“Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.” — Virginia Woolf
It started with a new friendship. And a dear friend whose cooking is legendary. What better excuse for a shared feast. With Doreen Prei returned to the Art Gallery of Alberta’s Zinc Restaurant,* the menu lights up. The six-course tasting meal - a good idea, says my friend. And why not wine pairings too? A welcome extravagance.
I'm thinking of a trending metaphor. After half a lifetime of labour, retirement feels like pitching yourself over the sticky glow of the honey-dew event horizon into the oblivion of a black hole. Edging closer, you peer into a black as deep as your own cornea. Up close, you witness your existential erasure in the maw of an absent nothing. What astrophysicists call the "singularity." Then it becomes more complicated and you hear Steven Hawking's hunch that black holes sport an exit.
(Multitasking is a myth. Working mothers simply work more.) My generosity has limits in these first days of retirement.
30 June 2019 When the sky is tangerine in your Edmonton garden and your daughter’s cityscape from Kuala Lumpur is clear, you know you have arrived in the present. When your now adult child wings her way across an ocean, lands in Shanghai and then takes off again for a more distant destination, the concept… Continue reading Only a Guilty Mother Would Admit To These Dreams – letting go #1
by Janice Williamson 4 June 2019 That insane night when you think that your daughter has been kidnapped and her phone is at the bottom of the sea near Malacca. Because when you look up the way this new app works, you discover the WhatsApp checkmarks tell you your message was sent but not read.… Continue reading Checkmark – letting go #2
No Gate No Lock 