Atlantic Canada

Gone Gros Morne

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Leah Pritchard

By Ed Staskus

“The secret to acting is don’t act. Be you, with add-ons.” Michael Sheen

“I’m going to take off now,” said Leah Pritchard. “I’m going to go. I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to leave. That’s what’s going to happen.”

It was the tail end of her last year at Gros Morne Academy in Rocky Harbour, Newfoundland. Closing in on the end of theater studies with Sarah McDonald, the teacher pulled Leah aside. “Of all the students here, the one we think would be feasible as a professional actor is the one who’s always saying they don’t want to do it. You would be the one strong enough and talented enough to actually make it.”

Leah Pritchard had other plans. She was geared up about joining the Mounties.

When the class mounted their year-end play, everybody’s parents coming to see the show, Sarah McDonald gathered up Ross and Marion Fraser-Pritchard.

“We’re going to put her in theater school at university, so that’s the plan,” she told Leah’s parents.

“My dad did not want me leave Newfoundland and did not want me to be in the RCMP,” said Leah.

“Fine, great, we’ll keep her here,” said her father, despite himself and his wife both being Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

“I was still very angry about being in Newfoundland, about being moved around, leaving Nova Scotia.” She was 17-years-old. “I was a surly teenager, a willful child. I didn’t want to be here anymore.”

She turned 18 her first day three months later at Memorial University of Newfoundland. “She can’t get into the theater program right away, but we’re going to make sure she gets into it,” Sarah McDonald told Leah’s father. “She was my mentor,” said Leah.

In the meantime, she snuck into theater classes.

“I was hanging with my friends one day when I got locked in the class by accident when the professor came in. After I didn’t get called out for it, after a few weeks I started answering questions,” she said.

“Who are you?” Todd Hennessey, the teacher and Head of the Division of Fine Arts, finally asked her. “Do you take this class?”

“Um, no,” she answered.

“Don’t worry,” her friends said. “You’ll meet her officially next year.”

In her last year at Memorial University she headlined Hard Ticket Theatre’s production of “Venus in Fur.” Todd Hennessey directed the two-person spooky sex comedy. “It takes one heck of an actress to convincingly play a character who is regarded as being a fantastic actress, and Leah Prichard nails it,” wrote Rachael Joffred in her review.

The campus she attended was the Sir Wilfred Grenfell College at Corner Brook, where the bulk of the theater program was, and which was only two hours from her family in Rocky Harbour. Wilfred Grenfell was an English doctor who opened hospitals, orphanages, and cooperatives one hundred years ago to serve the coastal inhabitants of Labrador and Newfoundland. He was an able-bodied doughty man. Once marooned on a slab of floating ice slob, he killed some of his dogs to make himself a fur coat in order to survive.

“They wanted to keep track of me, since I was just 18.” Two years later her mother was reassigned to RCMP Headquarters in Halifax. Her father took a post in the capital city, as well. Leah Pritchard lived and studied and worked in Newfoundland for the next nearly seven years.

Rocky Harbour is on the far western edge of Newfoundland. The town is home to Gros Morne National Park. There is a fjord lined with cliffs and waterfalls, formed by long-gone glaciers. There are caribou and moose, rainy moody fog-bound mountains, and the tablelands, where you can walk on the earth’s mantle. The landscape is ancient.

“If you ever see tourism commercials for Newfoundland,” said Leah, “there’s always this big fjord where somebody is standing with arms outstretched saying, “Look at the world!’ That’s where I lived. You can spend a long time by yourself there. I ended up loving it.”

A native of Nova Scotia, Leah Pritchard grew up in Lower Sackville, a fast-growing suburb of Halifax. In the 1950s it was known for its drive-in theater, harness racing track, and WW2 bomber plane ice cream stand. It is today a family-oriented commuter community.

Her parents, now both retired, were RCMP policeman and policewoman. The Force, as it is known, is both a federal and national police force. It enforces the law on a contract basis in the territories and most of the provinces. In many rural areas it is the only police force. Its French acronym, GRC, is sometimes repurposed as Gravel Road Cops.

Despite its name, the Mounties is not an actual mounted police force anymore, although it still was in the 1930s when they brought the Mad Trapper of Rat River to justice.

Her grandfather was a RCMP officer. “It’s just a family thing,” she said. “It also makes you very popular in high school, let me tell you,” she added with a booming laugh guffaw.

She is the youngest of five children. Her sister and two older brothers were adopted by her father when he was 21-years-old. “Their dad was a motorcycle cop and died on duty. My dad fell super in love with his widow and made a bold choice. The kids were 3, 2, and 1-years-old. The RCMP has always been a part of our lives. There’s a sense of honor and tradition.”

Growing up, the family moved whenever and wherever her parents were assigned. It was how they moved to Newfoundland, when her mother was made a detachment commander there. Leah spent most of her teen years in Yarmouth, on the Bay of Fundy in southwestern Nova Scotia. The seaside town is proximate to the world’s largest lobster fishing grounds.

“You get real accustomed to small town life real fast. There’s a lot of space in and around Yarmouth to get weird.”

