What I Miss About Libraries

 

 

Ah! The feeling of a hardbound book in my hands! The rows upon rows of texts, stacked five high! The quiet, studious atmosphere!

If you’re like me, you are surely missing your local library. With the pandemic, my library has been closed for months. It seems like an eternity. In these days of Zoom meetings and digital readers, here are a few things I miss about libraries:

 1)      Librarians: Yes, Google helps me track down reference materials, but search engines are only as smart as I. Many an instance, librarians have taken my searches in directions I didn’t imagine and found surprising answers to my questions. And I can have a conversation with a librarian; the computer remains mute.

2)      A place to concentrate: I write at home. But, like most writers, I need to get out regularly for the creative juices to flow. At home, distractions abound: the television, family members and even the dog. At the library, it is just me and my thoughts, and ideas flow so much more easily.

3)      Conversations. This might contradict the previous point, but one of the things I enjoy about libraries are the random conversations with interesting persons. Yes, they can be distractions if overdone, but are refreshing and energizing if done intelligently.

         4)      Cozy corners and enchanting places: This is especially true with old libraries, with their long wooden tables and reading chairs hidden in unexpected places. These places transport me into a mood where, unsurprisingly, I become easily absorbed in my reading.

        5)      Heading home with a stack of books: Somehow, there is a special feeling of contentment and fulfilment in spending a couple of hours in the library, wandering through the stacks, exploring dozens of texts, choosing the appropriate ones, checking them out and planning which one to read first.

             Hopefully these dreadful pandemic restrictions will end soon, and we can all get back to our normal lives. And with any luck, my local library will open soon!

 

            Mohan Ashtakala (www.mohanauthor.com) is the author of "The Yoga Zapper," a fantasy, and "Karma Nation" a literary romance. He is published by Books We Love (www.bookswelove.com)

The Importance of Kindness...by Sheila Claydon

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I'm not a great planner when I start writing a new book. I just have a sketchy overview of what I want to achieve, and an ending. I trust the characters to take care of themselves as far as the rest of it is concerned because I've learned that, for me at least, too much planning kills the story. So I allow my hero and heroine  to lead and I just follow them.

Such a laissez-faire attitude can only get me so far though, so before I start I have to have a very clear view of who my characters are. This means a mind's eye view of how they look and dress. An understanding of their temperament and their ambitions. And most importantly, how they feel about themselves and about those around them. Although very little of this will be described in the book it shows in their actions and speech. 

With this in mind (and a new book incubating) I've been thinking about my heroes and heroines this week and have decided that the one attribute they all have is kindness. Like everyone, my main characters can be temperamental, short-tempered, judgemental, miserable, the list goes on, but none of them is ever deliberately unkind. On occasion, some of the secondary characters are, of course, because conflict makes a story, but even they mostly have redeeming features.

In my book Loving Ellen, the story only works because Millie, the heroine, is kind. It's not a soppy sort of kindness though. She isn't afraid of confrontation or disagreement. Underpinning her every action is an inbuilt kindness that it transformational, however, and for this I genuinely like and admire her.

I like all the heroes and heroines in my other books too. Some more than others, but they are all people I would enjoy meeting in real life.

Thinking about them has made me think about kindness too. And about how we all treat one another nowadays, especially on social media. What is it that makes some people empathetic and kind, and others spiteful and vindictive, or just outspoken and uncaring? Is it their upbringing, an inbuilt part of their character, or is it because they can hide behind the safety of an anonymous name online? Whatever it is, it is sad, and it overshadows the acts and words of the many who still believe in kindness. 

We don't have to agree on anything to still be kind to one another.

Mothering

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My first memory as a reader was of my mother reading a wonderfully illustrated copy of The Wizard of Oz when I was suffering with the mumps. I was so enthralled that I forgot all about my achy body. Ah, the power of story!

I dedicated my first published novel to my mom, because the best thing the novel taught me was how much I loved her ... as much as the heroine loved her mother. Ah, the power of storytelling!

I lost my mom this month. She died peacefully just shy of her 102nd birthday.  

Conceived during the last world pandemic, she grew up in the Devil's Kitchen of New York City in an apartment full of love but very little money. She married my dad at 17 and became a professional mother of 10, grandmother of 29, and great grandmother of 20. The youngest is our little Desmond and they are 100 years apart. 

My mom's name was Kitty. She had many adventures. Her life is full of story.

Spring Break

 

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During this past winter of staying home, I looked forward to a spring getaway with my husband Will and our son Matt. With travel outside of Canada and our province of Alberta restricted this month, we booked a four-night stay in Canmore, an hour a half drive from our Calgary home and just outside the entrance to Banff National Park. 

Easter Monday, we drove directly to Banff and ate our turkey sandwiches on a bench by the Bow River. Despite the sunshine, a breeze made the 3 degrees Celsius (37.4 F) temperature cool for sitting out. We soon warmed up on our hike up Tunnel Mountain. Sections of mud and ice typical of early spring made us glad we'd brought our cleats. At the top, we rested on Muskoka chairs half buried in snow and enjoyed the panoramic views of Banff. 

