A Dead Coyote and a Day with a Friend

            On Saturday morning I had to skip going to the food bank because I’d been invited by my friend Hans (Dutch) Jongman to the evening banquet at the 40^th annual Haiku Canada conference. It’s held in a different part of Canada every year but this time around it was at the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. I wanted to get there earlier than the dinner because I knew that Dutch would be launching and reading from his new book, “Shift Change” sometime after 11:00. There were several authors launching books that day and on the agenda that Dutch had sent me, and I was hoping that since their names weren’t listed in alphabetical order and “Hans Jongman” was near the bottom, that it meant the names were arranged in order of appearance and so I wouldn’t miss him.

            I started getting ready to leave once I’d finished my regular morning routine, which includes song practice, memorizing French songs and rehearsing for my June 3^rd guest spot at the Words and Music Salon.  At 9:30 I took a shower, then I packed a lunch and mixed some homemade Gatorade out of water, brown sugar, lemon juice and salt in a Mason jar. This was going to be the longest bike ride I’d taken in a long time so I was sure I’d need to replenish my body’s fluids and electrolytes after an hour and a half of riding.

            I only wore my shorts and a tank top but I’d stuffed my hoody into my backpack as well because I knew I’d probably be riding home after sunset when it was probably going to be a lot cooler. I walked my bike out to the curb and swung on to start riding, but the back wheel didn’t move. It had gone off balance and was dragging against the left side of my frame. So I carried it back upstairs and turned it upside down in the hallway of the second floor and dug out the number 15 socket wrench that Nick Cushing had given me a few weeks before. I loosened the locknuts and rebalanced the wheel as I tightened them again. I had done this task as well on the previous evening to try to correct a regular, soft ticking sound that I’d been hearing on my bike rides. It hadn’t helped and it looked like I hadn’t rebalanced it properly then. This time I was extra careful and it only took me about five minutes and a greasy hand wash to get successfully rolling on my way to Mississauga of all places.

            I took the Queensway and though it was a sunny day there was quite a chill riding on the breeze, especially near the lake. Near the Humber River I was surprised to see a large, dead coyote in the middle of the road. I’d seen them alive when my ex-girlfriend’s headlights interrupted a pack of them that were feasting on a deer carcass at her place in Kettleby, but I’d never seen a coyote corpse before.

            I had not travelled that far west for a few years but near Royal York a second hand bookstore that I’d remembered had a sign up that read “Closing Sale” was still open with the same sign on display.

            As I rode along, since I was headed to a haiku conference, I was inspired to compose a haiku, though when I think about it, it doesn’t quite fit into a single moment and so it’s merely haikuesque:

out of business on the Queensway

a book store

and a dead coyote

            
            Even though I was still in Toronto, it started feeling like I was already in the suburbs once I’d passed Islington because the businesses became increasingly more industrial except for the big box stores and the fast food chains.

            Riding my bike through Mississauga, besides charm, character and culture what is also always conspicuously absent are other cyclists.  On the entire trip the only other riders I saw were and older guy with a long beard on the side street pedalling a bike with a trailer and a woman in a hijab waiting to walk her bike across the Queensway.

            For quite a while along the Queensway in Mississauga it followed a long row of transmission towers, then it changed to a snooty gaited community with big ugly new looking houses. After that it was more village-like (Cooksville?) with a little old steepled community church before it turned to woods and finally came to an end. Then it changed its name to Glengarry before curving up to Dundas where I turned left and continued on to Mississauga Road then north about a block to the long campus entrance.

            Being a student at the downtown U of T campus I’m used to the character and atmosphere of the old university buildings. I took an immediate dislike to the Mississauga campus with its sterile architecture. I’m not against all modern buildings. I think the Robarts Library downtown, for instance, has a powerful design, but the glass and concrete buildings at U of T Mississauga have very little going for them from an aesthetic standpoint.

            I stopped at the first important looking building I saw and went inside to inquire at reception if they knew where Haiku Canada was throwing their shindig. The guy I spoke to looked it up and told me that it was in room 260 in the Instructional Building, which was two more buildings along that road.

            When I got to the room there was a reading going on, so I didn’t walk in. I stood outside and listened while drinking half of my homemade Gatorade. The woman that was reading got emotional near the end because of the subject of one of her poems and began to cry.

