She called me the other day to make this announcement:
“I’m going to the country to pick mushrooms and frolic in the woods.”
[originally transmitted by e-mail July 25, 2006]
Tuesday, July 25th, 2006
Why I love Suzanne so much
Sunday, August 29th, 2004
a weekend up north
We paid an old-fashioned weekend visit to Mark’s friend Mary who was having her end-of-year cottage-closing party on a little lake in the Laurentians. Food was brought by everyone, children were brought by most and dogs were brought by very few (we dropped ours off at the Dog Lady’s on the way up). The drunks were sociable but not lascivious, the children were active and excited but not rude, agressive or whiny, the food was identifiable and nutritious. As this party lasted two days and as many but not all guests made multiple appearances it’s a little hard to count numbers; but I suppose that Saturday night there were about twenty adults. It ended with a bang this afternoon as the last five of us hard-core partiers played a rousing game of Cranium™.
Anyway, it was very nice.
We left this evening in time to pick up the dogs before the 7 pm curfew, giving a lift to a friend. The dogs were happy to see us but bore no apparent resentment towards the Dog Lady. Exactly perfect. We locked Pepe into his usual cage in the back of the station wagon and drew the cover over to muffle the sound of his barking somewhat. I sat in the back seat with Poupoune on my lap and our long-legged friend sat in the front. I quickly realised that Poupoune reeked something awful. After quick and urgent discussion windows (which had been raised against the rain) were lowered and I stuffed Poupoune into a plastic bag to contain the nauseating odor. This arrangement worked quite well, Poupoune being pretty compliant when she knows what is wanted. Upon our return home both dogs were ushered promptly into the bath and thoroughly scrubbed… and de-flead while I was at it.
I think the other dogs at the Dog Lady’s did the territorial thing and peed on them. And then I think the Dog Lady sprayed them with Febreeze.
[originally transmitted by e-mail August 29 2004]
Tuesday, April 15th, 2003
FW: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story
Glossary:
Outremont: well-to-do professionals live there. Rich people too.
Nerve.com: the personals site where I met Adam, and Mark, and Anne (in that order).
100 pounds: about 45 kilos.
>on 4/15/03 3:51 PM, Cummins, Alison at wrote:
>Um, may I forward this? It’s funny and lovely. (Just like you.)
—–Original Message—–
From: Anne McKnight [mailto:______@sympatico.ca]
Subject: Re: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true storyHi,
A funny story about Internet dating, with the moral being, you never know what will happen.
Remember last fall when I met that cool musician guy with the heady imagination, had a nice coffee with him, after which he asked to meet up again, and then he up-and-said his trials (“”) with Internet dating were over, when we actually hadn’t even been on a ‘date’?Well, the scene at that time was kind of bleak. I was dog-sitting. In outremont. In a house with no good food to raid, except for dog food, very expensive dog food. The dog had allergies and had to be given pills often. The dog’s allergies made its anus itch. The dog would sit & spin on its poor itchy anus for hours on end. I didn’t know this was an allergic symptom. I thought she had to go out. I took her out alllll the time. She has no discipline and weighs over 100 pounds, and would drag me down the street, towards other dogs, towards piles of dogshit, towards sodden donuts in gutters, all of which I would pry out of her mouth. If she put anything in her mouth, it would activate more allergies, more sitting & spinning. Is it any wonder I turned to alternate-virtual–worlds? Also, I was writing grants, which in academia means inventing parallel lives you will probably never get to live. Which I have already not gotten to live about 7 times since I moved here, all those parallel lives recycled back to the drawing board…
So, anyway, I answered the cursory, wildly funny ad on nerve, and started a conversation with this guy, the musician. Even though I was stuck with the itchy-anus dog, in outremont, with no food but dog food, it made me happy. I met him, and that made me happy too, since more than ‘dating trials’ I thought, oh at last, someone I can talk to about the freaky things I like, music & etc. well, that didn’t work out, obviously. I was dissed-electronically, ick.
The synchronicity of the conversation was good though, as it got my imagination deceived, productively, into thinking it had an interlocutor. I wrote a grant proposal to pay for all those things I invented in the parallel worlds that crossed between that conversation & the parallel universe sponsored by the government of quebec.
So synchronicity point 1, is that K**** says, Sunday, he is working with the guy who is the ***** man at *****, who is this guy. Oh really, say hi for me. So, yesterday, Monday, synchronicity 2–I find out that I got the grant. 45K + 10K for equipment, sound & image editing stuff. I guess I owe that guy a beer some time. Even though he has a girlfriend, and protocol dictates we will probably never be in a together-drinking situation anytime soon, due to the blowback such an encounter in his single days would oh-so-predictably provoke. Moral of the story: you never really know, do you?
