Grace in Small Things – 196

I alluded yesterday to yet another life-rocking event, but it wasn’t my news to break, so I waited. Today Sylvain has blogged about it, so you can hear it directly from him.

As with all things in life, you can choose to be resentful and bitter. You can choose to be afraid and worried. Going through any and all emotions for a period is natural, to be expected. And I am not one to tell anyone else what to feel. What do I know…I have never been laid off or fired.

I can only tell you what it feels like from my end.  What comes to my mind right off the bat are all blessings.

• He will qualify for Employment Insurance.
• He will get a severance package of some sort.
• We knew this could happen, but still we chose for me to come to Toronto for this certification.
• The timing could have been worse. Had this happened four months ago, I would NOT have made the decision to get my TESL Ontario certification and would still be trapped in an endless cycle of meaningless administrative jobs rather than empowered to pursue a dream.
• His last day is still over two months away, giving me time to finish up this course (Nov. 27), get back to town and start doing some kind of work, even if it’s just temping.

We have lots of options, including my moving back in with him if I get a good job right away and he needs help with his bills.

Grace in Small Things – 195

• Getting so deep in discussion with a classmate after class that we continued the talk in a nearby coffee shop.
• How mindfulness training gives me equanimity to face life’s ups and downs. Not always, mind you, but always more than I ever had before I started heeding the teachings of Ani Pema and her teachers.
• The fact that even though we didn’t end up being compatible for the long haul, P and I did have some really good times early in our marriage. I know both our lives were richer for our having loved one another.
• Weather so fine today that I wore a short-sleeved dress.
• Getting even more life-changing news today, yet feeling calm and unruffled by it. That Rashi quote keeps coming back to me: “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.”

Grace in Small Things – 194

• Olivia’s offer to help me with my statistics problem. It’s so nice to have friends like you all.
• Homestay host’s expression of contrition today about my fall. I did a lot of stretching all day and am on the mend.
• The weather today! It was so lovely that I sat in the garden to read a few chapters in my language testing text book.
• Being visited by the street’s friendly cat, a beautiful long-haired black cat who rolled on her back and enjoyed being stroked everywhere: head, back and even belly!
• The mating dance of the spatuletail hummingbird. Wow.

Some Tips for Doing Cryptic Crosswords

A woman named Theresa gives you an explanation of every type of cryptic crossword clue on her site. I have forgotten how to break down all but the anagrams and hidden words, so I’ll just show you how to do those. This will help you solve most of the puzzle.

For my example, I’m using the Toronto Star, Friday edition, puzzle # 1390 by Caroline Andrews.

The first thing to note is that your definition clue is at the very beginning or very end of the whole clue. The rest is the clue to how the word is spelled or how it sounds. So that’s what I do first, I try to figure out which end of the clue is the definition clue. I’ll try the first word or phrase and then the final word or phrase. Sometimes you don’t even have to mess with the rest of the clue. Sometimes you can just look at the length of the word, any other letters you already have, and the definition part of the clue.

One really good clue was 4 across: Put together awkward elm bases. (8)

The first thing I do when I see a word like awkward, crazy, mixed, etc. is assume we have an anagram. Then I look for which word or words are 8 letters long. That is the string I have to rearrange. Elm bases is eight letters long. So we can now break this clue into its two parts: Put together / awkward elm bases. We are looking for a word meaning “put together,” and we can find it if we rearrange the letters of “elm bases.”

I was once taught a trick that helps you see words hidden in jumbles. Write the letters in a circle! So I jotted down e-l-m-b-a-s-e-s in a circle, which made “assembles” pop out at me after a little staring.

Another good one from this puzzle was 6 Down: English earl in pastel gingham (5). When the clue says something is in something else, this often means that the word you are looking for is hidden right there before your eyes, no unscrambling necessary! I knew we were looking either for a word meaning English (unlikely, since there aren’t many synonyms for English), an English earl, or a word meaning gingham. Again, I don’t think there are any synonyms for ginham. So I looked inside “pastel ginham” to find the name of an English earl. And there it is! (Elgin)

9 Down was: “Fishiest Fish” is about vitamin T (8).  Well, I know there isn’t any vitamin T, so we are looking for a word meaning fishiest. At first I thought I should wrap the word “fish” around a T, but that didn’t give me enough letters. I did more of the puzzle and came back when I had _ H _ D _ E _ _. I knew we were looking for a superlative, so I went ahead and filled in the EST at the end.  Then I got it…SHADIEST. And only then did I realize that the clue “fish” was pointing to “shad.” Ha, ha. Sometimes I never do understand the whole clue, but I can work it out anyway.

