Weekly Stories

the Mommy fail of taking my daughter to Madonna

My daughter and I are going to the Madonna concert for her tenth birthday. It will be her first big concert ever and I am so giddy, I feel as though I am fourteen. Madonna, though not exactly role model material, was an important and provocative figure for me while I was growing up. Both of us had an Italian dad and a rebellious relationship with Catholicism. Both of us were fighting through our art for sexual liberation for women, for the LGBTQ community, and we did so through spiritually provocative images and ideas. Me and my erotic Christ figure…

10pm Skytrain commute

Working man on the sky train with a face like Spencer Tracy in Boom Town, forty years later. His hands are my Dad’s: short, wide, and strong as muscly octopi, a few digits short. Purple marks on the nails. Cuts. Splinters. Construction pants have drywall mud splattered on them. Still working this hard with a full head of white? Taking transit home? Lunch kit protected between steel toed boots. He doesn’t look like a drinker. So why is he not retired? I run through a myriad of possibilities in my head: a son he invested with who ran him dry,…

don’t buy this mattress from “Canadian” tire, buy local instead

The ferry ride to Bowen Island is a meditation. Twenty minutes: too short to do anything, really, except just “be”. I get out of my car and head to the front of the deck to stand in the rain: a shivering mid-sized woman in a thin sweater beside her compact car, bobbing on a boat between the rolling clouds and the inky sea. These little moments when I stop – and listen – and see – and feel – and taste the salt in the wind – and touch a sense of Wonder – these moments add hours to my day. My…

Old dog. Half blind.

Tonight my old man dog snoozes with his ears poking up. I wonder if he’s dreaming of when he was a pup. This long suffering hound has seen me through so many bad boyfriends. They’re gone, but he’s still around. Farting. Snoring. Inexplicably licking the carpet. Still wagging his tail, half mast, as he wobbles on arthritic legs, still pulls the leash a little at the sight of a squirrel. He was the cutest puppy – honestly – little carmel coloured puff ball with blue eyes. He was a lovely middle aged mutt – despite his penchant for a constant…

when the news reel reeks

Little boy in a red sweater, dead, face down on a beach. A girl of two and her father murdered in the mountains by a shy quiet man in a shy quiet town in the shadow of the Rockies. It’s not a bright week; the news reel reeks. I post something on Facebook about Syrian refugees and Christ and the call to compassion. I get a hateful rant from a well meaning man who is angry about the senseless pain in the world and decides to blame all form of religion. Tells me to “grow some balls” which I find…odd….

Fry and the fawn

A baby fawn was bleating for his mother last night while we were honeymooning. It’s the funniest sound, sort of like a baby crying through a kazoo, “mmmeee mmmmeee me…!”. It totally upstaged any vocalization of pleasure. Through the lace curtains, beyond the flickering candles, the fawn’s distress calls hooped over the red cedars and burst lightly onto our ears like bubbles: cute, constant and a little worrisome. Was a fawn caught in our fence? Fellow sighed with patient interruptus and went crashing out at midnight into the brush with a flashlight and little else…which made me giggle. The fawn…

post visitor anxiety

The house is empty after sixteen to twenty one people staying here over the past twelve days. After we waved good-bye to the last caravan headed for the ferry, the ever jovial Fellow hung his head and quietly said, “I’m not…doing so good.” I snuggled him into my neck and sniffled a bit myself and Nora clung to my side. “I’m gonna miss them.” She said. It’s hard to say good-bye when family is far flung and beloved. In the post wedding sorting of pie plates, three hundred napkins, someone’s forgotten shoe, dead flowers, broken toys and heaps and heaps…

The Wedding

Though I had a great deal of fun doing a “countdown to the wedding” Vlog on facebook, tracking my home renovations with Nora, I have missed the art of arranging words beautifully. Oh how I love to fingertip my way through a bucket of colourful adjectives, plucking just the right posy to contrast with a woody noun, arresting my eye, making me look at its meaning afresh in a bouquet that describes my day. Andrea Isaak did my flowers for the wedding. This makes me think of her. I actually don’t know her all that well, but she’s the kind…

Uber Lucia

I walk down Polk Street, turn right on Pine and then left to meander further down Fillmore, pleased that I am navigating San Francisco without using my phone. Blisters are starting to form and I am deciding between my feet and my indigestion, walking feels good. And the indigestion was worth it. I shouldn’t eat rich food with dairy but…how could I resist brioche donuts at Reverb with my beloved epicureans, Rick and Sylvia? The donuts were about the size of my thumb with a smear of tangerine creme so haphazard, it looked like a mistake. But oh, that dollop…

a season for wasps

This is a season for wasps. They buzz in the backseat of the car and you drive off anyway, there are so many of them. The only upside to a year of nasty stingers is: the children learn to wave them patiently away instead of freaking out. The sting though. The buzz. My daughter is at camp with her Dad and I am alone at home covered in paint and dry wall dust, eating ice cream. The good kind. The “I am ignoring stings” kind. A male friend jokes with me on line. “Congratulations on your upcoming wedding. I hope…

Lucia Frangione