summer Sunday

Cups of coffee this morning: 2

Minutes into the Spain-Netherlands World Cup game: 86

Goals: Zero all.

Sense of stress even though I don't really care that much about soccer? 9/10

In other news, Hamish Bowles at Vogue offers a highly entertaining, entirely persnickety account of surfing. Having surfed only once in my entire life (if, in fact, one can have claimed to surf when one did not ever quite stand up on the board without falling down), I love, love, love the novelty with which Bowles treats the whole experience.

(Yes, I was already on about this on Twitter.)

Another summer read you just have to love, courtesy the great L.M. Montgomery:

'A tall, slim girl, "half-past sixteen," with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
'But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing splendor of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a corner of the cherry orchard, was fitter for dreams than dead languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheeded to the ground, and Anne, her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr. J. A. Harrison's house like a great white mountain, was far away in a delicious world where a certain schoolteacher was doing a wonderful work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions.
'To be sure, if you came down to harsh facts ... which, it must be confessed, Anne seldom did until she had to ... it did not seem likely that there was much promising material for celebrities in Avonlea school; but you could never tell what might happen if a teacher used her influence for good. Anne had certain rosetinted ideals of what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about it; and she was in the midst of a delightful scene, forty years hence, with a famous personage ... just exactly what he was to be famous for was left in convenient haziness, but Anne thought it would be rather nice to have him a college president or a Canadian premier ... bowing low over her wrinkled hand and assuring her that it was she who had first kindled his ambition, and that all his success in life was due to the lessons she had instilled so long ago in Avonlea school. This pleasant vision was shattered by a most unpleasant interruption.
'A demure little Jersey cow came scuttling down the lane and five seconds later Mr. Harrison arrived ... if "arrived" be not too mild a term to describe the manner of his irruption into the yard.
'He bounced over the fence without waiting to open the gate, and angrily confronted astonished Anne, who had risen to her feet and stood looking at him in some bewilderment....'

happy birthday, Anne

I learned lots of things from this weekend's Globe and Mail. Alberta is hurting the country, according to Jeffrey Simpson. By maintaining a fixer in Afghanistan for longer than six weeks -- rather, keeping up trust and contact for nearly two years -- you can interview 42 members of the Taliban to interesting effect (but what then happens to the fixer?). And, Anne of Green Gables is 100 years old.

It's this last fact I hold closest.

Let me backtrack for just a moment -- bear with me, and apologies for the personal trek down memory lane.

In my family we do not have aunts. And certainly, I do not have any "awnts," as the Maritimers might say. I have tsias (the Italians) and aunties (the French-Canadians and Swedes). And Aunty Pam is my favourite.

There are many reasons for this -- geographical proximity when I was very young, my inability to remember a time when Aunty Pam wasn't part of my life and giggling, and of course, presents. What can I say? Like every other kid, I was pretty fickle when it came to likes and dislikes, and a good present went a long way with me.

She was the first person to give me a diary. It looked like a denim jean pocket and had a lock on its side, even though there was no one in my house with any interest in reading my diary. Still, I hid the key. Its clean white pages invited all the worries of an eight-year-old girl, and on its very first page my aunt scrawled a note. I don't remember the note, but I do remember the handwriting. I used to try to copy that handwriting.

Aunty Pam also offered a second inspiration to my young dreams of one day becoming a writer. She gave me the first three books in the Anne of Green Gables set -- Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island. My favourite was the first. My second favourite the third. Later, when I read the rest of the set, I had a serious soft spot for Rainbow Valley, and Rilla of Ingleside pulled up alongside the first favourites. (Anne's House of Dreams, though, bored me to tears.)

I wanted to be L.M. Montgomery. I wanted to be Anne. I wanted red hair, and to have my stories published in newspapers, and I wanted a posse of girl friends to boss around and make re-enact Tennyson poems. I wanted children to arbitrarily love me, and I wanted to be an adored teacher. I wanted to have silly adventures, although I had no interest in accidentally making my best friend drunk.

I know, I've talked about this before. The gift of these works, though, were they were my first ticket to CanLit. They bridged the gap between the Beverly Cleary and Judy Blume books I first read on my own, and all the books I would later read as an adult. They were stories of Canadiana, of a pastoral time before the time I knew. They made me imagine what fresh-fallen snow might look like if there were no cars, and what roads and highways might have looked like if Anne had had her way and farmers hadn't been allowed to hang advertisements on their fences.

For all these dreams and imaginings, I owe my aunty.