The Catalpa Tree

The NYTimes this morning has a story about catalpas and other out-of-fashion trees. It says the Catalpa Tree Appreciation Society is looking for members and I plan to sign up.

When we were living in the Paris suburbs I planted one of those huge square faux terracotta pots you find in garden centres with a little flame-like cyprus tree. The pot-with-tree sat on a flat roof outside our second-storey (or first, depending on whether you are North American or European) bedroom; the thought was for the cyprus to hide an ugly chimney, but I wasn't diligent and it died in early childhood.

The pot sat empty. Then one spring I spied a volunteer in the clayey dirt, a sprout with big juicy leaves like one of those avocadoes you grow on a kitchen ledge until eventually it's the avocado or the kitchen--you can't have both. The sprout put out more leaves, it thrived without much attention (like some children), and the leaves turned heart-shaped and big as dinner plates.

I had no idea what it was. There was an acacia in the yard, but it wasn't an acacia, and it definitely wasn't a yew tree, like the one that hung over the (neglected) compost heap, and it wasn't a maple--I'm Canadian, I know a maple tree when I see one. I liked this thing's independence. Water wasn't something I was about to provide: it had to be carried from the bathroom over a hardwood floor without spilling. The thing didn't seem to care if we went away for a month, or three.

Eventually I spotted a catalpa in a neighbour's garden and realised where my tree had come from. The flowers were beautiful, like wisteria. The seed pods were fun. I was glad I owned a catalpa. Growing up in British Columbia it didn't feel like part of my birthright. 

The tree was a teenager in tree-years when we sold the house and moved to a Paris apartment. We threw out a lot of stuff and left a lot more to the new owners, especially book shelves because they liked books. They stored our piano. They could use the Ikea bunk beds we no longer needed. We felt lucky to have them taking over the house with their two little girls.

But somehow I couldn't abandon the catalpa, in its big, ugly, by now really obviously faux, terracotta pot. There was a tiny back porch off the kitchen in the Paris apartment. The big, ugly etc. took up half the space. Now I could water it, watch the leaves flutter on a daily basis, wait for the flowers with which I was sure it would one day honour us. I bought a canvas director's chair for the other corner of the porch and in the evening I sat in it with a shot of scotch and watched my catalpa. I could even look up, four floors from the street, and admire it, the one plant on a stack of tiny concrete back porches, meant to house mops and buckets and brooms and serpillieres. 

One hot summer when we were away in California for my husband's work the catalpa died. I was sad. I tried to replace it, in the flower market on the Ile de la Cité where, between the Hotel Dieu and the market there are two rows of catalpas. Last autumn this was. No one had any catalpas for sale. I pointed out that there were six or eight planted in the pavement right next door. Yes, they said, and when they make seedlings we yank them out and throw them away. I settled for a little fluttery Mexican orange tree, but on my way home, trundling my bush behind me in a shopping cart, I broke some pods off the Hotel Dieu catalpa trees. 

And when I got home I planted them in the big, ugly faux terracotta pot.

Keywords:

• Catalpa Trees.

Insomnia (3)

Insomnia is, to judge by the other folks in the Sleep Clinic's insomnia workshop, is pretty universal. Some of us can't fall asleep, others fall asleep, but wake up after too few hours and don't go back to sleep. We all panic (a word I was pleased to hear a man use last week) when this becomes chronic and the pattern gets hard to break.

So the Sleep Clinic's very sensible solution is to deprive us even further of sleep. And if that seems counter-intuitive, it nonetheless makes a good deal of sleep--oops, I mean sense. It makes a good deal of sense. In my case, as in everyone else's, they decided, looking at my sleep logs, that I was spending too much time in bed for the amount of sleep I claimed to be getting (assuming my reporting was accurate). My assignment for this week was 1) to get up no later than 7 am; 2) not to go to bed before I was feeling sleepy (as opposed to "tired") and not, in any case, before midnight. 

Eventually this is supposed to break my pattern of falling asleep, waking up, stewing in anxiety, perhaps (perhaps not) falling asleep again. Last night it worked: I went to bed at midnight and slept through to 6:30. No stewing. I feel great.

But maybe tonight, more energised by more sleep, I will resist falling asleep. Who is this "I" that resists falling asleep? "I" want nothing better than to fall asleep the minute my head hits the pillow. Instead "I" starts worrying about not falling asleep and how lethargic, not to say depressed, I am going to be the following morning, how little I will feel like doing anything beyond waiting till I can unembarressedly go back to bed and try to sleep. (Rule No 1: Don'ttry to sleep! Tell me, how can you not try to sleep?) It's a little like Kafka in The Castle. I am judge and consenting victim all rolled up into one. I make my own misery. It's perverse.

