Weekly Stories

inversion

Calgary is having an inversion. At least I believe that’s what you call it when one day you’re wearing a summer dress and the next day you are scraping a foot of snow off your car and trees are falling over onto neighbour’s balconies. A wicked cold is ripping through the cast like a cat with its tail on fire and this week is my turn. Fortuitously I wasn’t needed in rehearsals today so I can lay in bed and rest. I am a stuffy runny hacking mess. At supper I hobble down the stairs, waver in the hallway and…

awake

I have two days in Vancouver. Oh I have missed my fellow and he has missed me. While walking up the empty stairs from il Mercato, he spontaneously spins me around by the hips and kisses me passionately mid flight. As we reluctantly part, out of my peripheral vision I spy a husky young man in a courier’s uniform. He side steps us with a huge grin on his face, witnessing a moment I thought we were alone for. His cheeks are flushed bright apple red, like a boy’s, as though I have just kissed him instead.

apart

Today I fly back to Vancouver with Nora in the vain hope she may have school to attend. As we head out the door, her two cousins run towards her and hold onto her so tightly: a little huddle of girls with hot earnest tears running down their sweet little apple cheeks. Two pug puppies are at their feet whimpering, little tails beating against the girl’s pyjama legs. Their shiny wet eyes blink. Nora says, “I’m going to miss you so much.” They can barely say, “Good-bye, Nora, I hope to see you…at Christmas!” This has been unprecedented family time…

Yahoos and Yeehaws

I receive a slap across the head kind of email and chuckle as I stare out the window of Sunterra at the gorgeous hot Calgary sky. The clouds are thin and fibrous, like I’m sitting in the centre of a huge blue seedless watermelon. A business woman is outside battling the wind with her coffee, sandwich, phone and smoke, prioritizing what can and cannot get blown away. Her kitten heels cast long shadows and they bend inwards like a schoolgirl. She must enjoy the bluster, trying to do all these things at once. I breathe in the beauty and decide…

visible minority

Calgary is the third most ethnically diverse city in Canada, next to Vancouver and Toronto. Nearly thirty percent of the population is a visible minority and of that number seven percent of the population identify as black. This is much larger than Vancouver, where less than one percent of our population identify as black, even though over fifty percent of our population is a visible minority. (is it still a minority if it’s the majority?) When I grew up in Calgary in the seventies and eighties we had a Chinatown and that was about it. When I moved to Red…

The oblivious trombonist

Warning: this story is gross. I am orally independent. If you ever need top secret information from me, forget electric shock or bamboo under the nails…threaten to stick someone else’s toothbrush in my mouth. Maybe this distaste for other people’s visible saliva comes from sharing beverages with younger siblings and cousins who were always phlegmy with a cold or too young to understand not to backwash. The communal root beer was always milky by the time it got to me so I would often pass. Likely it was exacerbated by dating not one but two gentlemen who suffered from an…

Surprise! First day of school

I blink my red puffy piggy eyes. Either I am allergic to something or just haven’t adjusted to the dryness of the prairies. I didn’t get a good sleep. I was up late chatting with my fellow. He asks “Do you travel like this often…?” I joke, “Oh, in a few years you will be tired of me and then you’ll welcome the breaks when I’m gone.” He doesn’t smile. “We know that isn’t likely”, he says. True. Somehow I already know. Nora wakes me up early rifling through her suitcase, “Mommy you haven’t packed me enough socks!” “Nora, it…

Micro Expression

I have been doing an awful lot of skype lately, away from home. Last night I was chatting with a dear friend. She was under the weather and feeling alone and struggling with a single-parenting issue that I heartily could relate to. And then she said something about when she was a child – and what would normally be a fleeting expression – froze. her image pixilated into a portrait of deep sadness that she normally would not allow herself to show. Skype held that fragment – that delicate split second of humanity – like a “missing child” ad for…

defiant

Calgary is defiant with money. A women clickity clacks down 17th Avenue wearing outrageous hot pink pumps she paid a lot for. I can tell by the heel. Another slips out of a cab in a bright neon yellow designer dress, knees together, short skirt. She doesn’t care that she’s sixty. She has great legs. Why shouldn’t she? Matching boys roar past in matching black Porsches – so loud I have to cover my ears. The young lady next to me in the restaurant patio, nibbling here and there at her various high end tapas, is bothered by a wasp….

hanger-on-er

While heading out in the Kubota over the rolling hills of Big Valley with Uncle Ed, we notice the cows are out and into Auntie Connie’s garden. Nora jumps out of the box and I leap out of the passenger’s seat and we run a gentle arc around the side of the hill and herd them back towards the fence where Uncle Ed shuffles, patiently, waiting. One little black and white calf bolts the other direction at the last minute, trying to duck under a fence and my little one and that little one have a battle of wills. Nora…

Lucia Frangione