By Peter Christensen

Op-Ed Commentary

“How is your rib?”

“I broke two while feeding the compost bin? Vern is dying you know. He’s the last of the fathers.’ They’ll keep him going for another day and if he doesn’t go by tomorrow, they will pop him: he’s had enough!”

She came by this morning to pick up Y.  They are going to canoe from Spillimacheen to Parsons with two other women of age. All single. Either they have got rid of their husbands through divorce or they passed from too much work, too much stress, too much dope or were just unlucky.

As usual, there is a carrousel of single, retired women doing things together.  I’m the only husband left. I made a smart-ass comment to B that as it was all women travelling together, they could say anything they wanted about men!

She replied out loud to no one in particular, but within range of Y’s hearing. “They always think it is all about them, don’t they?”

Y, after 48 years of marriage let that one slide. I was hurt by the comment but haven’t figured out why?

Before Y and B left, we talked about how slow the tomato plants were? (The tomatoes that will need watering if it heats up.) I said it was because ‘we’ weren’t closing the greenhouse at night.

“It’s the cold air coming down off the mountain at night that sets them back.”

Y said.  “It’s because the seed was poor. I started those plants inside a long time ago.”

It’s peaceful here, just me and Charlotte the poodle we inherited from a friend who passed. I decided to read. I have a sunny place on the deck where I can stretch out. I went to my Writing Office and looked at the hundred or so unread books that I carefully selected and purchased but never had the time to read.

Well, I have no excuse now, do I?  I settled on a fat book of short stories by Mavis Gallant. She was a journalist from English Montreal. Gallant wrote current political and active news stories during the fifties and after six years as a frontline newspaper women moved to Paris to pursue her writing.

Her stories start out with earnest descriptions of place, be it in Montreal, Madrid or Paris. As her stories progress, we are drawn into the lives of her characters and become so familiar with them that there is no need for a traditional plot with a classic ending; we are intimate and knowing eve’s-droppers! Gallant is a master of the short story.

The New Yorker published nearly all of her short stories. As her stories unfold, we become enraptured in the emotions of the characters; one cannot help but pause, out of breath when they end, before moving on to the next.  In her story, The Fifties, listeners sit in stunned contemplation after they absorb a profound declaration defending the propaganda of the day. She describes the terminal quiet as owed to “a sudden fury of some other emotion so great that only silence could contain it.”

Mavis Gallant, a Canadian, has been ‘censored’ by the overabundance of liberal academic feminist ‘writers’ of the 21st Century who control Canada’s government funding and the literary media: a whole trainload of over educated matriarchs perch warily upon their sacred beliefs and patrol for opportunity to attack opinion that is not 2SLGBTQIA+ approved.

Literate men are caged and neutered. It matters little whether a ‘writer’ sets a scene or tells a story, being politically correct is protected by covet, folly and parliament. One can enjoy current historical output by small presses, however anything that even hints at being greater in scope than pioneer struggle stands no chance for a home in the sanctuary of Canlit.

You may ask, what has my tirade got to do with Vern dying or with a group of women canoeing the Upper Columbia River? Only the observation that one can break a rib shoveling 2SLGBTQIA+ approved writing into the compost pile of Canadian wit as easily as not!

As Y and B are piling into the truck, I attempt to make light my concerns for the girl’s safety and say, “The river will have a strong current today, what with the rapid melt and rain and, be muddy.”

B replies. “Don’t worry. There must be 1 different channels one can take on that stretch of river though one might need to drag the boat across a grass levy from time to time to be able to cross the valley.”

– Peter Christensen is a Columbia Valley-based writer and poet

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