top five albums of all time: this guy.

i've long been a watcher of signs from the universe. when i was small, i watched the rustling leaves and told myself, 'if those leaves move in the next five seconds, the answer to the question is yes.' sometimes i had to sit in the yard for an hour until i got the sign i wanted, but eventually there it was!

i've also long been a creature of extreme habit. i can't get out of bed unless the clock's last number is a 5 or 0. i always brush my teeth while waiting for the shower to run hot, and i eat my food symmetrically.

when i lived in glasgow, i walked down to the same turkish cafe every morning for a latte and an egg roll with tattie scone. i brought with me a newspaper, the independent.

in victoria, i walk around the corner to lady marmalade, order two eggs soft poached, potatoes, toast and fresh tomatoes, coffee and a cranberry juice, and read the globe and mail.

breakfast and a paper. breakfast and a paper. that sweet hour before the day gets up and goes, just me and a simple early meal and a crisp, thick newspaper.

it keeps me sane, half the ritual and half the act of actually doing. of sitting in a warm, steamy diner, eating some fresh good food, reading some good stuff, listening to the clink and clamour of the kitchen beyond, the whir of the bartender making espressos, mimosas, fruit smoothies and caesers.

and now, joy of joys, i find that lady marmalade has just opened up a toronto location! (898 queen st east 647.351.7645).

it might not be my everyday place, but i'm taking it's existence as a signal that all is right with the universe. salut.

warning to immediate family: the words below have to do with sex and sexuality.

i do a lot of it alone, in my apartment. ain’t no shame. hawksley workman sings,

dancing is about sexual confidence,
so shake up your stuff if you feel good enough to let the moment just hit you,
if the music befits you.

and man alive, sometimes it hits me and befits me, and i crank up my shitty computer speakers to whatever song of the month gives me the most getupandgo, makes my hips want to keep time with the bass line, makes my feet get all twinkle toed and my arms fly up and snap and clap and hold above my head for long beats, and i dance my fool self into oblivion in my little bachelor’s suite.

i have also often reveled in the dancing-power of some of my nearest and dearest, former and immediate. i have half-fallen in love on many a dance floor, my hips impossibly close, impossibly well-fitted to another’s. the music swollen and magnificent, the sound at just the right level for frenzy, the crowd all pounding together to some insatiable rhythm. i have also watched with ill-concealed disdain as other people sully the good name of dancing as an expression of something, good, pure, natural. those flailers, those jerkers, those that use any open space at a bar with music playing as a platform for their drunken, thrusting sexuality; off-time, no rhythm, no soul behind it, only mindless movement set to any innocuous timbre.

still, dance and let dance, i say.

because for me, my ability to dance—however well or shabbily i might do it, and whether alone in my apartment or out at a crowded bar—is in direct correlation to the state of the union in my brain chemicals. that is to say, when my serotonin is wonky, the levels askew, so my steps are unsure, my lifeblood depleted, my limbs heavy and marbleized in immobility, and the notion of dancing is utterly unfathomable.

depression is the ultimate mojo-killer. in my own personal black hole, i am ugly, unattractive, stupid, wasteful, irrelevant, incapable of positive contribution to anything and completely lacking in natural rhythm. even my gait seems forced or troubled, my feet can’t land normally, everything about me has changed, and the memory of myself as a competent, confident, dynamic mover-about-the-universe is a gap-toothed, straggling bit of fluff in my mind, and i can hardly remember her at all.

in these times, there is no dancing.
there is none of the hopefulness or joy, or the flaming raging joie de vivre necessary for dancing. for me there is a lot of sitting, a lot of thinking, a lot of eating and drinking, a lot of smoking, not a lot of sex, some writing, some walking, zero dancing. there is agonizing self-doubt, visceral physical pain, and an all-dwarfing blackness of sadness and fear and loss and insecurity. in those times i can barely breathe the words, dance.



but always, always, the chemicals right themselves again—stop dropping and rising against my will, stop churning and fiddling with my everyday. my eyes open up, truly open up, without the clammy film of the black hole. i can speak and be spoken to and enjoy the words again. i can walk down the street and thank the universe for all that is good and plenty and all that is dark and shadowy because the grim doubt is mostly gone.

and always the way i know that the cloud has rolled on past, that i have been returned to my real self again, is when i find myself alone in my apartment, cranking up those tinny little speakers, pointing my fingers and waggling my hips, strutting and spinning, until i am breathless from it. when not only can i dance with wild abandon and fluidity, also i can again imagine my hips against another’s hips, rolling in time to some hot preternatural rhythm.

it's a glorious time.

