Once again I venture boldly into the snack foods that challenge The Way It’s Always Been.

I scoffed at the idea of Chocolate Creme Oreos. I said, “That’s just a Fudgee-O.”

I sit corrected.

I’d forgotten, of course, that the cookie part of the Oreo sandwich is not the same as the cookie part of a Fudgee-O sandwich. It’s that delicious crumbly dark chocolate wafer type of cookie, as opposed to the, well, fudgey cookies in a Fudgee-O.

Chocolate Creme Oreos are yummy. And just think how impressed Martha will be at your next dinner when you present a cleverly arranged contrating pattern of Chocolate and Classic Oreos as a dessert platter!

I should try one with a Vanilla Coke.

Sometimes, when you decide to rough it, life throws you an extra curve ball.

I went camping this weekend for the first time since grade seven. (No, I don’t want to tell you how long ago that was.) It was quite enjoyable – we got there early, set things up, had a lovely quiet afternoon, had a communal dinner with others who arrived later, did the campfire thing, slept well, ate a couple more meals, packed up, left. Glorious weather. Lovely silence. Much green. Few bugs. I must make the observation that a disproportionate amount of time is spent preparing food or eating, which leads me to believe that camp food should actually be more of a gourmet experience than it usually is. I mean, heck, if you’re going to spend that much time creating a meal, you might as well Create a Meal, right? I spent more time thinking about/working with food in a day than I usually do in a week. Next time, the husband and I will design ourselves a real menu, and gourmandise to our hearts’ content.

We came home and went to a late afternoon birthday party for a very young lady, which was lovely – we saw all sorts of people we hadn’t seen in a while. As an added bonus, we had front row seats to an exquisite electrical storm accompanied by waves of pounding rain and a terrific wind. We stood on the back porch with other storm lovers and revelled in the thunder and lightning (which hit the train tracks a hundred feet south of us) until it finally became just rain. We left not long after that, around seven-ish. I’m not sure what time we got home, because the entire neighbourhood had lost power at six-fifteen, according to the clock on my stove. That lovely storm we’d watched had knocked out a lot of the island’s electricity, and – worse – had torn up our beautiful park with its mature trees. We walked through the park to check the damage before we even went into our apartment; the trees have been snapped in half or by a third, the branches lying strewn on the wet grass like the fallen after a battle. The trees were mostly all right; some had snapped due to the beginnings of rot, but others were in shock from having perfectly healthy limbs torn from them and flung thirty to fifty feet away. I comforted them as best I could because it just didn’t seem right to walk away from them again after stepping over their branches and pushing past wet leaves. Yes, I hugged them, and stroked them, and told them it would be all right; I’m not kidding when I said they were in shock. I felt what I felt. An extremely violent sudden gust must have raged through the area – that’s the only reason we can think of for the trees snapping like that, for snap they did, all in the same direction with similar breaks; it wasn’t from a constant bending or weakening, and they certainly weren’t all dozen or so struck by lightning.

We came home and lit candles in the darker parts of the flat and ate the extra-creamy chocolate ice cream that was rapidly losing the “ice” part of its definition, which was fun. When we went to sleep we were confident that the power would be back in the morning; in fact, we were slightly surprised that five hours later, it hadn’t been restored. We put it down to reduced crews working on the Sunday eve of a civic holiday and blew out our candles.

Well, naturally it wasn’t back in the morning. We bought ice (which was in short supply) and used the cooler we’d taken camping with us to pack our frozen (thawing) meat and such. My husband grumbled. I said, “Yes, but we had a lovely visit last night, and a wonderful camping trip!” to which he replied, “Yeah, well, still feels like we’re camping somehow.” Our kitchen is equipped with a gas stove, so we could still boil water for tea and soup and such; and the husband went out to the car and brought in the coffee percolator we’d used on the Hibachi over the weekend, which worked just as well on our gas elements. He went off to work fortified with percolated coffee, and I spent the day reading and napping on the living room floor. Oh yes – I cleaned out the fridge too. Funny; I so often don’t have the radio or a CD on when I have the option, but yesterday the knowledge that I couldn’t turn music on nagged me no end, all day.

