WALK AFTER DARK

There is rain in the air. 

The leaves rustle in the trees.

The wind is a warm zephyr. 

A perfect temperature for a walk.

A hopeful cricket sings his symphony.

My feet crunch on the path. 

A car passes.

A skunk trundles away benignly in the grass.

I am happy in the shadows.

On a  lighted path in the woods.

Lights on a blue pool waver.

Men talk on a park bench.

Everything is peaceful.

The day is ending for most.

My workday begins.

UNCLE

My Uncle was an artist, who carefully made things beautiful. Whether it was a gift for Christmas, the table for dinner, or a letter, he designed it and executed it like only his artistic soul could do. He was most like my Grandma, with a rare photograph posed. Usually he was making a smart remark or laughing.

He travelled a lot, created and loved art, and was an amazing host.

He was taken in the span of a night. I am grateful that his life partner was there that night. I am sure it was traumatic for Joe, and being a gay couple living in adjacent States did not make it easy on him. The police wanted to talk to a relative with his last name, a final injustice to his gay partnership, so he had to call me in the middle of the night instead of being recognized as his next of kin. Later, he had to go in with local friends to again identify him for the State.  

My uncle had a heart attack over a year ago, remarkable for two things that he joked about in his sardonic way: he went to the ER by bus, and they put in 4 stents, which even as a radiology illustrator, he knew wasn't right. His dad may have died of a sudden cardiac death in the decade before him, but I think it was a longer night for Grandma who woke to Grandpa’s respiratory distress, and may have even been a pulmonary cause in discussions about it since, as I recently understood he was known to have “phlebitis”.

I had hoped to introduce my daughter to her great uncle in person one day, and attend another VCU French Festival together, post COVID, but it was not to be. Our last conversations were by email, with my parents version of American Gothic making him laugh.

Afterwards, his tribute page was filled with art, just as it is right to be. He was a funny, generous, smart, quick-witted, irreverent, lovely man. He was a bright light in a dreary world. I will miss him very much.

From his Christmas Card collection:

Here are some pictures in his legacy:

PATHS OF DESIRE

Our local Metro paper has almost completely disappeared, as have the crowds on public transportation, but I found a copy this week on a recent commute. There was a picture of a little kid on a trail very familiar crisscrossing the area around the hub of metro Lionel Groulx, now named after Rollande Danis-Pelletier (the first park named after I female that I recall seeing in Montreal, inaugurated in 2017). I didn't know a term in English to compare except for maybe a deer path. The caption called it "une ligne de desir". Wikipedia has an entry under the term, "desire path". I have always love-hated them. 

I have been enough places with fragile environments, respected the idea of "leave no trace" and seen enough destruction that is wholly human to be angered and disappointed by those who don't stay on the path. This is critical in forests and on trails that are increasingly travelled, but in the city it feels different, and the "desire paths" feel more inspirational for new type of design. If the paths were driven organically from the start, how would the park look then? The potential for inspiration is exciting.

Here are a few photos collated from Flickr.

If the website is accurate, it only takes 15 people to create a visible path. Follow the path if you honour the vegetation. I hope you do in the wild. In the city, it would be so interesting to follow the desire paths, and see pathways that arcade in the way that people have walked them, instead of how a planner thought they should walked. Maybe Parc Rollande Danis-Pelletier is a great place to start!

MYTHS AND ORIGIN STORIES

I am having the most fun reading with my daughter. She tore through Percy Jackson's books, and have read and reread the stories of heroes and gods that are companion tomes. I have read the Greek heroes one over the last weeks, and I was most surprised by the many details of the the demigoddess Psyche. Many of the ideas are the origins of classic Disney movies - the jealousy of a vain witch (Snow White), a sleeping curse (Sleeping Beauty), a beast (at least she thinks he is a beasts who hides his ugliness in the night but is actually the handsome Eros) (Beauty and the Beast), terrible sisters (Cinderella), and locked up in a tower (Rapunzel). 

I have told the story of the Israelites leaving Egypt in the Exodus to my daughter dozens of times. It's such a great story with so many layers. Now we saw a celebrity archeologist, Albert Lin, map out where and how that may have happened. (It was the "reed" sea, not the Red Sea, for starters.)

I am reading the Magician's Nephew, and the uncle is very creepy. But it increases my realization that great storytellers steal ideas, and  that great ideas change the narrative of storytellers from then on. From the magic rings harkening back to LOTR, and an evil queen with an enchantment lasting 1000 years, and creatures turned to statues like the effect Medusa has on those unlucky enough to look at her, he has borrowed from many great stories to make another. He describes the magician uncle as having a mop of grey hair, like the Professor Drosselmeyer in our local ballet's performance of the Nutcracker. The idea of magic being given to common people is scoffed at by the evil queen, and I think of the muggle Hermione as the exception to Hogwarts. Even this origin story of the land of Narnia is blatantly the creation as told in Genesis.

I don't know why stories are so important to me. I know that being introduced to the Greek myths in my 40s is late. I know my daughter doesn't have the same uniform exposure to the stories I grew up with. The Disney princesses that were my generation's stories were too upsetting, and the catechism of common knowledge doesn't exist anymore with the endless options on the internet. We had Sunday night 6 oclock for the Wonderful World of Disney, and Sunday School version of the Bible. 

