Father's patience runs out for sunday picnic

EMC Lifestyle -All Mother needed for an excuse to have a picnic was a sunny and hot Sunday afternoon - after church, of course. Father thought the whole idea was nonsense, when you could spend the afternoon having a little nap in the grape arbour."That once-a-year church picnic is enough for me," he lamented. Father's resting in the summer often moved him from the rocking chair in the kitchen with his feet on the oven door of the Findlay Oval, to the grape arbour, where an old lawn chair and the two-seater swing sat in the cool haven of the overhanging grape leaves.

But of course, as for the Sunday picnic, Mother overruled and we five children were thrilled beyond belief...we would be spending the afternoon on the banks of the Bonnechere. It was a hefty walk to get to the river, overloaded as we were with baskets of lunch, bats and balls, our swim suits and towels, Mother's newspapers, scrap books and diaries, and always I had to take at least one doll with me too.As long as Father had his pipe and a good supply of tobacco that was about all he was interested in lugging down to the Bonnechere. The cook stove would be allowed to go out on Saturday night. That meant a cold breakfast, which further annoyed Father,

who didn't consider any meal worth pulling a chair up to the table for, unless it included meat and potatoes as part of the menu. But Mother let the stove die down because that meant a nice cool kitchen when we got back from our picnic on Sunday, a rare treat from a stove that blasted out blistering heat waves 24 hours a day every other day of the week.

As soon as we got back from church, and while the boys and Father tended to the last-minute chores at the barn, Audrey and Mother would haul out of the ice box bowls of food that had been prepared the night before. This meant hard boiled eggs, mashed fine, sliced cold pork and roast beef, cucumbers, lettuce and tomatoes, and of course, a slab cake smothered in brown-sugar icing. It didn't take long for thick sandwiches, sliced vegetables and a huge sealer of iced tea to be ready to pack into 11-quart baskets, all wrapped in an ample supply of clean flour bag tea towels. We had enough food to feed half of Renfrew County! As much as could be would be piled on the little wagon with the wobbly tin wheels,We have a great selection of blown glass backyard solar landscape lights and Shun Stone Granite Countertops. and which I used to hitch our old collie dog to, to pull my dolls around the yard. But it was better than lugging the heavy baskets down to the river.

We always went to the same spot on the Bonnechere. This was where the old maple tree had long since fallen across the narrowest part of the river, and where there was a wide grassy bank and more trees. My sister Audrey spread out two blankets and covered the little wagon with another to keep the lunch as cold as possible.Wearing short pants for bathing suits, my brothers were in the water almost as soon as we hit the river, Mother had propped herself against a tree with her books and papers spread around her, Audrey and I hid behind a tree and stripped off our clothes and got into two suits Aunt Freda had sent us from Chicago. They were scratchy, made of pure wool,Are you still hesitating about where to buy Shun Stone Granite Slabs? and as soon as they were wet, went as hard as cement, but they were all we had.

Father walked around with his pipe hanging out of his mouth, not looking at all pleased. He asked Mother when she planned on taking out the lunch, lamenting that what he had for breakfast couldn't really be called a decent meal. Mother said lunch was a long way off, and he might as well settle down and have a little nap.The afternoon wore on. Emerson said he didn't care if we ever went back home. The three boys had water fights, tried to catch fish with a makeshift pole, and jumped off the fallen tree to see who could land the farthest. Audrey was reading her books gotten from the Renfrew Library and I was playing with my doll, pretending she was a brand new baby and this was her first outing on a picnic.

Well, Father never did settle down for a nap. He walked the shoreline, he lit and relit his pipe, and when he finally sat down with his back against a tree, he never took his eyes off the blanket covering the lunch."Think I'll head back to the barns to check on that cow that didn't look too good this morning," he said.Even though we had yet to eat the lunch, I knew Father wouldn't be back. And I knew too, the cow had little to do with it.

When the sun was heading for the west, and we had eaten the lunch, the boys had dried off, and everything was packed onto the little red wagon, Father still hadn't come back. Mother assured me he would be just fine. "He just doesn't like picnics," she said. We gathered up our belongings and started for home.I saw it before anyone else. There was smoke coming out of the chimney over our house! Mother just let out a long and laboured sigh when I pointed it out to her.

We opened the kitchen door to blazing heat, and there was Father sitting at the old pine table. He hadn't bothered taking off his straw hat, and in front of him was a dinner plate piled high with fried potatoes, slabs of salt pork, and enough buttered bread to feed a family of six! The white granite teapot was boiling on the stove, Father had opened a jar of preserves and they weren't in a fruit nappy, but in a soup bowl! "Well, so much for a nice cool kitchen," was all Mother said.Finally, Father stopped shovelling in his food long enough to look up from his plate and say to Mother. "A man can't be expected to work from dawn to dusk and survive on a sandwich and a piece of cake," then taking another long slurp of hot tea from his saucer.

Art is its own kind of alchemy. It puts materials together in hopes that the resulting creation might transcend its form. Put spray paint to a wall and you can reclaim a space as if you were adding props to a set between scenes. Cut a marble slab with a chisel and it's possible you'll find a human body buried somewhere within.

The Medium's Session, the current exhibit hanging at Zeitgeist's new space in the ever-expanding Wedgewood-Houston district, takes this idea and builds a comprehensive, fully realized survey of art forms around it. Curator Patrick DeGuira himself an artist, although he doesn't exhibit his own work here called the title a reference to "medium as a material and the medium as a channel," and calls the word "session" a derivative of "sance," another supernatural exploration. But this is not an exhibit that stirs up Holy Mountain-esque imaginings of the occult or even the psychedelic. It's more like an episode of Twin Peaks, where the ordinary a box fan, a draped piece of cloth, a single tree swaying in the breeze takes on mystical, otherworldly values.

The gallery entrance is flanked by some of the exhibition's most arresting works. On the floor to the right, it appears that a couple of discarded cardboard boxes have been broken down and stacked haphazardly on top of one another. Almost as quickly as you begin to wonder why the gallery owner hasn't taken out the trash, a detail or two comes into focus. Upon closer inspection, the boxes are pieces of handwoven fabric, which artist Frances Trombly has meticulously crafted with embroidered UPS labels, postal codes, even a few odd scrawls that look like they're written in Sharpie.

Hanging from the ceiling nearby is "Said Something," a sculpture by Ron Lambert that seems both sad and comical, like a Ziggy cartoon come to life. It looks like a round marquee that's been broken apart, but its two missing pieces lying on the floor below are still connected by wires, so each piece still has functioning lights. It's like a visual sad trombone, at once majestic and failing.
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