a favourite author

+ i have my own michael ignatieff story. we were leaving parliament hill, november 2007, me and james, amanda, haida, i think that was it. we were at question period, now we were leaving, back across the river to gatineau and our little conference. michael ignatieff was leaving too, big coat, handbag, no hat. we were next to the big holiday tree, hey, it's ignatieff! cool. we went out separate doors, but took the same path down towards the street, the same gate, and then walked right behind him down the road. he recognised some guy, hey, hi, they waved. we all kept walking, then he went into the chateau laurier hotel before we had a chance to really deal with the situation. but that's the story.

my dog will run to catch a duck or a seagull, and it flies away - these are the rules. she caught one, cornered it on a bench, it had a bum wing or something, and she looked at it, then left. i mean really, when do you do then? and we caught the next prime minister, wow, walking down the street. he was handsome. the eyebrows, they're real, it's not just makeup.

+ the globe and mail runs a column called 'generation ex', an advice and analysis column for divorcees. it was introduced with the new 'life' section. given the continuously high divorce rates in canada, went the pitch, surely there is a need for some conversation on this, particularly in a time when the wedding industry can sustain magazines and conferences and its own subculture - i saw a poster for an 'indie wedding fair' in town recently. so, 'generation ex,' still running. i skim it, sometime read it all.

and something a friend said, that he had, over time, felt a quiet jealousy from other friends over the fact that his parents were happily married and stable, which was rare. i remember, in elementary school, feeling as though, living as i did in a stable two-parent household, that i was missing out on a defining aspect of my generation, my peer group. the 'single-parent-household' felt like the norm, and i couldn't understand, didn't dare wonder further. i was missing out on 'generation ex.'

+ we went, four, five years ago, to port alberni for the holidays. my then-estranged parents were in ucluelet, a little lodge or townhouse i guess, for the holidays. a getaway to work things out. of course we'd join them for lunch, how wonderful, we'd drive to ucluelet, then we'd all drive to tofino for a fancy lunch, then a walk on the beach. the mist cleared and there we were, four of us, in front of a wonderful view of everything, the beach and the ocean. and then the perfectly condensed short story, the boiled down image of it all, a couple was getting married in front of us, right on the beach.

on one hand, i've finally joined my peer group, understand what it means to be us, this is the generation ex, and a lot of things make more sense then. on another hand, there you go, it's a capsule story. stable home / broken home. from one to the other. and both columns are so complex, so long and varied and full of, well, people.