Celebration!

This was the week for thank-you lunches with the friends who helped me through my two-year project on welcoming in ancient Rome. My friend Linda received many a despairing phone call, but was always kind and supportive, even though she herself spent the past year recovering from being hit by a car. She's walking, reading and knitting again, so it was time for us both to celebrate over lunch at the Banana Leaf restaurant.

My friends Andre and Georgeann, who kept my spirits and humour alive during my lengthy academic effort, came for a celebration lunch at the Salade de Fruits restaurant on Friday. Ever since we met at the beginning of the SFU course I just completed, we have been getting together weekly to discuss books. They indulged me with Rome-themed readings for as long as possible, but now we're on to the complete works of  Jane Austen -- which in itself is worth a celebration.

Champagne, Georgeann declared, was a necessity. When Carol finally finished her two years' battle with Rome, we would all drink champagne. And so on Friday, exactly seven days after my project on welcoming and immigration in ancient Rome was accepted by my professors at Simon Fraser University, Georgeann supplied a bottle of Pol Roger for our celebration lunch.

Many things fell by the wayside during my project on Rome. My weekly house-cleanings withered away, and grit ground underfoot on the kitchen floor. The windows didn’t get cleaned this year. My garden twice awakened, bloomed and faded with no help from compost, fertilizer or me.

But my friends stayed steadfast. Georgeann and Andre, the SFU friends I meet with weekly to discuss books, did as many Rome-related readings as they could, and excused me from some of their other studies.  My friend Linda, with whom I had long shared more modern books, graciously accepted that I could no longer keep up. My friend Ros kept in regular touch by Skype from Mexico, but knew when the conversation turned to books that we’d be reading very different things. Through it all, they sympathized and supported, joked and jollied, and assured me at the low points that they wouldn’t think less of me for bowing out.

Now that it’s over, I know it’s not the dirty floors and windows or the unkempt garden that matter. It’s the friendships that stayed true through a trial like this. Time to celebrate!

There was a corkage fee but the friendly staff at the Salade de Fruits restaurant -- a favourite of Ros and mine when she is in town -- were gracious about supplying champagne flutes and keeping our glasses filled with the champagne Georgeann brought. Their attitude and the wine added a sparkle to the meal. 

Well, I don't usually drink anything alcoholic, but once-in-a-lifetime occasions have to be honoured.

We shared a mousse and slice of lemon tart for dessert. As this photo shows, it was very much worth celebrating.

Winter vegetable-flowers

I sympathize with gardeners who want to inject some colour into their winter flowerbeds, but ornamental cabbages, with their big purple centres, have always seemed such an obvious way of going about it. But lately, I’ve been noticing a smaller, much more subtle version. It’s flowering kale – same family as cabbage – and some kinds have the look of delicate, creamy roses. Paired with carnations or other flowers that pick up their touches of green, pink or purple, they are part of some stunning bouquets at my local flower shop.

I'll probably never get around to growing them myself, but today, I indulged my interest in these unusual flowers and had them included in a hostess-gift bouquet for John's cousin Janice and her husband Jim. Combined with red alstromeria and some greenery, they turned into a cheerful, and unusual  Christmas bouquet.

My flowering-kale (brassica oleracea) bouquet. A gardening website says you can eat them, but they've been bred for looks, not flavour. Photo by John Denniston.

A closer look at the kale. The website says their leaves have been hybridized to feature purple, rosy and creamy white colours, making them look more like large flowers than vegetables. Photo by John Denniston.

I couldn't resist taking them outside to see how they'd look in my back garden. Maybe I should try growing some after all.

A close-up of one of the flower/vegetables. A beautiful combination of pink and green tints.

Messy or just genius?

Research is showing that messy offices may be more creatively inspiring than orderly ones. In that case, I may rank right up there with Albert Einstein, whose office was notoriously messy. A Time photographer who photographed it the day of his death found not an inch of desk space wasn't covered by paper. Look familiar? Photo by John Denniston.

