Fiction Friday: Joker the Clown

For fun, I thought I'd post one of the first stories that I ever wrote (way back when I was ten or eleven). It makes me laugh, but it also makes me remember the enthusiasm and joy with which I wrote, and that inspires me to keep writing today.

Joker the Clown was nervous. Nervous from the tiny round hat perched on his head all the way down to the pompom on the end of his big left shoe. Today was his first day performing in the Big Top. What if he made a mistake? What if he couldn’t climb the pole? What if he dropped the balls? What if he fell? What if the people didn’t like his act?

He tapped the balls in his pocket and peered through the crack in the tent. The stands were full of people! He’d never seen so many people in his entire life! Right now they were all laughing over the performance of Eliza the Elephant. Could he make them laugh like that? He looked at the balls again. Then he heard the Ringmaster calling his name.

“And now Joker the Clown will perform his amazing juggling act for you!”

The Ringmaster swept his hand toward the edge of the tent. Joker’s feet moved without him. He ran out into the center of the ring, tossing three balls around his head. Near the Ringmaster, he stopped and dropped the balls into his pocket with a bow. Then he grabbed the pole and shinnied quickly to the top, remembering to get stuck once on his big shoe. For a moment he really was stuck, instead of just pretending to be. But then he got his shoe out of the way and reached the top of the platform.

His hands felt clammy as he did his little dance step on the top of the platform, then hopped out onto the highwire. Three balls found their way into his hands, and he tossed them over his head. After a few steps, he added another ball. Then he did a trip, sweeping off his tiny hat and catching all four balls in it. The last one bounced off the balls already in the hat, and he caught it on the tip of his big shoe and rolled it into his hand.

Dropping the balls back into his hand, he put his hat back on and continued his waltz across the highwire. He started juggling three balls, then added another, and another. He kept his eyes on the balls, trying to make sure he didn’t drop them. Adding one more meant he was juggling seven balls. His feet felt their way along the highwire, carrying him to the other end. He needed one more ball. But could he get it without dropping the seven he was juggling?

Taking a deep breath, he tossed the balls up, snatched the last ball from his pocket, and caught them all. Then he had them all flying through the air again. He was doing it! He was juggling all eight balls!

Below him he saw Untz pedal past on his unicycle. At the same time, he heard the crowd shouting and laughing. Tears stung his eyes. He hadn’t made them laugh. Eliza and Untz had, but Joker hadn’t. Stepping off the highwire, he caught all his balls and stuffed them into his pockets. He grabbed the pole and started sliding down. When he hit the bottom, Unzt cycled past again, but he leaned toward Joker and whispered, “You did it!”

Joker stared after him. Had Unzt really said that?

He looked at the crowd, and then he heard the crowd. They were shouting his name.

“Joker! Hurrah for Joker!” they shouted.

He felt a grin spreading across his face. He had done it! Pulling his balls from his pocket again, he tossed them into the air and juggled them as he ran out of the rink.

WFMW: Activities with Baby

Until Sunshine arrived, the youngest baby I had ever spent much time with was an eight-month-old I used to babysit. While I was playing with him, I was also watching his three older siblings. It meant that a day of babysitting was never dull. Since the family also attended the same church as us, I usually spent several minutes after the service each week holding the baby. I was a pro at bouncing and rocking. Babies were easy.

Enter Sunshine. The first few weeks were as I expected—babies eat and poo and sleep. Other than the fact that I couldn’t put her down, she was pretty easy to take care of. Then as she got older, she began wanting to play. She’d spend a bit of time in her rocking chair staring at her toys. I could put her down for a bit longer. Bathtime became more fun. But she kept wanting to play more. And it was not baby who got bored, but mommy.

Playing in the mirror, singing or dancing, and peek-a-boo are good for twenty minutes. Then I’m wondering what else I can do with her. So I started googling to see if other moms had the same questions--and any answers. If you've got a baby under six months old, please share what you do to keep them busy!

Each new day brings new changes with Sunshine. Now that she's four months old, she's playing with sounds, trying to stand up, and more alert than ever—keeping me on my toes!

Road Trip

This weekend, my husband and I took off on a semi-impromptu road trip. It started off with his having an interview in Valleyview. Then I looked at the map and noticed that Historic Fort Dunvegan was sort of close (okay, if you’ve driven several hours to get there, what’s a couple more hours?). And he figured that since we were there already, we could swing past Peace River to drop off an application, and maybe those folks over in High Prairie who’d asked him for an application would like to interview him…

So Sunday morning found us in the car and on the road bright and early. We stopped in Mayerthorpe for Mass and reached Valleyview just past noon. After the interview, we spent a few hours touring the town, from the mobile home park at the top of the hill to the new duplexes at the other end of town. Then we continued down the highway.

