Say Grace or The Adventures of a Simpleton

In recent years (when many people think we shall soon see the end of the world!) there has arisen a disease among humble and arrogant folk [that makes them claim their religion is the right one].(1)

A long time ago, when I was a child in the 70s, I didn’t know that people believed in something called God. We didn’t mention God in our house. We had several books on Greek sculpture and Renaissance art. I remember Mom pointing out Zeus. I thought God meant marble statue. When I compare myself to children today, I was a simpleton. Okay, to be fair, I avoided conflict. I heard people joke on television that politics and religion should never be discussed, so I avoided these topics. It was so simple. I thought Easter was about hiding eggs and Christmas was about trees. It was a vacation on the calendar like Thanksgiving, Victoria Day (Firecracker day), or Dominion Day (Summer Firecracker day). Beyond that I had no opinion.

In the 70s, we moved from Mississauga to the country. At that time, the country was anything beyond Trafalgar Road in Oakville, Ontario. And we were far from civilization in the rural routes of farms and forests.

One day, a friend from school invited me for dinner to her family’s farm. I was only seven years old. I think they were a family of 13 children. Large dairy farm, huge dining table, lots of trophies and ribbons for best cow, best in show, best jumper (that was the oldest daughter, horseback riding), best track-and-field (all of them), best piano recital (middle-child, my friend). These were top-notch people. But they were a rough crowd, more feral than their docile cows in the pasture. The cows were grass-fed, the family corn-fed. Competitive with each other, snarling and hissing in their own sibling language.

We sat down to a dinner of potatoes and roast beef. The father of the family turned to me.
“Does your family say Grace?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” I said, trying to sound comfortable, initiated with this overwhelming family, but truly, I had no idea what he was talking about.
One of the many sons yelled across the table, “Yeah, make her say Grace, Dad!”

I honestly thought they wanted me to say the word Grace, so I said it as a question, Grace?
They thought I was nervous but I didn’t understand. The only Grace I knew was a Portuguese girl in Mississauga. I looked around the table. There would be no social cues, no reading between the trophies. So this young father (he was probably 35 at the time) thanked the Lord for the food on the table. I looked around the room. Everyone had their eyes closed.
Who was Lord? Who was this man talking to?
And what happened to Grace? Was he telling Grace to tell Lord?
It’s so funny now to think I didn’t understand, but I had never really attended church. Once, when I was five, I remember going to a church in Mississauga wearing white gloves and a frilly white dress in May. (We were carrying Easter baskets.)

My parents were old people compared to this farm family. By the time I came into being my parents had long given up religion. They just assumed I knew enough. Strange, considering the only bible we had was a small black book in one of my mother’s dresser drawers, stuffed under some perfume boxes, jewelry, and what I learned later was a diaphragm. I wasn’t a reader. And when I was older and received the Narnia books, I just thought it was a pretty fairy tale. Aslan was a lion. Edmund was an idiot. Why all the drama with the sacrifice? A fairy tale. Close the book and go outside.

One hot July day, I came back inside. I had heard friends talking about Sunday school. I was curious. They seemed to have fun. I stepped into a church on one of those unpaved concession roads. Parents were fanning themselves with handouts and hats. My friends had made paper crafts. They pranced across a stage showing off pictures they had drawn about the world as we perceived it and the heavenly world. One girl had a picture of a gorilla and when she turned the paper 90 degrees, it spelled her name. I liked that trick. That impressed me. Other children talked about someone called their Savior. I told my mother later, “It looks like they have fun, but I think religion seems to be mixed up in it. Someone called Jesus.”
“Well, that’s what Sunday school is about,” my mother told me.
“Is that a good idea?” I said, but my tone was more like, “Is that safe?”

I wanted to know if it made sense for me to go. Was I supposed to learn something? Did my friends know something I didn’t?
“You can go if you want,” my mother said, “but we’re not Baptists.”
“What’s a Baptist?”
My much older sister walked in, hearing our conversation, “They’re fanatics.”
It was all in her tone.
“So, I shouldn’t go?”
“Try reading for change.” She was the one who later bought me the Narnia books.