Creative projects come to an end, and then there's the big clean-up. After my thesis defence was accepted Friday, I have been burrowing down to my desk's bare surface. To me, it all  looks a little lonely.

I will not deny that the very large desk of my basement office was, ummm,  increasingly crowded as I worked my way toward the end of a two-year SFU project on welcoming in ancient and modern times. The desk is five feet long and two and half-feet wide, and every inch was covered with drafts, notebooks, clippings, printouts, textbooks, and notes on notes. Nor was there just one layer, but several.

Unlike friends who gasped at the sight and wondered how I could work in such confusion, I found the piles comfortable, nests I could burrow into for that perfect quote, that exact date, that floating concept needing to be scooped out of the air and nailed down on the keyboard. It was like being surrounded by potential – all that history, all those thinkers, all those ideas waiting to be mined. Annoying, too, sometimes, when they hid beneath each other, requiring a search. But I knew that even if I had lined them up with military precision, because of the way writing changes direction, I’d still end up searching for something.

Since completing my thesis defence on Friday, I have been digging down through the desk midden. John and I cleansed 40-plus library books of stickies, packed them into five shopping bags and returned them to the SFU library. Old drafts, printouts and notebooks went to recycling. Inch by inch, the desk surface I hadn’t seen for two years reappeared. I even dusted. My friend Linda, who inclines toward neatness, was ecstatic when she saw my office today.

Which got me thinking about messy work areas and orderly ones. Why are the former shocking and the latter commendable?  The value of tidy desks is a recent concept, an artifact of the mid-twentieth century and the influence of efficiency experts, according to a posting by Geoffrey James, contributing editor, inc.com. ( https://www.inc.com/geoffrey-james/a-messy-desk-is-a-sign-of-genius-according-to-scie.html )  In the past, a clean desk was considered a sign of “slothful laziness,” he wrote, noting that Mark Twain chose to leave his desk cluttered for photos. Samuel Johnson, Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs also had messy desks, as did Albert Einstein, who famously pointed out that “if a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then is an empty desk a sign?” 

James cited a University of Minnesota study that tested how well students came up with new ideas when placed in orderly versus disorderly work areas. It showed that while both groups came up with the same number of ideas, the ideas from those in the disorderly areas were more creative and interesting.  

An article by Andrew Tate on Creativity and Pychology, ( https://www.canva.com/learn/creative-desks/) also cited university studies that showed students in messy rooms were more creative. He speculated that mess may be a reminder “that the world is not an ordered and structured thing, but something that contains chaos and unknowns. This jumpstarts our brains into creativity mode and makes us remember that it is OK to be a little bit unconventional and think creatively.” But he conceded that degrees of useful messiness are different for everyone, so the neater among us have to find their own level of creativity and orderliness.

Tonight, sitting at my clean and shiny, but somehow uninspiring desk, I am enjoying the headline on the  Geoffrey James posting: “A messy desk is a sign of genius, according to science: Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs had messy desks, just like most other geniuses.”

Five bags of library books went back to SFU on Saturday, reducing some of the mess on the desk.

I had eight notebooks referring back to useful sections in those textbooks. 

My professor suggested taping the main points I was dealing with next to my computer to ensure I stuck to relevant issues. 

Oh dear. Notes referring to notes is what we are seeing here.

This is what happens when you can't get your mind off your project. You grab the nearest scrap of paper while you are making dinner or washing dishes, scribble down the idea and hope you can read it later.

All those books that went back to the library weren't my only stash. Here are a few of my own that will ensure I have Rome material to read for a long time to come.

Eaten by a wolf

On Friday morning, I got out of my grubby writing clothes, resurrected a beautiful leather briefcase John had given me years ago, and went to Simon Fraser University downtown to defend the master's project I have been working on for two years. Photo by John Denniston.

