TREASURES AND PLEASURES OF RHYTHM AND RHYME

Shakespeare’s Winter Song

When icicles hang by the wall,

  And Dick the shepherd blows his nail

And Tom bears logs into the hall

  And milk comes frozen home in pail,

When blood is nipt, and ways be foul,

And nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

  And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And coughing drowns the parson’s saw,

  And Marion’s nose is red and raw,

And roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl,

To-who,

To-whit, to-whoo, a merry note

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Dad was really good at reading poetry to us at bedtime out of a little book that he found for 25 cents on a bargain table in Eaton’s basement. He had a quiet style that didn’t get in the way of a poem, just laid it out so that we could make up our own minds, as if he were discovering it himself for the first time.  Sometimes he threw in for free a nonsense verse by Lewis Carrol or our American contemporary, Ogden Nash. Dad was especially fond of mock cautionary verses like Hilaire Belloc’s in his Bad Child’s Book of Beasts.

We three children absorbed poetry and verse from the sublime to the ridiculous,  relishing in awed silence the sounds of Blake’s Tyger, tyger, burning bright, and stifling giggles when Hilaire Belloc recommended a yak from Thibet as a nursery pet. Richard Orme Allen (aka Dad or ROA) got his money’s worth by adding a twenty-five-cent impulse investment to an already extensive library of nonsense rhymes.
 

Growing up steeped in poetry and verse, we knew the difference between them first hand. None of us aspired to pen immortal sonnets, when we could indulge in a whimsical family tradition dating from the days of Queen Victoria. Those happened to be the days of cautionary verses written to scare children into being good. A wealth of stories of goodness rewarded and wickedness punished offered scope for parody by those very children subjected to their black-and-white morality. Defiant scribbles began in secret as teenaged Victorians like my father and his brothers shook off the constraints of their strict upbringing. My Uncle Elliott let off steam by writing scary verses himself, and frightening his young brothers into the bargain.

Nor was Elliott the only author of homegrown verses. Dad, his older sisters and his nieces were prolific in their production on any occasion. Ten minutes’ rapid reflection by ROA produced a memorable ditty to celebrate Aunt Mildred Fairbrother’s foray at age 52 into teaching in the wilds of Ontario. As a beginning teacher in Rhode Island she had been reprimanded for smoking between classes. Three decades later, the darling woman still smoked, like a chimney. An elegant silent butler was her send-off present, along with this cautionary verse:

When at school you need a drag

upon a coffin nail or fag,

its evil signs you need not strew,

but carry them about with you.

After her marriage, my mother caught the doggerel bug, and reeled off the occasional jingle, like this limerick composed at a party about our family doctor, who was also a school mate of Dad’s and a family friend:

There was a swell doc named Norm

Who said, “Please fill out this form.

Take this pill at dawn

And just carry on,

And I trust it will do you no harm.”

That inspires me to press the verse button in my brain, and take a break from prose.

Doggerel is doggerel, a distant relation

to poetry’s art. You feel the elation

of finding a rhyme for a pesky word -

for example like “doggerel”.

“I’ll fight through this fog or I’ll ...”

invent something outrageous, as yet unheard.

Forsaking poetry’s heights of splendour

and being a frugal and choosy spender

my father delighted in do-it-yourself.

He drew the line at a Hallmark card,

and had no intention of mocking the Bard,

roosting well-thumbed on a handy shelf.

He’d toss off a couplet with easy authority

to honour the birthday of his niece Dorothy

or any other occasion for jollity,

celebration, graduation or other frivolity.

It is now well over seventy years

since my father first read us a song of Shakespeare’s,

and gave us a feeling of rhythm and rhyme

that clearly has stood the test of time.

The measures that pictured winter’s woes

trickled down from my head to my toes

etching into my very being

Elizabethan winters that I was seeing.

So now, grandchildren, it’s time to mess

with Shakespeare’s winter, and take a guess

at how to depict a Muskoka scene

under the reign of a different queen,

the second to bear Elizabeth’s name.

Some things are different, and others the same.

His brilliant pen portrait still shines as ever.

I borrow his words but I could never

aspire to tarnish their timeless glow,

so this is a tribute, written in snow

and destined to melt away like frost,

unlike these lines from “Love’s Labour’s Lost":

When icicles hang by the wall ...

A few centuries later in a winter traffic jam north of Toronto:

WINTERIZING

A Muskoka Tribute to Shakespeare

When icicles hang by the wall,

they’re Bob the Builder’s blatant proof -

no matter how we warm the hall -

heat is escaping through the roof -

and that is where the heating bill

will go before the next snowfall.

The roads are foul and tempest-tossed.

Just follow the snowplow; you won’t get lost.

