Vinaigrettes
Like any reputable Goddess, Mar Sulaika muses about her observations of the world at large.
A Goddess, however, doesn't use the simple word vignette to describe a brief, evocative account or episode. No, of course not.
A 'Vinaigrette', however, is not only a dressing of oil and vinegar but, historically, a small, ornamental bottle for holding smelling salts...and...you may just need them....
A Goddess, however, doesn't use the simple word vignette to describe a brief, evocative account or episode. No, of course not.
A 'Vinaigrette', however, is not only a dressing of oil and vinegar but, historically, a small, ornamental bottle for holding smelling salts...and...you may just need them....
Mar-velous Monday: Episode 2 – Air India, 1985: The Sari of Sorrow
The cloth is pure silk; a deep turquoise - diaphanous and mysterious. The sublime undulating shadows capture both light and dark. Every sari tells a story; and that story has a theme. The story here is the one solid gold continuous thread along the border.…
Mar-velous Monday: Episode 1 – Burstall, Saskatchewan, 1995
June 22, 2021 The Story: “You don’t know how many hearts you touched all these decades with that story we did together, “said Shane just two weeks ago. Pastor-Doctor Shane Andrus is a man I met producing a story over twenty-five years ago that changed…
A Spanish Banks Photo 32 Years Later
That sunny day at Spanish Banks before we found out about the cancer was joyous, sublime and our step across the threshold of before and after.
Vassiliky and Her Donkey
When I lived in Greece with Peter in the l980s, his neighbour Vassiliky was wary of me. She was in her 80s, I was in my 30s, and Peter was in his 50s. As she looked me up and down she was definitely skeptical: dyspistos.
Verity Bell-Irving : Memoria
Revised, March 12 2010. Second Revision: April 29, 2021 Anton Dolin, who began his career with the Ballets Russes under Serge Diaghilev, asked Verity to join his new company – The American Ballet Theatre in l941. ABT in 2021 is still going strong…
The Jets and Sharks in Their Mid-80s
There is always some amusing situation when I go to see my mother at Haro Park Center.
I know. They are now called Campus of Care Facilities, but it seem to me that title tries too hard.
Dementia Mama Wisdom
I’ve never confided in my mother about any of the things girls children, teenage girls, or pregnant out of wedlock women girls have been known to share with their mothers. So, it may be obvious why I navigated the rest of my life sans motherly advice,…
The New Purse
When I arrived at the nurses station to pick up my mother to take her for her smoke, I noticed her coming up the long hall to greet me carrying a white purse I had never seen before. Crooked over her left arm like the Kelly bag she had in the l950s I puzzled…
Virgo Mama
Easter weekend, 2021 meant we could finally give our mother, Trudy, a hug for the first time in l3 months. As a professional writer, sometimes events are so emotional it can’t quite be verbalized. But this story I wrote about Trudy from over a year ago,…
Le Monde: Chad – 1979
Heraclitus, philosopher 500 BCE, said change is constant. Is this an oxymoron, the mobius-strip of shit we must constantly relive every generation? That change is constant, but the constancy is that it doesn’t change?
Holly Go Brightly – A Covid Surprise
This collage is a reflection of new found friendship: our 1955 birth days are one week apart. March 21, 2021 “I just did too much,” I said to my new friend Holly, …all I had to do was return a DVD to the library three blocks away – so naturally…
A 2021 Valentine Story: For Our Second Year of Covid
Imagine connecting to another soul whose relationship to her own husband refracted the light. The searing single violin from Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade Suite — a magic music box, once in my hand almost thirty years ago, in another’s - hearing…
Life is… Raisins and Almonds – Skyping Mom During COVID
I stared at the Skype screen in frustration. My mother needed my arms around her to be consoled and I was not there.
The Gucci Purse
And there it was. A black patent leather Kelly bag. A single silver clasp gleamed right into my eyes as I spotted it on the shelf. I swear I could see my reflection ten feet away in that super polished cow hide. Simple. Elegant. And, mine….?
Brother and Sister
January 13, 2021 A favorite memory at 65 is my father and his older sister who were in their sixties when I remember them together most. They really loved each other, being with the other. I can’t say/won’t say Auntie Wan was like my dad’s second…
30 Years After The Fact
Love stories thirty years later - inspire other love stories. Here’s to the everlasting of both.
