Kindness revisited...

Contrary to my previous posting, I will be able to read On Chesil Beach while in Finland. The children's librarian that I volunteer with very kindly made a simple phone call and the book is on it's way, despite my blundering. I simply must get a grasp on this language when I return in the fall!

Kindness is everywhere I turn, here in Finland. I've been very lucky. I've met all sorts of helpful and generous folk.

I've also met a few characters. It's a small place. The other evening I went jogging on my own. I went to a local hill (which has a look-out tower and a playing field perched on top) and is wooded. Trails intersect and encircle the entire area, so if you pass a person jogging once, you are bound to pass them a dozen times. When I returned home to my partner, I informed him that I was checked out quite a few times on my run. I was being cruel, just trying to inject him with a motivator for joining me on the occasional evening jaunt. "Oh, by who?" he asked. "Um, some really serious runner, and Italian maybe, in short shorts," I replied. "Oh, that's the same guy that was checking you out at the grocery store when we were shopping a few weeks ago, his name is ---." As an afterthought he added, "He's a real horn-dog."

Oh, okay. Well, anyways before I get too full of myself.

Anyhow, the interpersonal weirdness just keeps on coming. In my first week here, we met a sprightly blonde German girl that dutifully showed up at every gathering where a certain friend of ours was bound to be. I was new, lonely, and eager to make new acquaintances. I tried to engage her in conversation a few times and really didn't get very far. She just wasn't interested in making friends...her gaze kept being averted. Let's call her "Tiffy" - because that's the kind of name she has. When the apple of her eye left town for an internship, Mr. Apple, I thought we wouldn't hear from her any longer. This was true, until two weeks ago. She ran into my partner while out shopping. Twice. Consequently we have been sent a text message to join her and friends for drinks, as she will being going away for three weeks. Well, I really haven't seen her in two months, so I don't know about this three week thing. Does she think that Mr. Apple is back, and he'll be coming along with us? Oh well, regardless of the motivators I will head out and take one more stab at friendship. Sometimes it is exhausting being in a country were all the people you socialize with are new acquaintances. I miss the lack of effort it took to hang around with old comfortable friends!

By the way, Tiffy has a watch that trains her. It has a programmed training schedule and gets her out the door and furthermore, if her heart rate is below target, it commands her to run faster. No wonder she's got such a great figure. I need one of those.


Image from Mati Rose, a Californian artist.

Some things transcend language...

I've had my fair share of language gaffs since I arrived here. At a conference workshop, I tried to help out by bringing over some extra chairs for a discussion, and I brought over a chair that said RIKKI. Lets just say that I discovered the hard way that rikki means broken. I've gone in doors that said OUT and out of doors that said IN and I've tried to open doors to buildings that are closed. It can be a little bit like experiencing the world as an illiterate!

I had another bad library experience -I stood at the circulation desk trying to comprehend why my holds went to a different branch (after all, I used the English version of the catalogue!) The circulation staff talked amongst themselves, gesturing towards me as the line grew, avoiding eye contact, and generally looking quite irritated. I wish I could speak the language, I am trying, and I don't want to seem like an arrogant North American. I don't expect people to speak English at all, but I find that most people do, and get accustomed to that. I begin to hope that one person on staff at any given institution will comprehend me to some degree. I kept apologizing and shrugging, we don't have a car and I can't imagine trekking to somewhere else to get a book from a library, I asked if I could cancel it. Looks of irritation soon appeared and I was asked to move away from the desk. I was pointed towards a reference desk, where I met a librarian that did not speak English and found myself standing there bewildered as Mika tried to explain. The situation seems hopeless and I've given up on reading Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach until I get home. I know I will now be eternally sympathetic to foreigners and new Canadians when I'm back home working on reference some day. I think I have always been courteous, but now I see how a smile can go such a long way when someone is bewildered. Kindness transcends language.

Another thing that transcends language is drunkenness! I had the wonderful opportunity to join the staff on the Mobile Library Bus this week. The bus driver, did not speak a word of English. By pointing to book titles, gesturing, and writing numbers down, and by showing me his wallet, he managed to convey that he had two children and that his son, only fifteen years old is 185 cm tall and plays basketball. His daughter is 25 and has a 2 year old child. Pretty good eh?

At the last stop of the night, we were a bit weary (I have no excuse because I was simply observing - all reference and circulation transactions were in Finnish) when a woman got onto the bus wearing the unmistakable odor of liquor. I guess that's the problem with pulling a library bus up in front of someones house on a summer evening. She tied her dog up outside and it was carrying on barking relentlessly in piercing tones. Every now and then she shouted out the door at it. After she left, the librarian and bus driver burst into laughter, waving their arms and saying "Pheewwww!" and the bus driver mimicked glugging out of a bottle. Yup!