17 Across was: Whole section of “golden tire” types (8). Can you find the division point between the definition clue and the spelling clue?  I tried it this way: Whole/section of golden tire types, meaning we’re looking for a word meaning WHOLE, and we will find it in a section of “golden tire types.”  Look through “golden tire types.” Can you find a word meaning “whole?”

That’s right: golden tire types

Well, this has just been too fun.  I still have not finished the entire puzzle from Friday. You can help me if you want!

3 down: A _ I _ S. The clue is: Sign that ocean rises around central marina (5).

16 down: A _ _.  Clue: Name last gondola left beside island (3).

21 across: I raid “Cat Dancing” and “Sea.” (8)  I only have _ _ _ _ _ T _ C.  I know the Atlantic is a sea, but don’t see how you get it from that clue.

How about 30 Across? T _ _ _ E _ _. The clue is: Returns large cheese cloth.

Sometimes “up,” “returns” and words like that can mean your word will be found in another word read backward.

Oh, well. Time for beddie.  If you like puzzles and have always wanted to try the cryptic, I hope you–like Karyn–will now give it a go.

Strange

The news I got? About another death close to me? It was my ex-husband. I don’t know more than that right now; I’m waiting for updates from mutual friends. A normal person would call. I should call my brother-in-law. But I don’t want to intrude on his grief right now.

Our divorce was amicable. We had remained friends and often helped each other out in the years after the divorce. When friends told me about a change in his life situation that had him depressed, I took him out for lunch, introducing him to Ye’s.  If a meal at Ye’s doesn’t pick you up out of a funk, well, you’re down deep.  The outing was appreciated.

But when I moved to Windsor, I cut ties, having given everyone–including him–a kiss and a hug.

I might blog more about him and our life together later.  I have him to thank for luring me to Canada, which I plan never to leave.

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There’s no arguing with gravity. My house slipper coasted across a puddle in the kitchen this morning and I fell flat on my left buttock. I’m really glad I didn’t hit my head on the way down, didn’t land on my tail bone, and apparently didn’t throw out my temperamental lower back. My homestay host better be very glad, too, that I didn’t kill myself, because the puddle was the result of her negligence… and frugality gone too far.

When I called her (she doesn’t sleep here these days) to tell her of the leaky ceiling, puddle, and my fall, she asked me to toss a towel down, then proceeded to gasp and sigh about students who point the shower head in the wrong direction when they bathe.  Her failure to acknowledge any culpability did not and does not sit well with me.

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I spent the day in a Computer Assisted Language Learning workshop.

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We got out at around 3:30, and the Bloor Cinema is just a block away from the school. Bright Star was starting at 4:00. I couldn’t resist. I needed some chill time after a day of instruction, certainly didn’t feel like tackling homework first thing when I got home, and didn’t relish the thought of hanging out in the dark, depressing old house for more hours than necessary.  Although the story was not very well chosen if my purpose was to cheer up, the 19th century English scenery was luscious, the actors beautiful, and the costumes eye candy for someone interested in sewing, texture, fabric. The movie was lovely and I’d recommend it, don’t mistake me. But the story of Keats’ life cannot really come out any way but sad.

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Grace in Small Things – 193

• It was sunny and mild today.
• The man who sat in front of me in the cinema turned around to say, “Tell me if I’m too tall.”
• I told him he was not in my way; he went to get popcorn and asked me if I would watch his stuff. Isn’t that cool? In a city this size? A stranger asked me to watch his stuff. I think that’s so cool.
• R’s striped tights.
• The way the deaths of two friends have made me even more aware of how fleeting and precious every day of life is. Not one single hour is guaranteed. Cherish each one.

