These Are A Few Of My Favourite Oxymorons

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Gotta love the word… OXYMORON…

While its true meaning is funny in itself, the word (an excellent Scrabble point’s grabber)- to me – implies an idiot catching his breath.

Whatever… the important thing is I laugh when I hear the word.

The word is derived from two ancient Greek words: oxys, which means “sharp,” and moronos, which means “dull” or “stupid.” Yes, even the word oxymoron is an oxymoron!

The days are getting oh-so-short here in Slumberland… the weather is way-out-of-character cold… and I’m sweeping the dust bunnies out of the nooks and crannies of my noggin searching for a hidden challenge … something to invigorate my snow-globe clouded mind… because, as you know, a mind is a terrible thing to waste.

So, to drag myself up, up, and away into the blue skies of mental magic today, I’ve decided to write a simply complex oxymoronic tale, a silly, bittersweet story of incredibly bad dialogue, terrible plot-lines, and sad attempts at oxymoron’isms. Properly ridiculous, would you say?

The hills are alive, let’s go twerking in the Austrian Alps…

The Silliest Sounds of Music

“Good grief“, she uttered through the clamorous hubbub of 7 excited children, staring off into the distance, dreaming of a warm holiday, perhaps the French Riviera or southern Spain… this was nothing like the working vacation she had envisioned coming into this bone-chilling Austrian winter.

Maria would sooner be a happily disgruntled nun than look after this unruly band of Butt-Heads, this small crowd of hoodlums otherwise known as the Von Trapp children.

Did the Captain even have the foggiest notion in his unconscious awareness that 16-going-on-17 Liesl was sneaking out at night to earn tips sliding and shimmying as a pole dancer in the Salzburg Barrel Haus? Yes, fellows WERE falling in line, those eager young lads, rogues and cads who were offering her food and wine, and much much more.

Months before, when Mother Superior told Maria, implored her really – in a detailed summary – of the opportunity to shed her habit and become a student teacher of sorts, she jumped at the chance. After all, it was an open secret at the abbey that Maria was a devout atheist.

Perhaps, thought cheerful pessimist Mother Superior, nannying a gaggle of defiant ragamuffins and a curmudgeonly Captain would help Maria to climb ev’ry mountain, ford ev’ry stream and find God.

Some of her sister nuns saw this as seriously funny, while others cast their eyes upon her in a pretty ugly way.

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But how had Maria ever ended up in a secluded Catholic convent, this place of sweet sorrow, where desperate freezer burnt women huddled in endless, quiet prayer?

It was old news that the Nazis had plans to forcefully conscript members of the Austrian militia to aid in their efforts to control the entire planet.

Before entering the convent, Maria had belonged to a militant pacifist group, a small crowd of bohemians that believed an Austrian civil war could be avoided, if they could only convince the general population to adopt a peaceful resistance of intense apathy. The unsophisticated group firmly believed that doing nothing could be the saviour of the motherland of Austria, at least until the Nazis took brutal control.

Maria had clearly misunderstood the mood of the populace.

Loud whispers grew in the underground faction, of her naive complicity with the German invaders and other ne’er-do-wells. With each passing day, she could feel the walls closing in upon her and her pacifist movement; if nothing was done soon, she would likely end up behind bars, perhaps even disappear like so many others she had heard of, in the night.

“You must hide yourself away from these slimy Nazi bastards“, implored her equally-naive freund Gertrude with a sad smile. “They will steal your guitar and your do-re-mi… I read a wonderful little story by some English playwright the other day who said, ‘Get thee to a Nunnery!’. I think this is fine advice. Take your guitar and skip away Maria.” It seemed her only choice.

In the dark morning light when the co-conspirator Austrian police and German army officers crashed through her door to arrest her, a deafening silence could be heard as the police realized she had absconded.

“Drat“, they exclaimed, Maria had been found missing. She truly was a wise fool they collectively agreed, as they nibbled on jumbo shrimp sent along by the wife of one of the police lieutenants.

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Time was running out and Maria and the Von Trapp family soon found themselves between a soft rock and a hard place. Both the Austrian police and the German army declared that climbing trees while wearing gaudy curtains was tantamount to treason and would be punishable by internment in a travelling marionette show run by lonely goat-herders.

