Lady Dar's Thin Crust All-Dressed Pizza Blues: Friday, March 2nd!

Religious freedom should work two ways: we should be free to practice the religion of our choice, but we must also be free from having someone else's religion practiced on us. -John Irving, novelist (b. 2 Mar 1942) 

Hi Toshi! Trust you are well and still enjoying life in Tokyo. Fond regards to your lovely Mother! Duke pestered Chloë until she could take it no longer, letting him and Etta out at 3:30 am! Both wanted in two hours later so we well know who rules the roost at Burns Street! Will be back at the pool today as forecast calls for periods of snow and rain, accumulating a coating to 1 cm!
 
Love this condo! We like it too send address Mom!

[Balcony over pool and entry! Hi Condo Woman! I'm glad you like the condo. Thanks for all the great snaps. Can hardly wait to stay! Love and cheers, Dad!]

Hadn't seen Mudbound and watched it last night. What a powerful, powerful film, very disturbing but finally uplifting. We plan to view Get Out and Darkest Hour, next. Must away to attend to the endless list of chores Lady Dar left before leaving for her volunteer shift at Penticton General Hospital. She works on the Information Desk there, from 8:00 am until noon, every Friday, when we are in town. Once I've discharged a few I'm heading back to the pool as my reward. 

Home Show is on at Trade & Convention Centre here this weekend so we plan to go on Saturday, as Lady Dar has plans for a solarium for the front of our house and we have found some great ideas and materials for some of the work we've done on our bungalow since we moved in May, 2015.  All the best to you, Toshi, and to your Mom as well, of course. Stay well. Take care of each other. Do keep in touch as I trust our paths will cross, again, in the not too, too distant future. Cheers, Patrizzio! PS: Enclosed message is from a former boarder at Hotel Kits! Pic: Duke having a pedicure, mango lotion rubbed on the pads of his feet. It helps to keep them from becoming sore as they are outside on the snow and ice during the day.

Good to hear from you and thanks for the pics... ive attached one for you guys of us on the dock prior to the wedding... the service and the reception after was perfect...the minister was both funny and sentimental and the meal and evening after was great. Once on board, my niece overcame her fears and stayed and had dinner with us so as i say..it was perfect. Tonight they return home to snowy Thunder Bay..the visit wasn't long enough.... but it was fun :).. soon Pam will be here! Looking forward to their visit...and then we start to think about going home...it is so true that time flies when you are having fun....take care 

Hi again, Forgetful Louisa! Glad to hear all went so well with wedding and dinner afterwards. Unfortunately, you didn't attach the picture of you on the dock, prior to wedding! Anyway, enjoy your remaining time in Paradise as weather here is still winterish. I was  back at the pool this afternoon. I walked as Lady Dar needed car. Not all that far so not a big deal. However, when I came out of the locker room at around 3:30 pm the rain was pelting down and howling wind had it slanting sideways! I called for chauffeur service but Her Royalness wasn't answering phone. 
 

After I tried a number of times, rain had turned to sleet/snow so I decided to brave elements. Had a small umbrella with me, [One of the ones we bought in Costa Rica!], just in case, and it worked well. Kept my dry although my pants were soaked, especially on right side, where the wind driven precipitation took its toll. Streets were awash, gutters small rivers in many places. Had to be careful at times as cars whizzing by threw up sheets of water when they plowed through puddles.

Lady Dar will be making her fabulous thin-crust, gluten-free pizza for dinner and we'll watch Get Out, another Oscar nominated film. Probably open a couple of bottles of wine, maybe even a snort or two of malt, and dream about the good life, (and grapefruit!), in Sun City! Fondestos from Lady Dar, relaxing in the Rumpus Room, after her ever so arduous day, swooning over Victor and all the Genoa City Losers in The Young and The Rest of Us, adored by Duke, while I tend the fire. Cheers, Patrizzio! 

Pics: Chloë giving Duke a pedicure, mango lotion rubbed on the pads of his feet. It helps to keep them from becoming rough and sore as both cats are outside on the snow and ice during the day, and night! Lady Dar in her natural habitat! Etta is keeping me company in the living room, perched on the windowsill, watching everything that goes on outside, in front of our house. She took a big stretch just as I was about to snap a shot! You can see that there is only a little bit of snow left. Stuff today didn't stick and heavy rain helped wash away much of what remained. 

Hi Patrick We start the long journey home tomorrow, hoping to get to Redding on day one , if we get an early start. It will be tough to leave, because as I write I have the sun on my back and a corona in my hand. We are now alone having dropped Chris and Nicole and kids off in palm desert where they are staying in a very fancy resort with Nicole’s mum, ( just the sort of place I hate) , smacks of Trump and rich America . Much prefer funky Palm Springs where we are.
 

