Among Objects

  So an object is a thing, if tangible, placed before the eye, or if not tangible, before the mind. Let’s say more or less solid items one can see and theoretically touch. Our planet’s moon is a large object that few have touched, and that with the intermediary of space-age clothing. But now I have a junior grade philosophical question. Quite some time ago I had the lenses of my eyes cut away and replaced by artificial lenses. Leaving aside the qualities of objects seen through these lenses, can’t we say that the artificial lenses were objects before they were attached to my eyeballs, and isn’t there a problem in saying that they are now part of my subjective conglomerate? Of course you might interpose that every atom that makes up a human body came from our planet, and perhaps ultimately from stardust. Let’s leave eyes for now, and consider teeth. The eyes might be part of the brain while teeth are the visible part of the skeleton. I have a question similar to the one above, as there is a row of artificial teeth screwed into my left lower jawbone and another in my right upper jawbone. Are these still objects? I mean, I don’t consider my fingers and toes to be objects. Fifteen years ago a doctor in Welland inserted four short metal rods to hold my right hipbone together, and when I broke my right femur last spring, a Vancouver doctor took out those four short metal rods (I asked him whether I could have them for souvenirs, and he replied that the paperwork would be too much) and inserted a long metal rod in with the marrow, and some more connective pieces. I think that the airport metal detector would consider these rods to be objects, though they are not easily removable as are my hearing aids. But I can’t use the airport metal detector because I have a defibrillator inserted under the skin of my breast, and it has wires whose ends are inserted into my heart. It also has a pacemaker to help it with the mathematics. I am probably not worth six million dollars in scrap, but I face the twenty-four dollar question: is it easier for me than for most people to follow Charles Olson’s direction and sense myself as an object among objects?

  The Rattle

  In my house I have always had to have many objets d’art, along with objets that I merely said were art. Perhaps I am obtruding on this book’s sequence properly entitled “Rooms,” but the above noun insists. In any case, I cannot summon to memory the object I had last night planned for this morning. These objets are, if I may be a little fanciful, a small musée of my adult life at least. I have a black figure of Ganesh, for example, and even if I cannot always remember fully what he promises with all the objects in his numerous hands, I know enough to have him facing the entrance to our condominium. I don’t know where he came from but I bought him in West Berlin in 1980. He rested heavily in the overhead compartments all the way home to Vancouver. Where there is a glass and wooden box with white sand inside and a broken Aztec bowl resting in the sand. I got this bowl from Laurette Sejourné in Mexico City in 1964. I also got the title for my novel about George Vancouver from her. In my mind the prominent piece of art in my “collection” is a painting titled The Woolworth Rattle, by Greg Curnoe. I bought it from Greg in 1967, and since then it has hung in an apartment in Westmount, two houses in Kitsilano, a house in Kerrisdale, a house in West Point Grey, and now in our condominium. It has also hung in Curnoe exhibitions in London Ont., Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. I can’t remember where it is going after my death. But that goes for me, too. There’s a lot of terrific art where I live, and some of it you’d call objets d’art, and then there are a lot of objets that are a little this side of art. Take my Daffy Duck Pez dispenser, for example.

  Cups

  Every morning one reacquaints oneself with one’s usual objects –– soap, razor, comb, toothbrush –– and then the most important one of the morning, the coffee cup. Those readers who prefer to drink something nonsensical upon waking, such as tea or chocolate or vodka, can adjust and adapt here. If you’re like me (and who would not be?), you’ll have a choice among many cups, and some favourites. There are cups in your kitchen that you would never use; you would rather wash one of your favourites. This tells us something, doesn’t it? Many years ago, when my chum Willy and I worked in his stepfather’s plant, we would walk up to my family home and eat our lunch and drink coffee. Willy always used the pink cup with a mounted Mountie on it and a message on the bottom inside, that he could read only when he’d drained the coffee. It read, “Now back to work!” Every day upon reading this exhortation, Willy would groan his complaint and rise from his chair. One of the reasons I’ve always loved him. That cup is still, I think, among the dishes in our condominium, but the writing has been worn away. I would never drink my coffee from it anyway. In my study I have a cup that bears a photo of Willy grinning our famous Club grin. I used to drink coffee out of it, but since it developed a large triangular gap in the brim, I employ it to hold a lot of pens, most of which I will never use. I have just finished my morning coffee on the balcony of our winter rental on the southern coast of Jalisco, but I had to make do. I don’t like any of the cups in this place.

