Bluenosing around

I've been visiting my Nova Scotian hometown for the past few weeks, trying to find myself. Since I'm still busy looking, I haven't yet updated on the goings on here on Canada's sweet, albeit misty North Atlantic Coast. Most has to do with whales, lakes and wondering how everyone from my graduating class in high school has managed to get married and pop out a few kids already.

If you find me, please return me to London, England by August 1st, so I can update this ol' blog properly.

Fewer things to kill me

If you believe everything my mother tells you, then you'll know she has no moral issue with endangering your life for the sake of 10 minutes of pleasure, or however long it takes to eat her spaghetti.

At the family table, it was everyone for their respective self. We didn't say grace, but my mother occasionally kicked off mealtime by announcing the possibility of death, advised us to be vigilant and, smiling, encouraged us to dig in and enjoy.

According to my mother, the bay leaf – a spice known for its distinctive fragrance and flavour – is both essential to any good spaghetti sauce and entirely capable of slicing your intestines with its razor sharp edges and causing internal bleeding.

Pigging out on Mom's meat sauce, I surmised as a child, could result in anything from indigestion to dying quietly in your sleep. This I believed, among other questionable, unquestioned quasi-truths:

Jesus is a white guy. Raw hot dogs will give me worms. Uncle So-and-So isn't gay. My face could get stuck like this. Bay leaves can kill me. Me, and everyone I love.

Having survived my childhood, I thought it best to avoid cooking with bay leaves altogether when I moved out on my own. I just couldn't bear the thought of my mother receiving news that, despite all her warnings, I'd gone and accidentally offed myself in that particularly unsavoury way. Not until I cooked with someone unaware of the risks of this common albeit deadly ingredient was I forced to, for the first time, express these thoughts out loud.

"Let's leave out the bay leaf," I suggested, explaining the risks.

"Who told you THAT?" my co-chef asked, scrunching up his face.

"My mother," I declared, considering her the authority on all things culinary.

"Doesn't she also think her house is haunted?"

"Well, yeah," I said, "but so do I."

He just looked at me. "Bay leaves can't kill you."

"Yes, they can," I said, steadfast.

Leaves in hand, locking his eyes with mine, he motioned toward his mouth.

"Don't do it!" I yelled, and tried to grab them away. The last thing I need is an accidental suicide in my house, I thought. "No!" I screamed when he shoved them into his mouth and began to chew.

"Why would your mother put something in your food she thought might kill you?" he asked. He was talking with his mouth full.

Because my mother takes cooking very seriously.

"If I die, you win," he taunted and swallowed.

Later on, when he didn't die, he didn't shut up about it for long enough that I kind of maybe sort of wished he had. Just a little bit.

Still, through the fog of my annoyance, I managed to glean that sometimes being wrong is best for everyone.

Photo: Mom and me on an evening walk, after another perilous meal.

Death, lies and dinner

When I was small, my parents lied to me all the time. "It's beef," they'd say, and drop a plate on the table. Sometimes, I'd refuse to eat, convinced I'd heard them slip a barely audible "just like" between the "it's" and "beef". It was inhumane, I thought, to hunt wild game and (at that age) equally inhumane to force me to eat vegetables as the alternative. My parents were cruel, and I was right not to trust them.

Several incarnations of Bambi's mother and his philandering father have joined us for dinner, as have Thumper, Donald Duck, Winnie the Pooh, Jaws and various anonymous guests, sometimes in a medley of murder my mother liked to call 'stew'. Children's stories, cartoons, movies and Teddy bears did not serve me well in a family of naturalists, hunters and fisherfolk.

Not until I fully understood the horrors of industrial farming, and tired of my diet of pasta and frozen chicken nuggets while studying at an out-of-province university, did my views on my parents' eating habits begin to soften. By then, I cared more about what food wasn't (pasta or mechanically separated meat), than what it was.

Not until I'd travelled throughout Southeast Asia and Latin America did I begin to actually appreciate my parents' choices. As it turns out, a lot more can be considered food than I'd initially thought, and the horrors of my mother's cooking weren't, comparatively, so terrifying. Travelling, I learned to find my happy place, which allowed me to politely choke down whatever lovingly slaughtered, hacked and salted ungodly creatures I'd been served. They won't eat me from the inside out, I consoled myself. Even if the heads are still on? asked my little voice.

While I maintain my belief that food should not be able to look back at you, I've learned to appreciate dead, cooked versions of creatures, so long as I have nothing to do with their death or any stage postmortem/pre-meal.

Among life's greatest motivators, however, (pain, necessity, a full bladder) is the desire to look tough in front of one's peers, and this is what got me to both kill and cook one of Earth's most hideous, head and all: a lobster.