Keywords:

• a cure?
•  
• insomnia
•  
• Sleep Clinic

Pen Translation Prize longlist

PEN has announced the longlist for the 2014 translation prizes, and I'm delighted that Hélène Cixous, Twists and Turns in the Heart's Antarctic is there.

All the happier as translating it was so much fun. It's a wonderful book, ranging from family history to philosophy via art appreciation in the vein of "looking after my 102-year-old-mother-and-fighting-with-my-brother" (Cixous's 102-year-old mother died last year). Comic and tragic, like Roz Chast's extraordinary memoir of her parents' last years, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, but no visuals except those the reader--easily--creates in his/her mind.

Insomnia (2)

It's a strange business, sleep. A bad night's sleep (2 hours? 4 hours?) seems to involve a lot of anxiety, not to say obsession, about not sleeping, which carries over into the day, a day that feels as Elizabeth Bishop wrote in a poem "almost impossible to lift." Nothing gives you any pleasure, you push on, do what you do till you can go to bed again...

I can move mountains after a good night's sleep. 

I thought I had read all the books about sleep. I stopped using my bed as my desk. I learned to get out of bed if I wake at 3 am and begin stewing about not going back to sleep. I make myself an infusion of rosemary or verbena and go and sit on the deck and look at the stars and think about how tiny my existence is in the cosmic order. I may iron, unload the dishwasher, sew buttons back on. Generally I don't feel much like reading, because that is what I do all day long, and some kind of manual or physical activity is more relaxing. I've thought about taking up crochet...crochet therapy. Eventually I may fall asleep again.

Beating Insomnia: Chapter One, the PNE

A memory: it is late at night for a child. Vancouver, B.C., end of summer. We are returning to the car after our annual family visit to the PNE: the Pacific National Exhibition. We have trekked around hangars full of agricultural produce, cornucopies of improbable tomatoes and hyperbolic squash, perfect carrots like the ones in my grandfather's garden only, if possible, better, glowing jars of jams and preserves, such as my mother would prepare every summer, sealing them with rounds of wax (the heft and texture still in my fingertips), adding labels with dates and names, and lining them up on papered shelves in a windowless cupboard down in the basement. Jams we will slowly consume during the long Canadian winters of my mother's Saskatchewan childhood. Somewhere in the back story are farms on Prince Edward Island and in Ontario, and dimly visible, subsistence farming in Scotland.

Store-bought jam? Unlikely. As unlikely as a store-bought cake. I had to live in France to discover that people bought pastries and that they were better than homemade ones, in France that is. And that it wasn't shameful to buy, rather than make, a dessert. Mind you, it's still better to make cakes from scratch in Canada and the US, because store-bought ones are dire, and this is a fact of life that no amount of positive thinking, even in upmarket Palo Alto with its sesame baguettes, has changed.

Meanwhile, back at the PNE...

we have had hotdogs and clouds of pink candy fluff ("barbe-à papa" in French). And we have been on the rides, best of all the shoot-the-chute. I haven't yet discovered that my father is scared of heights--that was much later on Coney Island when we made him take us on a parachute ride. Our feet are sore from walking through the fairground. I must be about 12. Am I cranky by now?

The car is far away, It's hard to find parking at the PNE. The people who live around the fairgrounds rent out their driveways and back yards. I see us trudging back to the car. I see a lot of fenders and shiny metal. And I hear mother tell me she thinks I am going to be the sort of person who needs a lot of sleep. An innocent remark...why has it stuck with me over all these years? It is this precise, singular remark that brings back all the generic fairground memories.

I can think about this till I'm blue in the face, but I'm never going to know.

There are a lot of things I'm never going to know, but I imagine I am stilll too young to realise this, too young to know this, increasingly, will be one of life's great sorrows.

It makes a good starting place for my sleeping problems.

(Next. How I ended up in "The Insomnia Group Treatment Program." There may be digressions, for example, into Riding the Paris Metro Covered With Electrodes. I may also discover I have better things to do than unpack my sleep problems.)