No matter what efforts you summon to make sense of it, the world can still be a strange place. Small towns impart a sense of place, but often feelings of self-consciousness, too. It can mean the opportunity to create your own options out of the weird mix of things.

It is where Leah caught the acting bug.

“I was at a production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” at our high school when two of the actors started laughing hysterically on stage about something and couldn’t control themselves. I thought that looks like fun.”

She took fine arts and acting classes in both French and English. In lieu of lunch the drama students staged short one-act plays at a nearby small theater, declaiming their dialogue and handing out sandwiches to show goers who needed a bite. “We were just harmless theater geeks, so the teachers let us go and do that. I started spending all my time in theaters.”

Once in the acting stream at Memorial University she discovered the program was the only one of its kind in Atlantic Canada. It combined practical and academic training with small class sizes and one-on-one attention to detail by actors directors production professionals doubling up as faculty and staff.

“It’s a fabulous program, especially learning to handle Shakespeare,” said Leah. “The Newfoundland accent is the least bastardized accent in North America, the closest to what it would be in Shakespeare’s time. It’s got that time’s rhythm and music to it.”

Many Newfoundlanders work in classic theater, especially at Canada’s Stratford Festival, the internationally known repertory theater festival that showcases William Shakespeare. “The music is in our DNA,” said St. John’s native Robin Hutton, who has performed at Stratford for close to a decade. ”We can’t have a party without a sing song.”

Natives of ‘The Rock,’ as the province is sometimes known, at Stratford include Brad Hotter, Jillian Keiley, and Deidre Gillard-Rowlings. “We’re storytellers in Newfoundland,” said Brad Hotter. “Theater is a craft handed down, where you learn from people who pass it down from generation to generation.”

Leah Pritchard’s last semester at Memorial University was spent in England, taking master classes with working professionals and seeing shows in the West End and Stratford-upon-Avon. “You see as many plays as you can, you write reviews, and you rehearse a play. When you come back you put it up. It’s the culmination of all the work you’ve done the past four years.”

One of the plays she saw in London was “The 39 Steps,” accompanied by her brother, Ian, a six-foot-six young man with curly ginger hair who at the time was also in the theater program. The show is a comic treatment of the Alfred Hitchcock movie. It is played for laughs, so Leah and Ian laughed their heads off

“Most people would unanimously agree that I’m a very loud person,” said Leah. “If I’m being quiet, there’s something wrong. Ian has an even bigger laugh, a booming laugh, not subtle, at all. We were there laughing our heads off, Eastern Canadians watching a comedy. Everyone around us was quiet. Somebody said, ‘That’s not why we’re here.’ English audiences are reserved. Come on! I said. That’s exactly why we’re here. Join in the jokes, please.”

Sometimes being the loud enough voice for quiet thoughts is what works. Leah sang with the Xara Choral Theatre Ensemble on their debut CD “Here On These Branches” about northern cultures, communities, and landscapes. It was nominated for best classical recording of 2015 at the East Coast Music Awards.

It’s what she does getting ready to go on stage every night, too. She sings to herself, pop jazz show tunes by Julie London, Ella Fitzgerald, and Julie Andrews.

Back in Newfoundland with a newly minted BFA in acting on her resume, she found work as a bartender, a nanny, and an usher. “I’d get up at 6 in the morning, nanny the three kids, drop them off at their family’s restaurant, jump into a shower, get into my uniform, and go usher at the Gros Morne Theatre Festival.”

She worked in a candy store to make ends meet.

“You eat a lot of candy,” she said.

She got a job at a dinner theater in Halifax.

“You gotta do it,” she said. “It’s like cutting your teeth.”

Madrigals in the Middle Ages were a kind of dinner theater. They made a comeback in the 1970s, featuring mysteries and musicals. Actors like Lana Turner and Van Johnson performed between appetizers and dessert. Burt Reynolds owned his own dinner theater.

“You’re a performer, but you’re a waiter, too,” said Leah. “You sing and dance and run off stage to pick up six plates on a tray, deliver them, and run back on stage. You get into wicked shape doing it.”

The bane of dinner theaters is the hubbub. “You’re a waiter as well as a performer and you have to deal with eaters. But there isn’t a fourth wall. If someone starts talking on their phone, because they don’t really give a fuck about you, you can stop and say, do you mind?”

It’s best said with an upturned nose, mock haughtiness, and a snooty English accent. “It’s not like you’re in the middle of a soliloquy.”

Breaking into the arts world is often a matter of catching a break. ”My first Equity gig was in the fall after I graduated, which is very lucky.” In late 2013, another teacher from the university, Jerry Etienne, saw her in a remount of “Venus in Fur.” He has directed more that thirty productions as Artistic Director of Theatre Newfoundland Labrador and founded the Gros Morne Theatre Festival.

When he signed on to direct “The Rainmaker” at the Watermark Theatre on Prince Edward Island the next summer he asked her if she would consider signing on at the same time.

“Yes, please,” she said.

She played the plain spinster in the drought-ridden story set in Depression-era America whose family worries center on her slim marriage prospects and their dying cattle. “Leah Pritchard tunes into the right emotional channel,” wrote The Buzz, Prince Edward Island’s arts and entertainment monthly tabloid.

