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september 3, 2000.This is my first "live" Nova Scotia entry. There should be fanfares & confetti; but instead there is just me in pink longjohns, racing against the time when the Boy will be done with the shower. As in the last days of Hippie Hell and the first days of my Queen Street life, I am sitting cross-legged on the floor, frantically tapping away against the certain doom of leg-cramp. So it goes. "By the way, I'm wearing crotchless lace panties as I write this."
Yesterday was a kick-ass day, even in a week full of pleasant surprises. About a month ago, our friend Princess Leah got ocean fever, and decided to return to NS for an indefinite amount of time. Her boy, St. Pete, came out last week to see her - and yesterday the two of them came out to see us. We haven't exactly been isolated here - we've talked to the building staff, the university employees and various clerks - but seeing those two on our doorstep yesterday felt like coming home to the human race. I don't think we ever stopped talking, from their arrival at Blossom to our departure from Leah's parents' home in Middleton. We first went out to lunch, it being St. Pete's august intention to buy us a meal. The Boy & I were pathetically grateful...we're lazy city-slicker types and we want to eat out more, unfortunately, we've been spending an average of $230 a day for the past three days, and the Mate has yet to find gainful employment. Poutine & chocolate milkshakes never tasted so good. Even better was the conversation, full of in-jokes and laughter. I was so happy. Happy, enough, in fact, to think that visiting the campaign headquarters of Progressive Conservative leader Joe Clark* would be a gas. We did; it was. We left festooned with buttons, pamphlets & paraphernalia, trying to keep our giggling from offending the earnest clerk. It's funny because Pete's family is old-school prairie NDP, the Boy & I are Liberals/NDP'ers depending on the issue and Princess Leah's dad runs for mayor under the Liberal banner (Leah says that he keeps losing, but the wind-up celebration is always worth the campaign. Pete puts it more succinctly: he claims that Leah's dad puts the "party" back in "Liberal Party". This affiliation made us mischevous: for awhile we debated the wisdom of sending the Boy to the door of her parents' house as a "campaigner," but we were too loud to achieve any sort of subtlety. But before all this, we went to see the ocean. It was kind of a big deal. We forget, we in-landers, how important the ocean is to life & culture & just about everything we treasure. Being on the iron-grey shore, watching the tide go out was deeply stirring. I felt like an atheist must feel in Westminster Cathedral, knowing that it means something but not having the necessary spiritual vocabulary to say what exactly that something was. And so, lacking that vital poetry, I made cracks about Margaret Lawrence novels and pulled snails from their moorings to see their pseudopodic foot retract. I swallowed a mouthful of the sea, my way of trying to welcome the land into my life although it's more properly the other way around. Toronto arrogance, thinking I can impose upon the shore. Oh well, it's all I gots. We spent the evening in the home of Leah's parents (which I suppose in pseudonymic continuity should really be referred to as Alderan but I refuse to be that geeky). We're getting to an age where hanging out with someone's parents isn't the trial it used to be. Old age, I believe they call it. I liked them a great deal. But then again, I've met very few people here that I don't like. It's that body language thing. Fun fact learned yesterday: Princess Leah used to be a punk rocker. St. Pete learned this when doing a vanity search. Instead of the bad goth poetry you find under my name, hers is linked to a history of the Annapolis Valley punk scene. Rock on.
The great thing about this province is that most of the stores are closed on Sunday. That means that we had absolutely no option when we woke up - we had to spend the day goofing off. We made an attempt to go to church in the morning, but we were thwarted by my poor efforts at gathering information (services take place on weekday mornings at 11:30 a.m., not Sunday mornings. D'oh.) Lacking any spiritual tasks at the moment, we went to get my university ID. My U of T one was taken during the sweaty days of frosh week & it shows. I tried this time, I really tried to have an attractive ID. It didn't work, as you have no doubt gathered from the tone of this paragraph. My face is turnip-shaped and my complexion sallow - but at least I can fairly attribute this to digital distortion, as I know for an iron-clad fact that my skin is anything but sallow. My wedding pictures are so pale that I look more like a scary kabuki bride than anything else. Eh. So it goes. Everybody hates their ID. At least I didn't fall into the Paris trap - his International Student Card ID photo is a xerox of his driver's license photo. Shudder. with political files from st. pete |
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