The night before I was to defend my master’s project on welcoming in ancient Rome, my supervising professor sent me a message: "In bocca al lupo!" it said. The Italian translates literally as "may you be eaten by a wolf!" she explained, admitting that’s an odd thing to wish on anyone: “But the meaning is much more benign: good luck!”

The equivalent of our “break a leg!” expression, I guess. But whichever horrible fate I was wished, there I stood on Friday morning, giving a 20-minute defence presentation. For those who have never had this experience, in my SFU program at least, it means first explaining what your paper is all about, then facing two rounds of questioning from three professors.

Then you leave the room and await their verdict. The professors can reject your project, or ask for major revisions, minor revisions, or – oh happy day! -- no revisions at all.

Everybody was smiling when the door reopened and I was asked to return to the room. The chair of the committee, a fourth professor overseeing the process, said: “Congratulations! Your project has been accepted with no revisions. And I have to tell you that hardly ever happens!”

And so, without having to reopen that 200-page monster paper that has dominated my life for two years, I am to become a master. Perhaps I got lucky and was eaten by a wolf.

What happens when all the writing/worrying/thinking is over?  You start removing the Post-It notes from your library books so you can send them back to their homes on university shelves. Mary Beard's SPQR can keep its finery longer, though, because it's all mine. Photo by John Denniston.

The sticky-note removal process underway. John helped, and we got through about 20 library books in an hour. It took a lot longer to put them all in. Photo by John Denniston.

All these notes came from this one book, which was a mainstay for my project. I'm about to say farewell to the good old Companion to the Roman Republic. Photo by John Denniston.

This is what two years of blood, sweat and tears looks like. 

My SFU friends Andre and Georgeann, who have supported me through the ups and downs of this whole project, attended my defence presentation. This is a detail from the card they gave me later. It's really about a Santa who crashed because his GPS system wasn't working. But the expressions on the fallen reindeer faces are reminiscent of many of my days of work on the project. 

Dog days

Besides his daily newspaper photography,  my partner John Denniston has had photographs published in Life, Time, People and Maclean's magazines. But it's still kind of a thrill to be on the same wall as Magnum photographer Elliott Erwitt, even if the topic is dogs. John's  (and Erwitt's) photos are part of the summer-long Dog Days exhibition at the swanky new Polygon Gallery in North Vancouver. The framed black and white photo to John's immediate left is Erwitt's -- the big colour photos to his bottom left and right are his, shown below.

This photo was taken for a Day in the Life shoot for the Driftwood newspaper on Saltspring Island in 2006. I thought it was one of the few photos in the Polygon exhibit that showed a happy dog behaving naturally. 

Kudos to the Polygon Gallery for admitting there is another side to dog ownership; the poop issue. John took this photo of a vacant lot pocked with dog-poop bags in 2015. Shortly after he posted this photo on his blog, the lot was cleaned up.

Way back in 1973, when West Broadway was much less developed, John spotted this sign and its accompanying dog.

John and I laughed when he was invited to submit dog photographs to the Polygon Gallery, the premiere new space for photography exhibitions in Metro Vancouver. After a lifetime of covering significant issues and events – breaking news, crime, politics, sports and social issues – as a news photographer, John’s debut in a major Metro gallery was to be about ….dogs.

Dogs are the cotton candy of the newspaper world – something to brighten the often-disheartening menu of regular news, but they get no respect from “serious” journalists. At one point, the popular-tabloid Province where John was a photographer ran so many ‘lost dog’ stories that he began a mock contest, handing out gold stars to his beleaguered colleagues for each dog-related photo taken. How many different ways are there to illustrate an absent dog?  

But dogs are a big part of everyday life, which John is always recording, so of course he had dog pictures. The gallery chose three of them. They sit nicely now among about 90 dog photos, old and new, stiff and joyous, local and international, in the gallery’s summer-long Dog Days exhibition.

Many of the photos are from anonymous sources, but the show includes some big names, including Elliott Erwitt of the prestigious Magnum international photo cooperative. Not that we’re competitive, but John and I did note that John had three photographs in the exhibition while Erwitt had only two.