Summer stock at the Watermark Theatre in North Rustico on the north central coast of the island means finding a place to live and a place to eat. “The stage manager and I roomed together for four years.” She ate at Amanda’s that became Fresh Catch that became Pedro’s Island Eatery when it was taken over by a Portuguese couple. “This village has been crying out for Pedro’s,” she said. “They give you so much food, delicious, and a beer. I get passionate about their haddock.”

Meanwhile, she worked up and down the east coast. “I’m very much an eastern girl,” she said. “I’d go insane without the ocean.”

In the spring of 2016 Leah appeared in “The Drowning Girls” at the Neptune Theatre in Halifax, a play about the real-life early 20th-century British wife killer George Joseph Smith, who married three women in succession and drowned all three in succession. “There was a lot of sitting in water for long periods of time. There was even a splash zone by the first row.“

Later that fall she played Balthazar in “The Spanish Tragedy” at The Villain’s Theatre in Halifax. All the actors were actresses in the new adaptation and the revenge story unfolded with a plentiful dose of black humor.

By the end of the summer season of 2017, after four seasons at the Watermark Theatre, she had appeared in productions of “Blithe Spirit” “The Rainmaker” “The Lion in Winter” “Romeo and Juliet” “An Ideal Husband” “The Glass Menagerie” and most recently “Mrs. Warren’s Profession” and the perky newlywed in “Barefoot in the Park”.

“The Watermark has been very kind to me,” she said. “I’ve gotten the opportunity to do Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw and Tennessee Williams.”

“Leah Pritchard and Jordan Campbell have genuine chemistry together, an innocent quality which is very watchable and perfectly suited to the play,” wrote Colm Magner in his review of “Barefoot in the Park” for The Guardian.

Some roles are more challenging than others.

“The Glass Menagerie was hard,” she said. “It was physically challenging, limping around, and I couldn’t figure Laura out, at first. She’s someone who lives inside herself, although as an actor on stage you can’t be too inside yourself. She’s a character who withdraws from the world, is quiet and reserved, and doesn’t want to be in confrontation. But on stage you need to be present, need to be seen, and need to be physically heard.

“It was weird.”

In the fall of 2017 Leah went on tour with Xara Choral Theatre’s adaptation of “Fatty Legs,” a children’s book true story about a plucky eight-year-old Inuit girl gone off to a residential school. “They called me Fatty Legs because a wicked nun forced me to wear a pair of red stockings that made my legs look enormous,” says the heroine. The larger theme is the cultural genocide of Canada’s defunct Indian boarding school system, which separated children from their traditional skills, language, land, and family.

Working with youngsters isn’t new for her. She has been a teaching assistant for Neptune Theatre’s youth theater workshops and led PEI Watermark Theatre’s youth theater acting conservatory the past three summers.

Still a self-professed east coast girl, Leah Pritchard has recently moved to Toronto. The city boasts one of the liveliest theater scenes in the world, from major musicals at the Mirvish Theatres to Soulpepper, North America’s only year-round repertory company, to Buddies in Bad Times, the world’s largest and longest running queer theater.

“I want to be on the coast, but I understand the opportunities are in Ontario. I know what stages I want to be on and I’m going to keep working as hard as I can to get on those stages, by hook or by crook.”

Getting in the front door is easy to do if you’ve got a ticket. Getting in the stage door is hard to do if you’re an aspiring actor. Trying to make it in Toronto is a long uphill row to hoe.

“In Toronto no one needs to see you, no one needs to let you into the audition room, because there are thousands of you out there,” said Leah. “The way I approach my career is, there are thousands of good actors, but there aren’t thousands of me. There’s only one of me and they should be so lucky.”

Sometimes she tosses her head back when she laughs, like an actress from another generation, a Myrna Loy or Angela Lansbury, who she bears a resemblance to. If she hasn’t laughed ten twenty times a day it hasn’t been a good day. “I get that I’m a young Angela Lansbury, a lot. I should be as lucky as that. I tell them I’m like a young old lady, not like how people are trying to be beautiful today.”

Moving forward owning her career in the big city, she has several pokers in the fire, for the coming summer, as well, including Prince Edward Island. “It depends if there are roles for me in the plays they choose,” she said. “Five years in that theatre would be amazing. Even if they don’t, if I can manage a visit, the ocean, Pedro’s, it would be fabulous.”

She will be touring again in the fall with Xara Choral Theatre’s production of “Fatty Legs”.

“I’m always working to better myself as an actor,” she said. “I’m an independent artist, so I’m not in Toronto desperate to be liked. I’m older, a little wiser, although maybe not very wise. I’m still only 27. How wise can a 27-year-old be?”

It’s the sharp-eyed 27-year-old on the way to doing what she wants who understands the first word line page in the manuscript of horse sense keenness awareness is about being unfailing about being you, adding-on but no second-handing and no pretending about what you’re doing to make yourself happen.

