Behold me, in your mind's eye, in blue T-shirt and grey leggings, a furry pink sleep-mask clinging above my hairline, sitting in my green armchair of illness. I look every year of my age and then some. Poor me, full of the cold. The only stickers I have been earning for my diary are for flossing.
Monday 31 July 2023
The Work of the Liturgy
Behold me, in your mind's eye, in blue T-shirt and grey leggings, a furry pink sleep-mask clinging above my hairline, sitting in my green armchair of illness. I look every year of my age and then some. Poor me, full of the cold. The only stickers I have been earning for my diary are for flossing.
Friday 28 July 2023
The Misleading Glamour of Artifice
I have caught a cold from my poor immunocompromised husband, and so I am not going to the gym. Instead I am going to bewail online my misspent youth.
Well, not really. However, I am going to approve the choice of a young Catholic lady I know who said she didn't want to go to a dance club, thus causing a flutter amongst her peers.
I heard this story at the sink of the tiny galley kitchen in the parish hall, the one place all week where I congregate with other women. It is also a locus for Real Trad Life, quite distinct from the bizarre impressions we get from Twitter (or, as we are presumably now supposed to call it, X). This slice of Real Trad Life was about, in short, partying, and one girl's reluctance to join the other girls in going to The Hive or whatever Edinburgh hellhole nightspot they had in mind.
It will very much surprise my mother--to say nothing of friends who saw me dance many nights away on Toronto's Queen Street West--to hear that I came down firmly against le clubbing.
"Just because we misspent our youth doesn't mean [she] has to," I harrumphed at the other married lady around, which was a bit thoughtless. First, I out-age her by over 20 years and, second, instead of misspending her youth, she married young.* Frankly, the only person in that kitchen who no longer had youth to misspend and had thoroughly misspent it was me. But I digress.
As a young teenager, I longed to go to dance clubs, and I didn't understand why my parents didn't go to such glamorous places, especially given my mother's growing collection of ABBA records. Now I can't understand my teenage thought process. I recall that I thought night clubs were full of excitement and adventure and very likely chaste and handsome young men with whom I might fall in love. If they weren't already chaste, I would surely inspire them to virtue with my virginal ways. Clearly, what I knew about real life as a teenager was almost nothing.
Fortunately for me, the first time I went to a nightclub (in fear and trembling lest my mother find out), it was late one afternoon with my church youth group, and it was quite empty and although there was a glitter ball and loud music, it was boring. Later visits to other nightclubs were less boring, as they were downtown and involved the risk of being turned away at the door for being under-age. Also they were dark and crowded and shot through with the energy of dozens of people packed together dancing and sometimes singing away. They provided an excellent opportunity for my then-favourite hobby--daydreaming about love and adventure. The clubs were black velvet jewel boxes containing sparkling, leaping diamonds ... until the lights were snapped on.
In harsh electric light, dance clubs are unfinished rooms with wires hanging from the ceiling, holes gaping in the walls, and indescribably dirty floors. The WCs, never attractive, are unspeakable. The people still lingering about are tired and drunk--and often sad--with slack, pale faces. Clubs after closing time are the visual representation of the maternal proverb "Nothing good happens after midnight."
In justice to my teenage self, the idea that I might find chaste and undying love with a complete stranger met at a dance club was imparted to the wider culture by Rodgers and Hammerstein, whose musical South Pacific promises:
Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger
You may see a stranger across a crowded room,
And somehow you know, you know even then,
That somehow you'll see her again and again
Never mind that South Pacific debuted in 1949, and society is rather different now. (For one thing, you can't see anyone across a crowded dance club.) The idea remains, and now it is sad to think about all the primping at mirrors my friends and I did before going out to dark bars and clubs where we were just more woman-shapes.
At the end of the day, if you want to meet marriageable and marriage-minded men, you need to go where that sparse brotherhood spends its few hours of sociability, and for Catholics that means church, Church events, Church-positive events, university/college Catholic clubs, Catholic singles conferences, Catholic dating websites (although they are a form--however mild--of human trafficking, if you ask me), and the smaller, friendlier pilgrimages.
Alternatively, you could befriend Catholic men with no romantic interest in you (the vast majority of men you will meet at the above) and say, "Who among your friends ya got for me, pal?" This is how I first heard about the existence of Benedict Ambrose, so don't knock it.
