Sylvana

and explained that tests had revealed what was believed to be ovarian cancer. She made me promise not to worry, because she was certain she could beat it as she had beaten breast cancer seven years before. Visits with my sister are what I will remember most when I think of this year. We drank tea, searched for answers, taught each other to let go. We spoke of our children, our parents, our husbands, God, mercy, suffering. We ate (when she could) and sipped wine (when she could). Mostly we held hands and desperately held on to hope.

2. My youngest daughter, Gillian, graduated high school and went off to McGill. I learned that we could share our days by texting. I glued my I Phone to my hip and learned to check it at every opportunity. Texting is my new favourite thing.

3. My daughter, Caitlin, graduated from UWO with a master’s degree and announced she wanted to go to England to complete a PhD beginning next year. I and my daughters have claimed Italian citizenship, something I just recently learned was possible. An EU passport should help Caitlin to realize her dream.
 

4. James Richard Mittag, Caitlin’s love, has become very much a part of the family.
 
 
 
 
 
 
5. Samantha (Sammy) Rose, our first springer spaniel passed on March 11. She was suffering from lung cancer at 12 years of age. I held her in our home as the technician injected the pale purple contents of the vile into her leg. She died in my arms.
 
   
 
6. Abigail (Abby) Rose, our new springer spaniel, came to us bringing joy and healing.
 
 
 
 
 
7. The bond I share with my brother and father thickened.
 
 
 
 
 
8. I grew closer to my nephew, Jeff, realizing the depth of his love and character.
 
 
 
 

9. I wrote very little this year, my hands occupied with holding on. Funny, pens seemed elusive all year, not to be found or not working. I hope that will change soon.

10. This has been a year of withdrawing from world affairs, focusing on more immediate things and feeling quite vulnerable. I watched The National less than ever, read fewer newspapers, read less in general. Books are piling high on my desk and I look forward to widening my view again.

Enough.

I am long overdue for an entry!  It’s not that I haven’t been thinking about what to write.  It’s just pinning myself down to one topic.  One of the many things I’ve contemplated is  my New Year’s self-help focus (yes, resolutions).  I guess I’m about three weeks late with this, but am I really?

Here are seven things I want to work on this year.

1.   To be a better listener at home with my family and at work with colleagues and students.  I remember first working on this as a university student, but it’s a tough thing to do and I keep coming back to it.  Why?  Because so many things get in the way.  We zone out – I do it all the time. We’re afraid of losing something – sometimes I have a vague feeling of this.  We’re impatient, feeling somehow that we’ll lose the opportunity to speak if it isn’t done right away – I’ve done this out of an irrational sense of urgency.  Are we afraid we will disappear if we really listen to someone else?  I think we are, but in fact, that’s the great thing about it.  Really listening makes you forget yourself  for a while and that can be so refreshing.

2. Keep an eye on my ego when I’m feeling threatened. It’s too easy to lose sight of things and become defensive.

3.  Be more joyous at work by focusing on what I love most about the job – the chance to help young people learn, find their strengths, and feel good about themselves.  It’s easy to focus too much on what we need to get done.  I want to shift my focus a little more away from the tasks that need to be done to the people I work with.

4. Write more regularly, including keeping this blog up.  Set aside more time. I never regret my time spent writing.

5. Practice more scales on my cello.  Those shifts aren’t coming and I’m sure I need to focus on some fundamentals before  I can move on.  We’ll see.

6. Sink into each moment a little more deeply and more comfortably.  This may sound odd, but sometimes I feel like I’m skimming my life, rather than really living it.  Preoccupied with things I’ve just done, or things people have said to me, or dwelling on what I need to do next, I’m not fully experiencing things.  I get an feeling anxious about it all too.  I’m sure I can change this.

7. Lose the five pounds that I’ve gained over the last few months, and stretch, walk, and practice yoga more regularly. 

There, I’ve shared them.  It feels good to say what they are.  I think it gives them more legitimacy.  It makes me feel like I owe them more attention.  I hope they inspire others.  At the very least the process of writing them down has helped me think about them more deeply and feel a greater commitment to them.

That can’t be bad.

We’re only a few days away now and as always I’m amazed that very soon the days will actually begin to get longer.  Funny how it seems to sneak up on me and just when I can feel the despair trying to take over, I think of the days soon getting longer and longer  and I’m hopeful again.

Still it all takes some effort.  Along with spending less of my time in sunshine and daylight, here are some of the things that change for me as the winter solstice approaches. I

1. relive the days leading up to my mom’s death on Dec. 19, 1998 (very sad);   

2. massage warm oils into my scalp as it gets tighter and tighter, dryer and dryer;   

3. push myself to get more active;   

4. ponder the last year of my life: what I’ve lost and gained, my health, the kind of person, how I’ve spent my time?   