Grace in Small Things – 192

• If all else fails, I can go to the library up the street and dig into a basic statistics book. (See last post re my linguistics survey.)
• Since about the second week into this course, I’ve noticed a pattern. Often there is a colour theme in our clothing so salient that you’d think we’d called each other the night before to coordinate.  I actually jot down that day’s colour at the top of my notebook page. Today someone else finally said something about it, making me feel less crazy. Today was purple day. I’ve found myself wondering if this means some of us are on the same wavelength. You know what? Instead of writing down the day’s colour, I should have been writing down the names of the students who coordinate to see if its the same people every time. Maybe it’s a sign of the degree of our bonding.
• I almost completed the entire cryptic crossword in today’s paper. I’ll save it as material for an upcoming post on how to do cryptic crosswords.
• It’s the weekend. I have a workshop all day tomorrow, but at least I have Sunday off.
• I found out today that someone else who was once very close to me died today. The Grace part isn’t that he died, of course, but that I found out immediately rather than months later through the grapevine. There is still time to order flowers or make a donation in his name, send his family a card.

Need Help with Statistics

Rats! I hate it when I am not totally self-sufficient. I am really struggling with running my survey results through various tools to find out if there is a statistically significant correlation between the answers and certain factors, such as age in one case, education in another breakdown, etc.

I found the cute little tools in Excel, like ANOVA for single factor. Or there are free calculators online that will do the Pearson product-moment formula on your data for you. And I remember enough of my university stats class to know what the p-value is, how to state a null hypothesis and that.

But no matter how much I read, I can’t seem to wrap my head around how to set up the data so the calculator is reading it in a way that renders an accurate analysis. So if any kind soul reads this, knows his/her statistics, and is willing to give me ten or fifteen minutes of his/her time, I would greatly appreciate it.  Or, if you prefer: If anyone is willing to give of their time, I would still be so grateful.

Grace in Small Things – 191

• A wet day today…wonderful excuse for putting on jazzy rain boots.
• I got a chance to help a classmate today.
• The prof was illustrating one of the strategies of second language acquisition: making up a word if you don’t know the actual word. In her example, she told of a time she needed to find a dentist but didn’t know the Thai word for it, so she asked about a tooth doctor. Fortunately, the Thai word for dentist is tooth doctor. Then another day she needed to find a vet for a wounded animal. She didn’t know the Thai word for vet, so she said animal doctor. That came out completely wrong, sounding more like “beastly doctor,” but since she was holding a hurt cat, they got the idea. Her story concluded on some linguistic point and the cat was forgotten. I had to approach her during the break to find out if the cat had survived. It had, she said. She added that she’d gotten in a world of trouble for doing that. In Thailand, vets only exist for farm animal and beasts of burden. The doctor had been furious with her for bringing in a cat. Nevertheless, since M was paying, the stray cat received treatment and survived. “It had come to my doorstep to die,” she said, “and I just couldn’t cope.”  This is a prof who is hard to read. Sometimes I think I detect a layer of warmth and kindness under her professional persona, but she keeps the latter pretty firmly in place. So that story made my heart happy.
• When the temperature drops, some pigeons come inside the subway station to keep warm.
• Back at the homestay, I asked D to get his question back out from the other night when I had not been able to explain noun clauses to him very well. “I can explain them now,” I said, since that was what we’d spent the morning on. He was getting confused about the placement of the word THAT in adjective clauses versus noun clauses. It took about half an hour, but the eureka moment finally came, and he was grateful.

Grace in Small Things – 190

• I slept in a little late since we don’t have class Wednesdays, then got down to business working on my project. I was satisfied enough with the progress I made that I allowed myself another movie. What I learned today is that only the very early showing (before noon) is half price. Ouch. But I still had a great time and enjoyed The Informant! Matt Damon should get a nomination. He absolutely became the character.
• An excellent pronunciation class tonight. We had a lot of fun figuring out stress and intonation patterns, and how to teach this topic.
• Feeling needed and valued tonight after I got back to the homestay. First I helped D with a personal crisis, then I helped J with his composition, and finally I helped M with a Facebook message to a friend.
• M and I ended up in a deep conversation about Islam. The beliefs we have in common far outweigh the differences between our respective ways of expressing those beliefs. I’m pretty sure there’s nobody else in this house with whom he would ever have opened up about his religion, and that makes me feel good.
• I handed him the Thank You card I got for him the other day when I was out, a thank you for the nice dinner the other night. M is one of those people who is a living example of what it means to be a good Muslim (or Christian, or Jew, or…). He is simply kind all the time.