Though the Captain had recently been in ill health, the family knew the writing was on the wall. Escape was their only avenue.

In order to raise the funds needed to mount a hike over the snow-covered Alps in the dead of winter, Maria and the Captain signed a contract for a live recording of their journey with a reality show producer that Liesl had met while lap dancing at the Barrel Haus.

This terribly good tale of the VonTrapp family comes to a close as we view a drone-shot of the group, twirling and singing in melancholy merriment as they traipse through waist-deep snow, like frozen zombies of The Walking Dead, enroute to Switzerland and lucrative deals with Swiss Chocolate and Watch makers.

• – Fade to black –

Twenty Years Ago Erstwhile…

 

David Albert Green and Lila Margueretta Miller – my parents July 14, 1940

… we were all wide-eyed and baby-scented Millennials, growing accustomed to this once-in-a-lifetime new year that began with the number 2 – catching our collective breath knowing that we had magically survived Y2K pandemonium… but also…

… 20 years ago this month I coordinated, edited, and collated a family book for a reunion of my Mom and Dad’s children and grandchildren; a reunion that celebrated what would have been my parent’s 60th wedding anniversary, had they lived to see the day themselves.

I’ll tell you more about the book and why you might consider doing something similar yourself in a minute.

My oldest brother Robert and wife Lois organized the family’s gathering at Miette Hot Springs, about 60 k. northeast of Jasper in the majestic and rugged Rocky Mountains.

My 4 siblings, our kids, and I have spread out from our Ontario childhood home of Hamilton, east to Nova Scotia, and westward into Saskatchewan and beyond to Alberta and British Columbia. I guess we were ahead of our time; we practised social distancing on a family basis before it was COVID-fashionable. So prescient!

And so, on July 14, 2000, our Green/Miller family group huddled together and staged a mini-reenactment of the tiny wedding that had taken place – in the midst of World War II’s gathering intensity – in Greenfield Park (Quebec) United Church 60 years earlier with two witnesses only: my Mom’s brother Alvin and his wife Pearl.

Back to the book preps: To put the book together for this reunion I decided to approach it in a two-pronged manner:

1. Gather the raw data of genealogy: birthdates, marriage dates and death dates. This satisfied my “science” mind, the 123’s of how we got to where we were in history. The internet was still relatively fresh to us all in 2000, but I was surprisingly able to gather lots and lots of family intelligence and figures. I unearthed a flock of names and relationships that were blind to me up until then. This was exciting!

2. As important though – in my thinking, more important – were the stories and details of daily life, the “artistic” or human side of all those names and dates. I wanted to see and read my family history through first hand accounts and stories. I longed to feel the life in my past.

I contacted all my living siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins and newly-discovered relatives I found through my genealogy research. I asked (OK, begged) for stories and anecdotes from the past that gave personality to the basic facts.

It’s no huge secret that history is largely HISstory and HERstory viewed through our own unique and often biased eyes.

In generous spirit, I received lots of input. Yes!

I gathered together the written stories of those who were willing, and also collected those stories I could through letters and accounts that had been recorded by my relatives who were now passed. This was pure gold.

After my Mom’s Dad – my grandfather Will – died in the winter of 1935, my grandmother Maggie wrote to my Mom about her feelings of loneliness:

Mabel washed a big washing Monday with Clarence’s help and went home on Tuesday… Earl and Clarence are in the swamp and Lloyd is choring and in the house quite often. Still we can’t help but notice the vacant chair. It seems so quiet. But when we think of other people have to come through the same thing. We will have to do the best we know how.”

It’s a palpable reminder for me that all those names we sometimes glaze over in genealogy research were REAL people that breathed and pooped just like I do now (except that pooping part happened largely outdoors in outhouses). They had their own scent, their own voices. Personalities, sweet or irascible. Maybe even racist.

Another golden example: in his later years, my father wrote a mini-memoir to pass on to his kids and grandchildren. Writing your own life history is likely the best “advice” that my Dad ever unintentionally passed on to me.

Here’s a small sampling of what he wrote about the first time he and my Mom met, in 1937.

Recently, he had moved back to Ontario from Nova Scotia where he had been working for the Bank of Montreal for the Depression-era annual salary of  $938.61.