I watch my parents do it every year on Christmas Eve, and, with the help of my happy place, I was pretty sure I could pull it off for my mostly urban, English, fruit-and-salad-loving boyfriend. On this, his first visit to Canada, my family had already introduced him to bear stew, moose sirloin, vampire-repelling dill and garlic pickles, pierogi and three batches of Mom's cookies, and it seemed a shame to have him leave Nova Scotia without eating something from the sea, especially since he'd never tried lobster.

My greatest realization, in cooking the beast, was that I truly am becoming more like my parents. Here I am, carrying on the tradition of lying to people who are reluctant to kill for dinner, while my boyfriend screams, "It's ALIVE! It's ALIVE! OH, EFF! It's still ALIVE!":

Pork and Poker, they did

My hometown on the east coast of Canada is the sort where everyone knows your name, like the small town version of the classic show, Cheers, but not as friendly and with more alcohol.

While I left nearly twelve years ago, my immediate family still lives there, and I'm very interested in whatever happens, because it probably involves someone I know. Thanks to at-home technology and self-publishing – and one woman's hobby that's inadvertently rendered the weekly paper redundant – I can follow everything that goes on via an independent online news source. I especially enjoy wedding announcements for couples sharing the same last name, before the ceremony. You'd think I'd be over that by now.

Yesterday, my sister sent me a quick email, telling me to check the site. I knew there'd be something good, and while it wasn't immediately obvious, I finally found it under the heading, Pork and Poker.

Pork and Poker. Say it out loud. What does that sound like to you?

On that page was a photo of my sister, accepting a cheque for hundreds of dollars. My sister participated in an event that can be summed up with the heading, Pork and Poker, and she got money for it.

The fact that it was a family-friendly contest involving a card game and community supper doesn't detract one bit from my enjoyment of this otherwise extremely perverted news.

Ghost in the latrine

"I think I have a poltergeist in my bathroom," I said over the phone to my best friend in London, and I was completely serious. It was the only explanation I could conjure on the spot, because what was happening just didn't make any easy sense, and the noise of it was distracting. Bang. Bang. Flop.

We were well overdue for catching up, and I wanted to give her my full attention. We'd pre-arranged this call (for Wednesday the 11th, two days before the only Friday the 13th in 2008), to circumvent the five-hour chasm between us. Last time, she cancelled due to a migraine, and a few times before that, I'd missed her call. And now, now there was a poltergeist in my bathroom.

What I was seeing was akin to special effects for low-to-no-budget films, something facilitated by someone's dad, and at par with footage from You Tube. And since I live alone in a multi-storey walk-up, on a middle floor, and my windows weren't open at the time, I was at a complete loss as to how someone's dad might've gotten in to arrange this.

I've played witness to strange happenings before, back home in Nova Scotia, so I didn't panic. My family's house there, according to local lore, is haunted. And if it's not, it certainly should be. Any old, wooden sea captain's house set in a fog belt on the windy Atlantic shore, near a cemetery with especially creepy grave markers (a number of which are inscribed with, "Lost at Sea") must have some restless spooks. Rot at least.

My old bedroom there was supposedly particularly haunted, and not by lovers. I was only sixteen for shit's sake. Anyway, one night, a school friend stayed over and while we chatted in the dark, a dim phosphorescent orb appeared near the ceiling in the corner of the room. I noticed it first, but I'd expected, for some reason, that it would disappear as soon as I mentioned it, or that she'd just suggest I had a cataract. But it didn't and she didn't and so we had to deal with it.

Not that it was doing anything disruptive (aside from showing up), but it's hard to relax with a glowing orb in the room. Incapable of conjuring an explanation of our own, we summoned my ever-rational, scientific-to-a-fault father to have a look. There we were, three of us in my bedroom, hands on hips, orb-observing. A minute passed before my dad, who always had an explanation, concluded, "Well, that's pretty weird."

It was the most unsatisfactory explanation he'd offered me as a child (of course, not including, "...because I said so."). I just couldn't let it go at that, and forced an explanation from him with a pout. He thought for a moment, and then decided that there was likely a phosphorescent fungus in the attic that permeated the ceiling in that one spot, causing the appearance of an orb - a yellowish, glowing, "pretty weird" orb. Or something. His explanation still lacked, but the orb didn't seem to be going anywhere, or doing anything, so my friend and I did all we could: We got over it, and went back to bed to talk about boys. By the next morning, it was gone, and it never reappeared. A crap explanation sufficed then, and I was sure, for my current situation, a crap explanation was all I needed now. Then, I could get on with my intercontinental conversation.

