Happy Canada Day! The Nuns are Coming.

We are all looking forward to Canada Day, hoping for a normal Canada Day, pleading for a normal Canada Day.  So let's think of that lovely day in the future when you can use a different excuse other than "social distancing" to leave your neighbour's house early.  And while we are thinking of that lovely Canada Day of the future, would it be OK if I told you about a Canada Day of my past?  I could write it and you could read it and we would both kill a few minutes of quarantine, so there's that.

When I was in grade nine my parents bought a cottage on Little Kennisis Lake and my Dad was the head of English at Paul Dwyer Catholic High School in Oshawa.  Sister Mary Elizabeth was my English teacher and of course, out of every fourteen year old's nightmare, my Mom and Dad invited Sister Mary Elizabeth and ALL the Sisters of St. Joseph to our cottage for the Canada Day weekend.

Now before we continue, the cottage at Kennisis was what realtors would call "rustic".  It was the cottage with an outhouse outback, newly abandoned because Dad and the music teacher he worked with, had put in running water in the spring.  Musical pipes. 

It was the cottage that was used three seasons and had no insulation between walls.  No sound proofing.  I repeat...as if you didn't hear me, NO SOUND PROOFING.

The nuns arrive on the Friday of Canada Day weekend.  If there is a more depressing sentence than the last, I don't want to read it and I hope I never write it...again.  The nuns arrive on Friday of Canada Day weekend and they, there are three of them, are given the room beside me with the two sets of bunk beds in it.  I know.  You are picturing nuns in bunk beds.  I will wait.

Did I tell you there was no sound proofing?

By Sunday morning, I am an atheist.  Dad and I are outside, in front of the cottage and because the cottage is too far away from the local Roman Catholic Church, the nuns are forced to gather on our lakeside deck to read their Breviary, their book of prayer. 

Dad and I are working at trying to remove a stump, the nuns are up on the deck, "reading" and down comes Floyd .  Floyd was the York Regional Cop who had the cottage next door that clung to the side of a cliff.  Floyd's only running water was him, running to the lake and back.   Sunday is Floyd's bath day, he is wearing a swim suit from the '70's.  Google it if you must.  And he does what Floyd does at the cottage.  He dives in.  He soaps up.  He repeats.

I am digging at a rather persistent root and Dad gives me a nudge. I finally look up and there is my English teacher and all of her sisters, their eyes peaking over the tops of their prayer books, enjoying Floyd's bath. 

We all pray for something. 

Of Poetry and Viruses

There is truth in poetry and viruses. 

A virus, for those of you who have not yet pillaged your local Costco for Purell, is a microscopic organism that replicates its DNA in its host, causing suffering and sometimes death.  They are contagious and can leave a path of destruction behind.

A poem is beauty and beauty is truth.  It leads you to places that you don't see coming and at its best it reveals universals.  Contrary to what you might think, poems have a logic.  They have a beat, a meter, sometimes a rhyme, that gives the poet and the reader a feeling of control. If the poet wishes, he or she can give a sense of chaos too, simply by changing the way these tools are used.  Chaos or control, what matters is when you are in the hands of a good poet, you can trust where they are taking you.

"Covid-19" is a poem.  The name itself is musical, making you think of a boat you might buy ("Welcome aboard the Covid-19") or a band you would like to hear ("Ladies and Gentlemen, Covid-19!").  It is a poem because it is revealing, peeling off masks and exposing. It has stripped Mr. Trump, who is virulent, parasitic; replicating the hate within him in others and leaving a path of destruction behind.  It has exposed small men in big empty shirts. It has thrown in contrast political ideologies that cannot understand a problem that cannot be solved with a tax cut or a trickle down theory.  The sworn enemy of these ideologues, the people in public service, is now the only thing standing between them and chaos.

"Covid-19" is a beautiful poem.  It reveals the beauty of humanity.  Nurses and Doctors and public health officers (are they all women? It seems so.) who are seen as items on budget lines to be cut  in good times walk down halls into the breech.  Researchers and lab technicians who toil in fluorescent basements, peer through scopes to find answers.  These public servants are our poets and we trust them to bring chaos to order, to bring us back to truth and beauty.

We need these poets to write us a new poem.