At school, in the fall, I made a new friend. At the parent-teacher’s night my new friend’s mother declared that we could be friends because she heard we were registered Catholics.
My new friend, Mary, attended catechism. I learned that several other girls I played with at recess attended catechism as well. I wanted to go. And so one Sunday, my mother dropped me off at the town’s local Catholic Church. An older woman, a volunteer, instructed me to follow the other children downstairs to a hall. We sat on plastic chairs in a circle around a middle-aged woman. She held a postcard of the nativity scene. She pointed to “the baby Jesus” and then to “who’s that? That’s Mary,” and then to, “look at the star, do you see the star?” I feigned interest by shifting my body forward in my chair, trying to get a closer look at the postcard, all the while, wishing my mother had not dropped me off. This inane catechism lasted an hour. Very bad baby-sitting for me, unbelievably ineffective proselytizing. How did this Catholic Church keep anyone? Here I was hungry for information. Maybe my sister was wrong about the Baptists—at least they were doing crafts.
“So how did it go?” my mother asked me when I closed the car door.
“The treat us like babies.”

I later found out that I had been put in the lowest catechism group because I had never been exposed to any Catholic teaching. Bad decision. I never went back. Did Mary remain my friend? Well, she invited me to her birthday party several months later and I had made other friends by then. As for Grace in Mississauga, I have no idea what became of her or what happened to the large farm family of 13 children. And to this day, I still feel a little nervous when I dine with friends who say grace, but they know better than to ask me. Grace?

Hello again!

My excuse for not posting more blog entries this summer is that I've been very busy with beekeeping. I have also been thinking about a new topic: Life growing up with two highly educated by very strange parents—Russian mother who had survived and escaped Communist Russia and destructive narcissistic father who had escaped the Communist Ukraine, both almost 60 years ago.


I realized that I had focused on so many negative aspects that I had completely missed the bizarre comedy that was our life. So I get to write the comedy and you (Dear Reader) and I both get to laugh. I am also including my own mishaps and misunderstandings in my youth because when your perception of the world is influenced by damaged people, you don't always understand what's happening around you. And as I’ve told friends, I am no moral exemplar.


The first posting in this series is entitled, Say Grace or The Adventures of a Simpleton.

Derrida and the Mermaids

I read my novel again this weekend. I am amazed at how separate it is from me even though it is my distilled experience of Brazil. The novel became what I ultimately wanted of it— a story unto itself. I remember how at times, during certain tumultuous relationships in my life, new obscure chapters arose. I was trying to please someone else and completely ignoring the natural progression of characters in the story. Thankfully, I threw out those wretched chapters when the relationships were over. What was I thinking? (I wasn't thinking.) In the end, it was a relief to cut 5000 words here and there and never look back.

But imagine cutting 500 PAGES of your work. I attended a summer writing workshop at Humber in 2002. I recall Nino Ricci talking about his first novel, and how it was originally 700 pages and if I remember correctly, it involved a lot of references to Jacques Derrida. When Ricci finally examined the manuscript, he found that the story was only about 200 pages and didn’t require Derrida’s approval. Ricci’s novel became Lives of the Saints and it won him a Governor General's award.

All those words. That's a lot of muck. It's like diving in a Canadian Lake. You navigate with a compass because the silt is all stirred up.

You must trust the compass because it's so easy to get turned around. I wasn't following any compass when I wrote those extraneous, superfluous chapters. I ended up at the wrong end of the lake. And it's hard to get out of the lake with all your heavy scuba gear.

So the book is done. It's up to the literary agent now. (The new agent.) I'm hoping she uses a hovercraft to skim across the lake to get my manuscript to the right publishers. And I must don my scuba gear again. It will be a different experience this time writing a new book, more like the clear water of the Caribbean—over 100 feet of visibility. I’ll still use the compass of course, but no more crazy mermaids stirring up the silt.