Meanwhile, I hold my waltzing parties not to marry off young traditionalists but as a form of rational amusement. They hold no dark glamour. They are firmly rooted in reality. The parish hall is never more nor less than a parish hall. The only artifice to be seen is my overly red last tube of lipstick--which brings me to my next theme.
Nailed it
As I mentioned, last week I went to the nail shop frequented by my blonde sister. I got the works: manicure, pedicure and OPI gel polish on fingers and toes. The polish is now peeling off in plastic-like slices, which inspired me to ask the internet if it IS plastic.
And yes, of course it is. This kind of nail polish (like almost all nail polish) contains toxic ingredients and, although it falls apart on your fingers, it is ultimately not biodegradable. Thus, it creates microplastics.
This is a bit tragic. At one point during my work event, I gazed at a number of sandalled female feet, and they all had perfectly polished toes. I felt pleased at the time that I had made the professionally- and (for North America) culturally-correct decision to "get my toes done" before displaying them to my colleagues. Now, of course, I think about four (perhaps five?) generations of women covering part of their epidermis with toxic chemicals that end up in the earth and drinking water. And for what?
Thus, to continue my adult life project of becoming rooted in reality, I am going to give up even the occasional shellacking. The next time I go to a manicurist, it will be for a manicure or pedicure, but that's it: no polish. And I look forward to the time when young women are astonished that their ancestresses used such stuff, just as we are amazed that 18th century people covered their faces with lead paint.
*Of course, not marrying young does not mean you have misspent your youth. I shall have to write something about a "youth well spent." At the moment, I think a youth well spent could include marriage, but also (naturally) religious life, priesthood, child-rearing, learning and working at a useful trade, learning and working at a noble profession, evangelizing, volunteering, developing skills, developing athletic ability, and generally rooting oneself in reality.
Saturday 22 July 2023
The Past is a Foreign Country
Ye werken womman c. 1387 |
The Go-Between, written in 1952 about 1900, is absolutely stunning and near the end made me think of Wuthering Heights. (I discovered afterwards, while reading the Penguin Modern Classics' introduction, that I was right to do so.) As good novels do, it both debunks and promotes myths, here of a "golden age."
I am glad of the promotion, for civilizational health relies on myth. When Americans stop weeping over "The Star-Spangled Banner" and thanking veterans for their service, the USA is toast. But fortunately for my American readers, the USA is likely to survive Old Canada, which will die with the last Canadians to learn "The Maple Leaf Forever" at school. L.M. Montgomery's Avonlea may have been fiction, but I'd rather be a Canadian with Avonlea in her heart than a corrosive hatred for her ancestors.
Interestingly, on my flight back to Canada I read Johann Strauss: Father and Son and Their Era by Hans Fantel (1971), which is also very good and also debunks and promotes the myth of a golden age. It also speaks in the same accent as the traditionalist Catholic Austrians I know, who both rejoice in Vienna's glorious past and seethe over what has happened to it since.
I read the latter to try to understand the waltz. My poor parents plunked down up to $15 a week for me to take piano lessons for years and years without succeeding in making me musical. I much prefer silence to music, but I have committed to the waltz, so I should like to know more about it. It is also a "traditional" ballroom dance--although of course it was at one point considered revolutionary and immoral--and I am as interested in living traditions as in healthy myths.
Incidentally, the idea that women didn't work for money before Ms. magazine rolled off the presses on July 1, 1972 is not a healthy myth. For one thing, there have been female paid domestic servants and farmers for millennia. As for the lettered, English-speaking women have openly written for money since 1688. Unmarried women survived as paid governesses from the 17th century into the 20th century, and as schoolteachers from the late 19th century. My Canadian grandmother was a teacher until she married; my American grandmother (born 1904) was a bookkeeper.
There have also been, probably since the beginning of commerce, women in trades that don't rely on brute strength or in family businesses. The New Testament records that (in Acts 13) a certain Lydia of Thyatira was a dye saleswoman. Over 1300 years later, Chaucer characterized the Wife of Bath as a wealthy woman in the textile industry.