Grace in Small Things – 189

• This news story (thank you, Sylvain).
• Today’s weather. It was partly cloudy with a little rain storm that passed through just as I was heading home. I decided to walk in spite of it rather than pack onto the sardine can of a bus. What a lovely walk I had in the wind preceding the quick little rain shower.
• A very fun day in class with lots of puzzles: the Metro Sudoku, the Star Sudoku, the Star crossword and THIS!!! If you try it and later want the answers, I can tell you where to find them.
• All the interesting musicians who busk in the subway stations. One dresses like a jailbird and sings stuff from the American South. Sometimes on the way to class I can hear steel drums or a marimba coming from beyond the opposite platform. Some days you can hear a cellist or a Peruvian-looking couple of men playing haunting tunes on pan pipes. What a beautiful way to start the day.
• Popping into a coffee shop to get their cheapest item (oat bar – $1.25) and being offered a free sample of their seasonal specials, gingerbread latte and eggnog latte. I don’t drink coffee, but was having difficulty staying alert during the second half of the school day today, so the tiny Dixie cup-sized dose of caffeinated beverage was just the pick-me-up I needed.

If you would like to read my previous post, just leave me a comment and I’ll tell you the password. I have begun to feel concerned that a classmate or classmates could find my blog. I don’t mind if they read it…AFTER I graduate and have left town. Ha!

Protected: Puzzling It Out

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Grace in Small Things – 188

• Getting to class early. I make myself a cup of hot chocolate and do a Sudoku puzzle. I can hear the LINC teacher in the adjacent classroom.
• Veggie chili for supper.
• The synchronicity between the grammar questions D asks me and what we are covering now in my TESL course. Of course it’s a product of the fact that I live with high level ESL students and I am in the part of the course that teaches the higher level grammar. But still, it’s pretty neat when D asks me about adjective clauses and they are still fresh in my mind from that day’s class. Instant practice opportunity, and a chance to see if I really understood it.
• Having fun trying to convert all the survey data into a meaningful report with charts, graphs and correlation testing. Thank goodness I took (and enjoyed) statistics 25 years ago.
• Sunshine!

Grace in Small Things – 187

• Having a view out my bedroom window of the bird feeder in the neighbour’s yard. I like watching the sparrows come and go. Today there was a pair of cardinals, too.
• Spying on the young woman next door when she came outside to put down food for a cat. Mmm, good strategy. Maybe a satisfied cat doesn’t try to catch sparrows.
• The nice long walk I took up Dufferin Street rather than catching the bus. The weather was mild and there are still flowers in people’s front gardens.
• This link Sylvain sent me.
• Looking forward to class tomorrow. I love being in school.

Movie: A Serious Man

The film begins with the Rashi quote, “Receive with simplicity everything that happens to you.” I can’t believe that was said by a Jewish rabbi and not by a Buddhist monk.  In fact, I came away from A Serious Man feeling as if I’d just spent two hours immersed in the tenets of Buddhism.

I’ll admit I have a thing for Coen brothers movies, though I didn’t discover them for myself until Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou? I then had to backtrack and rent The Big Lebowski. There are a few on our TO-RENT list still.

A Serious Man is about a mid-western physics professor just trying to manage a simple middle class existence. He earns a good enough living for his family, sends his kids to Hebrew school, minds his own business. But he’s accosted on all fronts by the vagaries of life and the glitches and hitches that come with all our human relationships: those with our children, spouses, siblings, bosses, coworkers. When everything starts to unravel around him, he seeks counsel from his rabbi.

The thing is, there are no answers. The film does an absolutely brilliant job of holding that tension between our questions and the the place where we would like the answers to those questions to be, a place where instead we find only the grand mystery. Can we stop looking for easy, comforting answers long enough to be in awe of the mystery? I’m not sure that’s the movie’s question, but that’s my question.