30,000 bees and the training documentation

I recently installed 30,000 bees into two hives. About 3 pounds of bees per hive. I wasn't stung once.

A week later I went to back to check on the hives--one colony was a little smaller, not quite 3 pounds, so I wanted to make sure the queen was alive and well and reigning over her brood. I took apart the hive boxes, found the queen in one frame and again, I wasn't stung. Such friendly bees.




But it’s intimidating when you first open the box and see a frame covered in bees.




You take a deep breath and gather your courage because they can smell the adrenaline coursing through your veins behind that beekeeper's veil.


I'm trying to figure out some potential training material. I feel like 60 pounds of bees have arrived on my desk. The PDFs look the same but the reigning messages are different. We have the marketing bee, the motivating bee, the suddenly-so-much-advanced-programming-detail bee. QJulia set bee-- that one took a lot of royal jelly to rear into a queen. I've just spotted the reductions bee and the familiar Control-flow bee. Okay, this is a messy hive.


I'm now thinking that the new user guide table of contents should be used to rear new queens. Let’s turn those topics into slides with voice over. Yes, we can reuse some of the slides from the PDFs but we’ll disinfect them first like old bee equipment. The user guide table of contents has the makings of a fully-functioning hive. No one wants to get stung. My work is done here.

Fear of Sharks

Six people are killed by sharks annually but in that same time twenty-six million sharks are killed by people.

In previous drafts of my novel, a shark enters the waters of the final chapter. The shark indicates that the main character has overcome a major obstacle in her life-- a portent of positive change.


However, the final draft of the novel has a different ending, for various reasons of which I can't disclose just yet. So no shark. The new ending works well, but I'm partial to the shark. Perhaps I’ll allow alternate endings.

I'm learning to scuba dive, so sharks are on my mind.

Recent lessons in scuba diving have included:

Losing one's mask underwater--everything is suddenly blurry and your nose is exposed to the water, but you're still breathing from the regulator (mouth piece).

Losing air -- the instructor turning the tank valve to the point of no pressure. You immediately signal you’re out of air. A diver equated the sudden loss of air to sucking on a McDonald's milkshake through a Tim Horton's plastic stir stick.
My favorite test, the one that scared me the most, was a failed regulator--air is forced out of your regulator at 3000 pounds per square inch. (The garden hose/fire hose pressure comparison). You have to tilt your head; otherwise the pressure will blast the mask off your face. And with the regulator away from your mouth, you sip the air bubbles. Naturally, it feels like you’re going to gulp water and choke and drown. You need to learn this because you could be a 100 feet down--it's not like you'll hold your breath and swim to the surface in time. After a few tries in a shallow pool, you've got the technique, but you really understand the fear of drowning. And you really understand how it's vitally important that you stay calm. Vitally important.

I think scuba diving is preparing me to stay calm for when the regulator, or the mask, or the valve changes for the novel. Breathe deeply because there might be rejection (or acceptance) of the novel. I might need to find a publisher myself. I might need to self-publish. The fear won’t be from the shark, it will be in me, in how I manage this sudden new reality. Sip the bubbles and surface slowly.

(Shark photos)

King Lear and the Queen Bee

I returned to the old family property--now owned by my cousin. Lovely forest and stream and pond, but lots of mixed feelings. I went to find remnants of beekeeping equipment: supers, frames, and queen excluders.

I'm starting an apiary for a community garden. I say remnants because my father kept bees and like all his tools, anything he owned, he discarded without regard for posterity.

My father dropped things where his mind became bored. His fingers released the level or the hammer, letting it fall to the ground because he saw a piece of plastic in the distance that interested him more. He threw empty paint cans, carburetors, lawnmower engines, water heaters, scrap metal into the forest. Scattered them like seeds.