Chalk up another felicity for parallel, virtual lives, and the unpredictable directions they go…
a
[originally transmitted by e-mail April 15, 2003]
Sunday, March 16th, 2003
An evening’s entertainment
Suzanne’s mother is dead; her father is dying. She is clearing out the family home in preparation for selling it to the highest bidder. Lineoleum is being pulled up, walls are being washed, cupboards and basements emptied and two lifetimes worth of accumulated stuff thrown away or given to the Rotary club. Hobby materials are the toughest: paintings and model boats gave meaning to the life of their maker, but that life is now over. The hobby materials do not evaporate but are left to the children to hard-heartedly toss in the dumpster.
In the guise of the sewing fairy, Suzanne came by last night bearing gifts. Sewing patterns from the fifties, sixties and seventies. Her mother was tall, so bought large-sized patterns I can use; more important, she had simple, classic tastes so I want to use them.
Attachments for my sewing machine: her mother’s Necchi went to another friend, but I got the attachments. Including a keyhole buttonholer! *Very* special! And a ruffler. The ruffler was bought for making curtains: in the pile of treasures were two books on soft furnishings and strings of orange bobble trim. Suzanne remembers the ruffled curtains in the kitchen. She also remembers the ruffler being turned to evil purposes once the curtains were hung, and being tortured with frilly dresses. I have twenty-first century plans for the ruffler but it will be used once again.
Books and books of knitting patterns for men’s cardigans A bag full of wool ends (dog sweaters!). Kniting needles. Darning needles. Snaps. A box of buttons.
A recipe book published by Lowney’s: 55 recipes for dainty marshmallows. I suspect I won’t be cooking much out of it, but perhaps it could be framed.
Everyday Etiquette by Amy Vanderbilt.
Scraps of vinyl left over from covering chairs. A little square of printed fabric probably intended to cover a small coffee table. Pre-printed fabric for embroidery. Embroidery floss.
Duvet covers from Germany. They are simple damask rectangles with embroidery and Suzanne’s Oma’s monogram at the foot end; all four sides and corners have buttonholes in them for attaching to a button-covered duvet.
Christmas time! Suzanne and I spent a happy afternoon opening packages, reliving and reconstructing the past and making sense of the present. And drinking beer.
We walked to a local artsy café for supper so that Suzanne would be okay to drive home. As soon as we sat down Suzanne announced that she disliked the waitress for treating us like dirt. Um, whatever, we’d just gotten there. We ordered.
Suzanne wasn’t having wine so the waitress brought her Perrier. She assumed it was free because she gets free bottled water at her neighbourhood Indian restaurant. Turns out it was $4.50. I had to ask for my tap water; in fact, I had to ask every time I wanted my glass filled.
The waitress got my order wrong. She brought us both what Suzanne had ordered. She was tight-lipped, not at all gracious when I asked for time to taste the food before having cheese grated or pepper ground onto it. She said she’d come back later, but had to be signalled and asked for the cheese; she promptly grated a huge mound of parmesan onto my meal with an electric grater, ruining the food. I abandoned any idea of getting pepper from her to balance the now much-too-salty meal.
Suzanne felt vindicated in her assessment of the waitress; I still defended her, saying she wasn’t a bad person – just someone who shouldn’t be a waitress, who didn’t grasp her role as hostess, who lived in her mind rather than feeding off the stimulation around her.
Guido Molinari was at the next table; the owner of the café introduced the waitress to him, who gushed her admiration of his work.
The waitress cleared our table, taking our napkins and bringing tisane. Um, our dessert? Apparently we hadn’t selected the dessert option. Yes, we had. We wanted dessert and had selected the dessert option. The waitress argued with us: we had asked for something not on the menu and she had arranged it specially for us. We were amazed: we had asked for no such thing. She angrily announced that she would have to go and get the owner to settle our dispute.
Okay, Suzanne was right. The waitress was not just spacy, she was narcissistic and treated us like dirt. A waiter came to our table, gave us our dessert for free (not what we’d asked for either – we just wanted dessert and to pay for what we got). He was very gracious, not obsequious, just a considerate host who wanted his guests to be happy.
Suzanne and I had a grand old time talking about the waitress. We speculated that she was an actress and was hired as a sort of jester to give patrons something to talk about, but Edsel Fung she ain’t.
On leaving the restaurant we tested the hypothesis that we were being hypercritical, getting sadistic pleasure out of tearing people to shreds, by going into a laundromat and criticizing it. But there was nothing to criticise: it was clean, the decor was nice, the music unobtrusive, the machines new, the change machine convenient, the bathroom large, the clientele polite. No, it was definitely the waitress.
We’ll be going back.
[originally transmitted by e-mail March 16, 2003]
Monday, February 3rd, 2003
Re: Wow, this is fascinating.
Not everyone snickered. This is Anne McKnight <____ @sympatico.ca>‘s impassioned response. I thought it was worth sharing.
