Another Dark Alley

copyright 2010

There I go again — another dark alley,
Where I don’t know what is down there,
But I know it isn’t good.
There is no hope of finding anything,
Other than despair and worry,
So I don’t think that I should.

But I find so much joy and so much exhilaration
When I run down in the darkness and the night.
Every time, no matter how I stumble and who I stumble into,
I always find another road back in the light.

There I go again — my heart is dancing,
My blood is racing through me,
But I know it’s just too hot.
There is nothing but warm blood
To make me red and jumpy,
If I had my way, I’d rather not
Be running down the alley
Where nothing comes out right,
I want to be safe at rest.
But the darkness calls out to me,
And I just venture onward,
Though I know this is all in jest.

I know that in the end this is but a game,
I am only playing in the dark, wanting to get home,
But I am so joyful and my heart is so alive,
I can forget that I am running all alone.

The Eagle’s Scream

copyright 2011 by Katherine Gilks

The woman shuffled slowly down the street to her waiting car.  She had passed the worst of it, the doctor had told her, but she still felt terrible.  A dull pain wracked her body and she wanted nothing more than to go back to her apartment and curl up on the couch.  The nurses did not recommend that she drive herself home, so she had lied and told them that a friend was meeting her at the café on the corner to give her a ride.  She had pleaded with the nurses to let her leave alone, since their usual policy was to have their patients picked up from the clinic itself.  Her friend did not know the nature of what she was having done and that she was at the clinic rather than the hospital, she had further lied to them.  For their part, the nurses were sympathetic and only one of them seemed genuinely upset at her stumbling out the door on her own.  Their attention and procedures annoyed her: she was a grown woman who had long been able to make her own decisions.  As far as she was concerned, she had every right to leave on her own terms.  Her car was parked out of their sight – she was certain that someone would have come after her had they realised that her friend was not going to pick her up – and she set her mind to getting to it without collapsing.

Wobbling around the corner past the café, she caught sight of a woman walking her dog across the street in the park.  The dog was running and playing about, blissfully unaware of anything but freedom and a sunny day.  She had assumed that she would be feeling as free as that dog now, but as she clutched the door-handle to her car, she instead felt trapped by her weakness and pain.  The dog’s owner grabbed a ball out of the animal’s mouth and gave the fluffy bundle of fur a big hug, to which it reciprocated her affection by wagging its tail and licking the woman’s face.  Shivering and hardly able to look away from the scene in the park, she opened her car door.

She slowly eased herself into the driver’s seat as the woman with the dog threw the ball again.  As she shut the door to block out the noise of the street, she saw another woman round the corner opposite her.  This woman was pushing a stroller and the dark circles around her eyes made her look exhausted, even though her jogging outfit and her hair were otherwise immaculate.  From her car, she stared at this obvious display of maternal bliss as she gathered up the strength to start the engine.  On one hand, she envied how well this new mother carried herself: she wore lovely clothes, was well-groomed, and owned the sidewalk with her stroller.  Confidently walking toward the park, the woman managed to keep eye-contact with her baby and her surroundings almost simultaneously.  To complete the picture, a lovely gold band and sparkling engagement ring adorned her finger as though to flaunt her status in front of this miserable lady sitting in her car across the street.

On the contrary, this lady in her car was quite relieved that she was not an exhausted bubble of fat and milk who spent most of her day talking with an infant.  After a few days, she could be her normal self again.  This ordeal would be finished and she would continue as before, albeit more carefully.  She started the car and tentatively drove away from her nightmare, tears streaming unconsciously from her eyes.  She had not wanted to cry – she had resolved not to feel sad.  This was a liberating day for her.

She did not see that the woman with the stroller had stopped just inside the park and was pulling her baby out to be bounced.  The little one – otherwise an adorable six-month-old who had caught the attention of the woman with her dog – was squalling uncontrollably, as though she had just discovered that the most terrible thing in her life had taken place.

 

Note from Katia: This is a draft prologue for a longer work.  It is quite vague on purpose.

Orthodox Groundhog Day…

No, there is no such holiday as Orthodox Groundhog Day, although if it did exist, it would probably involve a groundhog getting out of his den and circling it three times, making a lot of prostrations, and then returning to his den for another forty days until Pascha!