This is the Elliott Erwitt photograph next door to John's on the gallery wall. It was taken on a New York street in 1974, and gives a worm's eye view of a dressed-up Chihuahua, a woman's booted legs and the feet of some giant dog like a Great Dane. We don't know if the Great Dane had to wear a toque and sweater too.

Many of the photos on display showed dogs dressed up in bizarre outfits. This is a very old one, but the practice continues today. I'm not sure how much dogs enjoy being buttoned and bowed and posed. 

There's nothing unnatural about this dog. I loved the outrageous angle and that great big mouth. The 1990 photo, called Moxy, is by local photographer Jeff Henschel.

This anonymous photo, called Kids and Dogs at Play, takes me back to the era when children dressed like little adults and dutifully posed for family photos. The dog looks like a bigger version of Skippy, our childhood pet.

This is a photo I took this year of my niece Aya and her daughter Emi playing with Millie, who belongs to my niece Kat and her husband Maynard. I'm including it here because it is the kind of picture I think was largely missing from the Dog Days exhibition ; photos showing the simple joyful connection between dogs and humans. 

And for the same reason, I include this one of my sister Betty and her dog Molly in Quebec. The connection between those two is wonderful to behold. 

Molly in nature with stick. No bizarre hats or shirts. Dogs the way they should be. 

The joy of delphiniums

John took this photo of my friend Linda and me in the delphinium patch of my Dunbar garden on Sunday. I have always loved these flowers for their height and colour; recently I discovered that somebody at VanDusen Garden must feel the same way....

. . .Because there, what a show! A gigantic delphinium patch at VanDusen is even more brilliant because of the golden-leaved trees behind it.

I have a thing for giant flowers – those Jack and the Beanstalk wonders that stretch and tower, preferably above my head. No wonder I lit on delphiniums early in my gardening career, and count them as a yearly treasure. Every spring, it’s a miracle when their green shoots start poking out of a dead-looking garden bed, and if they survive the feasting slugs, transform themselves into a forest of blue, white and purple spikes.

If I’m enchanted by my little back-yard puddle of delphiniums, you can imagine how exciting it was to find a whole sea of them. Way at the back of VanDusen Garden, after the waterfall, the maze, the vegetable garden, the giant-sized red Adirondack chair, I was surprised this week to find a gigantic swirl of delphiniums, a glowing mass of  blues, purples, whites and pinks.

They soar and wobble, topple and tumble on both sides of a curved garden path, a luscious backdrop of colour for preening selfies, besotted couples and parents preserving memories of their toddlers among the flowers. While I was there on Sunday, two young men in business clothes posed gravely for each other at exactly the right spot along the path to ensure they were engulfed in blossoms.

 Delphiniums are a pain to take care of; wind and rain are their enemies, and they need constant staking. But somebody at VanDusen obviously thinks, like I do, that they're worth the trouble. Sometimes people need a forest of flowers that they can imagine climbing to reach the sky.

VanDusen's curved pathway, delphiniums to right and left.

These flowers like to droop; the white ones particularly have been bent by wind, rain or lack of staking.

Instead of staking each flower individually, VanDusen grows its delphiniums in a grid, which peeks out a little in this photo. If it's not enough to hold them up, they just have to flop.

An early look at my delphinium patch; you can see the stakes I have started putting in. In the background are roses and a few peony blossoms. 

My delphiniums, with stakes. They're not nearly as thickly planted as those at VanDusen.

These are foxgloves, which grow almost as a weed in my garden. They're another of those tall flowers I favour, even though they, too, like to flop. 

These are hollyhocks, another "Jack and the  Beanstalk" flower I love. I took this photo on a walk a couple of summers ago; most hollyhocks are just getting started blooming now.

And another hollyhock photo from an earlier year. Unruly, tall and flopping over -- my favourite kind of flower.