After a month or two of looking for work, I started in the office of Supertest Petroleum on Church Street [Toronto]. At first, I lived in the east end not far from Kew Beach as I thought how marvellous it would be to have a beach close by. I was soon to discover that Lake Ontario is mighty cold. I later decided to move to the west end of the city and joined a boarding house on Ostind Ave. I moved in one evening after work. As my landlady showed me to my room, I noticed a rather cute girl talking on the phone in the downstairs hall.  It turned out that she occupied the room next to mine and her name was Lila Miller. I was smitten and as she was unattached I made it my business to take up as much of her time as I could. Her mother, who was a widow, lived on a farm near Hillsburg with her youngest son Lloyd. There were five in the family, namely Alvin, Clarence, Mabel, Lloyd and Lila. Lila often went home on Sundays and the occasional weekend and I eventually got in on one of these trips home where Lila’s mother and Lloyd would look over Lila’s new boyfriend. They must have approved as I got to go again for the odd Sunday or weekend.”

Since I pulled this information together in book form 20 years ago, I’ve lost a sister and a sister-in-law who were both at the 2000 family reunion. My eldest brother, the “smart” sibling of my family, sits in what appears an Alzheimer’s state of minimal registration of the world.

What I want to lay on you here today is… you, and your descendants will treasure any information and stories that you collect today about your grandparents, parents, siblings and yes, yourself.

Know that we are Kansas’s Dust in the Wind.

Our dust can blow in the free air and be lost like feathers in the morning breeze… that is a choice we can easily allow to happen, no action required…. or….

… we can catch some of that dust in a jar, like fireflies, and place a cap on it so that we and others, can enjoy its blanket of warmth over and over.

One hundred years from now, that dust will sit, undisturbed, unchanged and waiting to be “lived” again after you and I are dust ourselves.

 

 

 

 

 

The Tao of Storytelling

“Tell me one more DAMN story Mommy! PUH-LEEEASE!!”

I know you’d never talk to your mother this way, but I was a sugar-high wide awake ragamuffin and desperate, and of course… I’m joking. I would never have spoken to my Mom like that.

Even before we catapult into this world all wet and wobbly, our excited parents-to-be begin telling us mumbled stories across the shielding barrier of the womb.

And then, once we emerge all pink and gassy-smiley, storybooks become a staple of most of our childhoods. The Velveteen Rabbit. The Cat in the Hat. Winnie the Pooh. 50 Shades of Grey.

We’re born, we grow up, we grow old… on stories. All kinds of stories.

Every day we hear and see stories that penetrate our hard outer shell because in some way they reflect a hazy image on the pond’s surface that shines a spotlight on what we think we look like.

This week I was put to thinking about masterful storytellers when I heard that Canadian raconteur Stuart McLean had died.

Icons are hard to lose.

McLean’s The Vinyl Cafe has shuttered its doors forever just like Kathleen Kelly’s (Meg Ryan) bookstore in You’ve Got Mail.

Life is stories. We are stories.

My most read blog posts are ones where I recount a story. Stories like a little boy missing his deceased Mommy at Christmas, or a young couple finding romantic love over a fancy mixed drink that I “bartended” for them.

Listen closely to yourself when you talk to your friends or co-workers.

It’s always a story. This happened, that happened, and this is the end result. Beginning, middle, end. Yup, a story.

I’ve encountered and admired a lot of storytellers in my lifetime.

Great storytelling is a wondrous art and a sacred beauty in the hands and voice of a skilled practitioner. Maybe you’re one of those talented people.

Of course stories come in different forms, served in different recipes and formats. There’s a smorgasbord of ways to convey a story.

Some stories are woven in books, some in campfire folklore, some in visual art, others in movies, and still more in harmonious music.

Stories are the background of our humanity. Each of us is touched by storytelling in ways that are unique to us.

Steven Spielberg told us movie stories about Oskar Schindler and the Holocaust (Schindler’s List)… how can I ever erase the heartbreaking vision of a little red-coated girl (set against a stark black and white background) entering a concentration camp?

