The Ferret-Jello Hypothesis

Doug and I met online, and spent several weeks writing emails back and forth before we spoke on the phone. My first impression of him was firmly anchored in his his love of words, and his love of writing. Two (of the many!) things we shared in common. 

An award Doug won for a Remembrance Day special feature he researched & wrote

At that time, Doug was running the newspaper in a small town, having retired after almost quarter of century working for the Toronto Star. He was a voracious reader, an excellent writer, and had a phenomenal vocabulary. His Dad, also an Star man, wrote a column about words, and reviewed books, amongst his other positions. Doug spoke of how their house overflowed with advance copies, review copies, books and more books; one of my childhood friends thought I lived in the library . . . and our homes (in the UK and now here) are similarly over-booked. (And yes, every single book in this house ‘sparks joy’ in my life.) 

Books & words & books about words . . . three from our bookshelf

Pre-Covid I had the best summer job - teaching Creative Writing to a group of International students in Cambridge. I loved introducing my students to OuLiPo, the poetics of chance, and Mitch Goldstein’s ‘Ferret-Jello Hypothesis’ (which suggests that we will always try to forge a relationship between two nouns which are linked only through physical proximity to each other, in order to make sense of what we’re hearing or reading) and then playing with writing exercises purported to have been created by a group of Surrealists.

The summer I was 10, Dad and I visited some of the most beautiful countryside in Canada. All I wanted to do was read. 

Fun fact: On my Dad’s side of the family, I am distantly related to dictionary writer, Noah Webster. On my Mum’s side of the family, I am less distantly related to dictionary writer, Felix Author Yockney. I grew up in a house where dictionaries were kept in the kitchen (and several other rooms as well), and were consulted multiple times a day, and every room (including the bathroom) had bookshelves. (I'm so lucky to have been brought up in a house where it was so easy to fall in love with reading.)

My heart has broken a million times as I’ve watched Doug lose the ability to read, and lose his nouns, and lose his sentence structure, and lose much of his English. Never blessed with a child to raise, I wonder if his loss of language is a reverse mirroring of the way he learned it. I think about a Linguistics course I audited during my undergrad, and non-verbal communication, and how easy it is, in fact, to carry on both nonsensical conversations and entirely one-sided conversations. And I am very aware that when Doug strings seemingly random words together, I am desperately trying to find a connection, to make them make sense, to listen and to hear and to understand. 

                      

(If you didn't know, you might think Doug is reading his mail)

What he has not lost is his gorgeous singing voice (the words don’t matter), and his ability to whistle, and his laughter.  Also, he has not lost his love of listening to poetry, and making rhyming words, and the sound of music. 

Words still matter. Words still connect us. 

The Gift of Stories

I tend to economise at the grocery store, because I find that an easy way to save money for other things more important to me. I’m a person who shops the reduced table, buys day-old, chooses a bag of legumes for protein. There are exceptions: if I’m cooking for other people, I buy the best I can afford. If I’m in a fabulous deli in another city, all bets are off. And if an avocado or a mango looks perfect, I’ll often splurge. This week I treated myself to a bag of blood oranges. 

I was three and three quarters when I ate my first blood orange. Italy, 1971. I argued with my older sister; this couldn’t be an orange, because it was red. She pointed out that it was the name of the fruit, not the name of the colour of the fruit. I didn’t call a banana a yellow, or an apple a green. Or maybe she didn’t. I wasn’t yet four - I don’t really remember the exact details of the argument, just that there was shouting, and crying. And in all likelihood my sister didn’t care that I didn’t recognise an orange, albeit a red one: our eldest sister had just died. We’d been bundled up, we’d been driven through a blizzard to Montreal airport, we’d flown to Italy, and been met by my Mum’s sister, my Aunt Em. This wasn’t a holiday; it was an attempt to escape an unbearable grief. 

I have explored that story in poetry, and in fiction. It’s one of very few early childhood memories I have. I am aware I grant it more poetic weight than it truly deserves - but isn’t that the way of the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves? Fifty years later, blood oranges are still magical to me, still a treat, still transport me back to that long ago moment. 

A friend of ours recently sent some photographs and snapshots of Doug’s early adulthood, with stories about the moments captured on film. (Thank you, Ron!) What a gift - to have a window into the past of the man I love, to hear his stories, many of which he’s never told me. 

Every story confirms that Doug has always been Doug. A good man, an everyday hero, an optimist. He once rescued a woman from a car accident; once she was safe, he laughed at the song she’d been forced to listen to on repeat. 

At a party held in a converted barn, he mixed himself a strong cocktail and drank it from a pineapple. At some point during the evening he opened the wrong door and fell backwards down a flight of stairs. Instant panic - he could have broken his back, or worse, his neck. But as everyone rushed to the top of the stairs, Doug grinned and held up his pineapple. “I only lost half my drink!”

A glass half-full. That was Doug, and that is Doug. (Also drinking from a pineapple, and falling down a flight of stairs - that’s so Doug too.) 

This week marked an anniversary of sorts for me. On March 5th 2005, I was (according to the paramedic who saved my life) 7 minutes away from death. Since then, I have left a bad marriage, moved back to Canada (and back to England and back to Canada again), met my youngest niece, grown to truly know my other niece and my nephew, gone back to school, earned an MA and a PhD, become a teacher, become a writer, spent time with my family and friends, made new friends, had my first book published, met + married + made a life with Doug.

How many stories would I have lost had I not survived that day . . . 

It is heart-breaking that Doug no longer holds the favourite stories of his life - but they are not lost. We who have witnessed this wonderful man now carry his memories for him. 

Europe, 1989