Resisting Exile

25Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

Monolith, continued

Musings

In a post last year, I talked about why I'm writing about my father as much as I am. He was looming so large in my thoughts that I couldn't not write about him. At the time, I mostly just wanted to knock my experience with him down into bite-sized chunks that I could digest more easily. It's also possible that I wanted to knock the man himself down a few notches, prove to him that he wasn't the great man he thought he was. The first motivation is fair. The second is not, and needs to be addressed. I've mentioned elsewhere that I have my father's permission to write anything about him that I need to. At the time of that conversation, and during much of the telling of…

20Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

The Stories

Action, Musings

When the mother of one of my uncles died, about twenty years ago, he told me that he’d discovered that she’d put little tags on most of the furniture to tell each piece’s story: where it had come from, who it had belonged to, when it had been acquired. “I mean, who cares?” he said to me. “It’s just stuff.” Well, his mother cared, for one. I would have cared, too. “Stuff” carries stories with it, and I always love to hear them. I remember this conversation especially well because my own Gramma’s funeral had been just a few days earlier, and I had been through her apartment with my father and my cousins, and I’d had a list of the things I wanted to take home with me. None…

08Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

How to Drink Tea

Poetry

For Audrey Boil the water. Listen to the roiling tempest as it builds in the kettle. Hold the back of your hand against the kettle’s hard surface and wait to feel the warmth on your skin. Pour the water slowly into your best mug, the one too big for its coaster, and watch the water turn black, the colour of tea leaves. Wait for the steam to hit your face, smell the subtle aromas of sunrise and awakening. Set the mug beside your work. Let it cool. Let it cool. Let it cool. Sunrise can be harsh, melting your tongue if you fly too close, too eager to wake. Send word to a friend, reminding her to sip from her own best mug, urging patience while the tea cools, but…

05Feb 2021 by Linda Bayley

Safety

Musings

Content warning: this is an essay about bullying. Some violence is described, but not graphically. I walked past your old place on Drinkwater the other day. I stopped for a moment and looked up at the doorway where you and I used to stand watching thunderstorms, huddled together under the sheltering archway. We counted alligators between the lightning and the thunder. We counted Mississippis. Standing there with you, with your arm around me, I knew I was safe. That was one of our first doorways. Our last doorway was different. Behind that last doorway, you were a target: you had forgotten what safe was like. You insisted that you weren't a victim, so I told you to stop acting like one. But you couldn't. It’s hard to picture you as…

18Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

False Dichotomies

Musings, Self-Esteem

Once upon a time, there was a girl who was a bowling champion. Actually, she was pretty awesome at just about everything she did: she was a champion, in general. But it started at the bowling alley. I remember the beginning. One Saturday morning when I was eight or so, my mother brought me to a tiny downtown bowling alley: Quilles Ste-Anne. The place was tiny, six lanes and five-pin only, and hard to find, built as it was in the basement of a building that sat in the middle of a parking lot behind a church. I don’t remember who handed me my first bowling ball. I do remember being taught to hold it between my spread legs and lob it down the lane with both hands. Which was,…

10Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

Lil’ Punk Ass

Action

At first she was just a stick figure, a cardstock cutout made for a scene in an animated short in which she stands on a train track and reaches out while her father walks away from her. Her cameo was to last two or three seconds at most. Almost immediately though, she demanded more screen time. She pushed her way into another scene in the short where artwork was parading right to left: without warning there she was, marching along between two works at the end, shoving the one ahead of her when she got impatient. I told my friend Leif about this, that I hadn’t known she’d be in the scene until she showed up, and he replied, “LOL sure.” But she wasn’t supposed to be part of the…

01Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

Worse than FOMO

Musings

A few days ago I opened and read our Christmas cards from 2018. I wish that were a typo. It's not. I also opened and read the cards sent to us in 2019. It’s not like the cards were lost. I knew exactly where they were: on the dining room table. Or, as it is affectionately known, the Bermuda Dining Table. They were all together in a plastic box from one of the many times where I tried to organize all the papers piled up there. I set them aside to read all at once, and then... what? Walked away? Forgot? I don’t know. When I finally went through the box, I was shocked to see just how long the cards had been sitting there. The shock was one thing.…

09Sep 2020 by Linda Bayley

Hand-me-down

Love, Musings

When I was a teenager, my Dad would hand-write lectures to me and pass them over to me before I got out of his car, back at my mother’s house. He would insist that I read them then and there; I couldn’t get out of the car until I did. He had to make sure that I received his wisdom. They were infuriating. They actually had the word LECTURE written across the top of each one, along with the sequence number. He really, truly, expected me to benefit from each one, and to save them, and to one day publish them all in a book. Naturally, I shredded each one into tiny bits as soon as I got inside, angry, futile tears falling onto my hands as they worked. I…

02Sep 2020 by Linda Bayley

Instamatic

Musings

Big Billy’s Belly I want to tell you about this photograph. What you’re looking at here is almost all of my Gramma, and most of my father, standing on the beach at Lake Nepawhin. The picture was taken no later than 1981 with a Kodak Instamatic X-15F, by a clearly amateur photographer. Let’s face it, it’s a terrible picture. The photographer didn’t understand that what you saw through the viewfinder was not exactly what the camera would record, or how to hold the camera so that a fingertip wouldn’t get in the way. But I love it beyond all reason. Not for what it portrays, though it is a pretty spectacular depiction of my Dad’s beer belly, which until the end of his life he declared to be “all muscle.”…

25Aug 2020 by Linda Bayley

Teal

Musings

Content warning: emotional abuse, physical abuse, child abuse, boundary violations, tickling. I wrote this because I needed to; please don’t read it if it’s going to hurt you. At first there was a little sigh of pleasure, but as I’d continued to touch her and ask her to stand for me there was a strained rumble and a sharp intake of breath and another uncomfortable rumble, the way a child held and tickled begins giggling and ends crying and pleading to be let go.- Kim Echlin, Elephant Winter You know that progressive relaxation technique where you’re supposed to start from your toes and work your way up your body, tightening and relaxing each group of muscles along the way? Yeah. I can’t do that. Ever. Just the thought of it…