Rear Window

I happen to know that at 6:15 a day ago, five people were standing in line at the Cineplex on Eglinton for the 7:00 showing of Hitchcock's Rear Window.  I happen to know, furthermore, that thirty minutes later no one else had arrived. Soon another 50-60 streamed in, though "streamed" wouldn't do for the over-70s--yours truly, at 64, a young buck in this crowd. 
None of us could see. Everyone who entered suffered through a spell of stops, gropes, and wobbles before eventually carrying on, often on the arm of a companion. Three minutes later they were up again, the over-70s, saying, "At my age, I'd better go now."
The movie itself was a hit with this audience. It's a fabulous piece of cinema, for one thing, and its brilliant screenplay (by John Michael Hayes) appeals in part to a certain courtliness familiar to anyone who was an adult in the 1950s.
Something else about Hitchcock. I noticed when my kids were little that Hitchcock films, with the exception of Psycho and The Birds, which I never showed them, held their attention so crisply. Why? Because he was such a master storyteller, his camera always in the right spot to deliver the goods, with or without dialogue. View the first few minutes of Rear Window, for instance.
Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly, her Edith Head gowns, Thelma Ritter, Wendell Corey, a Franz Waxman jazz-flavoured score--this is one of the greatest films ever.

One Equinox Morning at Fool's Paradise

I've taken to beginning my day with a tour of the property and corresponding page of notebook with the most objective language possible. I know such a claim is impossible the moment I make it, but what I mean is language with no intentional voice or form, no purpose other than to notate the specs of the place in as straightforward a manner as possible. 
Yesterday I was musing that such language might--in the end, when all the ideas and drafts and entries and revisions and other turns of pages have come and gone--be all that remains. As in, the only language immune from my noisy, nosey interventions in my own world. Or, and here I congratulated myself, such language and the repetition of attention it supposedly represents is in fact the beginning and the end. All a writer (this writer) needs is right there.
So, just now:
Geese (ten) eating applefall. Heavy dew (a given from now on). Shine on the lake, breeze over the blufftops. Lake steady. Mild. Sky loaded with light cloud. 
But I'd already inserted the dew bit last. And I'd paused before not writing cloudlight. As I walked back toward the house, four more geese arrived from below. Two slipped over me to the pond; the other two goosed out and veered into a short loop and came in a few metres east. All four of them sipped, then stepped out of the pond and commenced preening, my signal to get inside and do the same.
Next entry: morning bath.

TOday

When "building a tower from single grains of sand, a backyard project the city must eventually approve" ranks as my best idea, the day hasn't done much. As for the thrill of lying flat on my back a metre from a bluff that one of these million years will be long fallen, I think I got more kicks on a kids' ferris wheel at the Regina fair with my daughter years ago. ("Dad was clutching the sides, clutching," she might say. "He said he wanted to get off. I talked him into waiting for the wheel to stop.")

Today was a muggy afternoon, that's all. I tried a few stretches. Everything seemed to be connected. If the cliff goes (I was thinking), at least I'll feel loose on the way down.

I've got to hand it to lake Ontario. The boats are out, the beach is long, water checked every day.

Look up, you'll see the flightpath to/from the airport on Toronto Island, west of here (but created by a few thousand years of ex-bluff).

More Bluff

First, thanks to that squad of readers--a sunny Scarborough to you kids at Ravine Elem--who pointed out that not everyone uses "bluff" the way the Loyalists do starting with Eliz Simcoe, wife of the first Lt.-Gov of Upper Canada. For her, bluffs were cliffs, like white cliffs of Dover. Westerners know bluffs as members of the gully family.
Anyway, the bluffs here are, by definition, endangered, though the multi-million erosion control project (ECP)will keep the lake off the base of the bluff for now (as in, the next x-million years). That still leaves the wind, which the other day was blowing a visible cloud of fine dust from the upper face of the bluffs. My gnarly head of hair was full of it.
Now, between the western edge of the ECP and the eastern edge of a public beach a half-mile or so west, lake and bluff-base interact as they always have (always being one of those words, like now that can't hold its center in a formation like the bluffs). It's pretty, and inviting . . .

if scrambly on the far side. This is where it gets:

one of the best beach days I've had all summer. On the way back, I picked up a fragment of bluff which, despite its thousands of years of weight, breaks in my hands.
I really shouldn't be here, in other words. And that goes for the rest of  you. ECP or not, the bluffs will fall,

and for those lovers I saw enjoying the beach, that's double the risk.

Halfway from Doug to Dug

I hear a voice out there--could be the four-seater heading west for Toronto Island airport, could be goose #63 with the limp, could be that swift of wind that blows fine dust from the face of the bluffs--I hear a voice curious about what I'm working on here at Fool's Paradise. Thanks for asking!
I've got a character named dog (always lower case) who veers from actual canine, as in the incident with the ham on the kitchen counter, to actual human feeling the effects of time, as in his routine bluffing struck by what the earth has to say. He lives, he drives, he walks, he seems to want to put things in words. Dogging it, he admits. It's not so much the specifics of his life that have surfaced (other than that he's a dog from Saskatchewan), more his general approach/response channels. So a series of poems, a book-full in the end, should there be one. Today, dog goes downtown!
Another idea: create English lyrics for the traditional fado songs (sample here) of Alfredo Marceneiro. Free translation, sonic translation, no attempt to render the Portuguese into its corresponding English, but sustaining the essential heart--most dog-like, as it happens--of the music.
I can hang a day on either or both of those.

One Could Go On About the Critters

The once-a-month pest guy told me about the mice this morning. I showed him one of the ancient mousetraps Doris McCarthy used for decades. Still the best kind, the guy said, with a little peanut butter. I've seen the ones that emit a frequency we can't hear but the mice can. They work for about a week until the mice get used to them. He went on. If you have a large mouse population, those traps are what we use. Once we cull the population by about two-thirds, we go to the poison and the bait, and that controls them.
Here, dear readers of this blog--that's you uncle Ahab and aunt Bee--we can all insert stories of living with a certain antenna-heavy insect the size of one of those clickers we used to get at the fair, for instance. 
Today down on the groyne, it was Mr or Ms river otter slick with a mouthful of weed off the lower rocks that gave me a look and carried on. You might be able to spot him/her here:

Maybe not. As for the groyne, a new word in my book, it's one of four massive but composed rock piles, essentially, designed to take the brunt of the waves and thus protect the base of the bluffs and the properties above.

Even the most benign wave action as seen from a peek over bluff-edge 60 metres up will pick the speck from a rock's pocket, if it finds one, and replace it with its million psi of lake Ontario. I'm not sure whether to feel such effects or just notice them.

And part of being down here is the climb back.

Goose Morning to You

Just now geese invented hockey, number 99 billing a newly fallen apple past the defencegoose, big number 4. 
I must hand it to the geese. It's taken until day 5 or so of my stay here, but I think I'm revising my normal chase-and-disdain impulse re these creatures. In the pond and fountain and today's bright sun, they put on quite a show with their splashes flapping, their giving each other chase. I wonder which came first--a body the size of an outboard motor or a fabled neck to tune it up, which they do more or less constantly. I wish I were half as clean.
At first light this morning (as if any light could be first), a deer and two young stood around out back, nibbling. I've seen raccoon and squirrel and a tubey dark fellow with a thin tail. The reporting on the erosion control project, the saviour of these bluff-top properties, lists dozens of creatures that populate the bluff and ravine. Of all the pond visitors, I'm the tamest.