Historic Fort Dunvegan is located right on the edge of the Peace River—those priests and fur traders knew how to pick scenic spots (though they chose it for the more practical purpose of getting their boats there). All that remains of the trading post and mission are the church and the rectory, carefully restored since being used as a gas station and tire repair shop. There’s a visitor’s centre there (which closed just before we arrived) and a campground. We walked around enjoying the birds singing, the sun shining, and the wind in the trees, but decided that we didn’t like listening to the jake breaks on the trucks coming down the hill into the river valley.

So we hit the highway once more, and had supper in Grimshaw—a very small town that has very few eating places open at 9:00 on a Sunday night. My husband was quite pleased with the Chinese food we found, and Sunshine enjoyed watching the fish in the tank there. We camped that night at Queen Elizabeth Provincial Park (I was slightly surprised the Queen was all the way up there on her visit here back in 1978), along with a few other fishermen/boaters and a gazillion mosquitoes. There was a gorgeous sunset across the lake (which I'd share with you if I hadn't forgotten my camera).

Monday morning found us driving around Peace River, trying to figure out their extremely confusing overpass. After breakfast, we made a couple stops in town and then found our way out of the extremely confusing overpass onto the highway. As we drove up the river valley, we could see up and down the beautiful river valley that the town perches on. Then we were once again up on top, with farmer’s green fields stretching into the distance. These faded into forests as we approached High Prairie.

After another interview and another tour of the town, I was smelling home, so we pointed the car in that direction. My husband perused the map and decided a route through Swan Hills would be the most scenic. We enjoyed the rolling hills there after the flat lands around High Prairie (I guess it’s called prairie for a reason), but were more delighted by the black bear that ran across the road just in front of the car. Deer were also in abundance, including the one that patiently watched me go by and then stepped slowly across the road (she must’ve learned to look both ways first). And finally by about 9:00 at night we reached home, with the odometer reading just over twelve hundred kilometres for the trip.

My Dad and I Built That

I was halfway through my university degree when I decided I needed a new desk. My old desk was scarred, wobbly, and too small. Dad listened to my sketchy description of what I wanted and we set out to find it. For several evenings after work we’d go touring furniture stores. When we didn’t find anything suitable, he looked up more stores to try. He is a cabinetmaker and had high standards for any furniture, but many of the desks we looked at were cheap particle board or poorly constructed or simply didn’t meet my needs.

After months of unsuccessful searching, we decided to build it ourselves. Dad and I sat down with some paper, and I described what I wanted while he sketched. He proposed better storage ideas, grilled me about what exactly I needed, suggested ways to have more work space. We measured, drew, erased, debated, drew, calculated.

I picked oak—my dad’s favourite wood—and we got started. The next few months found us in his shop whenever we had a spare evening or weekend. We measured, cut, nailed, glued, changed the plans, cut some more. Dust hung in a haze in the shop and coated our glasses and followed us into the house. Hammers swung gently so as to not mark up the wood, and a wet cloth was kept handy to wipe up any excess glue. Piece by piece, it came together. Then it was the smell not of oak dust but of wood stain that drifted from the shop and clung to our hands. We stained and sanded and stained and sanded until the wood shone smooth.

Finally came the grand day that we moved the new desk into my room. The base was three pieces—a bookshelf on the side of a narrow drawer unit and a wider drawer unit for the other side. The drawers were all designed for specific purposes: filing, CDs/tapes, pens and stationary, paper, envelopes, etc. The desktop was the heaviest, because we made it of solid two-inch thick oak, and it had The Thing—a pull-out workspace with a drawer inside (see picture on the left). On top of the desk sat the bookshelf, stretching nearly to the ceiling. It had a bulletin board, a light bar, deeper shelves on either side for my binders and narrower shelves in the middle for my paperbacks.

When I moved into my own apartment last January, the desk was my biggest piece of furniture. We carefully debated where it would go in the apartment, because once we put it together, we weren’t going to move it again. After we put the pieces of the desk together, my husband and I started to lift the bookshelf onto it. It hit the ceiling. We put it down again, and my husband got out the tape measure. We had an inch to spare. Once again, we lifted it, set it down on the desk, and slid it back against the wall. I let out a sigh of relief, and thought about the discussion that Dad and I had had over how tall to make the bookshelf. We had almost built it one inch taller than we did, because my old room had slightly higher ceilings.

Each piece of that desk speaks of my dad’s ingenuity. I knew what I wanted—a filing drawer, a place to organize my pens (picture on left), more space for my books—but he made it happen. He had ideas that I wouldn’t have thought of, like how to create a larger workspace or make the most use of corner spaces or give the desk better lighting. His wealth of knowledge and experience poured into that desk, carefully created to be exactly what I needed and wanted. Today it dominates one wall of our living room, attracting admiring comments and looks from all our visitors. And I proudly tell them, “My dad and I built that.”

