusted. So obviously I forgive Sue. We were after all, just kids.

This poem makes me want to do everything today and not hide from any of tomorrow's fears. This author seriously amazes me. Brenda Shaughnessy. And I reek with envy that I did not write this or any of her other poems!!!!


Fortune

Luck today will be skill tomorrow. If only your fear
held now gorgeous in its white cotton frock
could become small and frayed in the next millennia.

Be brown and blowsy and on the ledge instead. Used
and fueling, a succubus cannot ruin what she pulls
on her tricky leash: dread's body, desire's body.

If terror bent double could thicken into a frenzy
for the last flushed basket of windfalls
that arms October, could you really wander

forever in that shelter? Are wondering and losing
the same? If you ply me now all pure-voiced,
with some sepia trinket from your big box of ducks,

could I sculpt this cold knowledge into the fresh
hot fruit swinging in next summer's
branches, slimsy in rain, saturated
in the pear-flustered color closed in your eyes?
This bleary, fragile calendar: Your disbelief,
your loveable haunting. How clever you are

tomorrow. The expert veils around your face, scarlet
fabric woven by apprentices whose fingers
are sad and large with the work of beginning.

Jesus & Mary Chain

I love when you hear a song that Sometimes Always slips from your mind. It was only until today that I realized this hit from so many years ago had Hope Sandoval singing on it. Who I love. Now listen and rejoice like me! weee!



I have decided that I need to travel. I am eager.
I need to stop losing money.
Those things don't go hand in hand.
So until I figure things out, I will learn Illustrator.




--------------------------------
Below is a Random Keepsake response from my friend Karen, who is currently living in Iqaluit, Nunavut. This is her Random Keepsake:


Karen:"I never would have shelled out $45 to see the White Stripes down south, but the oddity of the band playing in Iqaluit, Nunavut, was enough enticement for me.

Their show took place almost a month to the day I moved up here, in the defunct Arctic Winter Games Arena, so badly built it'll never see ice. Due to a further problem with the building, only a few hundred people were allowed in. It was a bizarre experience.

I like it as a keepsake because it reminds me how little I knew about this place then, and how much I still have to learn."

Random Keepsake #1

Today I am sharing my first Random Keepsake of my new blog series (and no, this is NOT a mild effort to get people to leave comments on my blog, although that would be nice once and a while)!

Article #1
One Victorian picture book (one of many received), containing childhood class photos. My grandma really loved Victorian themed books so I am the keeper of numerous bonneted, floral keepsakes. It was only later that I actually filled this book with my many faces.



Part Two
Part Three

It comes in at a whopping 3" x 2" and ties with a pretty ribbon.

words I never said

I was listening to GO on CBC this weekend, main topic on the show being "Things you wrote when you were a kid that you're not necessarily proud of" or something of the sort. Basically I have twenty boxes filled to the cahoots with passed letters in school, poetry galore, my first paintings, and old hand made story books with fabric covers (I was always so excited for the day that they were bound. I think maybe I rushed through drawing the main furry animal characters so that I could get some green, yellow and white floral print magic slapped on the outside, along with the Title and Author).

There is an open event that happens regularly in Toronto (at the Gladstone, as I recall) where you can get up and read a short story or whatever you want from your youngen years. I think it's a great idea for a series.

That's why I've been inspired to now have a new series on my blog. RANDOM KEEPSAKE. This series also comes from a deep love for Edward Carey's Observatory Mansions, where a crazy kook collects, catalogs, and cherishes other people's garbage. My new series first entry will take place on the next blog posting. I hope that if you read this and have something random you'd like to share, that you go on ahead and scan it in, post it on flickr or something and happily share your link and story on my blog.

Class participation gets you a sticker and some of those wonderful plaque fighting red tablets you'd get on Dental Day in the first grade that would make your teeth turn pink if plaque was having a party in your mouth. How mortifying! I can't believe they made us do that in school! Gratefully, my mother watched over my brushing habits.