5. start making thick turkey soup again;   

6. assure myself that it’s okay to grow older.  The alternative is not desirable;   

7. write.  I write more and better during this time (okay, usually depressing things);   

8. prepare to do battle with the black dog that threatens to come to my door about mid-January.  It doesn’t always show up, but if it does, I’ll be ready;   

9. read.  There are so many wonderful things to read (thank goodness for electric light);   

10: and finally, look for good things to believe in.  After all, I really am an optimist.   

Here’s a poem I wrote on the subject- it appears in Other Living Things (2009).   

Winter Solstice, 2002

(After M. Atwood)   

i   

A green barbed phantom, dotted with red and glitter   

stands in metal, filled with water.   

Four screws gouge its trunk,   

erect it in the family room.   

This is our refuge, a piece of life   

here by our fire on this darkest day of the year,   

just before we stop this migration   

to begin our way back   

to the light.   

In the garden trees wait patiently, faithfully, befriended   

by true red cardinals, while inside,   

this pine glows with blue, yellow, green, red lights,   

strung in pearls, crystal frills, gilt trim,   

a gauzy angel on top,   

reminding us to believe.   

ii   

Across the road, above us   

below us, behind the frozen   

vegetable garden, choices are made to douse   

the lawn in pesticides come spring,   

trade the car for an SUV,   

burn gun registrations in front of news cameras,   

purchase ten million doses of smallpox vaccinations,   

just in case. Pacifists in blue denim   

get in the way, carry signs,   

walk and talk.   

Outside this town, pinstriped politicians   

far from their families, calculate war,   

cost out strategies, leak bits of news, just enough   

to shape opinion, shake off fears,   

keep the markets steady;   

it’s a balancing act   

performed just above our heads.   

But we are poised   

to distance or align ourselves   

when the time is right, one eye on stock markets,   

one eye on spilt blood; we’ll say we were always opposed,   

the price too high, or it had to be done,   

though it’s dirty work.   

Either way we expect to be alive,   

our homes and jobs intact, our pensions   

secure.   

iii   

On this darkest day of the year, my daughters   

rehearse songs they will soon perform on violins;   

eyes fixed on music, hands loosely gripping bows,   

fingers searching out notes.   

I want to warn them about brutes, leaders, lies,   

people who easily forget, but standing beside that lighted tree   

in the family room just before midday,   

they are oblivious to my unease.  At once they look up at me   

standing in the kitchen   

cradling a cup of tea   

with both hands.   

I mouth the words, I love you,   

and hope it is enough.   

Golden Gate Bridge

I’m both a poet and a teacher and if there’s anything both of those parts of my character has a hard time with, it’s avoiding the truth. 

Many educational leaders are avoiding the truth that there’s a generation of kids out there whose lives are finely meshed with digital technologies. I know when people are overwhelmed or just plain unsure of how to respond to something new, they go into denial.   I suppose it’s a coping mechanism, but at some point they have to face things and adapt. 

Back in the 80′s, I remember being staggered by the idea that people watched 50 hours of tv a week. Now we’re looking at a generation of kids who not only watch conventional tv and go to the movies, but also spend 40 to 50 or more hours a week on computers – in social networking sites, on ipods, on cell phones, etc.  In the midst of all this, there are too many of us trying to shut out that reality, rather than immersing ourselves in it. 

I was on the committee that drafted our school rules, including those on the use of “personal communications devices” and I think we knew we couldn’t really make them keep these in their lockers,  but I guess the timing wasn’t right to admit it, at least not publicly.  There are lots of reasons educational leaders tread so cautiously, but it’s time to face the truth. 

When you spend the better part of your day in a building with about 900 teenagers, you need to expend a lot of energy to deny what’s happening.  Almost all have computers at home, cell phones or iPhones, and iPods or MP3 players.  For a huge chunk of their day they’re wired, the lines threaded under their shirts and sweaters or their talking openly into a device as they stare through a wall, the floor, or me.  When we remind them we shouldn’t be seeing that in the school, they invariably say they are speaking to their mothers or sick grandmothers.  (And for the most part, I think their mothers and grandmothers would tell you they need their phones with them at all times and should be allowed to use them in the halls or library.)  You’ll also find them making their way around the many blocked sites on the school network. The more obedient ones may just roll their eyes as they say, “They’re so ridiculous.  I need youtube for my class presentation! What are they so afraid of?” 

What are we afraid of?  They won’t listen to us.  They’ll use youtube to view seedy or dodgy things.  They’ll tie up the school’s bandwidth by watching music videos. They’ll pick up their phones in the middle of class to conduct a drug deal or to find out what time their fathers are picking them up. Bottom line – they’ll do things, some bad, some really bad,  some just at the wrong time. 