Don’t stamp on your brake, you reckless kid,

or your four-wheel drive will go into a skid.

You’d better avoid the 401

and a twenty-car pile-up that’s not much fun.

Black ice is a dreaded invisible danger.

In white-outs known landmarks turn suddenly stranger.

A sign by the roadside makes travellers think 

of a coffee shop and a hot, warming drink.

But it’s shut for the season, to their disgust,

so they stay on the road because they must.

Where’s Greasy Joan, to stir the pot,

and serve up meals that hit the spot?

Joan hath clothed, I mean, has closed

her Greasy Spoon and flown away

to Florida until next May,

leaving her baffled creditors,

to utter bleak, frustrated howls

strangely like the staring owl’s.

HELEN'S FEBRUARY POEM 2011

        

All of a  sudden, my daughter Mary

wants me to write about February.

That was the month that used to be

the target of the year for me.

Although the shortest month of all

by count of days, it was no friend

because it never seemed to end,

proceeding at a maddening crawl.

It proved a challenge to my muse

that I could simply not refuse:

find out how many rhyming ways

could celebrate those dullard days.

That was before all Canada

began to shout and yell, “Hurrah!”

for Chinese New Year’s timely feasts,

rotating twelve symbolic beasts.

This Rabbit Year will be terrific -

Prosperous, healthy and prolific.

I wish us all a very Merry

Forty-seven and Nine this February.

Helen Heubi

Visit: http://www.theholidayspot.com/chinese_new_year

FROM JAPAN WITH LOVE

Chiyo is now 72, and still looks like an eight-year girl. It is no coincidence that I was also eight in 1938 when my missionary aunt Annie Allen brought her over on furlough from Tokyo. By the way, Chiyo means "Long Life", but if she ever completely falls apart, and cannot be repaired, she will be buried, in the Japanese tradition. 

Meanwhile her sweet face inexplicably gives some people - and once a confused, frantically barking dog - the creeps. She looks so human - maybe it's her human hair wig. Maybe it's also an aura of love that she always had - beginning with the women in Tokyo who stitched her an extra outfit in silk and brocade when they learned she was for a niece of "Aren-sensei".

                                      Chiyo and Akira

With Chiyo came two boy dolls - one looking about four years old, the other a baby - all three for me and my two younger brothers.

In the early 1980s my brothers discovered the littlest boy doll in my father's basement, and handed him over to me complete with kimono. Ten years later I gave him to a Japanese American girl whose family had lost most of their valuables when sent to detention camp; they managed to bury their Samurai armour, though. Keiko and I named the little guy Akira, a sunshiny name.

Peter  brought his doll to me a few years ago, because he thought I might take good care of it. First my husband mended it, then we set about finding a name.

First I checked "Taro" or First Born Son on line, and found it is no longer used on its own much these days, but rather is tacked on to another name, as it had become so ubiquitous as to be impractical.

Then I found two equivalents to "Peter":  Isamu meaning Rock and Ishi: Stone.

Both Mary and I agree that Ishitaro has a nice ring to it. And so Ishitaro he is.

THE MAGIC OF A GENTLE TEACHER

My first  lesson in typing was a surprise to me.  It happened when I was very young - I don’t remember when, but I remember where. I was visiting Auntie Coleman at her tall house on Huron Street. Her niece Helen was living with her, a soft-spoken lady, who suddenly seemed struck by a bright idea. Picture a light bulb above her head. Certainly a sparkle came to her eyes behind the steel-rimmed glasses. She would lose no time in teaching her namesake, small Helen - me - how to use a typewriter.

I could barely print my own language - I may have been in first grade. I felt honoured to be picked as a pupil by my gentle cousin Helen. She seemed to believe it inevitable that I and a typewriter would meet sooner or later, and that it might as well be sooner - in fact, immediately. I wonder now if perhaps Auntie was busy writing one of her poems or stories and I was being kept a little out of her way.

Helen steered me to her Remington in a sunlit corner of their dining room, and sat me down in front of it. She showed me where to put my right and left index fingers.

“This is the middle set of letter keys, starting with the “a”. You keep your hands poised above these, and reach up and down to the row above and the row below.”

That made sense. I would be able to pounce upward and downward from a secure home row of keys.

“Good! Now you make sure to rest this finger,” said Helen, lifting the index finger of my left hand, “On the “f”.  This finger goes here,” she said, shifting my right hand over to the right, leaving two keys  untouched in the middle of the middle row of letters, and placing my  right index finger on the “j”.