Harry Chapin told us musical stories about desperate love (A Better Place to Be) and misplaced fatherhood (Cats in the Cradle) …

I’ve long since retired, my son’s moved away
I called him up just the other day
I said, “I’d like to see you if you don’t mind.”
He said, “I’d love to, dad, if I could find the time
You see, my new job’s a hassle, and the kid’s got the flu
But it’s sure nice talking to you, dad
It’s been sure nice talking to you.”
And as I hung up the phone, it occurred to me
He’d grown up just like me
My boy was just like me

 

Peter Gzowski told us radio stories about Canada that made us feel a part of the whole country…

Galt is the setting for a quintessential Gzowski tale, one he told often, about a game of hockey that began in a park. After the puck flew over the boards, the boy who went to retrieve it found the grounds—the whole city, in fact—transformed by verglas, a French word describing fields of ice created by frozen sleet overlying snow. Soon every local boy, “40 of us, 50 of us,” were skating “across roads, across lawns, racing down hills like skiers, out into the country, soaring across farmers’ fields, free as birds.

Garrison Keillor told folksy stories on NPR about Lake Wobegon and its residents in his Prairie Home Companion:

I checked in at the desk and a man at a nearby table said, “So how are you doing tonight?” and that seemed to be an invitation. So I sat down. Two other men and two women at the table. A cheerful group, as people tend to be in winter once they’re warm and in off the road. “How was the drive?” he said. “Almost rear-ended a snowplow,” I said. Other than that, I had listened to the Beatles’ “Because” eight times, which I never cared for because of the dumb lyric, but now I do. A woman at the table didn’t know the song, so I sang her a little of it. “Because the world is round, it turns me on. Love is old, love is new. Love is all, love is you.”

Garrison Keillor

Stuart McLean told us heartwarming stories about Sleeping Crickets and Dave and Morley (Vinyl Cafe).

Dave, the bumbling protagonist, promises wife Morley that he will take care of their Christmas turkey. Come Christmastime, however, Dave realizes that he’s forgotten to buy a bird. He rushes to a grocery store in the middle of the night to find that they only have one unappetizing, frozen, Grade B turkey left. Dave takes it home and defrosts it with an electric blanket and hairdryer.

“As the turkey defrosted it became clear what Grade B meant,”  the story goes. “The skin on the right drumstick was ripped. Dave’s turkey looked like it had made a break from the slaughterhouse and dragged itself a block or two before it was captured and beaten to death.”

But Dave’s not out of the clear yet.  After Morley and the kids leave the house to work at the soup kitchen for a few hours, Dave discovers that he can’t figure out how to turn on the stove.  In an escapade that involves a hairdryer, a hotel, and a bottle of scotch, Dave somehow manages to deliver on his promise.

Stuart in his Vinyl Cafe

Stories.

Multitudes of stories, a few key themes … but a million unique ways of expressing something that crawls inside of us and shakes us like a mini-earthquake until we laugh, or cry, or nod in recognition. Stuart McLean did all three in every one of his stories.

In years past, my old friend John would sit in our living room, cockeyed grin aglow, and recount tales of his experiences, ordinary daily life stories… told in a way that made us laugh and shake our heads. A consummate storyteller.

When John was bravely succumbing to cancer a couple of years ago, when his tales drew slowly silent, I was inspired to write a small-scale story about him that I set to music and occasionally sing to folks (including at Open Mic last night) in his memory … and the memory of his stories…

One John sang sweet about his Annie
When we grow old we sing our Swan Song
One western John we called him Duke
But this verse and melody
are what I’m gonna call for you a John Song  

We drank beer in the Overlander in the midst of a western town
William’s Lake both dusty and brown
where your probation days
melted into music nights
played your Ovation guitar after the sun lost its light

CHORUS:
There was always a saga
a tale on your tongue
and a breeze that blew wind in your sail
a crooked grin on your face
a laugh in your strum
a weathered cowboy hat that lies waiting
for its story at old Pier 21  

The years slipped by and we lived our lives
we drifted in circles afar
I smiled when I saw a pic
of you and Jane overlooking Barnhartvale
with Jesse your new son

One day you were a Kamloops politico
Then I heard you settled onto Vancouver Isle
spent some time on the Indian reservation
and wrote your songs
in southern Nashville style

Bridge:
Your days may seem long now
the years somehow short
Aint forever always shorter than we plan  

CHORUS:
There was always a saga
a tale on your tongue
and a breeze that blew wind in your sail
a crooked grin on your face
a laugh in your strum
a weathered cowboy hat that lies waiting
for its story at old Pier 21  

Life is stories. We are stories.