Joy of Teachers

Despite yesterday's Argentinian food fest for our wedding anniversary, I bounced out of the flat this morning, all excited about Cycle class. Cycle class--which is probably called spin class everywhere else--is a killer, but it's great fun. My favourite Cycle teacher, dark-haired, tiny, and mad, can whip up the class into a frenzy of cycling and sweat. When she says "Turn up that dial," I actually do it.

Usually during Cycle class I try to think only about what the teacher is yelling over the music, but today it occurred to me that the reason why the old run-for-half-an-hour, lift-weights-for-half-an-hour routine no longer inspires is because I'm alone at home all day working on highly stressful news, and the last thing I need is another hour alone with myself and my thoughts. I need classes---especially as I can't get to Polish night school any more.

Maybe this is the secret of getting fit: you experiment with a lot of activities and beginners' classes and then commit to the ones that are right for you right now. Teachers are a big part of that, for me, since I am the sort of student who either wants to become the teacher or wants to avoid them altogether. (I'm trying to get some balance there, however.)

Teachers should inspire, and today I was inspired by this video because it showed what the human body is capable of. Well, that human body anyway. Starting ballet at three is probably a good way to work up to this:

All bodies are different, of course, just as all brains are different. I like the idea of trying to achieve the healthiest brain and body I can manage. Benedict Ambrose is happy just walking to and from work and having the occasional hike or bike ride. But then he's from a line of tiny, thin Scots, whereas I have the 300+ lb spectre of German-American Great-Aunt Tilly hulking in the back of my  mind, drinking endless cans of cherry cola.

Married Ten Years

Today is the tenth wedding anniversary of Benedict Ambrose and me, and thus ten years since I stopped being "Seraphic Single."

I was going to joke that I am almost at the point where I can give advice about being married, but then I realised I have already. At least, I'm sure I blogged that a woman should take every opportunity to praise her husband for doing anything well, on the principle that men are like beautiful plants, and wives must metaphorically water them.  

Another useful piece of advice, aimed at wives in countries with imperfect medical systems, is to be prepared to fight to the death for your sick husband albeit without raising your voice or doing anything else that gets you kicked out of the hospital. To use a less martial image, be the squeaky wheel that gets the grease. 

A third piece of advice is to be grateful every day for what you have and not to think overmuch about what you don't have--money, children, a clean house, a PhD, a career, whatever. To a remarkable (although of course not total) extent, happiness or sorrow is up to you. 

I love the realism of the wedding vows: "for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health." We've definitely experienced all of that--never more so than in the last 26 months. 

The worst, I think, was the terrible spring after B.A.'s first brain operation when nobody, even me, took his first complaints seriously. (More advice: don't expect your husband to snap back to his old self within three months of  life-saving surgery.) The poorest was the terrible February I returned to the Historical House to find the contents on the front lawn and discovered we were banished from our home in the attic indefinitely. The sickest was when B.A. was sliding slowly towards a coma, and nobody seemed to see how ill he was except me. 

Speaking of sickness, the day the doctor phoned me to say that my bloodwork indicated signs of irreversible peri-menopause (and was I still sure I didn't want to try IVF ?) was also bad.

However, the interesting thing about this (now that you're all in tears) is that, just as soothing docken grows right among the nettles, the "better", the "richer" and the "health" were right there by the bad stuff. 

The night that B.A. was diagnosed with a brain tumour and hydrocephaly was terrible, but we lived most of it together, with an acuteness I don't think we'd experienced since we first fell in love. The next morning before his operation was like that, too. It was terrible, but it was the best. He sat up in bed--looking as healthy as could be, by the way--and I sat with my feet in his bed (against the rules,  I later discovered), and we just "were" together. 

The day we were officially evicted from the Historical House was awful, but we had saved up against this day, and so when we got the message that we were never going home, we had more money than either of us had ever had in our lives. So, in our most abject moment of poverty, we were richer than before (in money anyway). 

The year B.A. was so sick, I was physically well. A lot of anxiety, but no depression. I started a full-time job and managed also to visit B.A. in hospital every day and, when he was bed-ridden at home, I  forced him down the stairs for walks and made him what should have been fattening Christmas food. I called up the Caregivers Association and cried. I got on Facebook and asked for cards, letters, and children's drawings--which came. I walked five miles to a Scottish shrine three times. I gave houseroom to a temporarily homeless young married couple, too, and in return got youthful energy from them. In short, I had all the health I needed to get people to do their best to make B.A. (and keep me) well. 