“There you are, in the right position to move your fingers easily to any letter. Just keep your fingers on the “f” and the “j”, and you don’t have to go far to touch the “g” and “h” in the middle row. Maybe a little further to reach the middle letters up above - “t” and “y”, and the middle letters down below - “v” and “b”. Now you’re all set and ready to type anything you want.”

Helen was delighted with my initiation. I sensed that she was paving the way for me, but to what I was not sure. I felt a little too young to be operating a typewriter, and just  enjoyed the afternoon sunlight coming through the bay window and tapping away in a most professional way. My cousin was determined that never would I become a two-fingered hunter-and-pecker. 

Come to think of it, she was like a swimming instructor by-passing any chance of a beginner floundering around in a frantic dog paddle. Start by teaching a genuine stroke, so that the dog paddle doesn't have a chance against the Australian crawl, its equally elegant but easier cousin, the side stroke or the frog-like moves of the breast stroke.

Helen didn’t make a super typist out of me that sunny afternoon, but she made sure that I would never even start to hunt and peck with two fingers. No matter what, I would always be correctly poised about a keyboard - typewriter or computer.

Was I destined to become a true typist, the kind that rattles off 80 words of English a minute? Time would tell.

Soon it was time for tea with Auntie Coleman, and those melt-in-the mouth cookies from Unser’s bakery on Bloor Street.

LEAKING ROOFS AND A DOUBLE RAINBOW

RAINY DAYS IN PROVENCE AND MUSKOKA

A rare August rain is always welcome in Provence.  Seeing the clouds gathering the day before, the owners of the apricot orchard behind the old mas at Buis-les-Genets, where we were spending our summer holidays, had left their work in the ripening vineyards to plough the earth around the trees.  Now the rain could soak into fresh-turned earth, instead of running off over sun-baked ground.

The picturesque rose-tiled roof of the mas didn’t take kindly to wind and rain. As a gloomy dawn broke under pelting skies, all hands came on deck to place buckets, cans and pots under leaks where tiles had been dislodged. When the confusion resolved itself we flung ourselves into chairs around the cold hearth for a breather. It was also story time.

Round-eyed we listened while my sister-in-law told us, once again, the saga of primal leaks when they had first occupied the old mas. From her dramatic description, these were not mere leaks, but gushers heaping mounds of accumulated debris onto unsuspecting sleepers in the middle of the night.

Incredibly to us Canadians and Swiss, neighbouring families who had been around for centuries  were inclined almost to boast about la gouttière in the corner of the living room, the one by the fireplace, the one in the attic, and so on and on. Meanwhile, my husband Paul, the legend-breaker who had restored this old sheep station from its ruins, had already marked the new infiltrations. He would be up on the roof as quickly as it dried to replace tiles ripped off  by the mistral.

On a rainy day like this, the atmosphere of the mas reverted to grimmer, older times. Windows were taxable not long ago in France. Slits high up in the north walls lent some colour to suspicions that this place could well have doubled as a fortress. The old shepherd's refuge had no panoramic view of the valley outside. One of us was playing patience at the table by the high, small window that looked out on a small section of the porch roof and a tendril or two of grape vine.

We had congregated in the main room of the mas, around the unlit fireplace.  The big lamp had had to be turned on for those working on a giant jigsaw puzzle, slowly taking form on a large piece of plywood.  My suggestion that we light a small, cheering blaze of olive wood was dismissed with a snort of contempt. 

Memory of rainy days in Muskoka

A brief, wistful memory of rainy days in Muskoka flashed across my mind's eye.  They seemed long ago and so far away, years before my marriage. We must have been very stiff-upper-lip, my Anglo-Saxon family, as we made a cosy fire in the fireplace and a concerted effort of cheerfulness on every such occasion.  No one would have dared to complain about the weather.  Instead, we found ways to make it fun.

Instead of eating around the big table outside on the screen porch, where it was a trifle chilly, we pretended to have a restaurant in the living room, using several smaller tables.  My mother and brothers installed theirs by the fireside, but I preferred to dine beside the long row of windows on the north side.  I could glance up from my game of patience and admire the long valley to the north, romantically blurred under mist and rain.

All this home-made entertainment was played against a background of leaks dripping into buckets, but the sound seemed to soothe rather than irritate us.  We were taught to enjoy what we had - rain, and not bother about what we did not have - sun. Waiting inside was wise. Rock faces can become dangerously slippery when their moss gets wet.

An empty chair in Provence

The hours wore on in the old mas,  punctuated by "plink- plank - plonk" from one leak, "pinka-pink-pink" from another, "drip, drip, drip" from a slower one.  I could have enjoyed the mingling of these gentle tunes, but my heart wasn't in it. I was not alone in feeling a void where there had been a gentle presence, linking us in affection.  When people thought no one else was noticing, glances would stray toward an empty chair in the corner that no one seemed ready to occupy. We all missed my dear mother-in-law, affectionately known to everyone as Grand'maman.