I found stacks of bee boxes near the pond--all rotted. At one hundred dollars a box, not including frames, about 2,000 dollars worth of equipment discarded. Found some boxes beneath fir trees, stuck together with resin and pine needles. Out of the 35 hives I managed to piece together 2 hives with frames. I had to climb up a pyramid of wood and metal in an old shack, nestled in the forest, to find the queen excluder, which lay dusty and gummed with beeswax on a top rafter.

When I return to the property (rarely now), I'm angry at my father's legacy. He was careless with his life and careless with his relationships. He was a destructive narcissist-- a terrible personality disorder: destructive to spouse, children, even the land. I feel compelled to write a novel about growing up with such a parent so that I can save some future boy or girl from this King Lear.

But I don't know if I will because I'm with Virginia Woolf on this one: Rage can deform and twist books. That's what she thought of Charlotte Bronte's writing, a writer who "had more genius in her than Jane Austen." But Jane Austen was brilliant says Woolf because "Here was a woman about the year 18oo writing without hate, without bitterness, without fear, without protest, without preaching. That was how Shakespeare wrote..." (1)

So no bitterness, no preaching. And I'm one who likes a bit of comedy with my tragedy. It's hard to find some comedy in this narcissist's tale. There's a reason King Lear is called a tragedy. It's a heavy burden, like the actual experience and who wants to relive that.

I have to clean and sterilize the bee boxes. It will be a relief to handle the bees myself, no frenetic King around fueling the rage of the Queen bee and her colony.

The Sparrow and the Uirapuru-Laranja

When I lived in Brazil I was asked what birds we have in Canada. I recall one Brazilian asking whether we have these little common brown birds. She was pointing to the ubiquitous house sparrow. Of course, the answer was yes, we have sparrows.

The sparrow made me feel at home in Brazil and that was what he was intended to do. Sparrows are native to Eurasia and North Africa, but during the 19th century, “settlers of European origin intentionally introduced the house sparrow to North and South America, southern Africa, Australia and new Zealand.” Their hope was that the sparrow would control insects and “create a familiar landscape for immigrants."(1)

I mention a sparrow in my novel set in Brazil. He flutters between the delicate black capped heron, the engineering Rufus Horneo, and the squawking Hyacinth macaw.

Yesterday, I found a little children's book about a sparrow written in Ukrainian (I have a few Russian, Ukrainian, German, and French) story books. I read the first page: "The little sparrow sings a little song 'cheev, cheev'.” He has six brothers--guaranteed mischief. I have to read the story to find out more. I'm curious if the illustrator shows the sparrows taking a dirt bath--always amusing.

Sparrows are everywhere. When in Washington D.C. recently, I viewed some Japanese screens at the Freer and Sackler galleries. I was drawn to a one-foot square screen that was originally used as a cupboard cover. With loose brush strokes the artist had recreated the flight of a little sparrow.

The sparrow is plain compared to a cardinal or blue jay here in Canada. And in Brazil, well, the contrast is enormous. Its juxtaposition in that landscape is interesting because it makes me think about my novel. Many years ago, in one of my many drafts, I actually had the metmorph (main character) descend from metamorphs on both sides of her family. It was a little too much, but it's easy to get caught up in an idea. Nino Ricci told me, too many metamorphs diminish the impact of the main metamorph. So I needed a lot of sparrows and one exotic bird.

(One exotic bird: UIRAPURU-LARANJA (Pipra fasciicauda) Band-tailed Manakin. Photo by
Haroldo Palo Jr.)

Another hole?

Tech writers do not hold copyright to the documentation they produce for corporations. Writers can be proud of their work but not attached. To a degree, the same is true for an author producing a piece of fiction. The story is more important than the author. Authors have been told to kill their darlings because these are little side stories, embellishments that add little to the narrative. Readers trip over these like jutting roots of trees across a worn path. Readers are caught up in the story, looking up and around, not down at the path. Trip, tumble, and they've left that imaginative realm. The book closes shut.

Writing for so many years has taught me how to separate from the final product, the final manuscript. When you're working for a start-up company though, you're documenting someone else's creation and creators can be very attached to their products.

