SAINTS PRESERVE US

Notes on the Fringe

Spring in Edmonton, its possibility and possibilities at least, is heralded by repeated arrivals of squonking formations of Canada geese. Robins, savvier, turn up later. Summers here are short yet the days are long. The geese are quiet, content. Summer is festival season. Edmonton’s largest festival, maybe not by box office but certainly by duration, is The Fringe, an august, 10-day celebration of theatre in all its guises. Once The Fringe winds down, the Canada geese wind up, squonking travel tips throughout their flocks for the web-footed return leg of their annual migration. Cacaphonic cues of another summer readying itself for departure. The robins always elect an earlier check out. Alas, in times like these, the provincial fringe lingers, much like Moe’s Three Stooges haircut.

Chrystia Freeland is the most powerful and influential Albertan in Canada. Her remit includes the two major federal dauphin portfolios: Freeland is this country’s Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister. She was the face of Canada’s shy and tentative foreign policy; Freeland renegotiated an already perfectly adequate North American free trade agreement with der Trumpenfuhrer’s inbred administrative toadies. And she has somehow navigated the vagaries of her boss’s vacuous “Sunny Ways” and his litany of ethical lapses.

Freeland was born up north in Peace River. Friday she was close to home, visiting Grande Prairie with minimal staff and no security detail. Routine government business. Entering an elevator in the foyer of city hall she was accosted by a lout, a big man sporting a ballcap, a wife-beater and a delightfully bouncy pair of pecs. He screamed at Freeland, calling her a “bitch” and a “traitor.” He was emphatic that she was not welcome in his province. The one-sided encounter was planned; his female companion was video-ready. This is the nature of civic discourse in these days of inarticulate rage.

Alberta is home to some 4.5 million souls. Most of us live in the big towns, Calgary and Edmonton, Lethbridge and Red Deer. The large-breasted Grande Prairie clown and his auteur consort are two of the province’s 2.8 million eligible voters (I have rounded Elections Alberta’s 2021 figures). About 120,000 of these eligible voters have ponied up $10 for membership in the United Conservative Party (UCP), an asinine ride beneath a big circus tent. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, the party’s founder and the Jesuit-trained brains behind its formation experienced his “Eh tu, Brute?” moment last spring when the rank and file, prairie hillbillies, decided he was jist too durned progressive as far as sweaty, uptight libertarians go. Time for a new leader even as the party wields power.

The Platonic ideal of the Canadian federation is simple. Its aim is to elevate the subsistence level of everyone in the country’s provinces and territories. Canada’s national political parties rarely agree on the best course of action, but in general, pardon the hockey metaphor, they shoot at the same net. Everybody matters.

Alberta, formally established in 1905, has been a wealthy province since Leduc No. 1 first gushed black gold in February, 1947. Provincial governments ever since have relied on that primordial gravy train. If the train jumps the track, boom and bust, how does Edmonton claw its money back? Kenney’s regressive 2019 electoral platform was predicated on complaint, blaming distant Ottawa for decades of localized mismanagement, some kind of raw materials deal. After all, imaginary villains need labels, like “bitch” or “traitor.”

Kenney’s would-be usurpers have just wrapped up a series of leadership debates, one of which was co-sponsored by a pro-independence group and a right-wing media organization. The topics discussed have ranged from bizarre to fantastical. This is Orwell and this is Kafka unfiltered by people who’ve never read either author. These folks aren’t even trying to reach Alberta’s general electorate; they’re speaking to party members and whistling doggy style to the lunatic fringe because support from the likes of Misogynistic Paranoid Grande Prairie Boy might be enough to win a ranked ballot.

The next provincial election is mandated for May, 2023. The winning UCP contestant will be announced this coming October. The frontrunner in this painfully drawn-out race of slugs is Danielle Smith, a notorious political opportunist. She was the leader of the Wildrose Party. Still, it suited her to cross the floor of the legislature and join the Progressive Conservative Party. She has since spent her time away from politics assailing, among other things, the blatant character flaws of cancer victims. Should she win the leadership, she will not follow the honourable and traditional course of dropping an early election writ. No, she wants those seven unfettered, unelected months as premier to further disrupt already snippy federal-provincial relations and predicate a national constitutional crisis.