            After her reading there was a lunch break. Terry Ann Carter, who turns out to be the current president of Haiku Canada noticed me in the hall and approached me in a friendly way to find out what I was doing there. I told her that Hans Jongman had invited me and she invited me inside, though I think she might have welcomed me in anyway. Dutch was glad to see me and also Marshall Hryciuk, who I know through Dutch, got up to come over and give me a firm handshake and tell me that I was just in time for lunch. They had ordered pizza and so Dutch put some money in for both his and mine and I ate a couple of slices while he introduced me to some of the other members. Some people remembered me from a few years before when Dutch had first invited me to the conference when it was held on one of the Seneca College campuses. We chatted for most of lunch with Richard Stevenson, from Lethbridge, Alberta, who in addition to his poetry projects and several children’s books had also written a book about Canadian serial killer Clifford Olson and a poetry book about the life of Miles Davis. I asked if he’d mentioned Juliette Greco in his book, since I knew that the French singer of whom Jean Paul Sartre said had millions of poems in her voice and who was known as “The muse of existentialism” had been Davis’s lover for a time while he lived in Paris in the 1950s.

            When lunch was over I found a chair and took a seat next to Dutch.

            The next reading was from Guy Simner, who cut a striking figure with his bald head and jet-black Abe Lincoln style chin whiskers. He was accompanied by a multi-instrumentalist who also translated and recited some of Guy’s haiku in Ojibwe and also by a woman from Iran who translated and spoke other of his haiku in Persian and even mimed a couple of poems. I thought that some of Guy’s haiku were quite good. The only one that I remember though, but which I can only paraphrase went something like:

my sons, dressed as prospectors

dig for Yukon Gold

potatoes

            Then we heard Vickie McCullogh speak about a book she’d put together that featured the poetry of a female author who had died without a lot of recognition. She spent way too much time talking about her encounters with the author and her efforts to put together a book about her that there was very little time left over to read the poet’s haiku. I was drifting off during her tiresome ramble. It would have promoted the book better to have simply spent all her time reading the poetry.

            One thing I noticed was that Haiku Canada seems to have a membership that for the most part is not getting any younger. Even newer members tend to be about the same age as the more senior members. Unless they get some fresh blood in it’s going to keep looking like a guild for those in their golden years.

            Then there was another break because the coffee they’d ordered from Tim Hortons had arrived. I spent the time reading a section from the Hans Jongman book, “Swooning”. The book is his autobiography, written in the form of several haiban, which is a short prose piece accompanied by a complimentary haiku. About halfway through the book the young Hans meets Farida, the woman who was soon to become his wife of what will be fifty years in 2018. In the centre of the book Dutch inserted a piece that he’d transcribed from an oral account by Farida of her own life. I had known that Farida was Egyptian but until reading this section I had not heard about the rough and loveless childhood she’d had before moving to Holland where she eventually met Dutch.

            After the break, Hans Jongman was introduced. He read from both “Swooning” and “Shift Change”. Not very many haiku poets have as much experience at reading their work aloud in front of audiences as Dutch does. He has clearly benefited from all of that practice and has developed a relaxed, smooth style, with good enunciation.

            I found the prose that Dutch read from his earlier work to be generally better than that from Shift Change. I think it to be the case with a lot of writers that memories of childhood tends to call forth stronger imagery and more potent writing. And yet my impression of the accompanying haiku that he read from Shift Change is that it stood out more than that from Swooning.

            At the end of his set, Dutch did something that seemed totally out of character from my experience of him. He turned the haiku at the end of a well-written haiban called “The Carilloneur” into a performance piece. First he bent over and it looked like he was about to take his t-shirt off and one of the women said, “Oh no!” But instead pulled the top of his shirt up over his head and arched his back to look like Quasimodo. Then he mimed the pulling of a rope to ring a church bell three times and recited:

change ringing of bells

up and down goes

the stock market

            The final reading came from the MC for that day, Anna Yin, who spent most of her set showing a very boring montage video featuring images of her. I think it would have been more appropriate if she’d shown the video as a backdrop while she read poetry.
            Next on the agenda was something called “The gingko walk” which was supposed to involve people going out to be inspired to write haiku while experiencing the nature on the campus. Everyone that Dutch talked with about a group walk said that they’d planned on either taking a nap or resting up in some other way before the banquet. I think Dutch was a little disappointed. I was feeling a little sleepy myself after my long bike ride followed by the readings, but I’d come out to hang out with Dutch and was also hoping that the walk might perk me up.

            First of all we went over to the front of the building so I could show Dutch the bicycle I’d built. He was impressed and confessed that he only rides one from Canadian Tire. He said that if he had a better bike it might compel him to wear a helmet, I didn’t understand why that would be the case. I guess he meant that if he rode faster he would be more at risk.

            We strolled around the campus and although it was nice out there was a bit of a chill blowing around. It was just uncomfortable enough to understand why we couldn’t see anyone else from the conference out walking.

            In the parking lot there was a large red van that had once belonged to Rogers Communications but the company name had been painted over. Dutch told me it belonged to Marshall Hryciuk and his wife Karen Sohne, who are sort of like the king and queen of Japanese poetry in Canada. Some members of Haiku Canada rented rooms on the campus for the weekend but Marshall and Karen sleep in their van and were probably napping there as we passed.