Religious Climate in Canada

Here in Canada, there are many churches and attendance is fairly good. We attend a large Catholic church that has four masses every weekend, and all are usually full. There are also large numbers of “once-a-year” Christians (both Catholic and Protestant) who show up for the Easter and Christmas services, because it’s tradition in their family.

When I was in high school, my family attended a Lutheran church that my dad nicknamed a “historical building society.” The people showed up there every Sunday not for faith or God, but because their parents and grandparents had built that church and they weren’t going to let it die. If the pastor preached questionable theology from what he read in the newspaper that week, they didn’t care, because at least there was a pastor in the pulpit. It was small (maybe a dozen people including the pastor and organist), but I wonder how many other churches have people attending for similar reasons.

It would seem odd for a person to make a statement like “I’ve been praying about that” at a non-Christian social event. I remember my dad commenting that business conferences in the States were different than those here in Canada, because there he would hear faith brought up more often. Here, it wasn’t discussed. I’ve often struggled with trying to fit in and be accepted, so I tend not to bring up my faith in circles where I don’t feel it will be accepted.

When I was in Australia, I spent two weeks on a farm learning to be a jillaroo (cowgirl), and somehow a discussion came up early in the school where I revealed that I was a Christian. Among seventeen young people from around the world, I was the only Christian, but I now had to answer for my faith. It was both freeing (in the sense that I didn’t have to hide anything about myself) and hard (they challenged me about what I believed). Yet they also accepted me, faith and all, and I could talk about it (even when they disagreed with me) without them seeing me as odd. We had fun together and at the end of the school, a couple of the girls went to church with me on Sunday morning.

I would say most neighbourhoods have a few Christian families, or families who attend church once or twice a year. The dominant belief system is still somewhat Christian—I say somewhat because even if people don’t actively attend church, their parents or grandparents did and so they still hold onto those values. There are several mosques in the city and I know a few people from other faiths, but most of my acquaintances would identify themselves with a Christian worldview.

As for families with more than two children… not many. Growing up, my best friend was the second youngest of five kids, and my friend around the block came from a family of nine. I thought that was great; they always had someone to play with, and their homes seemed so busy and happy. Most other families I know have one or two kids and that’s the norm. My husband and I get weird looks when we say that we want lots of kids (I suggested twelve and he said a rugby side was fifteen). People have told us “wait until you have one—you’ll change your minds” (we haven’t yet). And yeah, there’s the usual jokes about birth control and such for families who do have lots of kids.

A recent survey on Yahoo! news said that about 75% of Canadians still believe in God. That of course includes a large portion who don’t attend church but do accept the existence of God. I would say the trend is to becoming less religious. People are walking away from the faith that they were raised with. In our busy lifestyles, it’s easier to chose to do other things on Sundays, so God simply gets ignored.

I found it interesting at my husband’s convocation this weekend when the chancellor began the ceremony with a prayer to “the Creator.” I wondered if that meant God or if it was just supposed to be a generic term that would be acceptable for whatever belief system people came from. And did the chancellor really believe in the Being he was praying to? It was a nice prayer, at a very secular university event, yet was it just included as tradition, recited like the words investing the graduates with their degrees simply because that’s what they’ve been saying for the past 100 years?

He Convocates Again

Today, with my in-laws, I watched my husband convocate for the second time. Sunshine wore for the occasion a pretty frilly dress and almost stole all the attention from her daddy--but he looked extremely good too, in his kilt and graduation gown (I thought since the kilt and gown came from about the same medieval era that they looked pretty good together). Sunshine people-watched and then fell asleep in Grandma's arms, while I attempted to catch my husband's march across the stage with the zoom on my camera from the first balcony (honestly, that little speck in the corner of the photo is him).

So congrats, baby, on two degrees with distinction!

My First Pack

My first pack was an old red external-frame backpack that my dad cut down to fit me. I remember playing outside his shop while he was working on it, and telling a neighbour kid that we were going hiking. It was my first trip and I was so excited. That red frame pack would hold everything I needed for the weekend: sleeping bag, air mattress, clothes, poncho, water bottle, mess kit, gorp, and at least one meal. Dad insisted that we all carry enough so that if we got lost by ourselves, we’d have enough to keep warm and fed.

I liked the pack because it had lots of pockets. There was a flat pocket on the front for my poncho, and four pockets on the sides where I stashed my gorp, water bottle, mess kit, and Koala Bear. When it was sunny, I zipped Koala Bear into the pocket with his head poking out; if it rained, then he got tucked into the pocket. So it was that he saw Mount Robson several times, the Cadomin-Miette trail, Ram Range, and other places.