Anyways, it was lovely to see how the book bus works. Kids with bike helmets in hand were the number one customer. It was great to see how the bus can serve children in their own neighbourhood as they showed up at the right time, waiting to return books and pick up their holds. One girl picked up a slew of Manga while we held on to a pile of James Bond novels for a boy. The librarian knew many of her regulars and walked the length of the bus helping patrons find books. She had a keen sense of what people needed, and took time to refresh the fiction that was available while we were stopped. The shelves are very tightly packed, both to make the most materials available and to reduce flying objects while driving! They keep a tight collection of fiction, non-fiction (from sushi to gardening) and children's materials (including kids DVD's but not adults). The materials are quite fresh and new and are housed separately from the regular collection in the basement of the library.

I wish we had a mobile library bus at home. Sigh. On the road...

A Little Piece of Paris and some sterner stuff...

Fatima's Good Fortune by Joanne & Gerry Dryansky.


This was a quirky lovely little book that made me laugh out loud, and long for escape into its sunny pages. Yes sunny. Don't usually long for that. Okay, I do sometimes.

The most extraordinary descriptions of human interactions with very personable animals. Pets I would love to have:

"As if Durand's glance had cued her, the dog, the Countess's ancient Labrador, Emma, strolled in from the hallway, rolling her hips, and began to sniff suspiciously at Monsier Durand's zippered half-boots. The dog trailed a faintly unpleasant smell, resembling the odor of a cellar. Durand hiked his trouser leg nervously and Emma's saliva wet his hairless leg above a low sock. Her teeth grazed his skin. Time, he thought grimly to get back in the literal elevator."

Another scene...

"Cacohouete looked at him in a strange silence when he walked in."

"Don't say it!" Suget shouted at the bird. "Or I'll fillet you like a fish."

"Cacohouete kept mum and turned his back and let go a bit of bird-do. Suget took it as an insult and threw his raincoat over the cage. Perhaps, to be fair, the bird had merely shown that it was terrified, and perhaps on the other hand, if someone who knew bird expressions were looking at Cacahoute full in the face from the other side of the cage, he would have seen a look of sympathy. This from Cacahoute for the first time."

Where does the story start?

"It was the twenty-seventh of August, and rain had been falling on Paris for several days on end. As if in winter, the Eiffel Tower was amputated above the hips by fog. The swollen Seine was splashing the boots of the stone Zouave below le Pont de l'Alma and covering the gangways of the rising houseboats. In the blurred city, on streets that smelled of wood fires lit in yellow-windowed living rooms, the cobbles were all that glistened." And here we meet Rachida, the sister of Fatima, the Tusanian hotel maid who finds herself in France, despite her accursed and life long bad luck...and so the tale begins...




The Known World by Edward P. Jones


I've been meaning to read this one for a while, the 2004 Pulitzer Prize winner, but the opening paragraph deterred me. Serious stuff, best saved for another day when I am made of sterner stuff. Amidst the extreme, and I do mean extreme, busy-ness of my previous children's librarian life (all my own doing, too many things going on, too many jobs, too many people to please, too many activities and involvements) I often grabbed a book on Friday evenings downstairs from the adult department on ending my shift, looking for something straightforward and enjoyable. A light diversion. Now that I'm far from home with more time for reading, I am finally reading some things I should really read. I finding great rewards within the pages! I am currently reading Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown. I am completely immersed, unable to put it aside, a great storyteller indeed and beyond any blog entry review!


The tale opens with Moses, the formidable overseer of the other slaves at a plantation surprisingly owned by another black man. This paradox of slavery and ownership runs through out the tale. This man, Henry Townsend promptly dies, leaving his widow Caldonia to grapple with her role. I did not enjoy the opening, or this character Moses. I did not enjoy how shallow and lifeless Caldonia was in this tale. This was a tale about many people populating a particular time and place however, and we were not to dwell on one woman's story. Intricate layers of family and generation unravel and a beautiful symmetry unfolds and the story reaches it's somewhat violent but inevitable culmination. I loved the detail and care taken, the gift of foresight the author offered at ever turn with every character. A glimpse into the future of the narrative, for this example comes early on, years before it actually occurs...


"Louis, over time, would learn how not to let the eye beome his destiny, for people in that part of Virginia thought a traveling eye a sign of an inattentive and dishonest man. By the time he became friends with Caldonia and Calvin, her brother, at Fern Elston's tiny academy for free Negro children just behind her parlor, Louis would be able to tell the moment when the eye was wandering off just by the look on a person's face. He would blink and the eye would come back. This mean looking full and long into soemone's eyes, and people came to see that as a sign of a man who cared about what was being said. He became an honest man in many people's eyes, honest enough for Caldonia Townsend to say yes when he asked her to marry him. "I never thought I was worthy of you," he said, thinking of the dead Henry, when he asked her to marry him. She said, "We are all worthy of one another."