Meanwhile, the day I learned from that cold, clinical phone call that I will never have a baby, B.A. rushed home from work as soon as I phoned him. I didn't think he would, but he did.  He held me while I cried, which reminds me now of the first time he rubbed docken on my arm when I got prickled by a nettle. 

Before all that, of course, there were the ordinary ups and downs of marriage: the parties, the weekend guests, the Christmas family visits, the summer family visits, the negative pregnancy tests, the arguments over how to wash dishes properly, the arguments over housework, the pride in each other's publications. 

Regrets? Yes--one. I had a prospective on my desk in 1990 from the University of Aberdeen; weirdly enough, I had a half-fancy to go there. Sincere apologies to all the friends I made between 1990 and 2008, but if I could got back in time, I would find some way to get to Aberdeen and meet B.A. when we were both in our twenties. However, there is no point thinking about impossibilities, so instead I will be grateful for my friends and B.A. Better late than never. 

Well, that's what our marriage looks like. Not as glamorous as a bridal magazine, that's for sure. But real.

Update: I realise I've said most of this before, but let's face it: it was traumatic, and people do tend to revisit their trauma.

The Joy of the Cherry Trees

The cherry trees along the river are no longer in their April glory, but some blossoms still adhere. One of the nice side-effects of gym class ("barre" today) is that I walk home along this river. The river, whose earliest stone bridges were built by the Romans, has a population of ducks, geese and swans, and the ducks quack together cheerfully. I find this very soothing to the ear.

As I walked along today, I pondered my homeschooled students. I am apt to say things like, "When you are 25 ... " and they are apt look a bit dubious, as if turning 25 is something that happens only to other people.

I'm teaching what I call "English Composition" and what my high school called "English Writer's Craft." The children are clever, so they have grasped the structure of the "persuasive essay." We're now working on the "descriptive paragraph," and I told them that when they are 25 they will want to reminisce about their childhood home, so they should experience it in detail now for better recollection later.

That reminds me, I marched up to the apple tree yesterday and had a good snuff of the white blossoms. They have a very sweet if subtle smell, and I am thrilled.  My childhood home had a pear tree, and I don't remember the blossoms smelling like anything. They did, however, make me break out in blotches. The pears themselves were an acquired taste, and my parents made dozens of bottles of jam, of which I soon tired, and for which I would give large sums to taste today.

I had forgotten about this jam until a few years ago when I was in Gdansk--I'm pretty sure it was Gdansk--and had some pear ice-cream from a Poland-wide chain patisserie called Sowa. Suddenly I was transported to a sunny, tree-lined street in Willowdale in the 1970s, where my parents cooked jam behind a wooden baby barrier stuck in the doorway.

I must admit, though, that I was very often bored in the back garden--which naturally I then called a back yard--of our part of that sunny, tree-lined street, and spent what seems like hours swinging on the swing-set and staring at the cloudless blue sky wishing I could go to the UK.

And here I am, so that worked out well.

But to return to my charges, I hope they dig up the riches of sensory apprehension of their surroundings right from the start of their writing career. When I go through my teenage diaries, I am always sorry I did not include more detail and, therefore, more illustrations of the outfits I wore to dances. I wish very much I had thought to illustrate the outfits my friends wore to dances, and the now-amusing hairstyles.

I am also sorry that I thought I had nothing to write a novel about because just writing about my day to day life would have made at least two good ones: a teenage drama culminating in me being chucked in the drunk tank of the local police station for pro-life activism and a coming-of-age horror story involving half-starving to death in romantic downtown before returning to tense uptown. Very cheap ground beef on special at the local butcher featured.

Dear heavens, I would not be 24 again for anything. No wonder my students look confused at the thought they will be (please God) in their 20s themselves one day.

The Joy of Exercise

Since I write mostly about sad or simply controversial things all day--yesterday was devoted to a Facebook ban, Canada's growing euthanasia numbers and the destruction-by-media of a Catholic businessman--I think I will concentrate only on The Happy for this blog.