That large numbers of European and North American women of quite humble origins did not go out to work in the19th and 20th centuries--not even in fields--strikes me not as "traditional" but as a historical anomaly. And as we have seen, it has proved to be unsustainable for all but the rich or the very determined. It is very difficult for men today to command the kind of wages commensurate with running a middle-class household according to the expectations of 1900.
And so I work and try to get along with men who think I shouldn't. When, at my work event this week, a man recommended that I read Mrs. Timothy Gordon's Ask your Husband: A Wife's Guide to True Femininity, I affably promised to do so because I want to see what she brings to the debate.
One of the perks of this work event was staying in a business-class hotel with a a splendid gym; there I did bicep curls and other activities I do not expect to find in Mrs. Tim's opus. I very much enjoyed looking at the Canadian sky while running on the treadmill and travelling from this gym to my suite without having to go outdoors. There were lots of fluffy white towels that renewed themselves daily and apparently the bed remade itself. The breakfast buffet was bounteous and delicious. It crossed my mind that it might be nice to live permanently in a hotel, if one could afford to do so. However, now it escapes my mind how I thought I would get a whole post out of that fanciful notion.
UPDATE: Benedict Ambrose says he's going to write a book, too. He will call it either Make Me A Sandwich or How Interesting. Where's My Dinner? He's currently in the kitchen washing the dishes, so I am not taking this pronouncement very seriously.
Tuesday 18 July 2023
Toronto on Business
Fortunately, my father and I found each other soon after, and--I think also for the first time ever--I paid for the parking. We drove from unfamiliar Terminal One, special to Air Canada, missing one turn but recognizing another route home. The air was hot--"Italy hot," I said, meaning Italy in May, not Italy in the jaws of Cerberus. My mother and a tin of my favourite cookies welcomed me in.
I flew Air Canada, not Air Transat, because a travel agent organized all the flights for overseas staff. Months ago I petitioned to be allowed to arrive four days before my colleagues because I suffer from extended jet lag. Past work events have seen me longing for my bed by 9 PM and creeping away unsociably at 10 PM.
My mother always tells me it's worse West to East, but that's not how it is for me. On Friday morning I first awoke at 2 AM, on Saturday at 4, on Sunday at 5, on Monday at 5, and at last this morning (after remaining awake until around 11:30 PM), 6:30. Yesterday I thought I was teetering on the edge of a sleep disorder, but this morning I think I have finally acclimatized to Eastern Daylight Time. I will be able to comport myself at tonight's Gala like the sane woman I know myself to be.
Incredibly, I spent my first afternoon in Toronto correcting the English translation of Polish liner notes for a friend's frantic musician sister. But I also called my best Catholic Toronto friend, and we made a Saturday brunch date. One of my sisters dropped by with her son. We sat on the deck over the garage with coffee and cookies and discussed her Latin American travel plans: Colombia, Costa Rica, Argentina. She is now taking a Spanish course in Colombia; the computer test placed her at C1 and C2. I felt torn between pride and envy. In Polish I careen from B1 to A2 to oblivion. In Italian, I'm probably a solid B2. I'll find out for sure next month.
Friday
The following morning, I had a 6:30 AM Italian lesson. My tutor, visiting family in Italy, was having a respite from Cerberus but expected its return later that afternoon. My brain was mush; really, there is nothing so bad for my language skills as actually travelling. (This is, as you can guess, inopportune.) And then I did a full day's work, texting "Could you...?" and "Would you...?" to reporters and publishing their submissions.
Saturday
On Saturday my Best Catholic Toronto friend (MBCT), accompanied by my Canadian goddaughter, bore me away in the family van to Cora's for brunch. MBCT and I agree on practically everything despite living almost complete different ways of life. She married in her mid-twenties, a few months before I met Benedict Ambrose in person, and now has five children. She is almost always with at least one of these children; she remembers our last pre-COVID brunch as a rare outing in which she was entirely "child-free."
"What do you usually get here?" I asked as I turned the heavy colourful pages of the Cora menu.
"I don't," said MBCT in the firm tone of a felon unexpectedly released on parole.
My Canadian goddaughter sat quietly listening to the adult talk and ate her brunch without fuss. This is not something I can imagine my Polish goddaughter doing, but to be fair, the former is almost 6. Neither of them is permitted smartphones, tablets, computers or any other screen except on the rare occasions the Canadian is allowed an (old) Disney film and the Pole a ballet. I know demanding it is for both MBCT and Pretend Polish Daughter-in-Law to have to tend their attention-greedy children almost ALL the time, but it makes such an enormous difference.