My Guest: Susan Baxter “Masquerade”
“Chicken Little and Henny Penny were off on a quest: to terrify everyone and tell them the sky was falling. Close to a year later it would seem they succeeded and everyone is indeed scared witless. As the world moves in slow motion Christmas appears…
Trudy Does Skype
December 9, 2020 I’ve come to love my mother more and deeper since this second lockdown with Covid-19 over the last eight months. Yes, absence makes the heart grow fonder – but/ and – out of sight, out of mind, no? We haven’t had the…
The Bullwinkle Decoder Ring… Just Doesn’t Work Without Them
November 25, 2020 Is it possible that I am making this up? You know that l960s thing we used to say, not knowing we were apparently quoting, Zhaungzia from the 4th century BCE: “…Once upon a time, I dreamt I was a butterfly… now I do not know whether…
Men: They Have To Have Two
June is with it, spunky, on top of life, acerbic, intelligent and a no-nonsense kind of gal. She’s also survived cancer in her 60s, lost her husband six months ago and has one arm. She jokes about being ‘the one armed bandit’ after a discussion on…
90 Is The New 45… He Thinks
I once had a boyfriend named Fred.
Well, he wasn’t a true boyfriend, but he may have thought so.
Or imagined it, or wanted it, or…
Just Like That
October 31, 2020 Come on chick – a boom says Linda, checking her reflection in the bathroom mirror where Hope does her mascara. Saturday night for the twenty-eight year olds; l988. I don’t know if I really want to go out to the American again.…
Fly Fishing: A Dream
“Fly fish tackle box”, he said, mesmerized by the same glittering light dance I was. I just looked at them -in their little cribs, one in one at a time. An array of dancing strings of color. For fishing?
In TV Cable Land: Male Testosterone Rules
“Men are better at this than women aren’t they?”
Yes,” said Raj.
Southport: The Air Force Base and Paulette
Ya gotta love the l960s. I Love Lucy after school. Basketball practice after supper. Gangs of 13-year old girls picking up one and then the other girlfriend and then the third or fourth to roam the airforce base of eight streets (we thought it was gargantuan)…
The New Moon in Our Newness of the Covid-Ocracy
To me the cosmological sense is that life, love, nature and reality all have second chances, with this meeting once a month, face to face in the same place when the Sun and the Moon meet.
Apartment Managers: Canada’s Answer to Mussolini
It’s an old saw that we don’t learn from history, but the repetition of bad behaviour in the extreme during a world pandemic is unconscionable by those in power of anything.
The Trudester Does COVID
I went to see my mother at Haro Park Center where she has lived the last 4 years, and where she survived the Covid pandemic that hit Vancouver in March 2020. It had only been a week but seeing her come towards me took my breath away. She appeared more…
The Ghost on The Lady Ghislaine
August 9, 2020 Pipits and wagtails and maybe a song sparrow or two, breakfast from my very old bird feeder in my terrace garden around 5:30 in the mornings. It delights me to see them beak down, as they pick up, then thrust their heads up. Sometimes out…
Musing… Real Life In Real Estate
May 5, 2019 My best friend, Mark in London, and his wife are selling their house now that the kids are setting off for college. It’s that empty-nesting-downsizing thing. With the overemphasis on hurry-up-and-click-bait your life to death with techno…
A Memory A Day: TRUDY AT THE OSCARS
Remember back in the l970s’s the Orgasm-Atron in the movie, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask? A character would walk into what looked like a space-age telephone booth. After a few minutes of twirling around inside he would…
A Memory A Day: MEDITERRANEAN WINNIPEG
When I drink tea from a particular porcelain cup of my mother’s which I have known all my life, I am transported to another world. Where the Crinoline Lady in blue and yellow holds a basket of flowers I imagined as a kid, a whole garden of such ladies…
Musing… ABELARD & THE COCOBOLO
“…The truths of our hearts and memories never finish running their risks,” wrote Peter Abelard to his love, Heloise in the 1100s. I look down from that flash card clipped to the lampshade on my desk as my eyes catch sight of a dusty wood carved turtle.
Musing… MEMORIA
The latin word for memory is memoria. The very sound of that word draws me back into, and forward with, a wave of some emotion I cannot describe. Like the tides I watch from the 26th floor of my apartment building. Even from a distance those tides are…
Ya Gotta Laugh… THE DELIGHTS OF DEMENTIA
“When did you get back from China?” Mom asked.
“I’m not in China, mom. How are you?”
A few minutes later, she said, “When are you going to China?”
Mom, I’m not going to China. I’m going to be right here.
Ya Gotta Laugh… RIDICULOSITY IN DIRE CIRCUMSTANCES
Someone had the audacity to send me an email today on what to do if you were bored in the Covid-19 Lockdown that has gripped Vancouverites like a very ugly pangolin chomping on a bat wing. Bored?
Ya Gotta Laugh… MINDSET MILLENIAL
I might have mentioned that it’s a simple customer service
courtesy that’s been around since the equivalent of Bob’s Burgers opened in Athens
at the time of Christ.