Photograph by Matthew Downey.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

In Your Face

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By Ed Staskus

Attendance at church services in the United States has been steadily declining for more than sixty years. Today, scarcely one in four Americans go to church, at all. When they do go, they don’t go, since more and more of them are going to online rites by way of app. Churchome Global – the brainchild of celebrity pastor Judah Smith – has set everyone free to worship in their bathrobes, thumbing bright icons and releasing glowing hearts to float around their laptop screens.

Jonathan Edwards, the Colonial Christian preacher who declared we are all sinners in the hands of an angry God, is rolling over in his grave right now. “What the hell happened?” he cries out. “What happened to the Wrath of God?”

In Europe and Australia fewer than 20% say religion is relevant to them. The Japanese and Chinese barely even respond to the question. Only in the Middle East and Third World countries do more than less respondents believe religion is important in their lives.

The yoga project, on the other hand, has been growing by leaps and bounds the past half century in the United States, Europe, Australia, and even Russia, once the motherland of godless Communism, where it has ballooned to a billion-dollar-and-more industry. Even though India, the birthplace of the practice, remains a hotbed, the rest of the world, especially the Islamic World and the Third World, has kept its cool.

When bead-wearing hippies began doing yoga in the 1960s they were drawing on a vibrant yoga culture that had thrived in the USA in the early 20th century, but which by their time had run its course. In the 1940s and 1950s the practice was nothing if not holding down the fort, what there was of it.

In the next 50 years the fort would grow to an arsenal overflowing with blocks, straps, and yoga mats, until today almost 40 million Americans say they do yoga. Nine out of ten of everybody say they have heard of yoga, no doubt far more than have ever heard of Jonathan Edwards, or want to hear anything he ever had to say.

Older Americans, the kind of people who once filled pews, are more likely than most to be found on mats. The number of them over 50 tromping to studios has tripled in the past five years. They believe “yoga is good for you.” They do it for their aches and pains. They do it to smooth out the rough patches, to tamp down the stress, to slow their breathing. It’s a way of counting to ten. They do it because it makes their lives better.

Even though yoga is a good fit when it comes to improving health, from flexibility to cardiovascular fitness, from reducing stress and pain, from overall quality of body to overall quality of life, they might be fooling themselves that yoga in its overall aspects is compatible with the way we have structured our lives and fortunes in the modern world.

Yoga made a lot of sense when it washed up on the shores of America in the Progressive Era, during the progressivism of the New Deal, and when Flower Power was free and easy, but it is questionable whether it is or ever will be relevant in our own age of post-modern capitalism, an age long since devoted to the idea that nature is a commodity to be marketed and consumed, that consumption must be encouraged at all costs, that unrestrained competition is a free market fundamental, and accumulation of wealth is the best of all possible worlds.

Talk to the cold hard cash fist full of money ’cause the face ain’t listening.

When the Grand Coulee Dam was proposed in the 1930s, there were myriad problems, not the least of which was that there were long-standing Native Americans living on the land that would be flooded, there were no manufacturers who needed the power and barely any farmers who needed the water, and the salmon and steelhead that ran the river would end up being cut off from their spawning grounds. It was the mid-30s, too, the middle of the Great Depression, and money was tight.

But the power that would be generated, its promoters promised, and the irrigation created would stimulate a need for itself. It would, just like the cutting-edge economists of the day said, create its own demand. And it did. The fish ended up swimming with the fish.

Fifteen years ago, as we were rounding into the new millennium, the richest 10% of the world got 55% of the world’s income, according to the World Bank. The poorest 50% got about 6%. Since then the only thing that has changed is that wealth concentration, especially among older Westerners, has grown faster than poverty reduction.

Non-greed and non-possessiveness are markers and moral guidelines on the path of yoga practice. Nevertheless, who wants to give up their two cars in the garage, their flat screens and stainless steel, their expanding portfolios and growing non-limit line on their credit cards. The good life has become what you’ve got in this life, not what you might get by making a life meditating on the mat.

Cold hard cash can buy you a fine warm purebred puppy. It’s uncertain a king’s ransom can make him wag his tail. You can offer your dog $10 million dollars and he might or might not wag his tail. Offer him $50 million and he might or might not do the same thing. Pat him on the head and say “Let’s go for a walk” and you will get his tail wagging, for sure.

In the same way that one of yoga’s core principles is non-violence, one of the core principles of today’s world is funding armed forces. United States defense expenditures are projected to rise from $682 billion dollars to $1335 billion dollars in the next 25 years, China’s from $251 to $1270 billion, India’s from $117 to $654 billion, and Russia’s from $113 to $295 billion.

When you add nine zeros to a number, you are talking real money. The human brain has approximately 100 billion neurons. Putting a gun to your head puts every one of those neurons in mortal danger.

Every neuron in every brain is connected to ten thousand other neurons. The aim of yoga is to get all of them firing in unison, all on the same page, all together now. The aim of the world’s armed forces is to keep their hands steady on the butts of their guns.

It’s talk to the gunhand ‘cause the face ain’t listening.