***
I read the mail about the death penalty, and got kind of worked up responding…
This is my point of view as registered voter in a state (Illinois) in which the death penalty has been abolished, and where critiques of systematic racism and injustice in the prison system have been launched. As you can imagine, this article pressed a lot of buttons, as it relies on the old, uninformed stereotypes of the US as a coherent ideological force.
In my opinion, the anti-death penalty movement is a successful movement of social change in the US. It represents an internal critique of social justice which has been successful-and under the Bush administration, no less. This success story is not something people typically like to hear. It does not fit the historical narrative of the US as racist homeland, as failed fatcat, as some place activism died in the 60s–an interpretation that allows us to see the US as a force already, irrevocably well on its way to whatever mode of blind destruction is supposed, as if all possibilities of intervention were already over. The effect of this narrative is to concede the momentum of a set of events which may not actually be decided. (Of course, sorting out the contradictions is difficult whenever the US as an international force is conflated with what is going on domestically.)
In the US, capital punishment is decided by the states, not the feds. It thus doesn’t really make sense to talk of a coherent “US” position on capital punishment if referring to the domestic death penalty.
I think obscuring this difference creates a false impression of unity in the US. Of course, seeing the issue in national terms allows us to think of the US as moral low ground, categorically ‘barbaric,’ and to indulge our stereotypes about what a backwards, contradictory place the world’s most advanced country is. But seeing the issue in a national frame completely bypasses the fact that there is a vibrant and effective movement against the death penalty in the US–on a state by state basis. It has been successful, and is still spreading! As this is one social issue on which there is actual progress in the US, I think it is damaging (by which I mean shutting down critique where it actually does exist-these people need your support!) to paint the US in terms of an imagined ideological coherence-for instance, the ‘prison industrial complex’ in California, and the failure of the ‘3 strikes you’re out’ law, is hugely controversial.*
And then, there’s governor George Ryan. The growing anti-capital punishment movement in the US has been greatly spurred in the last 2 years by state governors, most notably by Gov George Ryan of Illinois. In the last 2 years, he has signed many prisoners off death row, and has set a precedent for other governors to do the same.
You can read Ryan’s speech, that he gave as he left the office of governor in January, 2003 at http://www.cuadp.org/20030111ryan.html. You can search for ‘George Ryan death penalty” and get a number of advocacy briefs to track the issues on line.
In his speech, Ryan explains how he came to regard the death penalty as wrong, and makes the connection between economic growth and the prison system–the death penalty is simply more cost effective. This cost-effectiveness is a great motivation of Bush’s policies abroad, of course, whether such policies consist of extending loans that weigh like anchors on developing countries, or insisting on ‘free markets’ at any cost. Bush is pissed off at China for its ‘anti-religious’ tolerance because it sees it as a mark of barbarity–failure to obe ‘universal’ human rights standards. This is simply one more reason to assert the universal–of which Bush is presumably the representative–as the authorized law to go in and set things right, restore order, so that markets will function. This is an old story in China. And Japan. And postwar Europe. And Iraq. And so on.
It is important to realize that the jurisdiction over which G Bush speaks in terms of foreign policy is symptomatic of his stance as a former GOVERNOR. G Bush is on the side of the state (whether state government or feds) possessing the only authorized law–within this he includes the right to adjudicate life & death. This policy, for him, is consistent in the state-government arena of Texas, and in the international arena. This extension of practices of Texas-style governance is one part of the extension of his Texas-style governance into national & international frames.
The reason I think this article, and your reading, alarmed me, is that it is precisely Bush’s strategy to refuse to listen to any form of resistance: he just won’t make any appointment with citizens’ groups, clergy, military people, students, whoever-anyone whose voice is not already incorporated into his. So I think it is really important to publicize those who don’t agree with him, at this time, to show that in fact, he is NOT necessarily representing the people, even in his own country!
I think it is true that the anti-war movement, so driven by the imperial position of the US & the tacit assent of its allies, is in a funny state. No one knows what activism means anymore, they just know somehow that it is dysfunctional. But I think in my generation (born mid 60s) the backlash against the failure of the older, sixties generation to sustain its utopian policies is so strong, that we often triumph by pouncing on the certainty of failure. It’s confusing: on the one hand, 25,000 people will march through downtown Montreal writing peace signs on car windows (i.e. not smashing them). On the other, this movement is unsure where to go after the ‘symbolic demonstration’ of getting out the people, singing out the songs (wearing them out :) !) In the general atmosphere, I do think it is important to recognize that the US is by no means a done deal on all issues. These people need your help!
Anne
* Of course, public opinion polls will go on about ‘US opinion’ as their point of reference, but the fact is, the decision to rule the death penalty legal or not is made on a state-by-state basis.
[originally transmitted by e-mail February 3, 2003]