Turning 74

John's big birthday splash-out was a dish of vegetarian lasagna at Cafe Salade de Fruits at the French Cultural Centre in Vancouver on Thursday. A hip problem has curtailed driving and even walking, so we took a bus that landed us close to the restaurant.

I was 17 when the Beatles sang, hilariously, impossibly, about getting older, losing their hair, and asked, chirpily: “Will you still need me, will you still feed me/When I’m sixty-four.”

Well, today my life partner turned 74.

It was, for the first time in our lives, an old-people’s birthday. We’ve both had a terrible year health-wise, and John’s second round of hip inflammation within months has turned him from a bicycling jock into a limping senior. Driving for too long at a time is uncomfortable; walking too far is a problem.

So today, instead of driving out of town for a birthday lunch, as we have for the last few years, we took a bus that would land us within close walking distance of a Granville Street restaurant. On the bus, the alacrity with which young people leapt up to give John their seats was a measure of how he must appear to those for whom the Beatles’ lyrics are still an unthinkable proposition.

Luckily, as even the youthful Beatles acknowledged in their 1967 song, couples age together (“you’ll be older too”), so to me, John is not old. He’s still the intense photographer I met at age 21; still the athlete who booted it around the track before “jogging” became a fad; still the contrarian ready to challenge the obvious; the joker ready to tell a tall tale; the reader who will succumb to any book with Jane Austen in the title.

And, a decade beyond the Beatles’ wildest imaginings, the answer to their question is, yes.

Books are always the answer to the birthday-gift dilemma. We go together to Hager's books and choose what we want. The non-birthday person pays, then hides and wraps them so they are a "surprise" on the big day. Here, John unwraps his stash.

John's selection this year: Kate Atkinson's new mystery, Big Sky, a  Jackson Brodie novel. Jared Diamond's Upheaval, about how nations deal with crises. Niall Ferguson's The Square and the Tower, about networks and power. And Robert Morrison's The Regency Years, with the intriguing sub-title: During which Jane Austen writes, Napoleon fights, Byron makes love, and Britain becomes modern.

Finishing

John has photographed me many times in the nearly two years I have plugged away at a master's project on migration in ancient Rome. But never have I looked as -- satisfied? relaxed? -- as I did on Saturday, June 8, after I sent it off to my professors. 

Anyone who has ever thrown themselves off a cliff (metaphorically), then wondered why they did it and whether they would survive, will understand my feelings on Saturday when I pushed the “send” button on a 162-page thesis for my Graduate Liberal Studies master’s program at SFU.

Relief, amazement that it’s over, plus a certain amount of pride in sheer perseverance were my main reactions as I sent my paper – commonly known as “the albatross”—winging its way through the internet to my professors.

The Graduate Liberal Studies program is for non-academics, often retired or semi-retired, wanting to learn more about the basics of Western civilization. So we are amateurs dabbling in unfamiliar waters, which seems like dangerous territory for a lengthy, in-depth paper on anything. My solution was to learn something really well – in my case a certain aspect of ancient Roman history – and draw conclusions applicable to modern life. Fanciful? Ridiculous? Who knows what the “real” academics will think?

But in a way, it doesn’t matter. I jumped off a cliff when I started this project nearly two years ago, I learned a lot on the way down -- and I survived.

Part of my "finishing up" celebration was a traditional eye-dotting ceremony.  My niece Aya brought back a figurine from Japan and quietly explained that when you start a project, you dot one of the eyes, and when you finish, you dot the other. As I laboured on through my seemingly endless paper, the figurine with the one dotted eye challenged me to continue. It was a thrill on Saturday to black in the other eye.

 .

My mascots throughout the project. One was the figurine, now with two dotted-in eyes. Another was the flowers-and-butterflies card that Etienne, Aya and Emi gave me for my birthday last September. It was a cheerful addition to my desk, a reminder of summer days to come. The other was a little stuffed cat knitted by my friend Linda, who cheered me on throughout.