  Umbrellas

  I spent most of my childhood in the Okanagan Valley, which is an irrigated desert, so I didn’t get my hands on an umbrella. Then I got through four years in college and the air force, until I fetched up at the age of twenty-one at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, also known as Rain City. With my background and prejudices I was of the opinion that umbrellas were for female people, so with no hat and an air force raincoat I tried to get by. Despite the fact that all my male friends who were brought up on the coast carried manly umbrellas as if it were the most acceptable usage, I did not relent till my second winter really set in. I acquired my first bumbershoot in the conventional way, as instructed by my male friends, marching in wet clothing to the lost & found counter at the campus bus stop.

  “I’ve somehow lost my umbrella.”

  “Can you describe it?”

  “Black, with a brown handle.”

  “Does this look like it?”

  “No, it didn’t have any broken parts.”

  “How about this one?”

  “That’s the fellow. Thank you.”

  Years later I would instruct my scholar daughter about rain protection on campus. Always, I said, leave with a better umbrella than the one you came with. Nowadays people such as I buy our inexpensive umbrellas at the drug store and retain them until the first rain squall turns them inside out. As I usually carry a cane bought at the drugstore, I have returned to my childhood ways, trying to keep my head, at least, dry with a wide-brimmed hat that I often have to save from the wind with the hand that is not holding my cane.

  My Favourite Object

  I am a person who is always making lists. Alphabetical lists, geographical lists, names of authors, ballplayers, musicians, etc. I’m always asking people, what’s your favourite vegetable, European city, song by the Coasters. My favourite European town is Plovdiv, favourite colour is yellow, favourite poet is Shelley. But this is not a book about favourites; that may come later, you lucky people; it is a sequence about objects. All right, what is my favourite object in the world? Let me tell you something. I was a Protestant boy in a family where people didn’t hug one another. I had to learn late to tell anyone how I felt about anything. Yes, I have spent a lot of my life exposing myself to the fine arts, but I don’t make a practice of blubbering about beauty. All right. On three occasions I have wept and nearly fallen down when presented with a work of art. One happened in Montreal, where I was listening to a poetry reading by George Oppen. Another was at the Chan Centre at UBC, where for the first time I heard 80-year-old Ornette Coleman play live. The third, and it was in no sense third, occurred when for the third time I stood close and beheld my favourite object in the world. I will not attempt to describe it to you. Its beauty and force and divine origin make it live beyond the reach of description. I am referring to Donatello’s Magdalena. A ragged, suffering haunted woman made out of wood. Out of. I won’t try to tell you what the experience is like. See a photograph, a computer image. No, go there, to the Works of the Duomo in Florence. It was in a different location in the building each time I saw it. When you have spent an hour looking at it, go up the street and see Michelangelo’s big marble David, to return to earth.

  Luck

  “Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.” There’s a philosophical proposition that has bothered me more and more as I see it again and again. People sometimes call me a rear-view mirror guy because I would feed the dictionary into the fireplace fire if it told me that “imply” and “infer” were interchangeable. I say focus tighter. The objects are not in the mirror; they are reflected by the mirror. I suppose that the manufacturer is trying to avoid accidents. If that is so, he should not be encouraging loose usage. Perhaps he should note the difference between “appear” and “seem to be.” If I am sitting in the front passenger seat of the automobile in question, the image in the mirror may be less than an arm’s reach from me, while the object behind us, presumably another automobile, is a few car lengths behind us. In other words, the object, which is not in the mirror, where it could do us little harm, but following the object in which we are riding, is not closer than its image in the mirror, but still close enough to kill us if its driver or ours is careless enough not to keep at least one eye on the road behind or in front of us. Naturally, if our driver is driving in reverse gear, as when backing into a parking spot, the objects not in but reflected by the mirror may be closer to the back of his car than he or a careless mirror manufacturer might wish. Any passenger might be forgiven for wondering why the last-mentioned person could not find a way to make a mirror that reflects distances more accurately. In that way he might prevent instances of bad luck that continues for seven years.