Smith’s platform plank, her legislative Rosemary’s Baby is the “Alberta Sovereignty Act.” No one, politicians, pundits or constitutional lawyers, knows what this means except telling Ottawa to “talk to the hand.” Elected Quebec separatists at least held two referendums. Brexit demonstrated that extraction from a political bloc proved much harder than the snappy, pro rhetoric promised. That poor policy decision wasn’t arbitrary, Britons voted, wrongly of course, but they were at least given the opportunity.

Canada geese are a nuisance. Loud and disruptive dirty birds, but, you know, at least they go away.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of skewed espied askance since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format. 

EAT ME

Breaking Bread in Baltic

There is a pub in Kensington, they call the Island Stone, there they make fine sandwiches and, God, I love them so.

History frequently manifests as an exercise in bureaucracy. For such a tiny place, Prince Edward Island has a lot of it. Once the Treaty of Paris was ratified in 1763, Prince Edward Island (then known en anglais as St. John’s Island) became a possession of Great Britain. The Crown got to work. The Mi’kmaq people were discouraged from infringing upon a portion of their traditional coastal territory. Established Acadian settlers were deported. British surveyors created three counties, Prince, Kings and Queens. These tracts of land were then jig-sawed with parishes to better orchestrate the ministrations of the Church of England. Subsequently, these 14 parishes were  subdivided into townships. The townships were not named, just designated as numbered “lots.”

My big sister, Anne, a semi-retired physician, and her husband, Al, a semi-retired scientist, spend their summers in Prince County, in St. David’s Parish, in Lot 18. This particular area is named Baltic for the purposes of the provincial government and Canada Post. Their home is rustic, isolated. Still, when sitting on their porch, I believe I could, should I still possess my teenage arm, throw a baseball into Lot 19, a one-bounce frozen rope. Of course, a bad hop off the weathered boardwalk, a frost-heaved cobblestone or a rusted rail might break the window of the Island Stone Pub in Kensington, which is housed in the town’s old train station, now a heritage building.

I love and admire my sister; of our immediate family we two are the last ones standing, five minus three; we are still getting to know one another after all these years following different lives in different places. Anne’s place is just 13 two-lane secondary highway minutes from a “Crusty.” In my pre-covid memory the Island Stone’s “Crustacean Special” is a club, a double-decker stuffed with minced crab, minced lobster and smoked bacon. This year’s version was more of a BLT on a brioche roll. Maybe it always has been? I ate two of them, anyway - in separate sittings.

The top of a brioche glistens because of an egg wash. I’ve not been transported by the ones I’ve eaten in Edmonton. In my experience a brioche roll does no favours for its filling. Trendy does not equal taste. The bottom of the Island Stone’s roll was more alluring, lighter in tone, tastier, pebbled with cornmeal: bun conditionally delicious. I love sandwiches; I consume them like vitamins, one a day. I complained to my sister, who bakes her own bread, my frustration in being able to find manna in Edmonton - Jesus, my eternal afterlife in exchange for a mere decent loaf of bread. Anne, never passive and always practical, said, “Well, Geoffrey…”

My sister’s Beatles albums altered the direction of my life. That noise had so much more bandwidth than the Annunciation of Our Lady choir and the dining room hi-fi soft Muzak jazz of James Last or the choral warbles of the Ray Coniff Singers. God, you know, Anne had the London Records double A-side 45 of “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday.” The Young Adult literary genre did not exist when I was growing up. I read her paperbacks too, prose above my level. One that still reverberates with me is Chaim Potok’s My Name Is Asher Lev. The Autobiography of Malcolm X. A different world existed somewhere out there. I also read The Feminine Mystique; the jacket art suggested racy science-fiction: a bare-naked female torso on a clothes hanger.  That stolen input all took a while to gel, but I eventually stopped buying the Catholic catechism. I never saw Christ on the altar, not once and, frankly, His wafer-thin bread-body was a bit dry.

