from chris lloyd <dearpm@gmail.com> hide details Aug 4
to pm@pm.gc.ca
date Aug 4, 2007 1:18 AM
subject Charges laid against CN Rail
Dear Stephen,
The human capacity to absorb various extreme emotions within a short period of time never ceases to amaze me. First: my grandmother’s funeral. My dad gave a great speech. I know how difficult it was for him to do it and he did it so well and with grace and conviction and honesty. But I still feel like I hardly knew my grandmother; she represents a side of the family I barely know. I spent three days at the Cottage, and learned a bit more of Anne and Lee, had great watergun fights with Lee in fact, and Brian and his native wife Wanda, and even Sharon, who resembles my grandmother the most in both appearance and attitude.
Then there was the surprise visit to Pointe de l’Église to see Claudine. If you look through the archives of my PM letters check the February 2004 entries. I moved to Montréal and showed up at Claudine’s doorstep the weekend of her birthday while her close AC friends were visiting. It didn’t go over well; some surprises are just too much a surprise to be mutually satisfying. Same deal last week. It was the busiest night for her; exam preparation, plus just the bubble-nature of summer camp. Having gone to NSCAD I should have understood how unexpected breaches of a very particular way of life can be disruptive.
A nice long, relaxing drive up the Annapolis Valley to Sackville, NB and then it was one NSCAD reunion after another. The OK Quoi? Contemporary arts festival has artists in residence, like Goody-B and Kennie Dorion, musicians coming from all over, sound artists, radio jams, Motion Ensemble concerts, plus I got to see Leah again after 4 years, and Erin from eyelevel. Even went to the beach at Cap Pélé yesterday, before driving back to SJ to work the bar.
Today, after cleaning the apartment for most of the day and just after opening the gallery, Peter came up to give me sad news. Mary is dying. She has internal bleeding and the doctors don’t think she has more than a couple days left. Without even speaking to her I know Judith is beside herself with grief. She’s not going to leave her mom’s side. I haven’t visited since before the wedding. I’m selfishly caught up in music and art festivals and the anticipation of my sweetheart’s arrival tomorrow. The sadness is tinged with guilty relief: finally, one part of me thinks. No more pain, no more staring at the ceiling. I imagine a huge weight lifting off Judith’s shoulders. In the same instant I am struck again with the finality of death, it’s ultimate unknowableness.
I realize I think about death almost constantly. So much so that it rivals the amount of time I spend thinking about sex. I think about sex a lot: sex with Claudine, hypothetical sex with just about everyone else, I wonder sometimes if I might not be sex-obsessed. It almost worries me, until I realize that there are way worse things one can be obsessed about. Politics, perhaps, or maybe just power.
That bridge collapse? Intense. A sign of the times; we have no idea when the bridges or buildings in and around us will just give up.
The bar was the slowest Friday ever. The long weekend did us in. I’m hoping to surprise Claudine with a trip to Sackville tomorrow night, but there is the chance I might have to work. Will make an effort to visit Mary first thing in the morning, before taking the cats to my parents’ house. Joanne, Philippe and Nataniel arrive on Sunday and they are allergic, so the cats are having a grandparents vacation.
I had a long Irving discussion with Marni at the bar tonight. It seems almost everyone she had lined up to speak for her documentary has now backed out. It is a very stratified kind of enforced incestuousness, very feudal, very dependent. This followed up on and even overlapped a bit a discussion I had with Mike about the need for an arts school, or very least, a fine arts program as part of the university in Saint John. Another circular discussion.
DEAR PM 