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I'm thirteen years old. Someone yells from the front of the school bus. "Hey Mon, how do you keep a moron in suspense?"
"I don't know! How?" I yell back. I love jokes! My friend waves me off, apparently engrossed in a new conversation already. "How?" I yell again. "Never mind. I'll tell you tomorrow," she hollers back. "No, tell me now!" I beg. And beg. All the way home. Like a moron. Patience is not my strong suit and it can lead to bouts of moronitis. I actually think I may have become a teacher to teach myself patience. I have learned to be more patient in general - and I have endless patience for little people who really need it. But overall, it is still not a strong suit. There are gifts with every burden, of course, and the upside of impatience is that if something needs doing, I want to get it done. I am not a procrastinator. I may be a precrastinator. Case in point: It has taken my poor partner 28 years to train me to sit after a meal and not hop up to start the dishes. I still can't tell exactly where the line is between we're sitting around chatting and patting our full tummies and I don't want to look at these dirty dishes anymore. If there are dishes to be done, let's get them done so it's over with. Paper to write? Get 'er written! I had a pile of completed term papers in a basket on my desk in university - each with a note to remind me of it's upcoming due date. Jeez, now that I see that in print, I think my friends may be right: that story really does make me look like a loser. Anyhow, the point is, I'm not good with waiting. Which is what I am doing at this very moment. I wrote earlier about wanting to write the new book with more patience. To wait and to listen and to follow the characters which is not my usual style. Well, I am out of road in the story and instead of constructing more and moving forward, I'm waiting to see if the characters will point me in the right direction. So I'm sitting and waiting. Well, technically, I'm writing to you about sitting and waiting. I just put the pen down for a while when I noticed a moth on the deck - a big, beautiful moth who wasn't moving. I went and sat closer to it to watch, thinking perhaps it was dead. But then one section of wing moved a little. Oh! Is it asleep? Dying? Meditating? Every few seconds that wing moved a little so I sat vigil and watched. And waited. Then a breeze flipped the moth up and over and revealed a little scavenger ant underneath the magestic corpse, licking his nasty little ant lips; this culprit was causing the movement. The moth had been dead the whole time. So, what's the lesson? The novel I'm working on - that I am "watching" - is already dead and I just don't know it? Egads! Perhaps the lesson is simply that things are not always as they appear. Or maybe it's that finding the truth requires a much closer look. And some patience. Okay. I'm waiting. It's 1977, and a bunch of unemployed writer dudes are sitting around a Vancouver bar and one goes Hey, what are you doing for the long weekend, man? And after everyone at the table has complained about not being able to do anything on accounta being starving artists, they order another round and start speculating on how much writing a person could do on the long weekend if they, you know, didn't stop to sleep, man! There followed a bit of one-up-man-ship, a sprinkle of bravado, and then the dares started. By the time they got to a double-dog-dare, the 3-day novel contest was born!
Honestly, I don't know exactly how the story goes, but the history definitely includes a bar bet. Here on Cortes Island, the contest has some lore of it's own. Picture it: Whaletown, 2009. Ruth Ozeki and I are sitting around the Whaletown Institute eating potato chips and scheming about fun writing projects. We should get a whole group together and enter the 3-day novel contest, man! And so we did. Ruth ran four writing workshops in August. Nineteen intrepid writers began planning their novels in their heads only - no writing yet! (I also began planning my menu for the weekend which was my second favourite part of the whole experience.) Over the Labour Day weekend of 2009, nineteen Cortes writers wrote over 1000 pages. That's more than 2% of the entire island population. Can Manhattan say that two percent of their population wrote a novel on the long weekend? I think not. Several of the writers camped in and around the Whaletown Institute. Volunteer body workers dragged cramped bodies away from laptops and smoothed out the kinks. Community members brought soup and bread and all kinds of snacks to keep body and soul together and the writers kept writing. It was epic! I can't describe the energy that vibrated over our whole little island that weekend, with its Whaletown epicentre. It was as though we stepped into a different landscape altogether that weekend. For 72 hours, we gave ourselves permission to leave the everyday behind and strive for something special; a freeing of our most creative selves. Our families were left to fend for themselves, we abdicated from all other responsibilities, we turned off phones and email and told everyone we were unreachable for the weekend. We left the world behind for the words. I will never forget that weekend. First, I found out this morning that Full Moon Lagoon has won a Canada Book Award. Then, I seemed to have way more blueberries than usual in my oatmeal. And right after breakie, I was notified that my book and I are featured today on BC BookLook.
