where did yesterday go?

I'm actually not sure what today is. I'll get to it soon. I haven't acknowledged yesterday yet.

I'll be here soon....

Okay, I'm here now, end of day.  I "finished" my new screenplay yesterday and I am on the brink of oost-partum depression. I am also tired. But it was nice to get out and to walk outside and to pedal  inside.  I finished the Lehane book I was reading. I didn't like the violence buts I like the central character and Lehane's style, fresh and quirky.  

I've started reading Sapiens, by Yuval Harari - breakfast reading as it's quite a thick (paperback) book. Just beginning but I've already learned of our mass extermination  of entire species on the planet.  We're still doing it, only we might be the ones to go. I wonder how long we've got. 

Two new diaries have come in: An English Governess in the Great War: The Secret Brussels Diary of Mary Thorp by Sophie De Schaepriijver and Tommy M. Proctor; and  Miss Confederation: The Diary of Mercy Anne Coles by Anne McDonald. I love diaries, as many of you (all two)  already know, and I am more and more discriminating in my assessment of them.

I had planned to give my rather large collection of women's diaries to the University of Manitoba Archives, along with my files, already there. I designated the gift in my will, with UofM's  help in the wording.  However, they have decided they don't want the entire collection - no room, they say - and they want to cherry-pick a few good ones.  It's too large and valuable a collection to disperse so I have to find another home for it.  I'm not going to live long enough to do what I'd like to do with them. There are so many novels, plays, movies, and essays in them, just waiting to be brought to light.

One major project would be based on a multi-volume record of the wagon trains' western journeys. I've actually plotted a screenplay  -, more like a television series -  inspired  by them. It might have to be a novel or two, with the series based on the books. There' s a diary by a southern woman who went with her husband to Alaska shortly after the sale of the state to the United States.  He was second in command of a fur station and he couldn't afford to go south during the worst of the winter. They were trapped by snow and weather for weeks and weeks in their home situated above the town.  They almost starved but they survived and when they emerged with spring, the dear diarist was pregnant. 

I found a striking similarity among several disparate artists from different countries. You wouldn't think Emily Carr, (1867-1945); Kathe .Kollwitz (1867-1945); Edna Manning (1900-1997); and Anne Truit (1921-2004) would have anything in common butt they shared a mystic, spiritual quality in their thinking and approach to their art, or so it seemed to me.  Worth an essay?

Or a blog.

whatever happened to russell meade?

In the early 1980s, for almost four years, I wrote and recorded  a 5-day-a-week 90-second thought-for-the-day, sponsored by the United Church of Canada, for cross-Canada distribution on independent radio stations.  I called them Happy Homilies but I realise now they were blogs from above. I used to write about 15 of them and go in and tape them all, trying not to fluff anything, forcing a repeat, so as not to get hoarse before I finished. In all I wrote about 1000 scripts. My agent, Nancy Colbert, insisted on gathering  them into books when she and her husband, Stan, took over Harper Collins Canada.  Under the umbrella, "Betty Jane's Diary", my squibs (an appropriate word?) were given categories and published as little chapbooks: "Passages", "Celebrations"; "Lessons Children Taught Me"- something like that, I forget the exact titles.I called them bathroom readers.

I tell you all this so that you can understand how it was that Russell Meade showed up.  Russell was a boy I remembered from elementary school who was accident prone.  When our class went on a field/discovery trip to a local creamery, he got pasteurised and scalded his legs.  When we went on a similar excursion to a candy factory, he got coated in chocolate. Willie Wonka would have been very annoyed.  And when we went on a picnic, Russell lost his lunch. Everybody took pity on him and shared some of theirs and he ate so much that then he really lost his lunch. I forget now what was the moral of the story. At the time I developed a real knack for telling parables. I called myself a parabolic thinker. Anyway, I ended my little thought for that day with a question: "Russell Meade, where are you now?"

His sister saw his name in a copy of "Betty Jane's Diary" in a Vancouver book store and phoned him to tell him about it.  He lived in Minneapolis then and I lived in Toronto. But somehow he contacted me and  we both happened to be in Winnipeg and arranged to meet after some 40 years. We had a day-long date of reminiscences, including a trip back to our old school where we introduced ourselves and our reason for coming and were given a tour - necessarily a short one.  The school we attended had been a four-room schoolhouse.  We had actually been in the same room the last year we attended. We were in Grade Nine along with two other boys, and Grade Eleven, also with four students.  How different we were and how different our lives were!

It was 1943. I was twelve and he was fourteen.  All my male relatives and one female were in the forces, most of them overseas. For five years my mother was a single mother coping with a mortgage on an army doctor's salary, considerably less than his civilian income. I prayed every night for the end of the war and the safe return of my family. Russell took clandestine flying lessons and couldn't wait to get into the action. It was over before he was old enough. Just as well; with his luck he might have been hurt.