Anne holds strong opinions about pretty much everything, but they are never wrong-headed; I have always heeded her advice and counsel. When our parents were divorcing she sat me down in the screened front porch of our home that would necessarily be sold to state emphatically that what was happening to our family was no fault of mine; I’d been fretting because I was quite late to the game as the third child, Vatican roulette, and an angry voice from the living room carries up the stairs late at night and a baseball game playing on the radio in a darkened room is suddenly hard to hear.

And so, I spent a few hours of my time in Baltic learning how to bake bread. (As I type this, the dough rising here in the kitchen of the Crooked 9 is just about ready to go into the oven.) Anne’s kitchen is expansive, the locus of a century-old farmhouse. It makes me think of Celtic reels – a Maritime cliché to those of us who come from Away - and the blues of Robert Johnson, “Come on in My Kitchen.” There’s the large square table where we ate and played Dominos after dark. The picture hung above the wood stove to the left of the exhaust pipe has always struck me: an open window with fluttering, delicately precise, sheer linen curtains. How else may an artist depict a gust of wind beyond a bent tree? The frame of the sash window is brown. The sky is grey. The field is fallow, ochre stubble. I imagine the image as James Whistler’s mother’s view, a vague gothic dread of yet another winter storm looming low on the horizon (Wind from the Sea, Andrew Wyeth, 1947). This was my classroom.

My education required three steps. First, I shadowed my sister as she prepared the bread. Anne explained the process step-by-step in a faux Scandinavian accent, sort of a cross between the Muppets’ Swedish Chef and Frances McDormand in Fargo. “Yaah.” I liked leaning over her shoulder; the closeness of sharing a chore and a few cups and teaspoons of expertise. I made our second loaf of bread under close, hovering supervision. I told Anne I couldn’t make up my mind about being left-handed or right-handed for whisking and kneading. We talked about combining two different types of flour, ensuring the teaspoons of yeast and salt were separated in the mixing bowl, dissolving tablespoons of honey in warm water. We walked through all of the steps together. I believe we were actually alluding to other things, stuff we were raised to never demonstrate, like love and affection. Anne would consider the combination of those two nouns a Joan Armatrading song. Me, I’m more Def Leppard. But we mean the same thing.

I flew solo on the third loaf. Anne was outside tending to her vegetable garden and yelling at the rabbits; they’re not tame so much as awfully complacent. Skittishness is for squirrels and chipmunks. Al’s been musing about purchasing a pellet rifle to give those rabbits a nudge, a wake-up call. My sister is more eco-friendly; the township’s foxes and stoats are welcome to cruise the property any old time. A short layover by a bald eagle would suffice too.

This sort of setting is half the charm of the Island Stone’s “Crusty.” Another portion is made up by the company. Landlocked Alberta isn’t exactly renowned in culinary circles for the superior quality of its fresh seafood. This is a sandwich I can never replicate in the kitchen of the Crooked 9. The “Crusty” is rare fare, what the trade describes as a destination item, a signature dish. And I have returned home from Baltic a novice master baker. As for my own repertoire of sandwiches, oh po’boy, my big sister Anne has once again helped me improve my game.           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of ecstatic gluttony since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format.

Crazy for You

I’ve never been much of a joiner. Or gas-fitter, for that matter. But, seriously folks…

With the obvious exception of the involuntarily celibate, there exists a club or community for everyone should they be interested in participating. The foci will vary because there’s nothing as diverse as people’s particular passions. There are book clubs, car clubs, chess clubs, cycling clubs, equestrian clubs, fan clubs, film clubs, golf clubs, gun clubs, jazz clubs, knitting clubs, motorcycle clubs, record clubs, rowing clubs, running clubs and cults, and churches of weirdly obscure denominations. Something for each and all in this short life.

How can someone find meaning in a fleeting existence by identifying with a mass market retailer? My brain hurts a lot. I’m uncertain if Costco pioneered the warehouse concept. It is inarguably the best known banner, like Kleenex to facial tissue. The chain periodically publishes a slick magazine for its members, all the fat skinny people. It is rife with ads, coupons, helpful hints (now known as life hacks) and advertorial prose. As such, it has a longer kitchen counter life than a weekly Canadian Tire, London Drugs or No Frills flyer, days as opposed to hours.