The essential aims of military might and yoga practice aren’t on the same page, no matter that the same millions of people who do yoga also pay for and support their armed forces. Everyone rallies around the flag. Nobody wants their patriotism questioned, no matter what. Wrong may be wrong, no matter who says it, but when it comes to patriotism, it means supporting your government and country all the time, no matter what anybody says.

“A patriot is the person who can holler the loudest without knowing what he is hollering about,” said Mark Twain.

Yoga is about finding your own way to knowing what you are all about. It’s not about hollering it up. It’s not about getting on a soapbox, or taking the word of some blowhard on his soapbox. Patriots are enemies of the rest of the world. The practice of yoga is about becoming a compatriot to the rest of the world. You don’t necessarily have to love everybody else, but you don’t necessarily have to hate them, either.

If yoga is about letting go of judgment, it is a problematic undertaking today. The rise of social media has led to the rise of a judgmental culture. It has long been thought judgment is inherently genetic, along with free will and the ability to choose, although it is much more probable that it is a learned behavior. It’s a way of living that goes back a long way, back to when we had to protect ourselves from harm on a day-to-day basis.

It was talk to the fist ’cause the face ain’t listening.

Even though snap judgments are no longer necessary for survival, at least not most of the time, it has morphed into our social behavior. Yoga advocates empathy and compassion. Social media is as much about pigeon holing as it is about cross-culturalism. For every curious explorer there is an angry nationalist. The practice of yoga is about creating a purposeful existence. The practice of judgment is living in lockstep with prejudice and bigotry.

Yoga isn’t a religion, there aren’t any churches or cathedrals, there are no martyrs or jihads, no shrines or wailing walls, no holy men or holy books. It is, however, a spiritual practice. It wasn’t a bad fit a hundred years ago, but it’s awkward today. The best thing that could have happened to the business, stripping it of all its aspects except for the physical dimension, is what has happened, and is why it is as popular as it is in the modern world.

It flies in the face of reason to believe that yoga can make it in the new world, at least not old world old school old fashioned yoga. It has little to no chance of making it in the Amazon Wall Street White House Big Oil Big Banking Big Corporations Big Ego scheme of things. When you throw in Big Tech, it becomes a Big Scheme.

Almost all of the principles of yoga are at odds with the way we live today. Something had to give. What gave was the last five thousand years. What broke into the open the past fifty-or-so years is the yoga we know works, the yoga we need, and the yoga we deserve. “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometime you find, you get what you need,” the Rolling Stones sang at about the same time the 1960s Flower Children got yoga going in the USA.

The future of yoga was always uncertain because the future ain’t what it used to be. But, there’s no living life backwards. We all have to look ahead, because that’s where from here to eternity is. Maybe the memory of what yoga was, and might be, will be the key not to the past, but to what is in the future.

After all, no fist can stay clenched forever, not in the face of the Wrath of God, which might be forever, or just simply more than the Hand of Man, just like every face has to face up to what it really wants and needs when rafting down the big river of time space and your own backyard.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Crashing Into Paradise

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By Ed Staskus

When we were kids my brother, sister, and I went to two resorts every summer, except they weren’t called resorts. One was two weeks with other Boy and Girl Scouts and the other one was two weeks with first-generation immigrant boys and girls like us at a Lithuanian Franciscan camp. They were called summer camps.

It was how our parents packed up their troubles and sent them away. The scout camps were usually in the middle of a forest somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The Franciscan camp was in Wasaga Beach, on Canada’s Georgian Bay, in the wind and sunshine. The longest freshwater beach in the world was a 10-minute walk away.

We never had any trouble making the most of summer camp, even though sometimes there were bedbugs and some kids didn’t shower, even when the showers worked. One summer somebody’s parents wouldn’t let their son in the car when they came to pick him up when camp was over.

“Go hose yourself off! What is wrong with you?” his mother complained, pushing him away.

We waited all year to go to camp and never regretted the wait. In the morning on the day to go we pestered our parents, who drove us there, to hurry up. We were always ready to crash into paradise.

A few years after I started taking yoga classes I started hearing about yoga retreats and resorts. The first one I heard about was Kripalu in the Berkshires in Massachusetts. More than 30,000 people visit there, attending more than 700 programs annually. The holistic health and yoga retreat is housed in a former Jesuit seminary.

On our way to Canada’s east coast Prince Edward Island, passing through the Berkshires on the I-90 Mass Pike, my wife and I veered off at Stockbridge, and instead of going south to the Norman Rockwell Museum, drove north to the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health. The drive on the rolling wooded road was a welcome change after nine hours on the interstate.

The Berkshires emerged as a summer resort for the rich during the Gilded Age. At first, what would become Kripalu was a 100-room mansion. Andrew Carnegie lived there in fair weather. It was his summer retreat. “Mr. Carnegie wanted a quiet place where he could meditate,” wrote a local newspaper. At the height of his career he was the second-richest man in the world.

Rich is loud. Wealthy is quiet. Andrew Carnegie never needed to say a word.

He was known as the “Emperor of Industry” and believed in staying calm by staying focused. “The first man gets the oyster, the second man gets the shell,” he said, meaning focus on the oyster. Andrew Carnegie is the best-known philanthropist in American history. He gave away more money, adjusted for inflation, than just about anybody.