Leaving the deeper level of this film aside for a moment, some things I enjoyed were:

• The picture they paint for us of 1967 St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis where the Coen brothers actually grew up.
• The junior rabbi’s lesson on the beauty to be found in a parking lot.
• The introductory scene set in 19th century Poland where Yiddish was spoken for a good five minutes. Where did they find actors fluent in Yiddish? Did the actors have to learn Yiddish for the roles?
• The disclaimer at the very end, after all the credits had rolled, that said no Jews had been harmed in the making of this movie.

One question I am left with is: why did the Jews in the film say “goys” as the plural of “goy?” I am absolutely sure the plural of goy is goyim, and until today I’d never heard anyone anglicize the plural like that. Hearing that was like listening to fingernails on a chalkboard.

Of course you don’t get nice and tidy resolution at the end of this film. No Hollywood endings here, folks, which is exactly why I love Joel and Ethan’s films. They rescue us from a sea of stories not brave enough to stray from the good guy/bad guy mythology. This film is about our naive search for black and white, a search that causes us to miss the beautiful and precious grey…which is really all there is and all there ever was.

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Happy Hallowe’en

I ran out of treats.

I never dreamed I would get more trick-or-treaters here than I did when I lived in Waterloo. There I was on a busy street where people didn’t really get to know one another. This neighbourhood does not feel TO ME like the type where parents are going to let their kids go around. It feels TO ME more like the type of hood where parents pack up the kids and take them to the Hallowe’en function at the local school or community centre, or over to aunt what’s her name’s house.

So I only got five boxes of Quaker bars at five bars per box, each box a different flavour.

I was so wrong. Parents came by with little ones, and teenagers were out in droves. What can you do but roll your eyes at the ones who don’t even bother with a costume? They just want the goods.

Fortunately I got to see some little sweeties before I had to turn out the porch light and call it a night.

One tiny girl of about three was so precious in her glittery pink costume. I got down on one knee to hold out the tray for her so she could choose among chocolate, vanilla or strawberry. Then I realized she didn’t know the ropes, so I picked one out for her and held it out.

“Say trick-or-treat,” her mom prompted softly. The wide-eyed child clutching mom’s pant leg could only stare. “Hold open your bag, honey,” the mom tried again.

We managed to get a treat into the child’s sack, at which point mom told her daughter to say thank you.

We stared at the child expectantly for a few moments before realizing the poor dear was feeling more uncomfortable by the second.

“Say thank you, sweetie,” Mom tried again.

“I can’t,” she told her mom in a shy voice.

“You’re our first house,” the mom explained to me. I smiled and waved as they retreated. I guess the little ballerina was not too keen on the idea of interacting with a score of large strangers, one after another.

Did all of you have a nice Halloween?

We Learned the Word “Slimy”

I caught on about a week ago to the fact that our host had no Hallowe’en plans for the homestay. I ate my oatmeal and provided all the nods and uh huhs as she chattered on about going to visit her sister this weekend. She assured me it would be okay, as we could just turn out the lights and not answer the door if the bell rang.

I kept my feelings and thoughts about this to myself.  I keep a lot of thoughts and feelings to myself here because I know I am only here for four more weeks, and I know she can be a bit sensitive when any of us is less than perfectly pleased with how she runs the homestay. I also figured that if it was important to me to offer the students a Canadian holiday experience, then I could take care of the details.

Some nights I don’t see all of the students at supper. They have lives outside this house, late classes, library study sessions, and keep different hours. But I almost always see my buddy D, who never fails to pepper me with questions about English grammar and idioms. I asked him if he wanted to carve a jack-o-lantern, and he seemed quite keen to do so.

So yesterday I picked up a little pumpkin for under $2.  This morning our host saw our new breakfast table centrepiece and asked me if I knew where it had come from. I told her I’d bought it. She asked me if it was a cooking pumpkin. I said no, it was a carving pumpkin.  She started to fret: if we set out a jack-o-lantern, we might get trick-or-treaters. I told her that was okay, we would answer the door.

Tonight I told the three guys who were having dinner in the kitchen to knock on my door when they were ready to carve the pumpkin. D came to get me when they were ready.

