Things A Canuck or Politico or Gridiron Artist May Not Believe
August 14, 2009, by Homme De Sept-Iles
It is the summer. Rain falls on the grass between towns. It falls on the wild tufts, the unruly channels of grass, the mushroom harlot halos of disobedient trees.
It is a season that has lost its purpose. Summer’s purpose. Maybe before these (we) settlers of a mighty land (their indentured followers and destroyed and displaced predecessors) there was, in fact, a purpose.
A season is a season and should be celebrated for its own existence and what it brings; the colours it casts and the moods it orchestrates. A season is a tectonic fugue.
In Canada, summer’s purpose is to rest from (hating or loving) hockey. To forget about it. And in the forgetting we are permitted to dream of it. To understand it. To resent it.
Hockey is or was or still might be a way to keep warm in the winter (yes it has become big business, the subject of near TSE ablution and thrall) – yet the game has reduced summer to a mere bit-player; a submissive role-taker in a panorama of silent iconic screams (ice-cream, vacations, or vapid entertainment and grim political newsreading abandon).
across the diurnal white land
a lamppost marker
a failed avro acollegiate
a blue alabaster figure, the Chief
Summer is just another servant of the game.
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