When the rain stopped, near the close of day, I just had to get out of that house in Provence, get away from the bombardment of emotions, my own and others'.  Down in one of the cellars, I found some old rubber boots, and headed for the apricot field behind the house.

I tramped toward the western end of the orchard, hoping dimly for something like a sunset to lift me out of my bad mood.  Already  I had become attached to the  silhouette of the house to the west of us - the picturesque jas, with its two guardian cypresses and its umbrella pine.

Westward, far beyond the sea, lay Canada, which I was beginning to regret leaving so hurriedly and so irrevocably. I began shuffling through my mental pack of problems, like a patience-player of interminable layouts. I seemed trapped within patterns, unable to command enough detachment to stand aside and watch what was happening in me or among us. 

Strong forces that I could only sense but not identify were at work. I seemed to be a puppet controlled by others, and at the mercy of circumstances.  Or were we pawns on some gigantic chessboard?

This mental impatience game was not coming out, again.  A game of patience or solitaire with real cards would have been less frustrating. Meanwhile, my walk westward came to an abrupt end when I reached the brink of a shallow,  dank, ravine, ringed with brambles. A westward glance showed lowering  clouds  too thick to allow a sunset.  I stared blankly into the ravine, then turned back, took one step, and stopped.

Two fountains of colour had arisen from beyond the eastern horizon, spanned mountain and sky, then spilled back down to earth in some invisible distance.  A double rainbow - the first that I had ever seen - was arching over the dark loom of the Mont des Buisses. A sign of hope when I most needed one. That was how I was tempted to take it, but I brushed the idea aside as too fanciful.

Still, it was a natural phenomenon, and might divert scientifically minded relatives from their preoccupations, after being cooped up together all day. I tried to rush back toward the house, and found the newly-ploughed apricot field impossible to hurry across, muddy as it was after an all-day rain. Especially when trying to watch a rainbow at the same time. The colours were beginning to fade after a few squelching steps. I realized that the rainbow would be gone well before I could reach the house and rouse anyone who might be interested.

And so, I decided to stand and stare. Quiet and receptive, I knew that all would be well, whatever tests were in store for me and my family.  My being soared above muddy earth, above attachments on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. Time and space were temporarily overcome, spanned by a double rainbow that reflected a double existence.

Contentedly, I waited while the magnificent colours took their  time to merge back into the whole. Then, full of love for people and places everywhere, I went back to the house.

ALL THAT READIN'

ALL THAT READIN’

One May afternoon on Davisville Avenue in Toronto in 1938 I sat in the sunlight on the steps of our back porch, opened a book from our grade one library and read it from cover to cover. I can still feel the sun on my back and the thrill of being able to follow a whole story for the first time, all on my own.

Mom and Dad were still reading at bedtime to my brother Peter, three years younger than I. He soon caught up with me, as I ploughed happily through books we had already heard over and over at bedtime, books like A. A. Milnes’s The House at Pooh Corners, When We Were Very Young and Now We are Six.

Within short years we landed on the same pages, devouring British author Arthur Ransome’s adventures about children who, like us, lived our summer holidays on islands in lakes and rivers. Unlike us, they went to sea and had adventures with real pirates and hidden treasure, giving our imaginations plenty of scope.

My brother and I had to make two half-hour trips by streetcar three times a week to slake our thirst for reading. The St. Clair Public Library, a friendly place, was firm about allowing only three books at a time per child. I vaguely remember that we an unspoken agreement to take out at least one book each that both of us would enjoy, like E. Nesbitt’s tales of time travel, The Amulet and Five Children and It.

Peter had read at least once every book that interested him in the children’s section, long before he reached the age for the adult room, or even the small collection for youth. I fought such a determined campaign for him that eventually the librarians for adults and children put their heads together and agreed he was entitled to include one book from the adult section in his limit of three per visit.

As for me, when I was not among the novels, I spent hours at the library table, poring over large, heavy picture books on ballet, memorizing the career and repertoire of every ballerina and first male dancer on both sides of the Atlantic. In time I would watch many of them perform at the Royal Alexandra Theatre.

Once Dad and Peter made a foray to Balliol Street, one block south of us, to buy a guinea pig from one of Peter’s friends at Hodgson Public School. The classmate’s father confided to Dad in a stage whisper his reservations about Peter as a playmate for his son: “Nice kid, but,” he shook his head, “All that readin’.

Books cannot have done much harm. The classmate became an engineer and Peter a professor of English at the University of Toronto. My bookshelves are still overflowing with books that I got to know first at the Public Library - a home away from home.