Weekly Stories

“Watch your Face”: Opening Night for a Playwright

Lisa pulls me aside and gently says with a twinkle in her eye, “You have to watch your face”. I have stuffed myself into a new dress from the Bay (I’m keep the tags on) to attend the opening of my first operetta, Off Leash. This is intermission and I am checking in on the children’s choir I organized, backstage, gently guiding my daughter into Lisa’s arms to get ready for performance. “What is my face doing?” I ask. Lisa then contorts her lovely mug into a comic series of pained expressions with the odd moment of delight. She says,…

red maple leaves and the chihuahua woman

On the bus (because my car broke down and I can’t afford the gas anyway) I am dressed as a bank manager, misleadingly slick. Confident! Early forties! Warm! Ethnic! That’s…me. Ethnic light. I am enjoying the multiculturalism around me. Having been raised in the great white plains of Alberta, it never loses its beauty to me. First Nations guy sits in the middle of the bus aisle on his amp with a shiny red electric guitar strapped across his back. Tiny Asian girl squawking out the window, bouncing on her grandmother’s knee. Both of them in violet. I am back…

three generations all voting differently

Tomorrow my daughter is going to give a speech as Elizabeth May to her class. She’s pored over the Green party’s platform with me and together we’ve broken down things to a grade five level of understanding. What is a pension? Why are old people poor in our country? What is a pipeline? What happens when it bursts? What is a tuition? Why does it cost so much to go to school? Why do some first nations reserves not have clean water? What does refugee mean? She asks me if I’m voting green and as much as I adore pretty…

nursing log

Yesterday we went to a beautiful art showing at Beaumont studios. Great Canadiana. I wanted to take half of it home. The artist himself is a hip friendly whipper-wit with great specs and good shoes. He’s got a teenaged son in a cool hot band. He said something along the lines of: there is no such thing as a God given gift, it’s all bloody hard work. On the way home we listened to the boy’s band. Fantastic. The next day both of our kids were on their instruments for hours and hours, practicing. Composing! Ah. So, knowing someone close…

the Mommy fail of taking my daughter to Madonna

My daughter and I are going to the Madonna concert for her tenth birthday. It will be her first big concert ever and I am so giddy, I feel as though I am fourteen. Madonna, though not exactly role model material, was an important and provocative figure for me while I was growing up. Both of us had an Italian dad and a rebellious relationship with Catholicism. Both of us were fighting through our art for sexual liberation for women, for the LGBTQ community, and we did so through spiritually provocative images and ideas. Me and my erotic Christ figure…

10pm Skytrain commute

Working man on the sky train with a face like Spencer Tracy in Boom Town, forty years later. His hands are my Dad’s: short, wide, and strong as muscly octopi, a few digits short. Purple marks on the nails. Cuts. Splinters. Construction pants have drywall mud splattered on them. Still working this hard with a full head of white? Taking transit home? Lunch kit protected between steel toed boots. He doesn’t look like a drinker. So why is he not retired? I run through a myriad of possibilities in my head: a son he invested with who ran him dry,…

don’t buy this mattress from “Canadian” tire, buy local instead

The ferry ride to Bowen Island is a meditation. Twenty minutes: too short to do anything, really, except just “be”. I get out of my car and head to the front of the deck to stand in the rain: a shivering mid-sized woman in a thin sweater beside her compact car, bobbing on a boat between the rolling clouds and the inky sea. These little moments when I stop – and listen – and see – and feel – and taste the salt in the wind – and touch a sense of Wonder – these moments add hours to my day. My…

Old dog. Half blind.

Tonight my old man dog snoozes with his ears poking up. I wonder if he’s dreaming of when he was a pup. This long suffering hound has seen me through so many bad boyfriends. They’re gone, but he’s still around. Farting. Snoring. Inexplicably licking the carpet. Still wagging his tail, half mast, as he wobbles on arthritic legs, still pulls the leash a little at the sight of a squirrel. He was the cutest puppy – honestly – little carmel coloured puff ball with blue eyes. He was a lovely middle aged mutt – despite his penchant for a constant…

when the news reel reeks

Little boy in a red sweater, dead, face down on a beach. A girl of two and her father murdered in the mountains by a shy quiet man in a shy quiet town in the shadow of the Rockies. It’s not a bright week; the news reel reeks. I post something on Facebook about Syrian refugees and Christ and the call to compassion. I get a hateful rant from a well meaning man who is angry about the senseless pain in the world and decides to blame all form of religion. Tells me to “grow some balls” which I find…odd….

Fry and the fawn

A baby fawn was bleating for his mother last night while we were honeymooning. It’s the funniest sound, sort of like a baby crying through a kazoo, “mmmeee mmmmeee me…!”. It totally upstaged any vocalization of pleasure. Through the lace curtains, beyond the flickering candles, the fawn’s distress calls hooped over the red cedars and burst lightly onto our ears like bubbles: cute, constant and a little worrisome. Was a fawn caught in our fence? Fellow sighed with patient interruptus and went crashing out at midnight into the brush with a flashlight and little else…which made me giggle. The fawn…

Lucia Frangione