Now it seems to me over the past hundred years or so, we’ve come to trust young people with directing their own feet and hands and voices.  We know there are a lot of nasty things  high school students can and sometimes do do with their words and actions.  We’ve spent a lot of time teaching and modeling what’s appropriate, ethical, moral, socially acceptable.   Would we think of preventing students from using their voices or hands completely because we are afraid they’ll misuse them?  Let me take this to a ridiculous extreme to make my point.  Imagine a place where students arrive at the door only to be chained at the ankles, bound at the wrists behind their backs, and  secured with duct tape across their mouths.  We wouldn’t be sending many of them to the office – at least not for telling us where to go, or for taking a 40 minute washroom break, and coming back trailing the scent of cigarette smoke.  But it seems to me, they’d still find a way to keep the vice-principal busy.  They’d learn to disrupt our great lessons by groaning their dissatisfaction, unnerving us by rattling their chains, and frightening us by wriggling their hands free now and then.  We can try to ban and bar 21 century technologies but we can’t stop their groaning, rattling, and wriggling at us. 

I know we’re in the midst of a huge societal shift in communication and learning and that’s both exciting and scary.  But it seems  that we educational leaders need to make 21st century technologies our own, harness them, determine how they can make teaching and learning more dynamic, more meaningful.  Our kids are growing up in the 21st century and need to learn 21 century skills.  We need to help them, as we do with everything else.  

Can we abandon our foolish denial and recognize that our students need help as they make sense of their wired world?  I hope so. It’s a challenge to find the time, but I hope we’ll take time to become a part of that world and put our energy into figuring out how to blend all these new communication technologies with all those other good things we’ve been doing in school for a long time.  All this so that we might help them learn to become decent digital citizens, learn what they need to know,  navigate their way through this huge onslaught of information, that is,  use 21st century technologies effectively at the right time for the right reasons.

My second book of poems, Other Living Things, has just been published by Black Moss Press – five years after my first.  Now in those five years I have also devoted a lot of time to being a parent and English/creative writing teacher.  I’m also learning to play the cello, love to read, own a home, etc.  Still I’ve been asked why it’s taken so long.

Time is part of it, but the truth is this set of poems were tough to write.  They deal with the unhappy things that happen to us (primarily in childhood) that won’t go away, but keep pushing their dim, dusty way into our lives – even forty or so years later.  Though we push them away, laugh at them, even deny them, they will not die. 

I think some people respond by resolving, learning from, and for the most part, moving on with their lives.  I don’t believe for a minute that’s easy to do.  There’s a lot of depression, anger, passive-aggressive behaviour out there that I think is rooted in these old hurts.

I’ve been interested in writing about these for some time.  It’s been difficult though.  I’ve avoided writing many of the poems in the book, convincing myself they could not be written, that I couldn’t write about them.  Why?  It’s hard to say.  In some cases, I just didn’t want to put the stuff on paper.  I went through a process too.  There are a whole series of poems I wrote at the start of this that never made it into the book.  I wrote these from the point of view of  a teenager finally standing up for herself and breaking free of all those limiting experiences.  They came out sounding angry and accusatory – not what I was going after in the book.  Maybe they had a cathartic effect for me.  Likely they did.

I draw on a lot of sources for my subject matter.  Sure, some are my own experiences, but many are not.  And I always use poetic licence – I twist and turn events, mixing fact and fiction until even I’m convince the whole thing is true.  I think that’s what many writers do.

Another challenge to writing these poems was that I’m essentially a private person and didn’t want people saying, “Did that really happen to you.”  I understand people’s fascination with such things but there’s a line I couldn’t cross.   I was actually asked this question at a writing salon that I attend.  I went home and wrote this poem, which does appear in the book.  Originally it was one poem, but the last stanza became the preface to the book and the first stanza was left to stand on its own with the title, “The Problem with Pity.”

Here’s the preface:

You ask, do I write about me and I tell you
I write about what matters to me, what I have done,
what has been done to me, what I have seen done to others,
what I imagine has been done to you.
I craft lines, yours now.
Take, chew, swallow what nourishment
you can, or spit them out.
They are as much about you as they are about me.

“The Problem with Pity” appears on page 54.

The Problem with Pity

Taking a detail out of a poem you ask,
did it really happen like this? to you?
a question that takes these words
off the page, out of your world, and moves
them to a place where you need feel nothing
more than pity.  The work undone, I fall from artist
to blathering victim or monstrous perpetrator.
The words become a news item full of pathos,
my bloody photograph and the headline
Woman survives attack of ten-foot tall chicken
or me, one of Jerry Springer’s guests
donning my double head, or sixth toe, or tail.

The poems in the book deal with all manner of hurts: humiliation, helplessness, sexual or physical pain, taunting – things that we’ve all experienced, witnessed, or read about on the front pages of newspapers at some point in our lives.  

There are also a number of poems that express the fears of a parent who knows what “some people would do” to children.

This is my first ever blog posting.  I welcome your thoughts.

Other Living Things by Carlinda D'Alimonte