I found the August edition of Costco Connection alarmingly confounding. The cover’s major headline is “Crazy for Costco.” The graphic is a tight shot of a tattooed bicep, stark against a white t-shirt. The tattoo design is a red, cliché Valentine heart accented with a few green leaves, all of which are enveloped by a yellow ribbon featuring Costco’s fatty, sans serif word mark. I dislike tattoos. Ink on skin makes my eyes water; ink on skin makes me think of hideous infections: black plague, gangrene, hepatitis. Please, God, I thought, let this be a Photoshopped image because who in their right fucking mind would even consider an indelible commitment to a big box retailer who charges its customers dues for their shopping privileges?

I shop at Costco a few times a year. It is a chore disguised as an errand. If I were to rate my Costco experiences on a linear scale, I’d give it a four overall, one registering as something less than zero and ten being stone blind love. To be fair, the expeditions have never been as miserable as I fear they will be on the drive there. The parking spaces are wide and the toilets are usually clean. I’m no hoarder but I don’t sweat our cache of paper products. When two tabbies prowled the Crooked 9 its green plastic jerrycans of litter were godsends and ultimately the impetus for another trip to Costco. Now I pick up baby wipes for the grandchildren’s bottoms. The annual spring pop-up greenhouse is always a pleasure. Still…

Page 26 of Costco Connection delves deeply into “Member mania!” a celebration of grape Kool-Aid consumer loyalty that far exceeds piddling membership fees. A key component of Costco’s engagement with its customers is Kirkland Signature, the chain’s all encompassing house brand: very good stuff and lots of it at an extraordinarily competitive price. I can buy two large tins (Costco would never sell just one) of Kirkland Signature canola oil cooking spray for about the price of a single smaller aerosol of Pam as sold by my neighbourhood grocer. I’m all over that; I’m there, but I’m not going to buy the Kirkland Signature branded pullover (formerly known as a sweatshirt). I’m nobody’s billboard – tribal affiliations with rock bands and sports teams being the exceptions.

Four ladies in Calgary love Costco so much they don ersatz uniforms for their monthly runs to the store together, grey Kirkland Signature pullovers. The gang’s all here. The bond tethering these four besties is stronger than ever, thanks to Costco! As with all gangs, there’s only one way out. A woman in Ontario arranges for her extended family to wear coordinated outfits for their annual Christmas portrait. Last year’s theme was Costco, Kirkland Signature pullovers in contrasting black and grey, because “the family that saves together stays together.” Another woman from Toronto celebrated her birthday in the food court of her favourite Costco. Costcos don’t actually have food courts. They have hot dog stands with plastic tables and woefully inadequate condiments. Party planners take note, every single invitee came!

At this stage of my life my social whirl consists more of funerals than weddings. However, I’ve attended a number of weddings in my time, including a few of my own. There’s always that photographic lag between the ceremony and the reception. The newlyweds pose while the guests kill an hour or two elsewhere in gracious stasis. The most heartwarming anecdote in the “Member mania!” article gushes over a happy Edmonton couple who staged their souvenir wedding album photo shoot at the Costco near the International Airport where they’d previously purchased their wedding rings. There’s a magical allure to the Soviet utilitarianism of the average Costco warehouse, romance in the air. These crazy kids have found time during vacations across Canada and the United States, Mexico, Japan, South Korea and England to visit the local Costco “wearing Kirkland Signature sweaters and spreading our love for Costco wherever we go.”

A macabre misfortune in my life has been being tasked with writing too many eulogies and obituaries for close family members. I sweated those deadlines. The stories of those brief or long lives, however, tended to write themselves: my left hand moved and then I typed up what was scribbled on the pad of graph paper. I had nothing to add either as an advertising copywriter or a novelist, nothing to enhance. My dead led interesting lives, their interests and passions were varied. It troubles me now that someone contemplating the life of a Costco “crazy” somewhere down the line, perhaps during a sombre celebration of life ceremony, must spin the dearly departed’s all-consuming predilection for buying large amounts of stuff at an unbelievable price because there's likely fuck-all else to work with.

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source rampant consumerism since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase your preferred format.