However, during church this past Sunday, I was reminded of how cyclical the Church is, and how unusual it is in our modern world of constant newness.  The modern story is one of progress, and history is usually told from a perspective of “how we got here and where we are going.”  We are reminded of technological change, social change, and political change, and are taught to fear regression.  Innovation and progress are one-way streets and always implied to be good things, or at least their dark sides are buried or blamed on individuals.

Yes, our lives progress in a linear fashion: we are born, we grow, and we die.  Everything else is incidental.  Likewise, social entities follow a similar path.  However, within this linear progression, we are cyclical beings.  We have natural cycles (like the year) and artificial ones (like budgets), although the latter are usually based on the former.  The adage that “the more things change, the more things stay the same” is still highly applicable, even when comparing centuries.  Very few actual “revolutions” have taken place historically, and the world revolution itself only implies going around in a circle!  This is not to say that progress or change is bad, but only that it is often misunderstood: one makes a lot of progress on a carousel, but one is still going around in a circle.

What is this to do with the Orthodox Church?

In the film “Groundhog Day,” the main character ends up reliving the same day over and over until he gets something right, which is where I got the idea for the title.  Otherwise, the similarity ends.

Our Church is based on a calendar that goes in a circle: we repeat the same feasts every year, we repeat the same prayers and the same readings every year, and frequently we repeat the same rituals on a yearly basis.  Unlike some other churches, our liturgical calendar is largely unaltered throughout the year and we have the same prayers and readings on the same day every year (except when they get switched around with the Paschal cycle, which is a different cycle altogether).  There is little need for novelty, except for when a priest has to come up with four homilies annually about the Gadarenes and their pigs.

I realise I come across as a stick-in-the-mud at the moment.

The Orthodox Church also has services that are rather like Lego-blocks.  Rather than having a distinct beginning and end, the services are repetitive and tacked onto each other to fit.  We finish Matins and move into the Divine Liturgy, or finish Vespers and move into Matins, without so much as a whimper.  Yes, we have “dismissals” and bell-ringing, to name some of the things that mark the change in service, but they are not usually emphasized.  Furthermore, a lot of our services are based on longer ancient services, or incorporate multiple ancient services, and this is reflected in the prayers.  A Protestant friend of mine was asking why we repeated the same litany several times in one night: partly because it was in place of something else that got cut centuries ago, but mostly because it reminds us continually to pray.  Why do we pray for our hierarchs, or for our departed, multiple times in one service?  Why not?  Don’t they need it?  Don’t we need it?

But what reminded me of Groundhog Day on Sunday was that as we finished the Divine Liturgy, we flipped back to the Trisagion (an hour backwards in the service).  Although it was the Sunday of the Cross, I wasn’t expecting a procession and extra litany, let alone needing to go back in the music.  For a brief moment, I was extremely confused.  To make matters even more confusing, we then had prayers for the dead.

And then things were clearer, because the Church is funny that way.  Everything makes sense in a slow, methodical, cyclical way.  For in the Church, nothing is linear but our own lives.  We progress from baptism to our funeral and beyond.  For God, nothing is linear, for everything occurs at once.  Likewise, in the Church, we are at once present at Christ’s death and resurrection, and present with the saints, and present within our congregations and living rooms.  The same prayers for the newborn baby at baptism are repeated (with necessary modifications) yearly at certain feasts, at their wedding, and at their funeral.  Everything and everyone are connected.

The following dialogue sums it up well:

Communist official: When all the old grandmothers die, we’ll finally be rid of such silly superstitions!

Grandmother: No, you are mistaken.

Communist official: Oh, really, granny?  What will happen when all of the grandmothers die, then?

Grandmother: When this generation of grandmothers dies, there will be new grandmothers to replace them!

Family of Canadian Provinces

If all of the various provinces were people instead…

So first of all, there are two sisters: Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.  Newfoundland eventually marries Labrador, but they try to steer clear of their annoying neighbour, Quebec.  Quebec is charming enough to marry Nova Scotia, and then have two children: New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island.

Then Quebec decides that Ontario is younger, sexier, and wealthier (hey — she does have huge tracts of land) and divorces Nova Scotia to marry her instead.  Needless to say, the rest of the family is not amused by this.  The couple have one daughter, Manitoba.

