When I first came to Edmonton, I was struck by the beauty of the magpies. We don't have them in Ottawa. Ottawa birds are on the whole a drab lot, which is fitting for a government town. So why would Edmonton, another government town, have the magpies?
As I was walking up the road to the Convention Centre from the river valley last week, preferring to walk since the whiplash injury, I noticed a magpie walking on the road in front of me. It was walking quickly, staying about ten feet ahead of me. Once in a while it would look back as if checking. And I looked back and saw four other magpies on the road, seemingly evenly spaced down the road and all walking in my direction. I had become the second in a procession, and we were all moving along at the same rate. I stopped and laughed. The magpies stopped. Then, as if caught out doing something they ought not be doing, they scattered to either side of the road and looked intent on finding something to eat.
The frost has come. This means no-one is camping in the lot next door. Fewer visitors to our tap. September/October always brings change. I am now working at the university, co-ordinating a project for one faculty and teaching a course in another faculty. For MacEwan College I am teaching grammar, and loving it!
Many years ago, when I was still thinking I would dedicate my life to avant garde opera (really!), I did a mask workshop at the Banff Centre. We went through a whole process of visualization and feeling, and we shaped the mask blindfolded. My mask ended up looking like my friend David - it had a truly wonderful aquiline nose, nothing like my hockey-accident stub. When we were done with the papier mache and the paint, it was time to play the masks. We didn't play our own - someone else put the mask on and waited for the character to emerge. Peter Spira played my mask. He said it was a 57-year-old English prof. I laughed at this, because I could think of few things less probable.
Well, I'm not 57. And I'm only a sessional. But it's eerie how my life seems to be headed in that direction some 20 years later. Am I in a procession of magpies, unaware that I am actually considered one of them?
