Anxious dreams and a Dvorak respite

Memorial chapel near Leaskdale, Ontario, this afternoon.

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Last night I slept fitfully, unusual this days. All night long I was carrying a pile of maps. They looked a little like my paper quilts. The one on top had squares of deep blue Japanese paper alternated with images of naked winter tree branches. Each map was the life of someone I knew; at the same time a portal. I would go down into one of those lives and its trouble, then surface briefly in the darkness of Danny's bedroom before descending into another map.

One of them was ghostsandrobots, no surprise really. I didn't see her, only felt that I was moving through one of the anxious moments of her life.

It was a dreadful, restless responsibility, carrying all the lives of my loved ones. I wandered through endless dimly lit rooms looking for a safe, clear surface where I might set down the maps, but everything was cluttered.

I crawled out of bed in the silent house at 10:30. The girls hadn't risen yet. I showered then got them moving. Last week I had promised Marian to take them to McDonald's for lunch today; she claimed she hadn't had her grease quotient for the month. So we went there. I haven't eaten there in several months, and afterward I felt sick. I could easily make another resolution: to eat nothing from McDonald's or Burger King in 2005. It wouldn't upset me one bit.

Then I had to take the girls home. In Toronto the clouds hung so low they obscured the tops of apartment buildings and office towers. We drove through all kinds of rain: spitting rain, freezing rain, torrential rain. In places the fields were bare of snow but shining with ice. Elsewhere the ditches were full of slushy snow. The streets of Lindsay were half flooded. The Sunfire chugged through pools, spitting deluges on the sidewalk. At Tim Horton's I accidentally ordered an iced cappuccino; I had wanted a hot one.

On the way back to Toronto I had Yo-yo Ma to warm me: my favourite, the finale from Dvorak's Cello Concerto in B minor. It alternates between an exotic march-like main theme and passages of tender poetry, the cello's voice line breathy and rhapsodic. Then it mounts to one of my favourite moments in 19th Century music, when a solo violin joins the cellist in an orgasmic, joyous duet. A golden glade in a shadowy forest. Eventually the movement subsides into a contemplative coda, peace mounting on peace, a bright summer evening flooding all the senses.

I believe this was a new recording from the New York Philharmonic, something to add to my wish list. Which reminds me, yesterday I picked up kd lang's new album, Hymns of the 49th Parallel. Mellow tunes from Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen and other Canadian songwriters. It's a rare event for me to buy a CD, but this was my Christmas gift to myself. It too is a capsule of tranquillity in troubled times. We must grasp and savour all we can.