Manitoba grows up and marries Alberta (who’s a boy, despite the name).  Alberta has a twin sister, Saskatchewan, who is good friends with Manitoba.  She’s married to the Roughriders, and most of the family think she’s a little weird, in a cute and lovable sort of way.  Alberta and Saskatchewan’s older brother, British Columbia, is married to Vancouver Island, a niece of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland.  Ontario and Quebec gave everybody jobs working at the family business, but meddle in the family like most middle-aged power couples.

Rounding out the family (they all have jobs at the family business, no matter how related they actually are) are the Yukon (another brother of British Columbia and the twins), his wife the Northwest Territories, and her sister Nunavut, who married to Labrador’s brother.

Revisiting Old Friends: Lois Duncan’s Teen Mysteries

Sometimes old friends show up in odd places. Sometimes, it isn’t so much that the place is odd, but rather the timing, or rather the identity of the friend. Why them? Why then? Why there? Why did I run into Childhood-Classmate-Fourteen at the luggage carousel on December 15th in the year 2006?

More pertinently, why did I run into Lois Duncan mysteries in Collection Development class in March of 2011?

I admit that I as a pre-teen, I had few close friends and was a social outcast at school. I preferred to read and write than hang out with other kids, so my fond memories of being a twelve-year-old also include my friends that were better known as paperbacks. I love all kinds of books of different genres, though I have my preferred favourites. I had favourite authors, partly because their work was reliable, and partly because the school librarian kept suggested authors and titles for me, and once she learned that I liked one author or another, she would ensure that I read all of that author’s books that our little school library had. While everyone else thought the librarian was a mean old lady, I enjoyed talking to her and wanted to learn all I could about the library.

Anyhow, nostalgia aside, one of my favourite authors was Lois Duncan. She writes primarily mysteries, supernatural or otherwise, and thrillers for young adults. Some of her well-known works include I Know What You Did Last Summer and Killing Mr Griffin. Of course, these were the books that I enjoyed the least. My favourites of hers are the ones that are obscure and/or out of print, after having enjoyed a resurgence in the 1990s. Lois Duncan started publishing in the 1960s, and some of her novels reflect this temporal dissonance. Like many books from the past, many plots could have been simply resolved with modern technology. However, her stories remain exciting and I was not fazed by reading stories set twenty or thirty years in the past when I was twelve. Most of them are not explicitly historical novels and use little historical references, so the only thing that dates them are the technology and such. Since most of her stories are not based on technology, they still do not feel dated.

I have decided to share my favourite Lois Duncan novels, since many of them are no longer found in library collections or on bookstore shelves. I recommend them all if you can find them! They have female protagonists, but many of the stories also have important male characters whose perspective we get a glimpse of: They Never Came Home almost has two protagonists, but the young man is not featured in the summary of the book. In chronological order:

Ransom (copyright 1966): Five teenagers get kidnapped on the way home from school; this is a straight-up suspense story following the teens’ ordeal, the parents’ attempts to get them back, and even delves into the kidnappers’ backstory. The five teens are fairly stereotypical on the surface: the preppy girl, the artsy loner girl, the jock boy, his less-of-a-jock younger brother, and the outcast troublesome boy. However, as the story progresses, each of them is explored in-depth. This book is very tame by today’s standards and may seem formulaic, but it is a good suspense tale. Highly recommended for ages 12-17, particularly for a more sensitive reader.

They Never Came Home (c. 1968): Joan, who is in her last year of high school, has to come to terms with the disappearance (and deaths) of her brother and her boyfriend. Her mother falls apart completely, while Joan strikes up a friendship with her boyfriend’s younger brother. The events follow several months after the boys’ disappearance and made me fall in love with the American Southwest. While even as a pre-teen I could recognise that this story was somewhat oldfashioned, the characters and setting feel fresh and are easy to relate to. What did tip me off to it being set in the late 1960s was that Joan faced little opposition when she decided not to go to university. A parallel plot in this story features a young man in California. Highly recommended for teen audiences, especially girls wanting a romance story without heavy sexual overtones.