            Dutch and I chatted in a courtyard surrounded by four buildings about the Dutch haiku scene. He said that it’s really big over there but that he hasn’t been able to break into presenting his Dutch language work to that audience. He offered the view that a lot of the Dutch poets are assholes. He also expressed some contempt for the Dutch language itself and surprised me by declaring that English is the most beautiful language in the world. I offered that French is pretty nice.

            As we stepped around the concrete island of the Mississauga campus we kept looking for a pathway that would lead to some kind of nature trail but there was surprisingly nothing. The buildings were surrounded by trees but there didn’t seem to be any welcoming interplay between the two worlds. Finally we crossed a road and found our way into a wooded area. The first thing we noticed was the strong fragrance coming from inside the bosk. It smelled very much like cedar and yet I saw no cedars anywhere. The smell seemed to be coming from an ancient trunk that looked like it had been hit by a bomb. If it had been still standing it would have been the tallest and thickest hardwood in that little forest.  Dutch pointed out that it had definitely been on fire. The stump was all charred and hollowed out and nearby, probably lying exactly where it had fallen was the blackened trunk that had once given the tree its majesty before it had gone to timber without the clean mercy of an axe.

            We heard a loud sound that registered to me as the patterned utterance of some kind of bird. It went “Whe whe wheaaaahhh!” followed by a kind of spooky staccato creaking song like the mating call of a haunted door hinge. Dutch was doubtful that it was a bird but I’d heard some very complex and almost mechanical noises being composed by the beaks of blackbirds. As we looked in the direction of the lamentation though it started to become evident that the disturbance was coming from the death throes of another broken tree whose agonized, shattered, groaning body was leaning and hanging like a nearly passed out drunk at an angle of 10:00 o’clock in the arms of its firmly staid living twin. The sound we were hearing seemed to be coming from a large fractured limb that was hanging precariously from the leaning tower and swinging like a tortured pendulum that when the breeze picked up made macabre music because of the play of ruptured wood against mangled wood that looked like it could fall at any time.

            Here’s my haiku for that day:

creaking dead tree

held up by its silent twin

I walk on a tender limb

            Dutch and I left the woods and headed back to room 260 where we found Guy Simner alone and packing up his equipment to leave. On seeing Guy close up I realized that he is probably older than most of the other Haiku Canada members and so I concluded that he must dye his beard black. Looking him up online later on I saw from photos over the last couple of decades that he’s had the beard in that Abe Lincoln style for a long time but has only recently transformed it from its natural white state to the coal dark shade that he now rocks.

            Terry Ann arrived and wanted us to make sure that the door to the room was locked properly since it was full of everyone’s books and the group wouldn’t be returning there until the next morning. The problem was though that when we closed the door it did not lock. This led to a search for maintenance or security to see if they could rectify the problem. Terry Ann finally located someone in uniform that was sure she could lock the door with her card but that didn’t work either. She called the campus police and Novelette assured us that she would wait by the door until they arrived to lock the door. We asked the woman’s name and she said it was Novelette. Terry Ann thought that was neat since we were all writers. I looked it up later and found that a novelette falls in word count somewhere between a short story and a novella.

            On our way out of the building we met the campus police. They told us how much they love Novelette and then gave us all campus police pens since they had their phone number on them.

            We walked a short ways together but then Terry Ann said she was going to go to her room and change for dinner. This got Dutch worried and he asked if we were required to dress up. She assured us that wasn’t the case and that it was just a woman thing that compelled her to want to change into a skirt.

            Dutch and I headed towards the Davis building where the banquet was supposed to happen. We followed the arrows and walked into a structure. The map on the wall said the faculty club was in room 28 on level 3, so we took the elevator and found that room 28 was an electrical room. We walked the halls for a while and whatever rooms weren’t under construction were science labs. We left the building and then retraced our steps to see if we’d been in the right building. Following the arrows again we discovered that we’d gone into the wrong place. We finally found the Davis building and the faculty Lounge but the weird thing was that the map downstairs in the Davis building was the exact same layout as in the other building we’d searched and that the faculty lounge here was also room 28 on the third level.

            Dutch bought me a beer and one for himself. That was his limit because he had to drive home after dinner. There were still quite a few free tables and so we sat down near the window and the buffet. A guy in his thirties named Brian joined us who had gone to university abroad and travelled throughout Europe. We chatted about the differences between Europe and Canada. He said that he was glad to be back here. He made the odd comment that Amsterdam is like Disneyland. I have been to Amsterdam and having seen lots of film footage of Disneyland I can’t see any remote similarity. I guess he meant that Amsterdam is very commercial now.

            Karen Sohne came to our table, put her hand on my shoulder and asked if this was table for all the studly single men. She seemed so much more upbeat than she’d been earlier that I wondered if the nap had been that magical or if she and Marshall had tipped a few drinks in the van.