When we decided to hike the North Boundary trail in 1998, my red pack was too small. I needed more room to carry enough gear for ten days. So the pack got passed on to my younger brother, and I inherited another of my dad’s old packs: a blue internal frame pack. This one had less pockets, so Koala Bear, in sunny weather, wore the strap for the ice axe around his waist like a belt. From there, he saw Jacques Lake, Jonas Pass, Mount Robson again, Cadomin under snow, and more trails.

With that pack, I learned the skill of packing lightly. If it didn’t fit, I didn’t need it. Even when Mom and I finally hiked the North Boundary trail in 2002, I only carried 30 lbs in that pack. We carried just enough food (and walked out of Kinney Lake on the last day with no food left) and only one change of clothes.

When I moved out, it was time to stop borrowing Dad’s packs and get my own. My husband and I looked a couple of times, but didn’t get anything. I felt slightly frustrated by the pressure riding on the decision: I’d have this pack for the next twenty or thirty years, and if it didn’t fit I’d have a miserable trip. So did I prefer the features of this pack to those of that pack, or did this other one feel more comfortable on my back?

Last week, we stopped to browse at a new camping store. I pulled a khaki green Jansport off the rack and tried it on. It felt good. It had lots of pockets. It was a nice colour. I bought it. Now I can’t wait to see where I’ll go with it.

Dads in the Delivery Room

A while ago, a blogger commented on an article in which a doctor claims dads shouldn’t be present in the delivery room. Dr. Michel Odent says that “the presence of a father in a delivery room is not only unnecessary, but also hinders labour.” I couldn’t disagree more.

My husband was with me throughout my labour, except for a couple times when he went out for no more than ten minutes. He got me food and water, encouraged me to eat and drink when it was hard because I was throwing up, talked me through my contractions, ran water in the tub when I wanted it, emptied the bowl when I threw up, got me towels or blankets as I needed them, and just provided emotional support by being there with me. Only at one point, when I was tired and wanted quiet and there was nothing he could do for me, did I not want him there. He went out for a few minutes to get something, and I used that time to rest, knowing he would soon be back with me.

We spent the months before labour learning all we could and preparing for it. In many ways, my husband was better at this than I was, reminding me that I should stay fit and practice ways to cope with the pain. So when we got there, he had a list of things he could do to help me. He was also good at observing the nurses and midwife to see what else he could do for me. Perhaps without this preparation, a dad would have a harder time in the delivery room and even annoy his wife, but that only adds to the argument that both moms and dads need to prepare for this time.

Dr. Robert Bradley was one of the pioneers of dads in the delivery room and is the author of Husband-Coached Childbirth. His observation was that women did better with their husbands—the men they love and trust—by their side encouraging them.

In today’s hospitals, when decisions are often made based on what makes the hospital more money rather than what’s best for the woman, husbands can help ensure that their wives get the birth experience that they want. He should be mediating between his wife and the hospital staff, if necessary, insisting on what she needs. In one case, a woman was doing fine in labour and handling the pain, but a nurse kept coming in to ask if she wanted an epidural yet, and the woman finally gave in. Her husband could have been there to say, “Leave her alone; when she wants an epidural, I’ll call you.” Both Bradley and Odent say that a labouring woman needs quiet and support; the husband can ensure she gets that, not only from him, but also from the staff. A person in pain does not make good decisions; so her husband, able to be clear-headed and rational, can help her.

I can think of a few situations where Dr. Odent is right—but only a few. If there are relationship problems between the couple, or the man is physically unable to see what his wife will have to go through to deliver their child, then perhaps he shouldn’t be there. In that case, I hope that the woman either has a supportive mother or sister who can be there, or is able to hire a good doula. The rule should neither be “no dads” nor “all dads,” but each couple should make the decision based on their own situation, needs, and capabilities. However, in most cases, I think that the man who knows and loves his wife better than anyone else is the best person to be at her side during the most difficult thing she will do.

Sick Day

Orange juice.
Chicken noodle soup.
Gingerale.

What did your mom feed you when you were sick? My dad's mom always got out the orange juice, so he still won't drink it today. My husband likes chicken noodle soup, but that's what my mom used to make for us when we were sick, so I usually only like it when I'm sick. And the taste of warm gingerale always brings back the feeling of laying on a brown plaid couch staring at a painting of four horsemen crossing a river.

I thought there was a rule somewhere that mothers weren't supposed to get sick. It certainly worked for my mom. I think she was sick maybe three times in all my growing up years. Dad always found it amusing, because it was such an infrequent thing. Mom would sleep and us kids would tiptoe around, trying to keep ourselves busy and out of the way. Luckily today Sunshine has been similarly cooperative; she had a nice long nap with me and then played in her Bumbo chair for a while.

Now, since this cold is making my brain move about as fast a koala in a eucalyptus tree, that's all I have to post.