"When was the last time you were in Toronto," I was asked. The answer was the summer I turned 5 and the Feirings-- parents, brother, Weimaraner --were on a mythical trip. It was the summer of the rustic cabin on Lake Ontario, catching perch, bringing them to my mother for cleaning and cooking. She was miserable.
But it was also the summer of one Ethel and Phil's most ridiculous, high volume yet memorable arguments as we were lost in the simple Toronto streets, perhap looking for a ferry.
"It's SpadIna!" my mother screamed at her husband behind the wheel.
"It's SpaDeena, as in you are an idiot!" my father screamed at his wife on the passenger side.
Andrew and I tried to ignore it by reading classic comics in the back seat. This was not easy for us to sit through as we tried to solve the mystery of what they were really fighting about. We would find out in eight years time, but the seeds for my parent's failure was that neither one could ever admit they were wrong, neither one could ever sit with ambiguity. The code to crack in that fight? my father couldn't forgive my mother her college education, she never forgot that coming out of the war, he went straight into law school without stopping for a BA. But that was then, and oddly enough, this fight might have happened somewhere around the time of Richard Feynman's Nobel Prize, and I hadn't thought about that until last week I revisted the scene of the crime thanks to my invitation to present at The Terroir Symposium, where one talk stood out-- about creativity given by Vanessa Eckstein and Marta Cutler of blok design.
I had heard the story about the physicist Richard Feynman before. He fell into a deep depression after experiencing a double whammy: 1) he feared his work on the Manhattan Project would be used for further devastation. 2) he mourned the loss of his wife. However he broke the spell of despair by solving the physics of the spin and wobble after observing a plate in motion.
The blok designers talked about the pain and the necessity of sitting through ambiguity as an important journey to creativity. For Feynman it lead to the Nobel.
There is no Nobel in my future for sure, and it's too late for brilliance or genius, those people are born not made, all I can hope is to sit through the ambiguity with grace and look for the spin and wobble of delight. In other words, it makes no difference if it's Sped Dinah or Sped Deena. There was so much in that fight, so much hurt and fog but most importantly, no tolerance to sit through the ambiguity until they burst into discovery. Tis the pity.
Which brings me to this; ambiguity, perhaps, that is until it goes down the hatch. You approach, the shape of the bottle, what is it, what are the expectations, are you man and woman enough to trust to pour it in the glass and drink? And then what next? The 2002 was brilliant. If you can find it, you're
in for wild dreams.
imported by Jenny & Francois.
Your parents were both right, sort of.
My high school history teacher told me the correct pronunciation of the family name is SpadEEna, and if you go to the museum that's what they'll tell you. But everyone in Toronto including the announcer on the subway pronounces the street name SpadEYEna.
Posted by: Drunkinitsyouth | 05/07/2012 at 02:43 PM