Is it possible for a summer to go by in a blur and yet to still be able to say that, yeah, I had a good time? Because that’s summer 2023 in a nutshell. It came and went. I don’t feel like I missed out (note: I’m not exactly a “summer person”, but I also like to take part in warm weather activities) and yet when I stop to think about the passing months, there’s a complexity to it. The wildfires didn’t exactly help matters. Nothing like the smell of burning wood and murky orange skies to inspire feelings of relaxation.
That said, we spent time with our lovable feline friend (pictured above) and managed to get out of the city for a while.
I hope you had a decent summer and, whether or not you love the autumn (like me) I hope the new season is good to you.
Let me start with a question people ask me when I tell them I spent a weekend getaway in Memphis: “So, why Memphis?”
I needed to get away. The “staycation” I took in April was basically a cold, miserable rainout. I decided it was going to be either Nashville or Memphis, because I hadn’t been to either city and I needed to be somewhere where there would be good music, hot sun, and Southern vibes. I’ve been boycotting the US since #45 took office (in case you feel this is an idle threat considering I live in Toronto, I have close family in Texas) but I seriously needed to get the fuck out of Canada and Europe was too expensive and logistically unfeasible for a weekend getaway.
I did my research and was swayed by three things: downtown Memphis was quoted as being very walkable (which meant that I didn’t need to rent a car if I wanted to get around), Memphis has blues whereas Nashville has country (no disrespect to the latter, but I lean heavily towards the former), and, in the words of someone on Reddit, “Frank Black never wrote about Nashville.”
Done deal.
There’s something about grabbing a travel bag and going somewhere alone, whether it be a country or city you haven’t been, and all you have to go on is some preliminary research and intuition. I wanted the three Bs: blues, booze, and BBQ. As long as I could secure those things, the rest would sort itself out. I prefer to immerse myself and come to my own conclusions.
This is the point where I should get something out of the way: you can’t talk about Memphis without talking about race. The city’s composition is over 60% Black. When I skimmed some forum posts about where to go and how to get around Memphis, I would come across terms like “rough areas” and “locals” (as in, don’t take public transit because only locals do that). While not explicit those terms can very easily be cover-talk for Black, as in “Black neighbourhoods” (rough areas) and “Black people” (locals). This is the place where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while intervening in a sanitation workers’ strike.
You can go to Memphis and pretend that Elvis didn’t exist (seriously, there are few signs, literal or figurative, of the other King outside of Graceland). But you can’t go to Memphis and pretend that Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t. Getting back to my 3Bs ethos, the first thing I did when I walked out of the airport was direct a taxi driver to a BBQ place downtown. As I got out of the cab and looked around me (this is in a former warehouse and light industrial district which has gentrified over the last 5 years), I looked across the street and saw the Lorraine Motel.
Exterior of the Lorraine Motel, Memphis TN
This is both the home of the Civil Rights Museum and, more significantly, the place where MLK was fatally shot on the second floor balcony. Now, I knew the Museum was downtown, however, when your only point of reference is Google Maps I didn’t realize it was also smack dab, right across from a popular BBQ joint. And so, I proceeded to eat a beef brisket sandwich (which was divine, btw) while staring at a very sobering national monument. Continue reading “Memphis”
I swear I’m not a packrat, but sometimes you hold on to things for reasons that seem more intuitive than logical. Which brings me to a book on our shelf at home — The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham. This was from Grade 9 English class, if I’m not mistaken.
Let’s get something out of the way, in case that book cover looks cool. It has absolutely nothing to do with the story, its characters, the themes. I am afraid to say there are no weapon-wielding anthropomorphic insects, which was a crushing blow as I turned the pages at the time. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a good book, and John Wyndham (The Midwich Cuckoos, The Day of the Triffids) was no slouch.
However, a couple of years ago, when I took it from the shelf to have a look, I found two photographs inserted. You see, back then I was a yearbook photographer, and these were a couple of photos I’d probably printed off at the time (this would have been 1985?) perhaps to give to one of the people pictured should I have seen them in the hallway between classes. It’s possible it was just a fancy bookmark. I don’t honestly remember, but I’m struck by the good condition of the paper (printed on glossy stock, which was verboten in the darkroom because of its cost and scarcity). If you look at the bottom margin of the upper photo below you can see that I didn’t square the cut.
This is not a John Hughes film. At the end of the day, we’re looking at three teenagers standing at the rear (smokers’) entrance to Memorial Composite High School, in Stony Plain, Alberta. I sorta knew a couple of them. The guy in the middle was an asshole straight out of Stephen King’s Christine. I suppose I could grab my yearbook and look up their names, but all that’s going to give me are facts, right? What strikes me about the Wyndham book, the photographs, is how much of a time capsule it all is, as a somewhat complete package. Of a kid who was yanked from town to town, school to school, who didn’t get to have much say of where I went, what I had to endure along the way, who became more preoccupied with getting through it as opposed to (cue Hughes, whose movies I grew up watching) Having The Time Of My Life.
I suppose there’s a clever thing I could do: to connect the misrepresentation of the cover of The Chrysalids vs the more complex content, to the misrepresentation of how high school is sold to us vs the reality of growing up for many of us. So I will.
My lack of updates (at least over the last few years) represent activity elsewhere (offline, or online somewhere else). In April I had the wonderful pleasure of being accepted at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity for a self-directed writing retreat. I hadn’t been to Banff since I was in my teens, so it was a great refresher on a very unique part of the country. It was also my second time visiting Alberta in the space of 6 months (previously over 20yrs before that), so with all that (including altitude and time changes) it was an intense, and dizzying, yet ultimately productive week.
When I say “productive” I mean that I’ve been working on the next novel. I can’t say that I achieved any fist-pumping wordcount, but the quality of the content was my focus. I realized when I began to work that I’d written much of the “easy” stuff beforehand, leaving this idyllic escape the setting for me to enter a very challenging series of character mindsets. Not fun. There was beer.
This past weekend, I got to take a getaway to Prince Edward County for some much-needed not work/not writing time away from home. I really love that neck of the woods. I have an affinity for rural environs: the smell of manure, the birdsounds, the expanse. And yes, the wonderful wine and beer, and cheese. Yet, coming back to Toronto, I realized that there were things missing that I would struggle to live without. Rural areas don’t have a lot of diverse culture (I will say that Picton has a very nice movie theatre, and Bloomfield has a cool-looking drive-in), and they also happen to be very white. By “very white” I mean they are almost exclusively enclaves of white people. I grew up in those sorts of enclaves and I am in no rush to return without some evidence that [wherever I fancy moving to one day] welcomes POCs (persons of colour).
I’m working through a lot of ideas as a result of these two trips, some fictional, some filtered through autobiographical experience. Along the way, I’m hoping to begin posting writing-related ideas here (I say “ideas” because I’m not comfortable with “tips,” which springs from my work as a psychotherapist who eschews advice-driven approaches).
