BOOK REVIEW: INDIANS ON VACATION

Bird and Mimi are a comfortably retired pair of artists that are retracing the route of his Uncle Leroy, following his postcards from his forced travels across Europe in a circus where he featured as “the Indian”. The story is set in Prague, but travels much more widely. The narrator is Bird, a curmudgeon philosopher, accompanied by his wife Mimi, an enthusiastic planner. The story contains typical travel adventures from illness to theft, but also intersects with the Syrian refugee crisis in the Budapest train station, and is filled with a lifetime of comedic truisms.

For a journalist, Bird doesn’t seem to involve himself very much in the present. In spite of this, the book manages to supersede the expectations of the usual travelogue. Peppered with amusing dialogue between a couple long used to navigating their opposite view points, the story is accompanied by an entourage of the narrator’s imaginary friends and demons that are not always able to hide.  

From what I know of Thomas and his partner Helen from reading The Inconvenient Indian, I felt I was temporarily in their company, travelling through Europe and North America, past and present, with an entourage of invisible demons, lovingly named and accepted by his polar opposite and essential travel companion.

Thoughtful, heartwarming, and real, this couple’s easy and funny dialogue comes from long practice of patience, acceptance and love. This book is equal parts laughter and reality, which is good fit for winning the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal of Humor Award.

Notable Quotes

Bird: “ I feel my blood sugars dropping. It’s not a pleasant sensation, akin to discovering you’re in the middle Saskatchewan in winter and out of gas.”

“I don’t believe in cosmic laws but I’ve come to accept that there is an inverse relationship between good restaurants and wherever we happen to be. The better the restaurant, the farther away we are from it.”

“Mimi has a theory that travel makes time stop, or at least slows it down. Her reasoning has a simple elegance. When you are home, you follow into routines. These routines are so familiar that you do them without even thinking or noticing the passage of time…When you are travelling, everything is new and every minute is taken up with decision making. Tic toc tic toc.”

Eugene and the other demons. “Lots of people have demons. I know I do, and my approach to dealing with them is to pretend that they don’t exist, to leave them tucked away in the darkness. Mimi doesn’t subscribe to my method and early on she decided that we should name them. Calle them out,as it were. To shine a light into the shadows. Eugene…is the main man, self-loathing…And you like to catastrophize. That’s Cat, or Kitty… and then we have the twins, Deedee and Desy, Depression and Despair.”

“Pizza is a young person’s dish. Grease doesn’t slow them down, molten cheese doesn’t plug them up, processed meat doesn’t clog their arteries. Immortal. You have to be immortal to eat pizza.”

“The default response is that we travel in order to see new places, to meet new people, to broaden our understanding of the world. Whereas I tend to see travel as punishment for those of us who can afford such a mistake.”

“The first expectation of a good travel story is that something went wrong. No one wants to hear about the uneventful time you spent in Istanbul, not even you. Next time, try harder.”

Mimi proposes a purpose to their travels: “Make our own bundle.” (of postcards)

“The Institute to Confound and Demoralize is something that Mimi has made up to deal with the contradictions that seem to arise with alarming frequency. “

On moving: “Having to start over again without the ignorance and enthusiasm of youth. Moves, in the abstract, might look to be wonderful adventures, but they’re really more akin to a life threatening disease or the death of a spouse. Most people recover but it takes at least two years to get back on your feet. Some of us have that kind of time. Some of us don’t.”

All the major contemporary events: Alcatraz 69 Trail of Broken Treaties 72 Wounded Knee 73 Seminals and Gaming 79 Oka 90 Ipperwash 95 Idle No More 2012 Elsipogtog fracking protest 2014 Dakota Access Pipeline Protest 2017. “If it had feathers and drums, I was there.”

Oz: Story of Russians coming to Prague. “This young man was angry that his country had been invaded and he picked up a piece of charcoal and found a wall. Here was his opportunity to write something that might stop the slaughter, something that might push back the tanks and chains what was to happen. But because his task seems so monumental, so impossible, he wrote nothing…(interrupted by the recall of the names of the 7 dwarves)…But your Uncle Leroy. Look what he was able to do with a bucket of shit and a brush. “

*Apologies for typos. I listened to the audiobook and estimated the spellings on occasions!

WRITING FOR A FRIEND

A few years ago, I found a trio of intrepid characters, and they have lived in my mind ever since. Over the course of three years, mostly written in the two short months of November, I created a story. I liked the characters, and I like the story. 

Then I tried to get clever, and thought my story was a little shiftless. 

I owe several people a debt for inspiring me to this point, and the most intrepid has already read a very bad erotica that I wrote on vacation beside her in Cuba, and she still travelled with me again later! 

So I thought about where my story could go, because the plot seemed a bit lacking, and I gave her the following options: romance, mystery, or historical fiction. She picked mystery, and I expected her to pick romance, and I have been struggling ever since. 