Early last month, when I was slouched over my desk reporting on The Sad, I suddenly snapped and told Benedict Ambrose that Something Must Change. First I demanded a puppy, and then I rushed off, inwardly gobbling, to an exercise class.

Now I have done 16 bouts of exercise (14 of them in studios), and we will be getting a puppy after we return from a trip to Berlin in July.

The greatest driver of happiness, apparently, are close relationships with other human beings. This is easier said than developed, however, if you move across the ocean from your family in mid-life and don't make any more family. However, exercise and pets are high up on the list of cures for gloom.

Yesterday I took a barre class, which involves ballet exercises, isometric exercises and girly dumbbells. It was great fun and made my quadriceps, already aching from a spin class I took the day before, ache some more. It also made me smile and afterwards to laugh because almost all the other women in the class (and we were all women) were half my age, slimmer, taller and much more beautiful than me.

There were two men, I think, in my spin class, and one or two women older than me. But again for the most part I was at the back of the class marvelling at the elegant spines of beautiful, tall, slim twenty-somethings. It makes me wonder why more men don't take spin class although out of the past I can hear the very slender twenty-something me yell, "Don't encourage men to chat up women in the gym."

I am a world away from the YMCA and the boxing ring in more ways than one, that's for sure. In the 90s and 00s, I almost never took an exercise class because they were still mostly versions of "Aerobics," which meant dance routines too complicated for uncoordinated me.

Instead I ran on the treadmill for half an hour, getting high on endorphins, and then I lifted free weights and pushed on the correct parts of various machines. For a few years I walked two miles and back to a boxing gym up to three nights a week. There I did a circuit of various stations at the gym--heavy bag, speed bag, skipping--while waiting for a trainer or to spar with someone in the scary old ring.

Unsurprisingly, both the weight room at the Y and the boxing gym (especially) were dominated by men. This almost never bothered me although you can bet there were young men aggrieved that I was  in the boxing gym at all. One manifested his displeasure by popping in a tape of the most misogynist rap lyrics I had ever heard, but my coach soon put a stop to that. He was as tough as nails, a Cockney immigrant who put up a shrine to the Cray Twins in his gym, but he was also fair-minded and seemed to divide the world merely into fighters and people who could be fighters.

I very much disliked being chatted up at either the Y or the boxing gym, and this happened rather less often than I (now being in my 40s) would expect regarding a woman in her 20s. It was probably because I had the ice-blue eyes and the forbidding expression of a Wehrmachthelferin.

I was also 117 lbs and fit into a Club Monaco size 2. I don't expect ever to be that slim again, but it will be amusing to find out how fit I can become in middle-life.

Joy of Easter

Exercise class this morning. What a joy! 

Also joyful: Easter. Yesterday I had the chance to go to Easter Wednesday Mass in the Extraordinary Form, and it was really very beautiful. Next year I think I will do my best to get to every Easter Week Mass I can. 

Now that Lent is over, I feel more comfortable revealing that neither Benedict Ambrose nor I ate a scrap of meat--nor drank much alcohol--after Shrove Tuesday. This was a bigger deal for B.A. than for me, and I am really impressed by him. That said, we both have the thought of the Greek Orthodox Lent to keep us humble. 

We broke our fast with the traditional Polish Easter soup called żurek, which contains white sausage, hard-boiled eggs and fermented rye juice. Then, after Mass, we went with friends to their home in the countryside where we ate a wonderful feast, including roast lamb, and drank really quite a lot. 

I baked a babka (bundt cake) and a mazurek for the feast. Behold the mazurek:

The next day B.A. both felt very rocky, and I felt awful when I woke up yesterday at 3 AM, for B.A. and I celebrated Easter Tuesday by going out for steaks and Malbec wine.  Apparently when you go without meat and wine for weeks, you should ease yourself into both gradually. 

Easter Week has been solemn, too, because of the Sri Lankan martyrs and confessors. We can hope the martyrs went directly to heaven; the little children certainly did, and the adults must have known there was a chance this could happen but went to church anyway. Now my prayers are for the maimed, injured and bereaved.   