  Food

  Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are.

  – Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Physiologie du Gout

  Toast

  My mother had a blue budgie to whom she gave the run, or rather the flight, of the house. Billy spent a lot of his time in front of a mirror that used to be a window in the front room. But if you tried to butter your toast quietly in the kitchen you would nevertheless hear the flutter of wings, and a blue flash would alight close to or on the edge of your slice. Toast was Billy’s favourite food, and it is now our dog’s favourite food, and our friend Guido’s favourite food. In her old age my mother had to be talked into eating anything else. In our family we had seen pop-up toasters in the cartoons and the movies, but we had the regular kind, with doors that opened downward on either side. When the slices were done on one side you’d open the door and turn the slices over. Usually one side would get burned black, and you would scrape the black off with your knife before slapping on the butter. Then Billy would come like a Spitfire around the doorway. In our family, once you got your slice of hot toast (except in our grandparents’ place, where they kept the British custom of letting your toast get cold and hard in a little ceramic toast rack. After they died, we put the toast rack in the goldfish bowl for scenery) you chose butter or jam as something to spread on it. No one in our family employed the benighted practice of spreading peanut butter on toast. My grandmother, who liked telling me stories of the funny things her youngest son, my uncle Gerry did, told us that he got around the rule by putting butter on one side of his toast and jam on the other.

  Apples

  On Halloween there were a few people who asked us in and made us sing for our treats, so Willy and I had a routine, a song that ended “Kellogg’s is the food for I,” at which we would slip from our pose of leaning on each other’s palms. Then there was the cheap son of a bitch who gave us an apple instead of candy. Come on! When my family first moved back to the Okanagan Valley, we lived in the house of an army officer who had moved his family to England. We had food hanging from trees all around us, just like everyone else. Cherries, apricots, peaches, pears, prunes, peachplums, and apples. After moving into town, we always had a box of apples in the cellar. The back yard had corn and raspberries and peas and beans and so on, and the front yard was full of potatoes. And there were chickens pecking away here and there. The Red & White store and the Overwaitea store were for flour and corn flakes and coffee. If I ever said, being a teenage boy, that I was hungry, my father, who grew up in orchards, said, “Eat an apple.” It still feels funny buying a few pieces of fruit in a supermarket or greengrocer’s. We got our boxes of fruit from uncle Gerry or the orchard my father and I were working in. Buying a little fruit, I thought, would be like paying money for pieces of gravel. But here’s something I would pay money for: learning how to do what some orchard veterans, including my father, could do –– pick up an apple and break it in half in your hands.

  Tomatoes

  Here is the way my father ate Shredded Wheat. He boiled some water in the kettle, then used his spoon edge to damage the top of the shredded wheat biscuit, then held the biscuit with his spoon while he poured a little hot water to soften it. Then he used the spoon to cut a groove lengthwise in the softened biscuit, and filled the groove with brown sugar. He did all this to avoid milk. My father didn’t like milk. I don’t know why –– maybe because it had been in a cow. Maybe it was something between him and his mother. He also refused to eat tomatoes. Is there anything less like milk? And this in the southern Okanagan Valley, where yummy beefsteak tomatoes are so big that one slice serves for a large tomato sandwich, along with lots of mayonnaise –– Joe Brainard’s favourite. When I was a boy I decided that tomatoes were one of my four favourite (I keep bringing up favourites) foods, the others being cheese, eggs and onions. Of course, living where I lived, and in the family I had, I didn’t know that there were any cheeses other than orange mouse cheese. Nowadays my favourite is manchego, the great Spanish sheep cheese, the harder the better. Tomatoes, cheese, eggs, and onions. Without knowing it, I was an Italian boy! My home town looked and felt like the Mediterranean, according to the cliché one was always hearing. I have always maintained that after his week’s work was done God asked himself what would make humans truly happy. The answer came: onions! All the variations of onions. Chives, shallots, leeks, garlic, scallions, red onions, white onions, yellow onions. Walla Walla sweets. And eggs? When the breakfast waiter asks me how I would like my eggs, I say, “One shirred and one pickled.” And what can you do with a tomato? Don’t ask my father; ask an Italian.