We’d planned to do laundry, but with no hot water or power we ended up travelling to my in-laws’ place on the South Shore (how ironic is that, after the ice storm?) so showers and clean clothes could be had. They had just returned from a weekend of camping themselves, but were happy to see us, and we had a relaxing casual dinner. When we left our apartment, we’d been without electricity for twenty-four hours. It amuses me to some extent; for six years I lived near the airport, and my power never went down – even during the ice storm I only lost it for a couple of hours or so. I’m not much for the constant use of electrical devices – I don’t watch TV very often, I don’t play computer games, I use candles a lot anyway, etcetera – but I missed hot water, and the loss of most of my frozen food irritated me. Bits of the neighbourhood were restored at various times of the day – the south side of our street had power early yesterday, for example; however, the poor depanneur next to us on our side of the street spent the day emptying his freezers and setting his shelves out against the building walls to dry off. Coming home late last night we thought the whole neigbourhood was back… until we turned onto our cross street and nearly had a fit to see that the street on our block was dark. Fortunately, we’re on a corner, and our building is apparently wired into the main street, not the cross street; our power had been restored nine minutes before we came home, according to all our flashing digital clocks. (Note to self: find a nice old-fashioned wind-up analog clock.)

It’s odd to notice that your mind automatically begins making plans. What do I have in the pantry, what do I need, is the grocery store out of electricity as well, what should I stock up on, who else might need help, etcetera, etcetera. I was thankful to have gas, so I could still have tea (while there’s tea there’s hope!), and overall it wasn’t a huge personal inconvenience. It just served to remind me how thankful I should be for the tiny miracles that we don’t notice – like flipping the light switch in the front entryway, or washing your hands in hot water. And laundry.

I have an osteopath appointment this morning, then it’s off to work. The official countdown begins: including today, four days to go.

Friends who are adaptable are wonderful to have.

Yesterday, a few of us had planned to catch Cobra: The Musical at the Fringe Festival. We met early for dinner, and by the time we got our food we were looking at our watches and calculating the time we had left to go get in line to secure tickets. It was do-able. “No problem,” I said, half-jokingly; “if we miss it we can always go see Fellowship of the Ring again.”

Oops.

Well, dinner meandered on, and when we’d done we looked at our watches again and hmmed and hawed, and waffled, and even though we probably could have caught the last few tickets for Cobra: The Musical, we ended up going to see LOTR:FOTR again, even though we’d missed the beginning by about fifteen minutes. We walked in just as Frodo and Sam were leaving. Everyone’s seen the film at least twice, so it’s not like anyone was left wondering what was happening. We watched it with pure glee. This was decadence. We went for the fight scenes, for the coolness waves, for Aragorn and Arwen and Boromir and Gandalf and Legolas, and yes, even the hobbits useless in a fight scene.

I noticed something this time around, too. The scene between Frodo and Boromir at the end goes wrong because Frodo is becoming paranoid, not because Boromir is losing it. Boromir is remarkably sympathetic and controlled right up to the point where Frodo turns his back, and Boromir realises that he’s trying to leave. That’s when he snaps, right there. From Boromir’s POV, it must look like Frodo’s just going to waltz right up to Mount Doom and hand over the ring to the bad guys. Now, Boromir’s pretty convinced this Fellowship thing isn’t going to succeed anyway, so he’s been thinking all along about the good guys using the Ring as best they can before the bad guys get their hands on it again, but abiding by the general consensus. It’s a rather logical POV, if you think about it. So he tries to grab it from Frodo before the hobbit takes off and walks right into a trap or something. The whole thing, though, revolves around Frodo’s paranoia, not Boromir’s obsession with the Ring. It’s a fine distinction, probably only made by acting, but it’s there. I was very impressed.