Keywords:

• insomnia
•  
• jam
•  
• PNE
•  
• sleep workshop

Risotto and killer whales

Late yesterday afternoon (I should explain that in French time, when people say "afternoon" they mean the hours between noon and eight p.m., dinnertime. "Evening"--la soirée--begins at eight and may include social activities. "Night"--la nuit--is when ordinary people are in bed. This can get one in trouble. For instance, once in northwestern Ireland we were to pick up a friend's house keys from a third person sometime during the afternoon. We arrived to pick them up about 5 pm, by which time it was already evening for the fisherman in question. Hard feelings all around.)

Late yesterday afternoon when I finished reading the Life of St Antony (don't ask) I decided to take a little walk across campus. I would drop my library books off at the library and go on to the wooded park with the Haida totem pole where I like to sit on the bench and figure out how a thunderbird becomes a raven becomes a medicine man becomes a killer whale turning into a wolf. It's the killer whale with flopped-over dog ears that gets me. 

Then I walked back, stopping off in the student vegetable garden, where I hadn't been in a while. I thought I might forage something to put in the risotto my husband was cooking. There were some peas, but I thought I should leave them for the students. The garden was lovely. Full of herbs (I helped myself to some rosemary and mint), nasturtiums, lettuce (going to seed), one big red strawberry, and a sunflower that was about ten feet tall. There was an adirondack chair painted funky colours, but I was shy to sit in it. I checked on the apple tree, the plum tree and the kumquat bush.

My husband had added asparagus to the risotto.

Keywords:

• risotto

No new news

Life is repetitive, and I like it that way. I sleep. But when I sit down to write, I think I've written that already (the strand of tinsel in the birch tree) and probably several times. Is it because I spend so much time with my nose in a book? My news is the book I'm reading...

So here I am, nose in a computer, books strewn round me on the spare bed, to my left a window, with a broken venetian blind (don't try to raise the blind we tell visitors), looking out past two birch trees and the carport roof and beyond that an oleander hedge, a street and a row of student houses. What most interests me is the rain falling into the puddles that collect where the flat roof sags. I like the random--well, they look random to me, but who knows?--circles the drops make in the puddles. It's one of those mesmerizing experiences, like wave-watching or fireplace-watching. Sometimes bubbles pop up on the surface of the puddle and float there  till a raindrop punctures them. I like the chains of droplets on the twiggy branches of the birch trees.

What I like most is the sound rain makes falling onto /into things. I heard the rain before I opened my eyes this morning. To make sure I wasn't dreaming--it's been weeks since any rain fell--I listened for the swish of tires.

Rain is soothing, but not if it goes on for weeks, the way it does in British Columbia where I grew up. There it can drizzle for days, weeks, months, years, twenty-two years. The sky is featureless grey. I couldn't wait to get away from it, first to Ghana for a two-year teaching stint where, when it rained it was a tropical downpour and then it stopped and we all came out and played tennis with the headmaster as usual at the end of the afternoon. The headmaster was very dapper in his tennis whites. It was a teacher training college. Every now and then during class hours someone would yell "snake!" somewhere in the grounds and then everyone rushed outside with machetes.

After Ghana I went to New York, then Montreal, where when it rained it snowed. Then Marseille where at last my hair stopped frizzing. Bliss.

Now I find I like rain, in small doses. I like clouds too. Plain blue gets monotonous.

Keywords:

• Ghana
•  
• Montreal

"He smiles a lot and then not. / Hauteur is the new hot."

To the library I went yesterday, or maybe the day before, to find a book, naturally, but right next to the one I was looking for was a row of books by Frederick Seidel, including Nice Weather (2012).How not to love a poet who has poems called "Cunnilingus," "The Terrible Earthquake in Haiti," and "Sweet Day, So Cool, So Calm, So Bright." Oh, and "Do Not Resuscitate" and "Rainy Day Kaboom." Appropriately, he has "Silvio" in a poem. In "Arnaut Daniel," pell mell: "Love cracks my sternum open / In order to operate... / A Caucasian male nine hundred yeard old / Is singing to an unattainable lady, fair beyond compare, / Far above his pay grade, in front of Barzini's on Broadway, /In Provençal...".

I keep turning to the author photograph on the jacket flap: the most incredible suit, dark, with a waistcoat. If I have ever seen such a beautifully tailored suit before it was lost on me. Try to be someone on whom nothing is lost. I try to read the titles on the spines of the books on the shelves in the background.

"He smiles at the photographer but not/ the camera. He thinks cold is the look that's hot."

Keywords:

• Frederick Seidel