Resisting Exile

18Jan 2021 by Linda Bayley

False Dichotomies

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…

16Aug 2020 by Linda Bayley

Monolith

Musings

In 2004 I self-published a chapbook of poems that I called Estrangement: Poems. My father had left town suddenly the previous September, and I was angry, confused, and grieving, and my psychologist gave me the assignment of writing about it. The result was a set of poems that I felt really good about, good enough to want to share them with the world. My mother’s reaction, when I finally gave her a copy, was to say, “There’s an awful lot about your father in here.” Only the first six poems were about him, but the way she said it I wondered if she thought she should have had equal time. I suspect now that if she were to read this blog, or my morning pages, or my journal, she would…

11Aug 2020 by Linda Bayley

Satellite

Musings

For a time, my father lived on Montague Street. It was a small, two-story house, two doors down from the laundromat and across the street from an empty lot. He had the main floor and the basement; another tenant lived upstairs, though truth be told I think my father spent his share of time up there with her, too. I remember a lot about that house, though it’s possible that I am conflating those memories with other places that he lived throughout my childhood. The bedroom was painted a deep teal — I remember helping him paint it — and the living room was some sort of peach or tangerine, maybe a deep yellow. Whenever I stayed over, I slept in the bedroom, and he slept on the pull-out couch…

13Oct 2019 by Linda Bayley

Found Out

Uncategorized

This is the story of how I discovered an ugly truth about myself, and lost a friend in the process. Who was the friend? She was my one Black friend. Not my “token” Black friend; just the one friend I had who happened to be Black. What was the truth? I am racist. I already had an inkling of this. I already had a fear. I didn’t understand how deeply it ran until pictures were published showing Justin Trudeau wearing blackface. It’s hard to explain all of this, because I am feeling deeply ashamed of myself. But I’m going to try anyway, because I owe it to myself and to my friend to own this, and to learn from it. For a couple of years now, I have been reading…

20Jul 2019 by Linda Bayley

The Granny Cart Conundrum

Musings

This morning I made a jubilant Facebook post about my granny cart: Wheeled transportation does not have to involve motors... I forgot I had this granny cart, and have been astonished by how much more independence I have now that I’m using it again. Milk and orange juice and yogurt in the same grocery run! 😁 And then, being me, the person who worries constantly about being caught in a compromising position with any ism, I had a long conversation with myself on the walk home about whether or not my post was ableist. And whether I was not, just a little bit, letting my privilege hang out. I decided that the question is not complicated, but it is complex. The first part: is this ableist? Not intentionally, but maybe?…