There are more important things that I need to understand to teach her, but I love that right now, with the pressure of school gone for the summer, and lessened by the months since Covid quarantine, we have time to read and tell stories. 

HAMILTON

I have heard about Hamilton for a couple of years, and have looked a couple of times at the possibility of seeing it, but in addition to baulking at the price, I never made it to a city where I had the chance to watch it. So when an ad popped up that it was going to be on Disney plus, where I had been watching Winnie-the-Pooh a little too often with my daughter, I was thrilled. I realized that one of my reservations was that no matter where I saw it, it wouldn't be the original cast, but this version, filmed in 2017, made it possible to turn back time.

I am bowled over by the production. It is a simple idea. Follow the life of an extraordinary man in extraordinary times. The storytelling is compelling. Start strong, introduce him by his friends and enemies, teach us something, move us with his brilliance and flaws. He is a hero, writing his legacy without knowing anyone would remember him. Desperate to make a difference, he is told he shouldn't be so honest, so driven, so much. He has to swallow condescension and racism to prove himself. He is passionate and too loud and immodest. Even if we had no idea who he was at the beginning, we are convinced about his influence during the birth of America, and it's hard not to finish the musical without liking, or admiring the man.

It's a timely piece with our own revolution happening with #blacklives matters. It's a refreshing change to have so many major players in the script being actors of colour. Washington, Lafayette, Hamilton, and Madison are reinterpreted, but the imagination ends within the male gender. I can't help but be sad for the superficial treatment of women and their general irrelevance. They are dressed in their corsets or ball gowns, serving as sex objects or chattel. The closest we get is Angelica singing about asking Thomas Jefferson for a sequel for women when the revolution results in equalizing all men. 

Still, the cast is half men and half women, and although their roles are smaller, the unrequited love of Angelica, and the forgiveness and grief of Elizabeth make the story richer and brought me to tears on several occasions. There are moments of total camaraderie, bald truth, verbal sparing, admirable character, and even levity. Even the moment of his death is so original, I will not spoil it for those who have yet to watch. Needless to say, time slows down, and I have never seen such a powerful idea for that climactic moment.

It has struck me in the past that if you don't have any good ideas to write a great story, another option is to find a great story and try your hand at telling it your way. Here Lin-Manuel knocks it out of the park. Sure, Hamilton's story is magic with his writing. There is no guarantee that even a good story is enough in a writer's hands. 

So how would the story look if a woman had her story told? Who would the story about? What if Hamilton was the story of Elizabeth? What do you do about the dearth of historical data when the story, even today, is written about males for males, even by females. 

What would a musical look like about Kim Campbell? Marie Curie? Irma LaVasseur? Suffragettes? Wives who stood behind their important husbands? Victims of sexual abuse? Rebels? Ordinary unsuccessful women at a certain era? 

What I think is that an all woman cast would not be the same draw, and that troubles me a lot. I know I am mistaken by many men, but also women as NOT the doctor, because of my gender. I know that I would rather watch men's basketball and tennis than women's. Ninja warrior and the Olympics are a relief in those exceptions. 

I had a flash on a zoom meeting with friends that we could all share our experiences as they hold significant jobs in many essential businesses, and solve some of the world's problems, but instead we spend another week listening to how to clean the house, and how great their families' meals are, and the new gym regime. We have our equality sometimes at work, but not in the rest of our life. Is it learned helplessness?

So I go to bed with lots of ideas and inspiration and frustration, but I can singularly applaud and recommend this tremendous work of art called Hamilton. Bravo! Brava!

EDITOR'S NOTE:

I have watched the musical so much that I have to watch my download monthly limit only 4 days into the month! Fortunately my brother mentioned the possibility of downloading to my phone after I looked at buying the soundtrack, but the audio wasn't the same. This way I only have to download data once, and I can continue to feed my addiction of this earworm of theatre.  I have also found the script: Act I and Act II. I persuaded Princess Pirate to watch the first scene, and the King George scene "You'll be back" that is followed by "Right Hand Man", which she asked to keep watching when it came to it. Both scenes are genius! To have a a genius script filled out with brilliant acting (and directing?) is over-the-top. Hilarious and true with the subtlest and most flamboyant of expressions! Jonathon Groff is amazing!

Other fascinations: A play exists called Hamilton based in 1917, and a movie called Alexander Hamilton was produced in 1931. Lin-Manuel Miranda was reading Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow, and by the second chapter he felt he was reading the story of a hiphop artist, and "hip-hop songs started rising from the page", just as the story reminded him of his dad, and the immigrant story emerged.

Notable are the stats of the word counts - 144 words per minute with a total of 20, 520 total, with Phantom of the Opera at the next highest word count at 6,789, averaging 68 words a minute.

The Hamilton Letters didn't have everything I was looking for, but the Reynold's Papers are a great example as how obfuscating his writing could be, when he was passionately trying to be clear, and it was fun to see his commentary on the Quebec Bill!

 So many great lines, but to quote the first president:

"Dying is easy, young man. Living is harder. ", says George Washington.

"Winning was easy, young man. Governing's harder."