Day two of our trip was sunny and warmer. Will and Matt went skiing at Lake Louise, while I spent a summer-like day in Canmore. In the morning, I checked out the local stores and bought a salad and bread for our lasagna dinner. My afternoon walk followed part of the town's extensive trail network. The rest of the day I read on our balcony, looking out at the Three Sisters and HaLing mountain peaks. Will and Matt had a perfect ski day -- sunny, warm, uncrowded, fresh snow from a weekend snowfall. I didn't envy them, since I'd preferred my lazy time.   

                                              Balcony view from our AirBnb apartment

Lake Louise ski hill

The weather turned cooler on our third day and cloud mingled with sun. We stayed close to Canmore and hiked up to Grassi Lakes, an icy trail we couldn't have managed without cleats. At the top, we were surprised and pleased to find the ice on the lakes had melted to reveal their clear, green colour. After lunch, we walked the riverside portion of the trail I'd done the previous day and continued farther. We talked about returning later this spring with our bikes to explore the whole Canmore pathway network.  

                                                                        Grassi Lake

              Former railway bridge on Canmore path - Will didn't hold the camera straight

Rain blew in that evening and we woke up to a snow-draped town. Matt's weather app forecast a relatively nice day at Lake Louise with only 17 percent chance of snow. We drove west. As we approached the village of Lake Louise, we hit steady snow and low cloud that made the mountains almost invisible. Hoping the sky would clear later, we opted for a morning hike through a wooded area. The snow continued, but we drove up to the famous lake anyway. Everything was so white, we could hardly tell where the lake ended and the mountains began. We gave up on a viewpoint hike and walked along the lakeshore. When we returned, blue sky started to appear and we left the lake in sunshine. 

Winter conditions at Lake Louise, summer on our Canmore balcony, in-between temperatures the rest of the time. That's spring in Alberta.

    

                                                             Lake Louise village trail

Will and Matt on our Canmore balcony

Are The Things We Can't Say or Write Getting Out of Control? By Karla Stover

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Near the turn of the last century, the swastika was a hugely-popular lucky charm and one much-loved by the Russian royal family. It graced the family's limousine, was stitched on the czarina's last diary, and Alexandra, herself, had drawn it on the window frame of their final prison. In 1920, the Völkischer Beobachter became the official newspaper of the Nazi party and had an "explosive story about the Czarina's swastika." 

Other symbols are gone but words and expressions linger and are often worse. For example, in today's paper, I learned that calling someone a "Karen" is bad. Apparently, it's "a term used by some to insult and stereotype white women." I sent the clipping to my cousin Karen suggesting she go by her middle name. Nor should anyone ever be called a "basket case." The term came out of World War I and was used to describe quadriplegics because they'd lost all their limbs and had to be carried in a basket.

"No Can Do" insults the Chinese; "Eskimo" insults the Inuits. "Long Time No See" is offensive to Native Americans, as is "Off the Reservation. When I was a kid, "Indian giver" was a common insult. Not anymore, no can we refer to a "Mexican stand-off."

"Spinster" and "Hysteria" go after women, and "Cat Got Your Tongue" is rude because the English Navy disciplined using a whip called the "Cat-o'-nine-tails and the pain was so bad, the victims couldn't speak.

A lot of expressions insult black people: "fuzzy wuzzy", for example. In the 1800s, British colonial soldiers referred to the people of a specific East African nomadic tribe as "fuzzy wuzzies" due to their dark skin and curly hair. "Mumbo jumbo" comes from Maamajomboo, a west African god. Tribal men, dressed like the god and tried to solve domestic disputes which included spousal abuse. "Tipping point" is supposed to mean when too many black people have moved into a white neighborhood. And no one refers to a black man as "boy" anymore.

One of the big no-nos is "Sambo." 

It started with the word, “zambo,” which the Spanish and Portuguese used during their Empire periods to describe a person who appeared more black than white, although there are also claims that it meant bow-legged or knock-kneed. In the 1852 book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, "the character of Sambo was one of the slave overseers" who worked for the cruel slave owner, Simon Legree. Then, Helen Bannerman, daughter of a Scottish minister who married a physician / officer in the Indian Medical Service and lived in India for thirty years, started writing stories for her children about "an Indian child navigating an Indian landscape" and called him Little Black Sambo. Sadly, her "text placed a narrative born out of Britain’s imperialist presence in India firmly within the landscape of U.S. civil rights activism and racial politics," and the rest is history.

"Honky" may be "a variant of hunky which came from Bohunk, a slur for various Slavic and Hungarian immigrants, but it could have come from a West African language known as Wolof where it means "red-eared person," or from a coal mining area in West Virginia where white miners lived on Hunk Hill, or from Honky -tonk music.

Most of these I never say or use in my writing, however, "basket case?" I have to plead guilty. 

But I think we're all trying.