Of Dreams and Nightmares

Back in October 2004 I was shocked like everyone else in my town to read about the senseless murder of a young woman named Kelly-Anne Drummond. By all accounts, she had been an out-going, vibrant girl, an accomplished athlete who had just completed her degree in Communications and who had recently worked as a production assistant on her first film shoot.

My reaction to her senseless death was very much coloured by the fact that my own daughter has a birthday in October which we were about to celebrate. I often thought about Kelly-Anne's mother and what she was going through. By what stroke of luck or fate did I get to keep my daughter, while she had so tragically lost hers? It consumed my mind for quite awhile and I followed the story right up until Kelly-Anne's boyfriend was convicted of her murder and sent to prison two years later.

At around the same time as Kelly-Anne died,  I was writing a book (Silent Women) which deals with the subject of abuse and how easy it is for people to lose themselves when they get enmeshed in an unhealthy relationship. Abuse comes in so many forms....verbal, sexual, emotional, physical...and it can be delivered so subtly that the victim, at first, doesn't even realize what is happening. Abuse can happen to anyone, at any age.

While I continued to work on my book, I was approached by a friend and colleague who asked me to help her with a film she had just finished directing. She had shot it but the storyline wasn't working for her and she needed to give her images new meaning in order to salvage the footage she already had. The film was entitled "Dreams and Mirrors".

The film depicts the emotional landscape of a young girl who is trying to come to terms with her past and the relationship she had with her late father. The breath-takingly beautiful images evoked strong emotions and were a natural outlet, given what I was writing in my book, to further explore the topic of women who choose to be silent about their inner pain. What cannot come out, goes deep within, and in the case of Sara, the character in the film, the end result is a sequence of dreams that eventually lead her to make an important decision. To quote from the narration: "The women always walk without speaking, knowing that silence is expected of them, that all shame must be borne without ever making a sound. This might have been my own fate had I not heard the wave of eloquent anguish coming from these silenced voices, showing me that pain is the force that either keeps you down or makes you rise."


"Dreams and Mirrors" is finally going to be screened this weekend after years of hard work and a tenacious belief in the message from all who were involved in the project. One crew member will not be able to attend the screening. I never knew until yesterday that the production assistant on this film, was Kelly-Anne Drummond.

I dedicate what I wrote for "Dreams and Mirrors" to her memory.

Feeling Grinchy

Last winter, while waiting for a delivery, I offered to give the store directions to my house. They politely declined by saying: "that's ok, our drivers have GPS." Duh.

They say you start to get old when you have trouble adapting to new technology so I guess I have arrived because I find myself commenting more and more on how things used to be. I used to give people verbal directions to my house all the time but now refrain from doing so for fear of sounding....well, like an old person.

Here's another example of how things have changed:  I always looked forward to writing Christmas cards around this time of year and would always send out between 40 and 50 to friends and relatives all over the world. As a result, we always received tons of cards back which provided a holiday tradition that goes back to the first year we were married; when the tree comes down we read all the cards out loud, one by one and share a memory or anecdote about the sender. With family living far away, this was always a bitter-sweet moment of connection, replaced now by the immediate gratification of social networking.

With twitter and facebook, skype and the convenience (not to mention the monitary savings) of e-cards, our old traditions are starting to change drastically. As a result we have received a mere seven cards so far this year. I probably should only admit to five, since one was from our newspaper delivery man and another from our dog's vet! I fully expect to receive Jacquie Lawson e-cards even from them next year.

And the anticipation of going Christmas shopping? Gone the way of the Dodo bird. Walking through stores to get ideas, checking and comparing with other stores, perhaps finding the ideal book for a person, getting them what you think they want, used to be fun and even exhilerating. Of course, you come home exhausted and somewhat cranky after a few hours of that, but it's all worth it if you find the right gifts. "Oh, you still do that?" asked a friend recently. "I do all my shopping on-line."

I concede that it may be more convenient to browse on the Internet but surely it's not nearly as much fun as shopping the old-fashioned way. I know that makes me sound ancient but there you are. I still like to anticipate what I might see in a real store and I like to touch and feel and check out the colours and I love the satisfaction of suddenly finding that perfect something that I know is really wanted by the person on my list and then bringing it home like a secret treasure. Although there, too, the influence of technology is vast. Remember when a nice holiday photo in a frame made a lovely gift? Now you can give grandma 200 photos in an electronic frame she can watch over and over like a bad sitcom. Should I give a book or simply download ten onto a Kindle/Kobi? Does anyone even remember how much pleasure we used to get from giving or receiving a simple sweater or scarf? Not many do.

I think this is the last Christmas where old traditions that my husband and I have built up over nearly three decades of marriage will prevail. Next year I will try to be more in tune with the times. I will send out e-cards, give Kiva gift cards to everyone and then serve a free range turkey with bio rice ad organically grown vegetables. But I will secretly treasure the way things used to be.

Happy holidays to everyone and may you put 2011 to good use!

How Memories Are Made

The little girl holds her grandmother's hand tightly. They cross the street but it is so wide they only make it to the meridian in the middle. Cars rush by, horns honk and people run across zig zagging between moving cars. The grandmother seems confused by all the noise. She looks around as though lost and cannot focus. The little girl begins to feel frightened. She doesn't know the way home. But she begins to recognize some of the landmarks and takes stock, just in case. There is the red church across the street and the tree that stands on the corner is one she has seen before. Looking around some more, she sees the curve in the street where the bus stops. She waits for her grandmother to cross the other half of the road with her and then she starts to pull her towards that bus stop. The grandmother is licking her lips now, gazing intently into the distance as though trying to see something beyond the horizon. The little girl chirps up that once they are on the bus they just have to remember where to get off. The grandmother clutches her purse tightly with her right arm. It is a brown purse with beige stitching and a metal clasp in the middle. The little girl will never forget that purse, not even when she is a grown woman and her poor old grandmother has become a memory. They stand near the curb watching cars zip by them. Eventually the little girl sees the bus in the distance and she tells the grandmother that she should take out her money so they can pay. There are other people waiting in line now and the bus is coming nearer. The grandmother opens her purse and takes out her wallet. She has to let go of the girl's hand to do this. So afraid is the little one of losing sight of her that she grabs a fistful of her elder's skirt in her sweaty little hand. The bus approaches, stripped gears making a horrible noise, belching black smoke behind it. The little girl and her grandmother board last after everyone else in order for the girl to stay close to the driver so that she can ask him to stop if she recognizes their street. Someone rises and offers his seat to the grandmother and smiles at the girl. The door finally closes and the driver makes the bus shudder forward, back into the traffic, back where they had come from, the little girl still clutching her grandmother's skirt.