“The rich man who gives steals twice over,” countered Edvard Munch. “First he steals the money and then the hearts of men.” It’s enough to make your eyes cross, or make you reconsider the merits of economic Marxism.

Andrew Carnegie died in his summer mansion. It burned to the ground in 1956 and the Society of Jesus built a large brick seminary building just down the hill the next year. But then the 1960s happened and in 1970 the Jesuits moved on. The Kripalu Center bought and renovated the building in 1983.

At the front desk we got the bad news. Two days and nights of their popular R & R Retreat, in a room with a bath, albeit a room fronting a small lake, would cost us more than $1,200.00. The good news was the cost included a daily yoga class and all the “delicious all-natural” food we could eat. The yoga class sounded good. However, there was only so much food we could eat.

The two-bedroom cottage with a kitchen and front porch deck on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, on a 100-acre slope overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, where we were going to be staying for two weeks, was going to cost us $2000.00 for the two weeks, although no food was included. There was, however, a grocery store and a fish shack on the harbor, a liquor store up the hill,  and plenty of outdoors where to do yoga.

There are no parking meters on the red dirt cliff-lined coast. Stop anywhere, unroll a mat, practice, or just lay in the sun. There is more than one way to find enlightenment.

“I went for R & R with my sister and it was perfect,” said Jayne Murphy, a recent visitor to the Kripalu Center. “Vinyasa yoga when we needed it, plus wonderful clean food. I’d live there, if possible!”

It would only be possible if you had about $200,000.00 a year to pay for your room and board. However, if you put that same money into U. S. T-Bonds, in ten years you would be able to buy a million-dollar home, live like Andrew Carnegie, and have plenty left over for grub.

Retreats are group withdrawals for instruction, study, and meditation. Buddhists have gone on retreats since Buddha. Christian retreats date from the 16th century when St. Ignatius of Loyola, the man who founded the Jesuits, got the ball rolling with what he called Spiritual Exercises. Sufism, the mystical path of Islam, has been retreating for a millennium.

Yoga retreats used to be about getting out of the rut, the daily routine, or what is called dinacharya, recharging and getting deeper into the practice. They were usually more ascetic than aesthetic. That has changed. Modern yoga retreats are more along the lines of a recreational holiday. There’s a slice of yoga on the plate, but there’s no real need to resort to it at the resort.

When Shiva Rea invites one and all to Rhythmia, a yoga and wellness retreat, she is inviting one and all to a “new kind of all-inclusive vacation experience luxury resort” in Guanacaste, Costa Rica. When she says all-inclusive, she means boffo it all, on the mat, meditation, life coaching, healing touch, mud baths, massage, juice bar, farm-to-table food, and colon hydrotherapy, just in case someone is about to bust a gut.

“Come get your miracle,” proclaims Rhyhmia. Miracles are events of divine intervention in human affairs. A good masseuse kneading out the knots in your shoulders is an outstanding accomplishment, but it’s doubtful a divine phenomenon. The chef at the resort, however, is said to have come down from the clouds.

Once you get to Costa Rica the “life transforming vacation” will cost you in the neighborhood of $3,000.00 a week. According to the Retreat Guru at the resort it is well worth it. “It is a beautiful way to reconnect to our basic sanity and health. Our aspiration is to inspire people to reconnect with their innate wisdom, strength, and kindness,” he says.

The Retreat Guru’s ideas about reconnection only work if your wisdom strength kindness originally stem from growing up and living in a resort. Otherwise, maybe you are connecting with those virtues when you fly down to Costa Rica, but you’re not reconnecting with the font of it, no matter how wonderful the weather and spa services are.

When did yoga resorts become the zenspirational way to go for those with a medicine bag full of hard cash to go to their OM class? Have mat will travel. Crashing into paradise was never so easy, no begging your parents to get the car on the road, just show up at your local airport,

Resorts were once the James Bond lifestyle. There are more of them nowadays than ever. Resorts are places people go to for rest relaxation recreation, letting it all hang out. Yoga retreats were once about brushing up on the eight limbs, not just getting your limbs all buffed up. Except when the retreats go hand in glove with resorting.

The first resorts were the public baths of Rome. Many of them included gyms, theaters, and snack bars. In the 14th century a large resort area grew up around the iron-rich waters of a town called Spa in Belgium. Seaside resorts became popular in the United States in the late 19th century, followed by mountainside ones in the west.

Even the Dust Bowl had a resort in the 1930s, in Arkansas, featuring the two largest log buildings in the world. Resorts are self-contained and are all about food, drink, lodging, shopping, recreation, and entertainment. There are resort towns all around the world, for yoga and everything else.

The Chiva-Som International Health Resort in Thailand offers ‘Yoga for Life’, featuring exercise classes, breath work, and meditation, as well as mood mists. When you get off the mat there are naturopaths, acupuncturists, massage therapists, and skin-care specialists to take care of the aftermath. “I was on a mat getting a Thai massage – in Thailand. Life was good,” wrote Meghan Rabbit in her ‘Escape’ travelogue in Yoga Journal.

