Category Archives: Writing

Teddy

Dedicated to the memory of Jakelin Caal and Felipe Gómez Alonzo, two children who died in immigration custody after crossing the American border from Guatemala.

Granny gave him Teddy when he was four. She’d patched him together from scraps lovingly sewn with tiny stitches in the dim evening light. He and Teddy became inseparable. But by the time he was five, his life and his world were very different.

Granny became thinner and thinner. The old woman wasted, slowly fading into quiet uninterrupted by breathe. His mother cried, and his father clamped his jaw tight against emotion. The little boy clutched Teddy closer. He always had food, but only years later did he understand that the extra bread Granny had given him wasn’t extra, but her own share of the family’s meager portion. His parents shared whispers in the dark, mouthing thoughts beyond his comprehension.

His mother woke him suddenly in full disorienting blackness, urging him to get up and dress quickly. Fumbling, he did his best, presenting himself to his mother and father with Teddy clutched tight under his arm.

His father took one last look before closing the door of their shack behind them. Outside, the boy became aware of shouting and gunfire and flashing lights in the distance. His parents had packed food and their few precious things into their two sheets. Each carried one. His father, looking wary, took the lead. His mother took the boy’s hand. He could feel her trembling, which scared him.

They walked, blinded by blackness. Quickly at first. Slowing as tiredness approached. They followed a narrow dirt road. Sometimes he tripped, righted by his mother’s hand. When he became too tired, his father lifted him up, cradling him against his strong back. His father smelled of sweat, and something unfamiliar. He clutched Teddy tight to his little chest, sandwiching him safely against his father.

Sometimes, others joined them. Strangers. Sometimes words were spoken. There seemed a quiet reverence in this march. A fear. A dim hope.

Then they came to the fence. They stopped. His father put him down. He looked up and saw his father’s tension. He could feel his mother’s hand shaking again as it gripped his little hand. The fence was taller than his father. It had spiky metal bits on top. All three of them looked up, daunted and fearful. He knew what was going to happen next, and was frightened, although he wasn’t sure why. He clutched Teddy even tighter.

Dawn was approaching. After urgent whispered discussion, and seeking in the dark for hidden dangers, his father quietly climbed, carefully lifting himself between and over the spiky metal bits. At the top, he stopped briefly, again checking the dark around them. He started to climb down, then dropped to the other side. A few shrubs broke under his weight. They waited in tense silence, seeing each other through the separating fence.

His father signaled that it was safe. His mother lifted him and Teddy as high as she could. He clutched the fence fiercely with both hands, feet finding toeholds, keeping Teddy wedged under his arm. Both parents urged him to climb. He was terrified, but knew he had to do what his parents asked. He climbed carefully, trying to be quiet. The fence was so high, his little arms and legs so tired. His mother started climbing too, her presence urging him onward. Eventually, he made the top of the fence. The metal spikes looked even more lethal close up.

His father urged him under the wire. His mother held the wire to make it easier for him. His little body was just small enough to get through, although he felt the sharp scratch though his thin shirt. His father motioned for him to drop. His father would catch him. He took a breath and dropped, landing in his father’s strong arms. His mother was suddenly beside them. His parents ran, his father still carrying him.

Loss. Teddy? Granny? Teddy? The little boy started crying the loud uncontrolled sobs of grief. His parents slowed but could not stop. They couldn’t understand what was wrong. Was their only child somehow injured?

Finding a dense thicket some distance from the fence, they stopped in the shelter of trees. As the boy sobbed and screamed, his father urgently checked limbs and body, finding the bloody slash across his tiny back where the razor wire had assaulted him. Watching in still silence, his mother looked scared. Then she noticed Teddy was missing and told his father what was wrong. Looking back, they could see the tiny shaped rags twisting from the razor wire on the fence top.

His father, aware of the risk of noise, urged for quiet. The exhausted boy was inconsolable. Hurried discussion between his parents. Then his father was gone, vanished into the nearing dawn. The boy, suddenly quiet, peered through the early light to see his father’s furtive glance, before swinging himself back onto the fence. He swiftly scuttled up the vertical metal, then raised one arm to rip Teddy down, before dropping back to earth and running quickly back to his family.

Overcome, the little boy jumped up to greet Teddy and hugged his father. His mother assured him that she would mend Teddy’s arm. But now, right now, they had to keep running silently through the coming day, and for many days to come.

Teddy now sat on his bookshelf. Whenever he glanced at his childhood toy, the events and emotions of that terrifying night flooded him. His mother had repaired Teddy’s torn arm with love and patience, but no access to materials. Since that night, the arm had looked a little thin, wasted like he remembered his Grandmother towards the end. But his mother and father had made it. He’d made it. And his precious Teddy had made it too.