The Third Eye (c. 1984): Karen is a psychic, and thus an outcast at her school. As she becomes increasingly frustrated with her visions, she loses her boyfriend and is alienated from her parents. She ends up teaming up with a young rebellious police officer to solve a crime involving kidnapped babies, and faces death many times. This is a fantastic mystery-romance (or romance-mystery?) with a dose of the supernatural, highly recommended for teen girls. It is a nice blend of girl-power and marriage-and-babies, which is a delicate balance. Karen’s psychic powers are also treated with respect by the author, but Lois Duncan does not glorify the supernatural in this book. (From a religious perspective, psychic powers are treated as a divine gift, although there is question whether it is demonic or not.)

Locked in Time (c. 1985): This is another family drama that incorporates religious and supernatural elements. Nore is seventeen when her father remarries a younger woman from southern Louisiana; she is forced to move in with them and her two new teenage stepsiblings: Gabe and Josie. Since this story takes place over the summer, the action is largely confined to the environs of the old Southern plantation that they live on. Nore pretty much only interacts with her family, but she soon is embroiled in a mystery that rapidly descends into a life-or-death situation for her, and she cannot be sure who to trust. Highly recommended for ages 12-18, and I would include it on a read-alike list for Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight.

These are my four favourite Lois Duncan titles. Others that I enjoyed include A Gift of Magic (c.1971), Gallows Hill (c.1997), and the anthology Trapped (c.1998). I would definitely recommend the above four titles to young teens and pre-teens, particularly to girls who like mysteries and deep subjects, but who are not ready for a lot of mature sexual content

Poem Time!

Upon A Stone (copyright 2003/2011)

 

I have knelt here for centuries,/My face as worn as the writing upon which I rest,/No longer readable at a glance,/But my eyes…

I have watched others laid about me/And fences raised to keep us apart/From the world of life that surrounds our realm;

I have seen houses appear and disappear,/The people who dwell in them change/As though the wind had carried them off,/Away from this sacred, silent place.

My misty gaze falls upon one such house,/White wooden boards form its walls,/Adorned with burgundy-red trim;

Outside its door, with its paint peeling and all,/A woman stands alone.

I remember the first time my eyes saw her,/All those years past,/She was on the arm of a handsome young gentleman,/And she met my eyes nervously,/Awaiting  a future mother-in-law’s approval…

Then she was bedecked in a long white veil,/Laughing in the young man’s arms,/Never taking her eyes off his face that glowed with pride…

Then that sunny morning some months later,/Still all the same to me,/When she stood at the bright burgundy-red window/In a cotton gown, her hair hanging loosely past the sill,/Her eyes radiant, smiling weakly,/Arms clutching a newborn child,/A child not unlike the one I guard, but alive…

As more years passed, I saw her now a matriarch proud,/A flock of children always anxious to greet her/Every afternoon, coming home from school;/She would embrace each one tenderly, keeping them close to her heart,/As though she could protect them always…

But then came the day one of her fledglings fell from her nest,/Too soon to fly on its own,/Her husband went home,/Her children went home, and yet,/She stood in black, ignoring her tear-stained eyes,/Clutching a worn, well-used white handkerchief,/Alone.

Years went by still, and the woman’s long hair grew greyer,/Her face worn and tired, but still she smiled;/She stood at the door, beaming/As her chidlren would return,/They carried tiny bundles that cried,/And little toddlers that giggled, eager to see their granny,/And she embraced every one of them as she had their mothers and fathers,/Her eyes joyously meeting mine…

Then the morning her once proud, strong husband/Never rose from the bed they had shared,/His eyes still closed peacefully in his sleep,/They carried him outside to be mourned,/Uncovered, dressed in his best clothes;/The woman followed blindly,/A sea of black washed past my still face,/Waves of grief lapped at my unmoving eyes,/As they brought him into my domain of silence/To rest in the soon frozen earth…

So that old woman now stands alone in her doorway,/Her eyes misted and unseeing,/She breathes in the fresh air and the quiet that surrounds her,/Knowing my presence across the road will never disappear.

The wind whispers past my wings that will not fly,/Giving me a soft, ethereal voice,/Sunlight peeks through the clouds above me,/Enshrining me in a faint, heavenly glow,/Painting life into my cold, dead eyes,/Bringing a soul to the sentinel in the cemetery,/The angel upon a stone.

 

I wrote this right before heading off to my first year of undergrad.  It is based off of a real tombstone and a real house, but all of the details are otherwise fictional. — Katia

Good morning!

Having enjoyed keeping up a blog for classes, I thought I ought to keep one for myself that doesn’t have to be stuck on certain topics.