  Picky Eaters

  My father was not the only picky eater in my family. My sister wasn’t fond of meat, so here’s how she ate her supper: separate the parts, eat the vegetables (usually carrots or string beans) first, then the potatoes, finally the chicken or beef or whatever. Make sure that once on the plate, none of these things is touching any other. Eat the meat in tiny pieces. My father made up for this tidiness by roiling everything together in one awkward stew. When my kid brother got old enough to have a plate at our table, the list of things he thought he could not eat was remarkably long. If he ever had spaghetti, which most kids like better than anything else, it could have nothing on it but butter and salt. The first time he ever saw a pizza, he knew he would detest it, until one day in his late forties he somehow gave the Greek special a try, and spent the remaining years of his life with the three pizza joints’ telephone numbers prominent on his refrigerator door. When the pizza arrived he would scrape the olives onto someone else’s slice before shoving the triangle into his mouth. As for my mother, she had a fear of exotic foods, such as feta cheese and bell peppers, so her pickiness was seen (or not seen) in the absence of anything unusual in the grocery bags that found the way to our kitchen. When my other kid brother showed up he fashioned a list as long as our middle brother’s. When I was a boy I was even more exclusionary than the person who bought our food and cooked our meals. The list of vegetables I liked was shorter than the list of vegetables I would not try, and this list would of course not include the vegetables my mother was wary about buying. Now in my old age I am trying to eat a lifetime’s supply of spinach, cabbage, turnips, kale, zucchini, parsnips, squash, vegetable marrow, okra and beet tops. As a boy I could not swallow chicken because I knew it when it was alive, and I could not chew anything from the sea or even a lake. I nearly committed suicide when my mother brought finnan haddie to the table.

  Drumsticks

  When you are in the hospital, you discover that you have lost your appetite when the people with plastic hairnets bring your tray of something foodlike three times a day, generally a few hours earlier than your usual meal times. Once, when I was in Vancouver General Hospital after a cardiac arrest, my first meal by mouth consisted of a dawn breakfast in which all the ingredients were puréed, including cold toast and strawberry jam. After a few days you find yourself tasting more than a spoonful of porridge and milk, and after a few weeks you surprise yourself by eating the whole little bowl of it. In recent times the kitchen has been sending a person to take one’s requests for next day’s meals. “Would you like salmon sandwich or fish sticks for lunch,” etc. One day I checked under the heavy plastic dome and around it, to learn that in every instance I got b. where I had ordered a. with my heart oozing hope, drumstick instead of pork chop, spice cake instead of apricots, etc. But after a month you find that you just clean up whatever they drop in front of you. Those vegetables you could not identify become your trusted fare. I remember a pregnant alley cat I once adopted. I relocated her from a West End industrial lane to a tony neighbourhood in Kerrisdale. For her new diet I offered her the cat kibble my other cats resolutely consumed. For days she would not touch it, but before the week was out she was crunching it and protecting it from the other cats. She did not forego her former ways entirely. Once I saw her returning from an excursion down our alley with a big rectangle of salmon skin hanging from her jaw. Now, I am not a willing consumer of fish skin, but toward the end of a hospital stay I will be cleaning my plate and ordering a. for the next day.

 

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