And for a warm up, here now are a few photos I took in the summer of 2001. Eep!:

dyslexia 2008

evre since christmas I'ev been
more dyslexic
the back of my shirt fits to the
fornt. front.

my actions correct themselves
by the right thing cleaning up
the wrong

I count the days
back to the beginning and
wait for my turn
first in the queue

with paper in my hands
and pencil in my teeth
I'll be done with the
chewing
when the
hunger swallows me

Lonely Austrian

I went to a psychic last month. She was super nice. The room she read out of was pretty funny, with guardian angel and native themed paraphernalia scattered everywhere, and some joyful Christmas carols (instrumental of course) on her tape deck. We got down to talking serious business and thank god she turned off the bell choir. All in all this woman ended up surprising me.

She read both palms, one of which was my spiritual palm. She explained that I am an active person who doesn't put up with something in my life without trying to change it first. She said that I will sit around and dwell, stay down for a day or two, but that I drag myself up off the floor and carry on. This all of course comes from the fact that in a past life I lead a long life of utter loneliness and heart ache!!! As a very wealthy, beautiful woman in the 1800's, in my Austrian countryside mansion, there I sat in her vision, at a piano, "playing a very somber piece". "Someone you loved very much left your life, after which you lived alone, unhappy. You basically wasted a life, so now your soul is trying to make up for this."

It reminded me of my piano teacher back in high school. Rivoli. He was such a cute Italian man, and so passionate. I was learning Liszt (I believe Consolation #3 or something) and he told me this gigantic fabricated story about the piece. That this man was in prison for a crime he didn't commit. An outdoor corridor linked the prison to the court house, and he was taken there in chains, as he looked way down into the valley of trees. After his verdict, he was sentenced to death and the piece was written for the long walk back. I was so moved by this story and it really helped me feel the piece out when I was learning it. He only told me it was a lie after I learned it. He got a real kick out of himself.

He told me all sorts of stories. Debussy having an autistic daughter that would play with her dolls and then go into deep droughts of exhaustion, only to get back up and skip around. Not sure if that was true. Or the story about the girl in the park with wind and sun through her hair (La fille aux cheveux de lin - The girl with flaxen hair).

Anyhow, I'm getting away from whatever it was I was talking about. But they're all stories. And somehow they inspire you to be better or play better or live your life in more detail...or embellishment.

Box Set

I was hanging out with my friends Christine and JP last week and we got into the topic of box sets. They strongly expressed their opinion that I needed to release a boxset in my career.


So I told them that my box set would be my giant face on the front and that a battery operated system would make my mouth open as the box is opened. And a gaggle of bees would come flying out!

Christine nearly lost her marbles (and lost some of her drink), imagining a soulful teenage girl opening her newly bought Valery Gore boxset.

I will say at this time, do not fret, these bees are not aggressive and do not sting. They merely get the listener going, in preparation for the box set's mass inclusion.

Please see attached blue prints.

random/no focus

So I'm on the road and there's this gigantic "Jesus Loves You" neon sign, just as the vineyards start and the lines of factories and steel fall away.

I have been wanting a picture of this Jesus sign for at least a year. And I scurry for my camera on the car seat every time, only to tell myself I will for sure snap it next time.

I have been having the most bizarre dreams lately. I couldn't possibly go into a story of one right now, as my mind is fully awake and exposed to the numbing, daily grind. But I think it has something to do with Twin Peaks! It's allowing the behaviour of my daydreams to sink into my sleeping dreams!

I thought I'd include an update on my record, as it has been on a bit of a hiatus. I am really excited to say that I will be working with my friend Tim Abraham from here on in. He is a local producer/engineer. He will be engineering the project and we're gonna hit it up in high gear starting in late February, March.
















In other news, I got myself a fish eye lomography camera and am enjoying it's awkwardness.

bring in

Things I love about my hometown:
-You see people you know at the bank
-You go for a walk and everyone and their dog says hello
-It makes me slow down because there is nothing to do and really nowhere to be as quickly
-There is one Tim Hortons for every 100 people.
-You can mostly count on things not changing very much.
-The quaint downtown of Ridgeway with the general store type facade on all the businesses
-My grandma's there. She is four feet tall and quite cute
-Many other reasons.
























Reasons like the lake. Like a lake and a lake will like you back, ya hear?





















































Now for the new year. I am thinking in high gear (just as soon as I get through the second season DVD of Twin Peaks).

Hopefully 2008 is taller and stealthier then his brother, 2007. Full of hot blood with thick skin. But you can tell just by the look of him that he definitely knows what he's doing.