The loose ceiling tiles in the bathroom had been floating upward into the infrastructure of the building, and randomly slamming back into place, over and over. Bang. Bang. Flop. My brain did a quick scan for an explanation. Human error? That usually works. OK, me first: Was I nuts? Surely, but hallucinations aren't my style. Maybe, I thought, I have someone living in my ceiling like that guy in Japan who had a woman hiding in his closet for months. That's not so unrealistic, it happened. No, she could never move all those tiles at once. A fire. Must be a fire, I thought. Remember Backdraft? There was some vacuum action in that. Meh. That explanation requires evacuation, so ixnay. Next. Hmm. Perhaps the apartment upstairs blew away. No, now that's just ridiculous.

My friend waited patiently while I stuttered on the phone. "I don't know what's happening," I said. Then it came to me: "I think I have a poltergeist in my bathroom." There, that's perfect, I thought. There's nothing I can do about a poltergeist. Not my problem. And just as it happened after the incident with the orb in my bedroom all those years ago, we did what we could: We got over it, and went back to talking about boys. A natural transition really, because the appearance and behaviour of both still remain, to us, largely ill-explained.

Winter details

I knew the night so well in Nova Scotia. I looked to the glow of the street lamp from my bedroom window to check for rain or snow streaking through the fog, powered by the open-ocean wind. I knew the persistent cling-cling of rope snapping against masts at the wharf.

Often I was the only one awake, unless the rest of the townspeople were laying awake in their beds like me, in the dark. From my vantage point I could see that the rest of the lights were out.

The wind rattled the old windows, and the hot water heaters popped as the pipes alternately expanded and contracted. My father breathed heavily in his sleep down the hall. I heard the television's high-pitched test-pattern screech, and wondered how my mother could sleep through it. I rose from bed to make my way down the winding staircase and turn off the TV. I kissed my mother's forehead and wished her a whispered goodnight, to fulfill my daughterly duty without waking her. Then, before returning to bed, I paused in front of the picture windows, looking seaward and seeing nothing. The old woodstove crackled, the fire glowed orange through its gaps.

I wondered what the rest of the world was doing, outside of this last jut of land before the Atlantic void, then caught a chill and wandered back to my crisp bed sheets, thankful that my mother hung them outside to dry despite the cold weather. They smelled like the wind.

Migration patterns of Canadian youth

I landed in this city unannounced. Nothing was remarkable about my arrival, and no one awaited me---a singular party caught in a mass departure---a wayward bird caught in a hurricane, and just as prepared. Children of small towns are economic migrants, even in Canada.

Reared in a rural coastal village, I threw myself from the nest with wet feathers. Maladjusted and armed only with certificates of insignificance, I bought my ticket out of all I knew well, for the uncertain unknown, for the urban existence of rape and murder, for narcotics and homosexuality. For fear-after-dark and beasts less recognizable than the chubby and misunderstood man up the street. I traded in the rattle of sea stones, the night sky, feral eyes in bushes, and sadly, my family. I traded the loneliness of a socially awkward adolescent in a small hamlet, for awe. And, here I am, still awed.

Surrounded by mechanisms barely understood, I very slowly created a new personal culture, within which I developed new belief systems, new approaches to supply and demand, new ideas about cause and effect. Several years later, I developed comfortable patterns. I learned to function effectively in my new urban environment as an entirely new species.

No longer can people can see sand on my scalp, or in my shoes. I regularly return to my loosely laid roots by the sea. This is my new migration. I am no longer unwittingly blown off-course, but still maladjusted.

When I return to my home by the sea and in the woods, I dust off the silt of the urban landscape. The local species recognize me as a fraud, an impostor. They ask me how I like living in the city, but they are really asking: "What are you and what are you doing here?" Locals have always been suspicious of my intentions. As I have come of age, so have presumptions about my nature. First, I was a "lesbian", now, I am a foreigner. I capitalize on the nature of my hometown. The handicrafts are cheap. I know the good beaches. The seafood is fresh and can be purchased straight from the boat. The people will at least pretend to like you, at first.

I can't explain to them why I return so often. I miss my family. I love tasting the ocean in the air, and smelling the beached, decaying seaweed. And, sometimes I miss the gangly child I used to be, who greets me there with a horse-toothed grin. That, is how I know I am home.

Wedding fiasco - finest kind

Everyone loves him. We still do. He was the class clown, and the only one of us to actually make it to TV. This month he got hitched - the real kind of hitched - not the kind involving visas. This wedding, which doubled as a high school reunion, allowed us - former high school hooligans - to gather on a beach resort near our hometown, without taking turns horking on each other for old times' sake.

The event was also the indirect cause of the paddle boat incident I mentioned in the previous entry. A friend asked me to expand on the story, but I think this picture says it all:

Wedding Fiasco

And yes, that's my dress I'm dragging.

Reunion Fiasco

And no, we weren't serious.