(I am currently writing in a quiet darkened house with my daughter studying science for her final exam tomorrow and my sleeping cat in a box that she can just barely squeeze into but that she has claimed as her own. Outside the rolling thunder and winds have come and gone, and I have no power. 

I regret not boiling tea when I first thought of it, and I had just discovered that using the water in my house during a thunder storm has some risk, so the shower that I could use now is also off the table for options.)

It turns out that I have learned the trick to writing (don’t think about it, just write!), but I have a lot to learn. I am not yet flexible or imaginative enough to take an idea and bend it to my will, even if it is a good idea or a familiar one. I am also struggling to edit my work. It feels like I am a raccoon with cotton candy. I do what I am used to, and before I know it, the act of rewriting words that I kind of liked the first time, but disappeared into nothing in my hands. Like the raccoon washing its food only to watch it dissolve, my editing results in no words that are worth keeping. It has been discouraging, and I am not able to get down to it as I was able to write. 

I even revisited the group that inspired me to write, but all the incentives and expectations are about writing and word counts. How do I inspire editing? By words, time, quality? Every time I diverge, I am dissatisfied. I write parallel stories, but they characters walk around aimlessly like an early version of SIM family. I can’t seem to give them purpose. It all seems so frustratingly pointless. I think like a reader, and I am certain that this is badly written and not even that great of an idea.

Authors are follow tend to be serialists, and most of those have been murder mystery. Agatha Christie chastises me from the grave. “I would just come up with an idea, and sometimes I would write the story in a weekend!” Argh!

So I lay down with a few ideas after a walk home one night. I thought about all the books I had read that worked for me: Nancy Drew, Hardy Boys, Trixie Beldon, Inspector Gamache, Kinsey Milhone, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple,  Encyclopedia Brown, Commisario Brunetti, Jeanette Oke’s intrepid female pioneers.

Here are my thoughts today on The Mystery at Chateau Laurier

Don’t tell the story as it happens. The trick is to keep some of it to the end for a revelation.

There is isn’t enough room for all 3 characters. Stephanie is the protagonist. She could have a physical disability that is obvious, but relieved in the pool. She may not join her friends for this story. It is often necessary to be alone for some things to happen.

Don’t be afraid to be outrageous, romantic, dramatic. That’s fun to read!`

Set the treasure hunt from the memory the a child who had done the hunt, and now was creating it.

The front desk, the room with Kirsch’s photographs, a table with fake books, fireplace, swimming pool plants or fountain.

So for Sarah T, I am still thinking and plotting and reading and writing and editing and rewriting. One day, when I think it’s a completed thought and not too painful to read!

WELLNESS REFLECTION NUMBER TWO

 It’s not easy for me to do something weekly, and it’s even harder for me to do something daily. For the first time in a few months, I had a week off from shifts, and that’s not a coincidence that I managed to do something daily. It’s probably why I am doing this “weekly” task that I haven’t done for a few weeks!

Today I am proud to report that I have run 3K every day. It’s also worth saying that I didn’t plant my garden yet, and I am not sure that I am not overeating for the few calories extra that I am burning. But it was a little more fun, and I was a little less stiff today. It was tough getting through those first 5 runs, but a fun run with a friend who hadn’t run at all yesterday, and a brother who is running circles around me linked to me by technology on my wrist made it a little easier. Now I am back into shifts, so it’s going to be tougher to come home and do it after a long day, but I am pumped and excited not to break the chain.

In other thoughts, I am in a good place. I was using a food processor to make energy balls this week. It was a wedding present from a friend, now deceased, who had also bought me the only 4 red wine glasses I possess. I am down to one, but one is enough during Covid, and I was laughing when I realized that those two gifts from a friend were more use to me than anything my husband did in 13 years of marriage! 

I was also grateful for caution. One of our colleagues had just decided to retire. I was glad, because I could see that the department was getting to him, but he died on his first day of vacation, just a month shy of his last day at work. I went to the funeral, and was wearing a mask, because I didn’t want anyone to be uncomfortable. I managed not to shake hands, but I was offered more than one. Most people weren’t wearing masks, and in the emotion of it, I realized that I was not used to showing my face anymore, and was happy to hide behind it on this occasion. 

When the announcement came today that someone tested positive, I had no regrets. Well, maybe that I couldn’t call in sick tomorrow. But sick call is for sissies. I have only had to use it on three occasions in 22 years. Although I would have liked for someone to have my back when I lost my voice, and gone to my grandmas funerals. Such is the dark side of such a code of conduct. We are trying to make it more normal to call in sick, but we still have so little redundancy that it’s still very difficult. Being a unionized unit agent about to retire doesn’t protect you fully either. So take whatever is given to you (unless you are one of those people who know you don’t deserve your jobs’ perks), and, for most of us, find ways to build a life in between work, because no one has a guarantee that they will be given it after.