            When the buffet opened, Anna announced that we would be lining up in order of tables. Marshall and Karen’s table got up first and then everybody else in the room lined up with no order at all.

            The food was good. The meat dish I think was braised Cornish hen; there was a nice lasagne, potatoes au gratin, an oriental noodle salad and a salad bar and bread after that but my plate was full. There were a variety of cheesecakes put out one at a time for dessert and coffee. As Dutch and I took the last two slices of a cherry cheesecake and lined up for coffee a waitress went past us with a delicious looking one of mocha. Dutch’s head turned covetously after it but we were stuck with our selections. It was perhaps a metaphor for all romantic commitments and so maybe was the fact that the cherry turned out to be quite satisfying after all.

            Our toastmaster of the evening was supposed to have been George Elliot Clarke but he had not arrived before, during or after dinner. I had mentioned it to him once at the end of March and once more on April 4^th on the last day of his Canadian Poetry course. I had also discussed it with Giovanna Riccio, who confirmed that she was definitely coming there with him, so it was fairly certain he hadn’t forgotten. Dutch wondered if he’d gotten lost but that seemed impossible to me. I assumed that as a U of T professor of several years he had probably lectured out there on more than one occasion. But a little later Anna announced that George had messaged her that he had indeed gotten lost and given up, with an added confession that on a previous occasion when he had been scheduled to be there he had also gotten lost. I guess I wasn’t that surprised that George would have gotten lost. He often gets lost as well during his lectures though he always takes his students someplace interesting nonetheless. I had no problem finding the place since all I had to do was look it up on an online map, see that I had to get to Mississauga Road and Dundas and then follow the signs. I suppose it’s different when one is driving a car like George and has to take the right exit off the highway before getting one’s bearings.

            Without George Elliot Clarke to officiate, a former president of Haiku Canada got up and took on the job. He decided to just leave the evening over to members coming up and talking about their experiences with Haiku Canada, and he went first. It turns out that he’s a lawyer. He said that he has handled murder trials and appealed to some very difficult judges but he was never more intimidated and humbled than he was by his first experiences with the poets he’s met in Haiku Canada.

            During the rest of the evening about a third of the people there got up to talk about how Haiku Canada had changed their lives, including Hans Jongman. A woman that was sitting to my left leaned over and asked me how this event compared to other poetry gatherings I’d attended. I told her that this one was much more like a club. Throughout the course of the testimonials, from time to time she would pass me a note. The first one read: “Not just a club, a religion”. I would agree that there is something slightly cultish about Haiku Canada, albeit in a less mind-stealing way. After a while she passed me another: “Or maybe it’s just a kind of timidity in keeping with the form?” In between speakers I tilted over and opined that there’s a little bit of AA in there too. Her final note read: “It’s a way to be a personality while hiding something subtle in your pocket.”

            On the way out I asked Dutch if he would help me find where I’d locked my bicycle, since it was after dark and the landmarks all appeared different. I walked with him to his car and he told me where I had to go from there. Then he reached into his trunk and gave me the author’s copies of his two books. Then we hugged and said goodnight.

            It had gotten quite chilly and I was still wearing shorts but at least I had my hoody on. I walked to my bike and set up the flashers at the front and back. The night before that I had slapped them both on the handlebar just so I wouldn’t forget them the next day.

            It’s not much fun riding a bicycle on the streets of Mississauga in the daylight, let alone in the black of night. I was definitely the only fool pedalling out there. But one goes into a home zone to some degree and the time passes. The cold wasn’t too bad once I got rolling but at around Hurontario I started to feel raindrops. Those drops increased to a splattering that followed me the rest of the way through Mississauga. My ass was also getting pretty sore.

            I was relieved when I saw a sign welcoming me to Toronto because I’d always thought that the boundary line was Kipling Avenue. I was quite disappointed to see my illusion shattered when the next road I passed turned out to be The West Mall. Once I did cross Kipling the rain stopped and it was nice that I hadn’t gotten wet the whole time it had been falling.

            Once I’d reached Royal York I was comforted by more familiar landmarks but discomforted by an aching left knee. As I passed the House of Lancaster several young women were running out of the club into a waiting black SUV limousine and a few more were crossing the street with the same destination while calling out to the other girls. I felt a sense of being home when I crossed Roncesvalles into Parkdale and passed a young drunken couple arguing on the street. She was sitting on the steps of the Our Lady of Lebanon Catholic Church and turned back towards her purse, which was a couple of steps higher. Her boyfriend was standing in the middle of the street wearing a crusty punk coat and pants and a big backpack, accusing her of showing the world her ass just as I rode between them. “You’re embarrassing!” she called back as I passed.

            I made it home at almost exactly 23:00 and I knew that on Sunday I would be nursing a sore knee.