Some days, it's very hard to convince owners that their product needs more information associated with it. Strangely, basic documentation like a glossary can be met with unusual resistance. As a tech writer, you're thinking of the customer, wanting to make sure she doesn't trip, or worse, fall down some hole (missing information).

The resistance can last months. Now to an author and writer, this can seem absurd, but to a creative person, it's easy to recognize that attachment. You created the work, only you know what it needs. But the work must stand on its own. No one will be around to explain, except for the documentation.

The White Rabbit of Highly Technical Writing

"The tech writer was not a bit hurt, and she jumped up on her feet in moment: she looked up, but it was still dark in her cubicle; before her was another long passage, and the White Rabbit as still in sight, hurrying down it. There was not a moment to be lost: away went the tech writer like the wind, and was just in time to hear the White Rabbit say, as he turned the corner, "Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!"

In a highly technical environment (with an art history background -- oh my brain!) understanding how the Master product works can be like chasing the White Rabbit. First you're surprised by the rabbit. (Really, a rabbit can do that? Is that useful?) And then you get used to the idea. (White Rabbit, okay.) And when you're ready to understand the rabbit, the rabbit bounds down the hole and so begins the chase. You feel you never grasp the information because you're not an engineer or a computer scientist or even a mathematician. But it's too late, you've tumbled down the the hole.

Welcome to the wonderland of API docs. It's not about simple GUI procedures.
1. From the Grand Duchess menu, select Off-with-her-head.

Your topics can be about multi-core processors, various optimizations, the Kaczmarz method, a simple iterative algebraic reconstruction algorithm. (My recent course in game mathematics has been invaluable.) So you then take an Intro C++ course and install Visual C++ 2005 Express Edition and write your first little program and no, it's not “Hello World” because you are a tech writer, it's "Woe Is I."

You try to apply how you study art and literature to understanding technology. You apply how you create your own work (fiction) and essays. You apply your own understanding of Waiting For Godot – your favorite play. You try the magazine writing approach of who when why what where. But with API, these are always surface questions, and the developer tells you something else that is important for the user to know. And then it's back to the audience. My audience needs more details! You think today you've got the White Rabbit by the tail, but he turns down another tunnel, you're bumping behind, having to let go because you're smaller now – you took that pill (Intro C++) and the White Rabbit is stronger than you.
(Just ask Alice.)

Novel Writing

When working on my novel, The Metamorph of Sao Joaquim, (still with my literary agent), I heard the main character's voice only in Portuguese. The setting of the novel is Brazil. So it makes sense that the story could be in Portuguese, but of course, I was writing the novel in English. Every other character I heard was in English. But the main character's voice was so strong in Portuguese that I was worried I'd be translating her dialogue into English. It would sound like that recent film adaptation of novel, Love in the Time of Cholera. Filmed in English, it felt false with the Spanish accents. I would have preferred the cadence of the Spanish language. (And I'm biased because I prefer the stories and style of Pedro Almodóvar films.)

So how did I get my character to express herself in English? Through cutting the first four chapters. The original first chapters were very cinematic. (Ocean at Santos beach, image begins in the water -- little did I know I'd end up liking scuba diving.) The reader at literary agency liked the cinematic opening, but Wayson Choy felt the book was stronger starting at chapter 4. And I felt he was right. This led to a lot of reorganizing and rewriting. And after so many years working on this novel (so many drafts), it was not unusual for me to suddenly cut 5000 words and write something completely new.

Starting the book at chapter 4 provided room for the main character to flourish. Suddenly she was far more integrated and her voice was in English. She became more like the Brazilians I knew when I lived in Brazil in 1983.

Previously I had used the main character as a device to move the story from A to B. I was also afraid to find out who the character really was. I didn't want bits of me in her. If I put myself in, my personality, my reactions would dictate the storyline versus letting the story unfold as it should. And this novel is not about my life in Brazil. It's a twenty year distillation of the red soil, the blue sky, and the desires of the people I knew and cared about in the town called Sao Joaquim.