 

By the way, if anyone has the brass to tell you that Christianity is in Asia only because of  colonialism, be sure to tell them A) that Christianity began in Western Asia, and B) that St. Thomas got to India long before St. Francis Xavier did. Naturally, your interlocutor will be confused, for he will be under the impression that there were no Christians in Asia until Donald Trump landed there with the PTL Club some time in the 1990s.  

Notre Dame de Paris

Watching Notre Dame de Paris burn down over my computer was not at all like watching the Twin Towers fall across library television screens on 9/11.

I was saddened rather than horrified. Nobody died in the Notre Dame conflagration whereas while the Twin Towers fell viewers thought over ten thousand people were in them.  9/11 was the Hindenburg disaster x 1000 + terrorists.

Of course, the Twin Towers themselves were just modernist monstrosities, even if symbolic of the growing wealth of nations, whereas Notre Dame de Paris is a, if not the, symbol of Western Civilisation itself.

I have been to Notre Dame de Paris twice: once in 1999--and I don't remember much about that--and once three years ago or so, when I went on the Chartres Pilgrimage. I lost the Scottish pilgrim group outside the great cathedral, and so I wiggled in through the doors to find them. Once I was in, I soon gave up and just knelt by a group of French Girl Guides. The stone was cold and grey, Mass was very long, and the homily and speeches a reproof to my ill-maintained Canadian high school French. I had arrived late at night,  had had very little sleep, and had made myself a terrible breakfast in my hotel room.

It turns out my group wasn't in the Cathedral at all. There were so many Chartres pilgrims that thousands of them had to hear the Mass outside. The Scots had been, instead, allocated space in Chartres Cathedral at the end of the pilgrimage. Naturally I now think that was a very fortunate mistake on my part. Although my abiding memory of Notre Dame was discomfort, at least I worshipped there when it was whole.

It astonishes me that Notre Dame de Paris has lasted this long. But it is also amazing that it survived 1944 and not 2015. Watching Notre Dame burn, I kept thinking "410: the Burning and Sacking of Rome."  (This was a mantra I invented as a teenager to remember my parents' license plate number; after the trauma of Grade 10 Math I became next-door to numerically illiterate.)

The Burning and Sacking of Rome was worse than Notre Dame burning down, as horrible things happened to the Romans, not just the buildings. However, it ushered in the era in which Western Civilisation came its closest to collapsing, and watching Notre Dame burn was like seeing the physical manifestation of cultural trends I read and write about all day.

However, Rod Dreher's ultimates thoughts on the topic are more hopeful and happy than mine, so off you go to American Conservative to read them. Meanwhile, the only foolproof way to preserve Western Civilisation, which is to say Christendom in its Sunday best, is not in fragile buildings but in ourselves and our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, pupils and students.

Update: Here, also, is Michael Brendan Dougherty writing about the Repair Notre Dame fundraising campaign in 2017.

Cult Status

What struck me most, when reading about the Allison Mack story, was that she founded what was called a "female empowerment" group. 

So I wrote this. (Someone else provided the headline.) 

One of the most embarrassing aspect of being a woman, these days, is that so many women (myself included) want a big strong man to look up to, make us feel special, and solve all our problems.

This may not have been so embarrassing before 1968. In that respect, women were definitely allowed to be women. In previous centuries, you were considered a bit strange if your erotic imagination did not involve the Big Strong Man. Strange or an excellent candidate for religious life.  

(I've been rereading The Summerhouse Trilogy, so Margaret's resistance to marriage is very much on my mind.) 

It's rather an irony then, that Allison Mack, whose life revolved around her male guru, has a same-sex partner. She had boyfriends before, though. Ah me. I'm just not qualified to comment on that. 

But the "DOS" story is a cautionary tale about how women will throw other women under the bus to get what they want from the man in their life. It reminds me that there are two kinds of women: women who use their power to help other women (e.g. good mothers, physical or spiritual) and women who use their power to hurt other women. 

I don't really believe in female "empowerment" unless it involves barbells, martial arts, or weapons training. Women are powerful in many ways, and the important thing is that we not use our power badly, hurting ourselves or others through sheer stupidity or wickedness. 

Was it Ethel Boileau who wrote that a woman's sexuality was "a weapon that can break in her hand"? I think it was. Meanwhile, how Marxist to rabbit on about power. Still, it's unavoidable when considering a "female empowerment group" that was ultimately a power grab.