We haven’t seen any movies here, but did watch lady bird , which I loved and I’m sure saoirse Ronan will win best actress. Also , Molly’s game good, not great, and shape of water which I thought was very average, but apparently is the favorite. We watched mudbound on Netflix and I thought it was excellent .
I wanted to see the Churchill movie but missed it in Vancouver. I loved Dunkirk but it probably will not win. We will definitely contact Elaine on our return and hopefully see you at the rugby. Cheers Mick

Hello again, Corona Man and Laundromat Woman! Glad to hear all went so well with family even if last Family Freeloaders are staying at a resort you spit upon! Anyway, enjoy your remaining last few hours in Paradise as weather here is still winterish, I dream about the good life in Palm Springs as I sip a Glen Keith 10 year old, 43%! Fondestos from Lady Dar. Cheers, Patrizzio!

From Quill & Quire: The publication of Wayne Johnston’s 1998 novel, The Colony of Unrequited Dreams, brought as much consternation as praise. While Johnston’s portrayal of Newfoundland’s “father of Confederation,” Joey Smallwood, proved contentious, another character emerged as a reader favourite: Sheilagh Fielding, Smallwood’s unrequited love and eventual nemesis.

Johnston, apparently as fond of the alcoholic, sardonic, tragic character as readers had been, made the surprising decision to write another novel covering the same time period and many of the same events, this time from Fielding’s point of view. A starred Q&Q review of that book, The Custodian of Paradise, concluded: “By the book’s end, many mysteries have been laid to rest, only to be replaced with new ones. This raises the happy possibility that Johnston intends to return to the scene again.”
 

Wish granted. Though relegated to a more supporting role, Fielding figures prominently in Johnston’s newest novel, First Snow, Last Light. Sadly, this time around the character seems tired. While her wit remains as sharp, she is not aging well. By the novel’s end, it feels very much like Johnston, overly fond of his creation, was determined to wrap up her story with enough hope and happiness to make up for the torment she’d endured at his hands throughout her existence.

Though settling Fielding’s affairs appears to be part of Jonhston’s plan, hers is not the primary focus of the story. At the centre of First Snow, Last Light is a mystery. The book opens with a second-person account that sets the scene for the tale of obsession, madness, and dark family secrets that is to follow. A boy returns home from school to find his house empty, the front door locked and his hermit-like mother nowhere to be found. 

Panicking, the boy – 14-year-old Ned Vatcher – runs back to school, where he finds his running coach, Father Duggan, and explains that his parents have disappeared. A cruel winter storm builds, but still Ned’s parents don’t come home. Eventually, they are believed to have been lost in the storm, but Ned knows something more is going on; there’s no way his mother would have left with his father in the middle of the day. She never went anywhere in the car unless Ned was there, too.

Finding out what happened to Edgar and Megan Vatcher becomes a lifelong quest for their son. Once it is clear Ned’s parents will not be coming back, the boy is sent to live with his paternal grandmother, Nan Finn, and grandfather, Reg, who has been laid low by a stroke that rendered him deaf and mute. At the Vatcher house, another mystery reigns: the death of Nan Finn and Reg’s son, Phonse, who went out on the sea with his fisherman father on a sunny, clear day, but never returned. While still able to speak, Reg claimed a rogue wave had drowned his son, but Nan Finn is convinced that something more nefarious happened that day, and constantly lambastes Reg in an effort to both vent her sorrow and cast accusation.

The combination of these two mysteries is almost too much for one book. Connections between them are meted out over the course of a slow-moving plot that jumps back and forth over three decades from the mid-1930s onward, with a few earlier episodes related via letters or flashbacks. Through it all, we are given Ned’s life from the age of 14 as he goes to school in Boston and lives in New York, returns to St. John’s and becomes a wealthy businessman (reminiscent of Howard Hughes in his obsessions and spending, but without the womanizing), adopts an orphaned boy whom he raises with the child’s aunt, and compulsively searches for his parents, all while spiralling into alcoholism and mental illness. Sadly, Ned’s first-person narration is so completely devoid of emotion it is difficult to believe or become invested in his story. Were it not for the intermittent chapters narrated by Fielding, the book would feel completely lifeless.

There is also the matter of the plot. Fielding’s storyline, while interwoven with Ned’s, is at least straightforward and satisfying. But even Johnston seems to feel the need to point out how convoluted Ned’s narrative is, using the character himself as a conduit. When Ned uncovers Reg’s secret, he laments the legacy he’s placed upon his adopted son’s shoulders: “A child, who didn’t know who his father was, a child, possibly of rape, didn’t need the added burden of a grandfather who had had an affair with his brother’s wife, which had led to another brother’s murder at the hands of their father, and his parents’ and wife’s chronic misery.”

With First Snow, Last Light, Johnston may have given the character of Fielding the swan song she deserves, but the central story of Ned Vatcher and his parents isn’t strong or engaging enough to carry the novel otherwise. While the writing overall is as crisply wry as ever, Ned’s narration is oddly flat. Fans of Johnston’s previous novels may well appreciate the return to familiarity, but will likely be disappointed by this latest work. 