An ocean side room for a week of the good life runs about $5,000.00 per person. Off-season rates are better, but that’s when it rains most of the time, which is called the monsoon. The good life, unfortunately, gets flooded away. Temperatures zoom into the high 80s and the humidity is usually 100%-or-more.

The peak season is the best season. That’s when the countryside opens up like an oyster. The slimy shells fall away.

“A yoga retreat to some amazing locations gives practitioners the opportunity to explore some mouth-watering scenery, such as the serene countryside, panoramic views of stunning mountains, and the opportunity to embrace nature at its finest.” pointed out Ledan Soldani in ‘Yoga Retreats Are Transformational.’

Every season hundreds of thousands of people burn up the carbon flying off to exotic places to yoga retreats. The beautiful locations are one reason they go, but there are other reasons, too. They go to take a break from obligations, relax and de-stress, make new friends, surround themselves with inspiring people, open up free time for breath work and meditation, and expand their asana practice. Two classes a day are often offered, and when it comes to the buffet table to sustain your practice energy appetite, all the work is done for you.

It’s time out for you and yourself.

‘Yoga Is for Every Body’ is a five-day retreat at the Kalani Oceanside resort on the Big Island of Hawaii. The retreat includes active and restorative practices, meditation, writing contemplations, and storytelling games. “This retreat will connect with your highest potential for alignment and restoration,” explains Kimberly Dark, the facilitator.

The all-inclusive cottage cost is $2,375.00, which includes sauna, hot tubs, and a clothing-optional pool. Maybe some yoga can be accomplished poolside, but anyone contemplating writing would be best served staying away from clothing optional. That goes for the spectacularly beautiful coastline, and tropical paradises. too. Mouth-watering scenery is distracting.

Yoga and writing are similar to the extent they’re best done in private. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed,” Ernest Hemingway said about writing. Practicing yoga and bleeding on the page are about discovering what you think and believe. The problem with trying to look inward while at a resort is that the temptation to look outward is immediate tempting eye-popping overwhelming.

“Going on my first yoga retreat five years ago was a major turning point in my life,” said Gigi Yogini. “So much so that now I lead yoga adventures for others around the world in places like Joshua Tree, Costa Rica, and Bali. Those are truly transformative experiences.”

Who wouldn’t want to be transformed in Hawaii and Switzerland, among other places? Who wouldn’t want to go to the Alpina Gstaad resort in Switzerland, a resort of Tibetan healing practices, a resort where you can practice meditation and yoga with monks who have been at it forever? Relax in a faux Himalayan salt cave. Throw in massages and the resort’s signature golden latte. Drink your latte on a post-modern deck nestled in the Alps. Chill in the Swiss sunlight.

What Yoga Journal called a “sanctuary” was profiled in their June 2017 issue. Sign me up, man! I mean, sign me up if I had the money. Alpina Gstaad was built by the developer Jean-Claude Mimran. He is known as the ‘Sugar King of Africa.’ The Panorama Suite is $21,000.00 a night in high season, 40% off in the off-season. The glacier view is a priceless outdoor experience at your fingertips, just don’t leave home without your Gold Card from American Express.

Budgets have a lot of numbers in them. So do yoga resorts. Some have too many numbers.

Yoga retreats were once intensives. Meditation was followed by morning practice by some classes on theory by lunch on fruits and snacks by evening practice by dinner by self-reflection. In time it got mixed up with wellness and recreation. Now there are retreats that fuse yoga and music, yoga and dance, yoga and massage, yoga and detox, yoga and surfing sailing cycling hiking paddle boarding mountaineering, yoga and relationships, yoga and gardening, as well as yoga and food. There is yoga and ganja.

There is the five-day Cannabliss retreat in Ojai, California. The $1,200.00 all- inclusive price has all the black light yoga and marijuana on the menu you want. “This is a new frontier,” said founder Sari Gabbay. Munchies, however, are bring your own.

Our Boy Scout camps were about raising the flag, working on merit badges, marching off for the day, collecting wood cooking cleaning with your patrol, and since our camps were often near water, swimming and canoeing. We followed the Outdoor Code. Be clean in outdoor manners. Be careful with fire. Be considerate in the outdoors. Be conservation minded.

But Boy Scout camping was more than being a good citizen. Camping was about “the trees, the tree-top singers, the wood-herbs, and the nightly things that leave their tracks in the mud,” said Ernest Thompson Seton, the first Chief Scout. We bumped into trees in the dark. That’s why every tent had a first-aid kit handy.

We played mumble the peg with our pocketknives, standing opposite another scout, feet shoulder-width apart, throwing our knives to stick in the ground as near your own foot as possible. Whoever stuck the knife closest won the game. If you stuck the knife in your own foot you won on the spot.

We played other variations like Chicken and Stretch. We raided the Girl Scout tents, making off with their training bras, running them up the flagpole. We crept into other Boy Scout tents, coaxing a sleeping scout’s hand into a bowl of warm water, trying to make him pee.