UNICEF estimates that 30 million children are currently displaced by conflict, more than at any time since WWII. Let’s try for a better world in 2019.  

© Catherine Jenkins 2018 all rights reserved

Bologna (the city, not the meat product)

Although Bologna and Florence are both in northern Italy, they’re very different cities. Although Bologna also features amazing architecture (the portico-covered walkways for which it’s known, for instance), it’s more of an industrial centre, with a rich history in the sciences and education.

Portico, Bologna

Last fall, I had the privilege of presenting part of my dissertation on Patient-Physician Communication at an academic conference at the University of Bologna. Founded in 1088, as well as being a prestigious international school, it’s the oldest university in the world in continuous operation, and the first to use the term university (universitas) upon its founding.

University of Bologna

I’d been wanting to visit Bologna for quite some time, specifically because of its connection with Luigi Galvani (1737-1798) and his nephew, Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834). Both were physicists interested in the effect of electricity on biological organisms. Galavani stuck to frog experiments, but Aldini moved on to mammals, including humans, and is sometimes credited with partially inspiring Mary Shelley’s (1797-1851) Frankenstein: or The Modern Prometheus (1818). I located a couple of exhibits of period scientific apparatus in or near the city. Why would I care about this macabre connection to Bologna? It’ll make more sense once the next poetry collection is published!

Early apparatus for producing electricity

Print of one of Galvani’s frog experiments

 

 

 

 

 

©Catherine Jenkins 2018 all rights reserved

The Three Rs: Reading, Writing, and Re-charging

This summer, I took the longest sustained pause since completing my PhD. I knew I needed a break, but my time kept getting eroded. I decided a year ago to safeguard this summer to recharge, and also to focus on my non-academic writing. With caring for aging parents, and then launching right into the PhD, life had been taking priority over the creative work for more than a decade. Six manuscripts had been parked that I wanted to get back to. I brought three with me on retreat, knowing that my writing focus tends to change with the weather.

It rained six days out of seven quite consistently, sometimes with violent wind, thunder and lightning; so while not a good summer for painting and outdoor cottage repairs, it proved very productive in terms of one of my writing projects. A poetry manuscript that I’ve been working on for a while, but hadn’t figured out how to bring together, is now nearing completion. And it feels so good! It’s like taking back a vital part of my self that’s been lying fallow for far too long. It’s not that I haven’t been writing, but I find that academic writing just doesn’t allow for the same level of free-thinking creativity; it just doesn’t offer the same buzz. And for me, creative work requires quality time that also supports the energy required.

Doe on the front lawn looks into the cottage to watch me knit

I took my writing retreat at the family cottage, a log cabin in the woods on a lake north of Peterborough. I was there for nearly six weeks, which proved to be an optimal amount of time. It was long enough to get good work done, but by the end, I was ready to come home. I also got some fun reading done; I caught up on almost a year’s worth of National Geographic, and read five novels, four of them YA fare. I knitted most of a sweater, noting my long association of writing with knitting. And in spite of the weather, I got out on the lake in my kayak several times.

Sitting on the front lawn, you can see and hear all kinds of birds: ospreys, blue jays, chickadees, scarlet tanagers, hummingbirds, herons, loons, ducks, geese, wild turkeys, crows (few things in nature sound as goofy as an adolescent crow), and woodpeckers. The woods are also full of animals: black and red squirrels, chipmunks, racoons, porcupines, groundhogs, fox, and deer. It’s amazing to see them in the wild, but they tend to disappear on weekends when more people are around and the lake gets noisy.

Pileated Woodpecker’s snack

It’s quiet there. So quiet, that I sleep heavily through the night. So quiet, that you can hear insects, and when a Phoebe snatches one from the air, you can hear her beak snapping shut. The air sometimes has sweet undertones. Sunsets provide amazing light shows, and then the night is truly dark and still.

I feel well rested, relaxed, and more like myself than I have for a really long time. As with all holidays, one tries to hang onto that feeling for as long as possible. I’m back in Toronto, with the teaching term starting, but I’ve scheduled regular writing time, hoping to move forward with some other projects that’ve been on hold. I’ll let you know when I get a publisher lined up!

 

©Catherine Jenkins 2017 all rights reserved

Reflections from Cottage Country

Catherine’s off being a writer in a cabin in the woods. Me? I’m on holiday, so I volunteered to write this month’s post. (Wow. Automatic spellcheck is amazing—especially when you’re not a great typist.) We’ve been here a really long time. It’s rained almost every day, so it’s been perfect for napping.