From CBC, via Penguin Random House: Ned Vatcher, only 14, ambles home from school in the chill hush that precedes the first storm of the winter of 1936 to find the house locked, the family car missing, and his parents gone without a trace.

From that point on, his life is driven by the need to find out what happened to the Vanished Vatchers. His father, Edgar, born to a poor family of fishermen, had risen to become the right-hand man to the colony's prime minister, then suffered an unexpected fall from grace.

Were he and his wife murdered? Was it suicide? Had they run away? If so, why had they left their only child behind?

Ned soon finds himself enmeshed in another family, that of his missing father and the poverty from which the man somehow escaped. His grandparents, Nan and Reg, his Uncle Cyril and others, are themselves haunted by the inexplicable disappearance of a third Vatcher, a young man who was lost at sea on a calm and sunny day years earlier.
 

Two other people loom large as Ned becomes Newfoundland's first media mogul, building an empire to insulate him from loss: a Jesuit priest named Father Duggan, and Sheilagh Fielding, a boozy giantess who, while wandering the city streets at night, composes satiric columns that scandalize the rich and powerful.

In Ned, Fielding sees a surrogate for her two lost children, the secret that dogs her life, while Ned believes the enigmatic Fielding to be his soulmate. From The Toronto Star: Few writers today rival Newfoundland’s Wayne Johnston’s sheer power to astonish. First Snow, Last Light begins on a snowy St. John’s afternoon in 1936; home from school, Ned Vatcher finds his house empty, his parents gone. No trace is found of either parent, or their fancy Brougham car. Just like that, a child’s world crashes and burns. The gut-punched fourteen-year-old thinks, “The snow, the snow, that’s all people talked about, as if the snow itself had made off with the Vatchers, his grandmother says “people who went missing in the woods at twilight . . . had been led astray, not by fairies but by snow where there should have been no snow, a rogue blizzard when winter was a month away, led astray by the pale, bewitching light of late November, the lulling light of sunset in the fall.”

 

Johnston’s Newfoundland can seem a treacherous place, a mythic mother who devours her children. This idea — reminiscent of James Joyce — weaves in and out of his books, which now number eleven (ten novels and a memoir). (He’s also prone to riffing from great writers; the last scene in his previous book The Son Of A Certain Woman deliberately mimics Molly Bloom’s monologue in Ulysses; and in this one, T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” is paraphrased to great humour.)

The facts are these: Edgar Vatcher, born on the wrong side of the tracks but with enough talent to become a Rhodes Scholar, then a prominent political fixer, has vanished, along with Megan, his English wife. Money is owed. Emotionally supported by Father Duggan, his track coach, and by hard-drinking journalist Sheilagh Fielding — a favourite Johnston character, she’s also appeared in The Colony of Unrequited Dreams and The Custodian of Paradise — Ned moves in with his bitter grandparents, bound in hatred by the mysterious death of another son at sea — swept away by “a rogue wave” that left his father suspiciously dry. Life in his grandparents’ “Flag House” — garishly painted the same stripes as the island flag — is Dickensian, at best.

 

Digging deep into the mystery that is family, Johnston raises troubling questions. Who were our parents, really? And how could they disappear? Questions act like combustible fuel on Ned’s life. Returning from college in the States, fired by ambition and the “American Way,” Ned determines to recreate his father’s early success. St. John’s proves fertile ground for the New York-style tabloid he founds — an overnight success that funds his obsession with the “Vanishing Vatchers,” a search for truth funded, ironically, by lies.
Harder to uncover — and much closer to home — are the lies that permeate Ned’s eccentric family tree. His business empire expands and so does his ego; he adopts the “Last Newfoundlander,” a boy born minutes before Newfoundland joins Canada in 1949. But his obsession with the past, with finding his parents, is relentless: Ned hires detectives, a pilot to help him comb the province from the air, consults a psychic. As each effort yields part-answers, he drinks more, falls into unrequited love with the motherly Shelagh Fielding, pays blackmail to an odious uncle. As his bourbon-fuelled search ramps up, he drives and flies drunk. From the air, “my life was laid out before me in a code I couldn’t crack.” Newfoundland yields its secrets with agonizing slowness.

Respite from Ned’s obsession comes with other narrative voices, especially Fielding’s, whose drink-conquering sojourn in an abandoned railway shack reveals the Newfoundland we much prefer: a land of privacy and enchantment. Healing is possible, it seems, even for lives “overthrown” by youthful disasters that won’t let go.

Johnston’s always been interested in writing historical fiction. And he’s on familiar turf writing a turbulent Newfoundland family saga. This one recalls, perhaps, a nostalgia that many still harbour of an independent Newfoundland, but at the heart of it is a love-hate relationship with The Rock. This is a wondrous book.