The raven in the snow

Black punctuating white
In perfect phrase,
In perfect form,
At flight, the phrase, removed,
Leaves only
Light.

Image by Unknown
Words: © the raven in the snow, sarah frances lemay 2008

roofbeams are the first to go

the air has changed, the sky with it too, and the colors of morning and the tones of the cooling sea. a change is upon us, autumn’s here, as we know it, another change among a bajillion daily changes.

i’m cleaning up shop again—purging my posessions, preparing to pack, culling the closet and shaving away all the extraneous debris that collects like barnacles as i live and breathe. i’m sitting in piles of paper: letters, official documents, notes to myself, a ten-point lifeplan drafted for me by my mother, a black and white portrait of my dead father—the same that we used in his memorial write-up in the globe and mail, the same that we blew up and framed and placed at the front of the hall where we held his wake, played jazz music, listened to a catholic priest say that all events had unfolded as they should, and my mother, brother and i all rolled our eyes.

my mother loves to purge: loves to dredge up all that lies dusty and unused and cast the rubble to charity shops and dumpsters. her homes—and there have been many: fifteen that i know about, eight that i actually lived in—are always exercises in devoted minimalism. she’s not a knickknack kind of a gal, nor does she collect objects, except paintings by her sister’s husband and china in her two favorite patterns. wood floors, white walls, books, stereo, television, art, simple furniture, non-existant clutter. this is what i understand a home to be.

despite a raging cull every time we moved house growing up, certain objects always made the keep list: the chapel-shaped wood-framed four-panel antique mirror, my father’s roll-top writing desk, a cement sculpture of a seated cat, the soft pine kitchen table, the three persian rugs, a painted portrait of my brother and i as children, a wicker laundry basket, and so on. and certain others have been picked up along the years: a brass beetle doorstop that my father loved and my mother hated, a horrifying wood-carved sign with our surname emblazoned across it, a birdbath filled with wishing stones, and what have you.

so it was that our constant moving taught me that a home is not a house, but that the certain things you take with you are important nonetheless.

so it is that in my adulthood i find that i have acquired my own set of saddlebags—the debris that i will not chip away from the hull, will gladly schlep from place to place, across oceans, across countries, town to town and back again. a flower from the garden of versailles, picked by the fingers of one of the people i love most in the universe—and also one that i have hurt the most. a framed black and white photograph of my grandfather as a young man, seated on a smooth stone at a summer’s picnic eating beans from a can. a lithe otter-tailed canoe paddle, a massive dictionary and thesaurus set, a troop of two-inch high ceramic animals, bunnies and geese and deer, collected by my grandmother, lined like soldiers along her window sill. my parents’ copy of khalil gibran’s the prophet, from which they took their wedding vows in december 1970. and journals: dozens of them, book after book since i was eight years old. the first was a tiny five-inch number, made of soft, pink plastic, with a close-up head shot of a ginger kitten in a white basket on the front. each page was fit with five short lines for each day, on which i would reverently record the weather, a fight with my brother and the cause, something said at school that day, and the like.

some are missing; where they are, i wonder often. i threw them away myself one winter, the last we spent in ontario. my mother was readying to move, and my brother and i were charged with getting rid of all that could be lost, lightening the load for her to ship our collected life to the other side of the country. i sat in the basement one night and opened up boxes filled with journals and wondered wether they were worth keeping. i opened one from when i was thirteen. i could have wretched with embarrassment at my own self—so stupid, so flailing, so desperate, so lost, so silly, so full of shit. and after ripping through the house, slamming things, making noise, exploding into raging tears then gentle sobs in my mother’s arms, i picked up an armload of the most vile of the records—those i wrote between the ages of thirteen and seventeen—and stuffed them in the trash bin outside.

recently at a dinner with eight members of my father’s family, my mother recalled that night to them, and told of how i had expected to look back on those pages and see the bloomings of a promising poet, writer, journalist, whatever. that i would see in that younger incantation of myself something bright and full of hope and spirit and at least a whisper of talent. instead i found only myself as a depressed, overweight, sexually confused, delusional, desperate adolescent; and not only that, but the writing was terrible. not a lyricism or literary insight to be found amongst those volumes of self-pity, angst and wretchedness.