Meanwhile, when MBCT got a call that her youngest was inconsolably crying for her, she took me home. When we pulled into the driveway, I felt like bursting into tears myself. Happily, we have tentative plans to meet after my work retreat. In fact, she and the children are likely to drive me back to the airport.
Sunday
On Sunday I went to the Oratory for the 11 AM TLM, finding a Pride flag wound around a flagpole and lying wedged in a corner by the front doors. It made me think of the unamiable habit of Toronto's Orange Order of marching past St. Michael's Cathedral. The laypeople socializing by the religious articles counter were interested but not concerned. Only one lady voiced my private suspicion that it may have been left there for a later protest, and I wondered if she were a regular reader of my news outlet.
The choir and organist, as always, were incredibly good.
Afterwards I met my Chicago-Polish friend (CPF), whom B.A. and I met through Polish Pretend Son, in the narthex. He is also in Toronto on business and, as he is fascinated by everything Polish, showed me phone photos of Toronto's Polish Combatants Association (SPK 20).
We went for brunch, walking along King Street West to the Katyń memorial at the foot of Roncesvalles, where CPF took more photos. We then walked up "Marszałkowska" towards such remnants of the vanishing Polish-Canadian community as St. Casimir's Catholic Church, the statue of St. John Paul II, and "Polonez," where CPF spoke C2 Polish--and I oblivion Polish--to the waitresses. We consumed traditional fruit punch, cold soup, cabbage rolls, pierogi, a pork cutlet, potatoes and several salads, and then we resumed our walk. The Polish-Canadian highlight of this stretch was, of course, Chicago, where I once hid from an irate blog-reader who had verbally attacked me after Mass at nearby St. Vincent de Paul.
The outing was capped off by cappuccino and tea at Coffee & All That Jazz, and then CPF went back down Roncey for eventual Vespers at Holy Family. I loaded money onto my Presto Card and took various trains and a bus home. I was joined soon after by my youngest brother, youngest sister, and oldest nephew, the young man once known to these pages (and, come to think of it, to Seraphic Singles) as Pirate.
We had what seemed to be a normal Sunday dinner. I told them the staggering price CPF pays to rent his Manhattan apartment, and they told me it wasn't staggering at all, as he could expect to pay that in Toronto, too. There followed a conversation about real estate, house prices, house taxes, and the interest rate, pet obsessions of the British middle-classes and very likely that of their Canadian counterparts, too.
Monday
On Monday morning I began work at 7:30AM, annoyed at Elon Musk for taking Archbishop Viganò out of Twitter jail on a Sunday. But we got the news of his release published before 9 AM, so I was happy.
I stopped work just shy of 3:30 PM and walked to the mall to get a mani-pedi at the salon my C1-C2 level sister frequents. Like nail shops all over, this one is run and staffed by Vietnamese-speaking women, and I was pleased when I was approached by "the chatty one." I was less pleased when she put the ultraviolet nail dryer on the edge of the foot basin. I asked her if I would die if it fell in.
"You make fun of me," said the chatty one genially and, as you see, the machine did not fall in. My toes are now a rakish dark blue-red and my fingernails a safe toasty pink because I am British now, ye ken, and even if the Princess of Wales got away with it....
Anyway, I paid up and walked to another part of the mall to meet my Poet Convert Friend (PCF) for a drink. Years before she was baptized, I admired her as the least egotistical career poet I knew. She ran a poetry event for years before I realized it was her show. This was heroically unassuming for the Toronto Poetry Scene, in which--incidentally--the Catholic Church was constantly the butt of jokes and the target of diatribes. However, for some art-loving non-Catholics Catholicism holds still holds some stale Brideshead glamour, so when PCF told me one winter-visit night that she was thinking of converting, I was suspicious.
"Oh," I said. "Is it the art, or is it (ahem, ahem) Jesus?"
"Jesus," said PCF fervently. "I want Jesus."
When I heard why, I gave her the Prayer to St. Michael and sent her to the Oratorians. The rest is salvation history.