And then…the preview.

I have one word to say: EOWYN!

When Bill and Stephen and I did our LOTR guest spot on CBC Radio One last December, we were discussing the alarming possibility that the scriptwriters had combined Arwen and Eowyn into a single character. I was pleased last night to discover that our fears were put to rest.

Damn, it looks good.

“How long do we have to wait?” my husband groaned as the credits rolled by. “Six months,” I said, bouncing in my seat, “but we get the first DVD in August, then the Special Edition DVD in November, so there will be lots of LOTR to keep us happy until then.” After all, it’s been a whole six months since we first saw it, as unbelievable as that is. The next six will fly by.

So, you see, having friends who can be adaptable and flexible enough to toss one plan over the shoulder and readily agree on another is an asset. Thanks, all; we had a blast.

Timothy Findley is dead.

There’s no graceful way to say it. I was jolted awake this morning with the six o’clock news because my husband didn’t get out of bed fast enough to turn it off so I could sleep. I sat up and said, “What?” to the saddened woman reading the news. I think I startled him.

Seventy-one. Died in his sleep in the warm south of France, where he moved after selling his wonderful home Stone Orchard in Ontario. Canadian seasons were getting to be too much for him. He still did work in Stratford in the summer, though.

My first thought was a selfish one. Timothy Findley is dead. I will have no more new books.

My next thought was almost as selfish. Timothy Fndley is dead. I will never meet him.

One of my dearest possessions is a signed hardcover copy of Inside Memory: Pages From a Writer’s Notebook. Findley’s writing style is so wry, so personal, that his journal makes for a humorous read while instructing in the art of living. One of my most awe-full memories of encountering an author is the lecture/reading he gave at Concordia when his novella You Went Away came out. He was deathly ill with one of those Canadian colds – he spoke around a cough drop that he replenished at regular intervals through his reading, and you could tell he wasn’t up to his usual sparkling, mischeivous self. Yet he still made a connection with me, and likely most of the audience. I didn’t have the money to buy the book at the time (the lecture was free), but when it came out in paperback I brought it home and cherished the reading of it, hearing his voice.

He began as an actor, which also endeared him to me. You could hear when he spoke: extravagant words rolling off the tongue, the use of dynamics, the rich timbre of his voice. I think many authors are actors at heart (and if they aren’t perhaps that’s why they’re missing some sort of dimension that adds the spark of life to their work). He loved the theatre all his life, and worked closely with the Stratford Theatre in southern Ontario for decades, creating several original works for performance, and appearing in their author series frequently as well.

Like Robertson Davies, Timothy Findley represents everything that is bright and good about Canadian literature to me. He explored contemporary struggle in a uniquely Canadian way, while still appealing to international audiences. Findley and Davies always seemed to have an intellectual approach to their prose that appeals to my vaguely elitist taste for a national literature that is elegant and still touches my heart. “There’s always something very magical about print,” he said. “There’s also something magical about the act of writing.” He’s so right. There’s a magic to capturing a vision, a feeling, in symbols that lie inert on a page until someone opens the book and reconstructs your vision. Writing and reading is a constant act of creation and abandonment that fascinates me.

Timothy Findley was a gentleman. He was a graceful man, with a great love of life. He was courageous, and refused to hide his homosexuality behind closed doors. He never used it as a soapbox either, for which I admired him greatly. He simply chose to live his life, in his own fashion. He loved food, struggled with alcoholism (that day in the lecture-hall, he refused to take even cough syrup), luxuriated in comfort and aesthetic beauty. He was an inspiration to me as a writer, and I feel bereft.

Tiff: for all your work, your thoughts, and your mentorship to the people of Canada both in the arts and in other disciplines, I thank you. One of his favourite sayings was, “Against despair – be well.” Today, I will remember that saying often.