besides the photographs and love letters, besides the ceramic menagerie and my brother’s copy of catcher in the rye, there are other stones that fill up my pockets, bits of life that are stuck fast to me, that i find follow me from place to place, apartment to apartment, town to town. like the feeling of rightness in the universe that followed kissing a girl for the first time, like the understanding that grew in me as i watched my father slowly slowly die, like knowing what it feels like to laugh truly from one’s belly, like the romanticism that lives in me despite all my jadedness. like the snatch of paper i tore from my haunted flat in glasgow, where a prior tenant had wallpapered the bathroom in the pages of crime and punishment, like the postcard i wrote to my grandmother when i was five years old that says ‘dear nana, i’m a good swimmer. love sarah.oxoxox.’

so it is that there are certain things i keep along the way. and prominent among them is that snowy night in ontario, when the total recognition of my own ineptitude was emphasized in high salut by my own words. there, immortalized, was the fabric of my being; ugly, naive, ignorant as it seemed to me to be, there i was revealed, forever in ink on paper. and it scared the living shit out of me. i threw those books in the trash, and god only knows where they are now, rotting in a landfill most likely, the words are gone now surely, the pages putrid in their leather binds.

funny then, isn’t it, that i should see fit to start this venture on the world wide web, setting down my feeble scratchings not just by the fundamentally impermanent medium of ink and paper, but in 1s and 0s for all in the cy-universe to see until the end of time.

so it goes.

that little pseudo-trauma in the snow didn’t teach me that it wasn’t worth it to write it all down anyhow. it taught me the opposite. it taught me that nothing, not even my sense of self, would go on being true forever, that nothing that i wrote in one moment would ever be the same in another moment, and so on. on and on about the nature of impermance in this fragile universe. on and on about knowing what to let go of and what to hold on to, what to forget and what to remember.

a lover of mine once fervently believed that one’s character was drawn directly from the fabric of their convictions. for her, to make noise, even if other people didn’t like to hear it, was better than any polite or nervous silence. this is among the many things i learned and kept in my pockets through my relationship with her. she is among the people i have known that reached their nimble fingers inside my chest and forever altered the chemistry of my softest, most important parts.

some of these people i will never see or hear from again, like the eleven year old girl that rocked my nine year old self on a swingset on the grounds of my brother’s baseball game. my mother was in the car reading a book, my father was at work, and i was soaring to the golden hour sky laughing and smiling with a girl that looked to me like an angel in the low lit summer night. that night, nine years old, i understood something fundamental about myself. or the night my father finally succumbed to the cancer and my mother and i stood at his bedside and just stared at his dead naked body in the moonlight, impossibly small, totally unrecognizable from his formerly sturdy, salt of the earth, stature. the forty five minutes we spent silent in the car as i drove us back to the hospice to see him. i fiddled with the radio but couldn’t settle on a song and there was no sound that could fill the silence of knowing he was dead, anyway. the way the moon was full and heaving white in the sky above us as i navigated his car down the lonely country roads. the way both of us could not believe he was dead, although we had been bracing for the moment for four and a half years. that night, twenty two years old, i understood something.

so it is that talent or no talent, knowledge or no knowledge, fiction or non-fiction, i’m going to just write it anyway. what did i know when i was fifteen? not a goddamned thing. what do i know now that i’m twenty seven? probably not a goddamned thing. what does anyone know when they’re any age? probably not a goddamned thing.

because despite my mother’s devout minimalism, despite my own grim experience with recalling former incantations of one’s self in gory detail, despite my total resignation to the fact that nothing stays the same, still i am never more truly enthralled or enriched as when i am trying my damnedest to nail something down with words. it’s a fool’s game really, like trying to catch a single drop from a free flowing faucet, but to do it is to find magic in reality, and to live with magic is to live properly. so then, even if everything i ever write i will think is wrong when i read it in the future, even if i will forever want to dump my former selves in frozen dumpsters, even if the only soul that ever hits this link is my own self, i’m going to write it out anyway.
because a change in seasons is upon us, the air is frosting over and the ground is freezing up. the leaves are pulling color into vibrant orange bloom and a winter is coming, followed by a spring. a simple change among a bajillion daily changes. i’m taking stock, holding up shiny fragments to a jeweler’s eyeglass, harvesting my goods. today, i’m here on this milk and honey island, with its ocean scapes and peacocks at the park. soon, i won’t live here anymore, and then.