Tuesday
I am now going to take myself off and study some Polish. I brought my daily planner and some stickers, which have created the necessary psychological bribes needed to study. Then I will act against all normal routine and iron a load of laundry. I am, after all, in Toronto on business and should turn up uncreased.
Saturday 8 July 2023
Will thank-you notes save the West?
Monday 3 July 2023
Strauss at last!
This month I decided to shell out for three whole hours, so my Waltzing Party guests would have ample time to review the Polonaise/Polonez/Chodzony [pron. HOD-zon-ih] and the various turns of the waltz, drink a leisurely cup of coffee, and get back to the dance floor for "free dance." This did not mean, of course, bursting from the constraints of ballroom dancing but being free to...
Well, in the end it meant being free to say "No" to a dance, which various belles did, leaving the askers to tell others that they had been "rejected."
"It's all part of it," said I and made horrible faces at one rejectee and jerked my head in the direction of a young lady I knew longed to dance. He got the hint. Hashtag Doyenne.
The real problem, I suspect, was that there was too little time between Mass and the Waltzing Party for lunch, and some of my poor guests were very tired by the time the "free dance" came along. Clearly I must think about what to do to spare them. I may have to smuggle them sandwiches to eat during the After-Mass Tea-and-Coffee-Hour, for B.A. and I cannot at this juncture afford to buy a flat in the West End.
As always, I felt some anxiety about the male:female ratio because there are simply more young men than young women interested in the Traditional Latin Mass in our corner of Christendom, and the mother-chaperones always have to make up the numbers. Yesterday I was the only mother-chaperone, as it were, and we ended up with only 9 women to 10 men, which wasn't too bad. Come to think of it, it does create an impetus for the men to hurry up and ask the women to dance.
However, there was no real impetus for them to ask anyone to dance during the "free dance," even when I, being spun around the room by a 14-year-old, wailed "Gentlemen, the ladies can't ask you; we're Trads."
The 14-year-old assured me that he much preferred having the whole room to dance in, which I could well understand, as he travelled all over the floor as if we were actually at a Viennese ball, and my sticker came off afterwards.
Yes, I have followed through on my sticker idea, and it has worked beautifully. Last month I bought two packages of rectangular neon green stickers, and my female guests have all worn them on their left shoulder blades.
"Why don't the men have to wear stickers?" demanded one of the yesterday's female guests.
"Because the top of the shoulder is rather more obvious," rumbled the dance instructor.
"Because men don't care if your hand accidentally slides any which way," thought the hostess. Hashtag Safeguarding Officer.
The one problem with the stickers is that they fall off after a particularly vigorous waltz, and I ended the afternoon wearing a plaster (band-aid) instead. However, I watched the 8 other couples carefully during the first waltz, and the hands remained firmly clamped to the shoulder blades, where they belonged. Am pedagogical genius.
Meanwhile, the waltzing instructor decided that we were all enough advanced to have real classical music, and not Whitney Houston or whatever horrors he has inflicted upon us unworthy non-Austrians in the past. Thus, we danced to Dmitri Shostakovich's "Waltz No. 2" and later--hooray!--real Strauss, including "Wiener Blut."
When the waltzing instructor disappeared to entertain his visiting parents, he took much of the energy in the room (and one of the ladies) with him. However, Polish Pretend Son arrived soon after, having paid a visit to his old Edinburgh pastor and then supplemented his drawing room gin-and-tonic with a pint at a nearby pub.
PPS had been shocked to hear that there is no alcohol at my Waltzing Parties and amused when I forbade him from turning up drunk, as he had been known to do at Edinburgh tango evenings. He wanted to know how I knew this, and I knew because it is a very small world and at least two women have told me. He certainly had returned intoxicated from tango parties to the Historical House, while staying with us, eyes horribly bloodshot. Nevertheless, he is also known to be an excellent dancer. Women have told me that, too. I certainly have chosen an interesting Pretend Son.
Anyway, PPS turned up perfectly sober, held a civilized conversation with the young men to whom I introduced him, and then asked me to dance.
"I cannot dance your slow English waltzes," he said, sounding rather like the waltzing instructor, and so we danced in the fast Polish (or Viennese) fashion.
Incidentally, you may be wondering where Benedict Ambrose was, for one or two of my dancing partners asked that, too. The answer is that he was at home working on his diploma course, but he will come to the Waltzing Party next month.