Now reprinted and re-issued, it is available for purchase here...

It is more than 2 months after Haiti’s disastrous earthquake. The catastrophe in Port au Prince taking place as it did just after the Christmas season, a time when we rediscover our idealism, gave us an emotional opening, a small window in time before we resume the self-interested behaviors which we assume to be necessary for our survival as individual entities and communities.
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Young Dancer

Epicurean beauty,
Delicate, fragile,
Ephemeral beauty,
You are perfectly molded, soft mannequin,
Feeling the shape of ecstasy
Translating through the alchemy of music
The heavy percussive invitation into ripples of
Human flesh,
Expressing the joyous contagion of movement,
Recounting the urgent tyranny of youth
Today I spend my beauty
Tomorrow?
Who cares?

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Old Dancer

Venerable, elegant, durable,
Ancient but unbowed,
Slight and rigid,
Your actions, though frugal
Present a generous statement of your love of the dance
How many more times will you feel the life force?
How many more times will you dance
Your defiance of time,
Of age,
Of decay,
Of death?

My trips back to the Caribbean from Canada tend to overwhelm me although by now I look forward to being overwhelmed, provided that I can grow from the experiences that overwhelm me. In the region of my birth I usually find myself in a state of near constant psychological arousal. I frequently feel a psychic connection, as if I have caught a fleeting glimpse of eternity. Carnival in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago has more than anything else reminded me that despite only spending the first 15 years of my life in that region and even after 55 years in Canada, the ties that have kept me bound to the Caribbean are part of my authentic self. The music of the Caribbean is an essential part of the psychic ties that still keep me bound. Of course the steel drum orchestras are the very heart of Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago. They give Carnival in these Islands a distinctive and inimitably attractive quality.
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For Lauren, Emily, Nikki, Ryley Akin and Reina Girvan-Randall

With all due respects to the traditional Chinese practice of giving animal attributes to calendar years, 2009 was, in our experience, undoubtedly the Year of the Fairy. This remarkable discovery we owe to a little Sprite in our life, our granddaughter Reina. The Sprite – herself the incarnation of ethereal existences – is able to devour quantities of books borrowed from the Nellie McClung Branch of the Greater Victoria Public Library. Throughout the year 2009, at least twenty books of Fairies (from the Rainbow Magic Scholastic series) escaped the rational filters of the adult brain to be read aloud to the Sprite. Over time by an insidious process, Fairies succeeded in thoroughly washing our brains (or more properly laundering or dry cleaning the brains, since no water was involved). We had to wait until the Christmas season to see, feel and otherwise experience the cerebral damage done by the year-long assault from a host of Fairies.
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