Check it out! On my way out to buy a lottery ticket . . . This photo is proudly displayed in the Cortes Island School because it was our very first school bus.
However, it was also the truck borrowed by the Nakatsui family in 1942 when they were forced to pack up and leave Cortes forever. The Internment of Japanese Canadians is history. No matter how compelling the events, kids seem to have a separate compartment in their brains for "History" and for many, it is not in the same file as "Real life". Finding ways to make the past real for kids can be a challenge. Sometimes it is as simple as taking a group of students out to the picture display in the hallway to show them what they've seen many times: our first school bus. Giggle, chat, point, who's grandpa is that, again? But then, a connection to what we've just been talking about in the classroom - the big nebulous thing called the Internment. This is the truck they packed their house into. This truck. The giggles and chatter stop. They look, silently. Real people. Real story. History. What makes the past real for those of us who didn't experience it? The threads of connection. While I researched this time in the history of Cortes Island, at our museum, I came across a letter from a member of the Nakatsui family, asking for any information about the couple who were interned from Cortes. Where were they sent? Where did they end up? I sat for a long time with that letter in my hands; the tangible evidence of a note in the history books about the "scattering of families". I sat and thought about this family's suffering and about how many other families lost each other, either literally or emotionally. For some reason, I jotted down the contact information of the inquiring family member and tucked it away with my research. A couple of weeks ago, I happened upon it and decided that since the book was now published, I should try and contact this woman. The number and address were several years old. It was a long shot, at best. Yesterday, I reached her. We had a nice exchange and she told me about trying to find out more about her own family history. And it was real all over again. So, why is this so important to me? Because I truly believe in the necessity of remembering for the purposes of learning and evolving. We readily acknowledge that growing up is all about learning from our mistakes. Well, if we have any hope as a species, we'd better learn from our mistakes. I am dismayed to see where we are right now, as fear about terrorism and extremist rhetoric stirs anti-Muslim sentiment in North America. I can only imagine how it feels to be a Muslim Canadian right now. I can only imagine how it felt to be a Japanese Canadian when Imperial Japan attacked Pearl Harbour in December, 1941. I wonder if the silence of the masses was as loud just before the Internment, as it is today. Every day, I am pulled further into the world of technology. We all are. Whether we like it or not and whether we're ready or not. This is the world we live in.
At the front of the pack, directly behind the creators and promoters, are the enthusiasts who embrace each new innovation as it comes and apparently, can absorb how to use it in their sleep. They leap out of their beds each morning and check their phones to see what has changed overnight. And something always has. Behind this crowd, the rest of us are spread from Eager to Reluctant and all points in between. At the back of the Reluctant group, a few people are actually chained to a small machine labelled Necessity and are being dragged. They keep their feet and shuffle along miserably for the most part, but are occasionally unable to keep up, actually stumbling into the dirt and being dragged until they can scramble to their feet again. See the one being dragged face down in the mud there? That's me. I'm not saying I don't appreciate the wonders of technology. I love how easy it is to connect with people, most of all. Behind that are a hundred other things for which I am grateful. But my gratitude list would include things like, "Elimination of typewriter," and not, "Ability to sync all my devices and have my watch tell my car where to go." I'm thinking of this as I sit and watch an eagle above the lake, playing on the currents of the same wind that giggles its way down my stovepipe to tickle the flames which keep my fingers warm enough to type. The trees are swaying gently in unison - a tall, geeky, green campfire circle listening to Kumbaya. The lake is white capping - as though the resident trout are mooning us with their bellies: Not today, Fishers! Yup, that's the same wind that regularly knocks trees down onto electrical wires and cuts the power to our little island. When that happens, we fire up the generator to run the well and light a lantern. The stove and oven run on propane and the house is heated by the wood stove. All we really miss when the power is out - is our gizmos. Recharging is possible with the generator, but low on the priority list behind fridges and freezers. And yet, I have noticed, I miss the electronics more and more. I have become addicted to my email. And for the first time this year, there is a tablet in the house. Now I don't have to go to the computer to check my mail. I love it. I hate it. The eagle is still playing in the wind, laughing at me, as I sit here with my nose stuck in my laptop, talking to you about being shackled to technology. I am resentful of every minute I spend learning how to use some program I need for my work, that I am not really interested in. I am grateful for every connection I make with a friend, new or old, by pushing buttons. Miraculous. Find the perfect balance, whispers the eagle as he tips his wings one way and then the other, finding the sweet spot,that lifts him up so effortlessly. |
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