We were the model of cooperation: we each sketched a face design and then we voted for the best face. J’s design won, so he drew it on the pumpkin with a pen before leaving for his Hallowe’en party.  D and G and I took turns carving, and D–who is obsessive–was more than willing to keep scraping the inside of the gourd with a spoon until it was clean all over and flat on the bottom.

All the time, D was interrupting our progress to take pictures to send back to his family in Korea.

I taught them the word “slimy,” which made them both rush over to their laptops to type, asking me how it is spelled. You can see why I want to work with ESL students for a living, can’t you?

As they were putting the finishing touches on the face, I scurried up and down the stairs of this big, old house searching for a votive candle and some matches. I found both.

D lit the candle and placed it inside, managing not to burn himself.

“Now what?” D asked.

“Now we see how it looks with the lights off,” I said.  Each of the boys reached for a light switch.

“Whoa, scary!” D exclaimed when he saw the glowing orange face. He started snapping pictures, showing us each one on his camera’s screen after he shot it. He promised to send me one, which I’ll post if he does.

After the pictures, we blew out the candle and put the jack-o-lantern on the porch for tomorrow. I warned the boys that we might not even get a single trick-or-treater tomorrow. “Parents might be worried about H1N1,…and in some neighbourhoods, kids just don’t go out. So I can’t promise you that we’ll see any costumed kids. But we’ll do what we can. At dusk, we’ll turn on the porch light and light the jack-o-lantern.  And hope!”

D thanked me about seven times for doing that with them.

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GiST 185

• Sitting with my Iranian friends at lunch to hear recited and learn to recite a stanza from a Sohrab Sepehri poem that R had written out for me the day before in Farsi script. “Zendegi khali neest…” God, what a beautiful language.
• Delicious white polenta that our homestay host made for me. She is a good cook.
• The free Metro newspaper with a daily sudoku puzzle. Today’s was not so easy; yay! AND I found a cryptic crossword in the Star. Double yay. I hope the teacher doesn’t see me doing these (I try to be discreet) and get her feelings hurt, but they do help me stay awake when she’s covering something I’ve already studied.
• Finding a wee fig on the tree out back just big enough and ripe enough to eat. Ok, I know…it’s nowhere near what Lynn gets in her California garden, but I can dream.
• The look on D’s face when we lit the candle, put the top back on the pumpkin and shut off all the lights. Priceless.

Grace in Small Things – 184 (In Context)

Today, instead of just listing the items of Grace, I’m going to interlace them with a regular blog post.

It’s not rosy all the time. Sometimes I don’t take time for a regular blog post and only post the Graces list, but that doesn’t mean that the stuff on the list is the only stuff going on. Sometimes there are things I choose not to report because I don’t want to dwell on the negativity and contribute my energy to its momentum.

At the same time I don’t want you to get the idea that counting the Graces daily means sugar-coating everything.

Last night I had an exchange with my sweetheart that I’m not proud of.

Sometimes I slip–legacy of my purple bracelet notwithstanding–and complain about something. Or start down that slippery slope toward gossip. Toward criticizing. At times my mood tanks, my patience wears thin, or I indulge in old habits that are on their way out but not completely extinguished.

I’m glad, though, that I catch myself and redirect my focus from head trips to mindfully inhabiting the moment so much more often than before.

• After I’d finished my lunch, there was still a good 30 minutes of break left, so I decided to wash the dirty coffee mugs in the sink. Normally people wash their own, but during our morning break the water supply had been cut off, so I knew those cups had not been left there out of laziness. R, my new friend from Iran, came up to me and said, “You’re so kind.”
• R went on to report a conversation she’d had with her husband the night before about me, of all things. I listened to her description of me and reflected: I really am becoming the person I always wanted to be.

And that brings me to a not so rosy point. The blind spot is a mother____. On an intellectual level, I know full well that when something someone else does really peeves me, the chances are very high that I have a small corner of my psyche where that very trait or behaviour is hiding from me.

And I’ve been using this knowledge to identify the things lurking in my blind spots and–one by one–work on them. So it was painful and extremely unsettling when a friend shined a light on a really nasty behaviour of mine recently. She didn’t say anything, so it took thick-headed me a pretty long time to notice her pattern of silence that eventually got my attention and told me that I was being a jerk.