Even inside, there’s lots to see and do. There are lots of windows, so I can see all kinds of birds. One day, the lilac bush was alive with them! And I’ve seen all kinds of animals outside too! Some of them are about my size, but they look very different. One of them lives under the cottage; I hear her scratching or grunting sometimes. Her whole body is covered with these long sharp-looking spines. Early one morning there was a family of five little animals about my size staring in at us. They sat up on their hind haunches with their front paws hanging down like little hands. There’s an animal that looks a bit like a small dog, but he has the most amazing tail!

And there are these huge animals—bigger than a human! I hear them snorting in the trees. Sometimes they come out though and they’re enormous! One of them had little antlers growing from his head! They’re not very brave though. The smallest movement or noise and they snort and stomp, then run back into the woods.

 

 

 

 

Catherine’s here all the time—well, nearly all the time. It’s great because whenever I get a bit peckish, I ask her for treats; sometimes she complies. When there’s sun, she lets me go outside. She makes me wear this stupid string thing, and won’t let me go under the cottage or into the woods. The other day, I took her around the whole cottage and then down the road. I decided to turn back before the cottage was out of sight; I didn’t want her to get lost.

I’m loving the quiet and the sweet air and the moss for stretching in and the grass for eating and so much to see and experience! And lots of cuddles when it’s cold. I hope the weather gets better so we can go outside more. Not sure when we’ll be home; I’m not the driver!

Signed The Mystery Cat in Black aka Baboo aka Fawkes Jenkins

©Catherine Jenkins 2017 all rights reserved

“Time, time, time…

See what’s become of me” (Simon & Garfunkel 1966). The things one remembers, the things one forgets, in the quick-quick-slow foxtrot of life. Wondering at 30, when the brain feels too full already, how memory can still be possible at 50, but somehow at 50 managing it with ease. And wondering at the selectivity of memories that pop up over and over, when others are forgotten—like the last time I felt truly affronted at being treated like a child. In the hallway of a Spanish hotel, my Dad quickly responding to my choking on a hardboiled sweet going down the wrong way by bodily upending me. The indignity! I was, after all, eight years old, and well past the stage of being picked up by a parent, this stance perhaps embellished by my being surrounded by adults; my parents and older siblings, then about 13 and 15, so adults to an eight-years-old’s mind. This fall, I’ve been reflecting on time quite a bit, and thinking about other writers’ reflections on time too.

I came to Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics only in the last few years, although they were published in Italian in 1964-65, and English in 1968. Each of this series of twelve stories begins with a scientific fact, or at least something understood to be scientific fact in the mid-1960s. Narrated by Qfwfq, a reincarnated Being who morphs from shape to shape, retaining memories from the inception, the stories follow the development of the Universe from the beginning of Time. Although each conscious form is true to its own nature, the stories offer very human reflections on love, complicated relationships, evolution, extinction, the search for signs, writing, and the urge for immortality.

I read physicist Alan Lightman’s Einstein’s Dreams when it was published in 1992. Told as a dream diary of the young Albert Einstein as he works out the theory of relativity, each of the thirty brief chapters explores a unique conception of time, and its impact on day-to-day life and being. Similarly to Calvino’s work, Lightman brings scientific concepts into his imagined time conceptions, although some may be pushed beyond their known limits. If time stood still, for instance, parents would forever hold fast to their children; if time were circular, we would be fated to return to our successes and failures ad infinitum.

Most recently, I enjoyed psychiatrist Francois Lelord’s Hector and the Search for Lost Time (2012, translated from the French, Hector et le temp, 2006). I stumbled onto the Hector series after watching Simon Pegg as Hector in the 2014 film, Hector and the Search for Happiness, based on Lelord’s Le voyage d’Hector ou la recherché du bonheur (2002). Hector’s examination of time takes him on an adventurous trek across continents, as did his previous searches for Happiness and Love. While Calvino and Lightman based their imaginative explorations, however loosely, on scientific constructs, Lelord focusses on lived and cultural perceptions of time. Lelord counters our current cultural anxieties about pressured time, our sensed lack of time, with alternative cultural constructs of time that encourage an expansion of our perceptions of time, allowing us to take a breath.

At this time of year, when Father Christmas “Did gyre and gimble in the wabe” (or some such, with apologies to Lewis Carroll, 1872), as we ring in the New Year (at least on the Gregorian calendar, 1582), and “settle our brains for a long winter’s nap” (thank you Clement Clarke Moore, 1822), this is a time of reflection, when memories stir. Tonight, I hope you’ll join me in reflecting on the past, as we move into a bright new future. 2017. Bring it on!

Nearly Midnight

©Catherine Jenkins this last day of 2016 all rights reserved