It was so ironic, like having a mirror held up to me for the first time. I DO THAT? Oh, God. That’s the one thing that disgusts me the most when I see it in others.

Argh.

I had the tool at my disposal all along, had I cared to note the pattern. It had the potential to alert me to this awful tendency, this shameful behaviour. I only had to look at what drove me craziest in others, the one thing I was least able to tolerate and be accepting of in friends or acquaintances. But I guess the psyche can be pretty clever when it comes to protecting us from our own areas of ugliness.

Yikes.

It’s been several weeks now. At first I felt so raw and disoriented, I could not possibly have blogged about it at that time. I felt shame. I felt like I’d been walking around for years with this slimy, grey creature writhing out of a hole in the middle of my forehead–one that instantly ducked back inside a split second before I turned to glance in a mirror. Everyone could see it but me. And nobody had ever before had the decency to point it out to me.

Okay, that’s not true. It HAD been pointed out to me by another friend a few years ago, so I started trying to keep it better under wraps. I’d like to think I did some work in that area, didn’t just get better at masking my true colours. But in a way, I let it slink back into the shadows. When this side of me would emerge, I would often manage to twist things in my mind so that I didn’t have to look with honesty at what I was really doing.

YUCK.

Yuck, yuck…YUCK!

• Tonight one of the young men staying here took all 8 of us out for an amazing meal. We gasped and sputtered and tried handing him our $25 each after he paid the whole bill, but he wouldn’t hear of it. As I’ve gotten to know him, he has single-handedly opened my mind in an area where I was, I’m sorry to say, quite bigoted. In my university days, after only a few experiences with some of his countrymen, I made up my mind about people from his nation.  Whoa, do I ever have a long way to go. Good thing my teacher training includes an anti-discrimination workshop. I’m looking forward to it.
• Usually as soon as I have finished eating, I get fidgety and want to stand up. But tonight I was enjoying myself so much with the students that I sat there for over two hours. Much of the night was spent on English. (New vocabulary: tongs, crème brûlée, clear the table.) We tossed around new idioms (“my eyes were bigger than my stomach”) and talked about where each vowel is formed in the mouth. In the street and on the subway, we were still drilling the z sound, “bed” versus “bad,” and animatedly chattering about differences between British, Canadian and American English.
• Sylvain accepted my apology.

I guess all this is just to say that becoming more conscious is hard work. It’s a long row to hoe, and you never really reach the end.

Grace in Small Things – 183

• Indulging in the nostalgia of a Japanese moment, I offered my seat to a middle-aged Asian gentleman, and he accepted it.
• Not sure what happened to cause the stoppage, but the TTC took my subway train and the one after it out of service. Rather than wait with the throngs of people for a third train, I decided to walk. It later became apparent that there was to be no third train, either, as a couple hundred people soon spilled into the streets trying to hail taxis. Why is this a Grace? Because of the lovely walk I would otherwise not have taken.
• I saw a park where the trees were turning brilliant colours and the grass was hidden by a carpet of wet, fallen maple leaves.
• I saw Korean fruit markets, Portuguese bakeries, Italian coffee shops and a coin laundromat pumping Suzanne Vega into the street.
• A Caribbean woman sitting on a bench asked me ever so politely if she could ask me for a dime. I gave her a loonie as a sort of “most polite request for money in the city of Toronto” award, and she gave me some advice for bringing good energy into my home.

Grace in Small Things – 182

• More gifts of chocolate! A different classmate, A, brought me two cubes of Xocai chocolate from home so I could taste it.
• I dreamt about a large bear that I thought was going to harm my mother. I intercepted it as fast as I could and tried to get it to chase me instead of her. It did come after me and leave her alone, then clamped down on my middle and ring fingers. But the bear only held my fingers in its mouth, did not bite or harm me. What a cool dream!
• I am happy to be going to bed early tonight. I have to get up early to observe an ESL class in a private school tomorrow.
• Taped to the walls around the school are little maple leaves cut out of construction paper. On each one, a LINC student in the level one class has written a reason they came to Canada. I love walking around and reading the words on these paper leaves, things like: “to do you choice” and “freedom & big garden.”
• I felt close to my mom today, as I was wearing a scarf of hers.