The trouble with our summer camps from a scouting perspective was that they were so much fun. Who could pay attention to Robert Baden-Powell’s maxims? Be prepared for every order. Make sure to think out beforehand anything that might happen. Know the right thing to do at the right moment. It might have been possible, except our camps were full of crazy curious high-energy 12-year-olds with pocketknives, which made thinking clearly difficult.

The trouble with yoga resorts is that they are sensual delights, from the food to the spa services to the sunny locales. Who can pay attention to the eight limbs of the practice when there are limbs in and out of bikinis at the pool? Who wants to meditate when they can nap in a hammock in the warm breeze? Who strives to be a better person when they’re in the best of all possible worlds?

You would have to be a saint. Who wants to be a saint? Who wants to go on vacation surrounded by saints?

Although it’s true that most people practice yoga only by engaging in the physical postures, work on the mat brings attention to your breath, stilling your mind, and getting you to be present. The movement of the body, the quieting of the brain, which is usually in constant motion, and the rhythm of your breathing get you going on the way. When you breathe and center your attention, any place you are is where you are.

Anyone can play the Game of Fives wherever they happen to be sitting standing in hero pose. It costs zero dollars. Zero in on five things in your immediate environment. Look at them, smell them, and listen to them. Focus on your attention. When all of your attention is focused it is clear skies and smooth sailing. You don’t have to resort to anything else to practice yoga.

When you go somewhere far, far away to find yoga you might or might not find what you’re looking for. You almost surely will have a good time, unless a monsoon rolls in. Exploring communing schmoozing with nature in Bali and Big Sur is fun and organic and rejuvenating. We did it every summer as kids at Boy and Girl Scout camps. But when you’re connecting with nature you’re not connecting with yourself.

“The greatest explorer on this earth never takes voyages as long as those of the man who descends to the depth of his heart,” said Julien Green.

Yoga is an inside out practice, not an outside in practice. It’s not about getting on a jet plane and going out into the wide world looking for it. It’s hard to find out there, no matter how far up whatever country you go. The best place to look for your heart’s desire is inside yourself. What Yogananda said was, “To work with God’s happiness bubbling in the soul is to carry a portable paradise within you wherever you go.”

You don’t need a telescope. It’s not over every horizon. Ship ahoy! Home is where the heart is.

Paperback Yoga

Riding the Om Bus

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By Ed Staskus

“It was twenty year ago today, Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play, they’ve been going in and out of style, but they’re guaranteed to raise a smile.”  The Beatles

It was twenty years ago that Cyndi Lee opened the OM Yoga Studio. It prospered and grew to 25 teachers offering 65 hatha vinyasa classes weekly. The sunlit wood floor space took up an entire floor of Manhattan real estate near Union Square. It was the union of a faraway and long ago tradition with modernity. The trendsetting crowd had long since been won over to bending.

It was no mean feat. “In New York City people have way more opportunities to take classes than in most other cities,” she said. If you don’t enjoy a challenge, the Big Apple isn’t what you want to try sinking your teeth into. There are more than 8 million people speaking more than 200 languages in the 5 boroughs. It’s hard getting them on the same page.

The page turned fifteen years later when she lost her lease. “The landlord didn’t give us the option to renew,” said Cyndi. “She just didn’t want a yoga studio there anymore.” The only thing harder than winning shrewd New Yorkers over to your yoga studio is staying on the winning side of shrewd New York property owners.

She took it well.

“Yoga has a sly, clever way of short-circuiting the mental patterns that cause anxiety,” says Baxter Bell. Yoga practice is filled with exercises in respect to balance, not just physically, but inwardly, too. It’s all about holding on and letting go.

“Honestly I feel fine,” she said at the time. “I’m just super grateful that the conditions arose for me to build that yoga studio and that the community grew and developed. I feel proud because there has been no badness, only goodness.”

Only there was more around the bend. Her marriage of almost twenty years was coming to an end, too.

When you come to a fork in the road, take it. Or, as Cyndi Lee has said, “Everything we’re doing is planting a seed that will come to fruition at some point.” Never mind about making plans that hit the nail on the head, better to make options.

“The opposite if being active in yoga is not being passive,” she said. “It’s being receptive.”

She met someone who became her boyfriend. She and Brad moved to Ohio. It didn’t get off on the right foot. “I was a hardcore New Yorker,” said Cyndi. “What the hell am I doing?” she thought. New York is a fast-paced around-the-clock lifestyle. It’s the city that never sleeps.

“Ohio was so quiet and the food was terrible.”

They moved to Virginia. Her boyfriend became her husband. The energy and the food got better. She didn’t open another yoga studio. “We do need more yoga, but when people say to me, can you give me advice about starting a yoga studio, my advice is, don’t. Instead of making places where people have to come to us, we need to go out.”

She got her footing back on solid ground. Cyndi is a longtime Buddhist. Buddha was an aimless wanderer when he started out, but once he got his clear thinking together he devoted forty-five years to traveling and teaching the Dharma to anyone who would listen. Cyndi has been traveling and teaching all over the world the past six years, since OM closed, except last year when she wasn’t.

“When the orthopedist says, ‘You have no cartilage left, you’re bone on bone, that’s why it hurts so bad,’ that’s called end-stage arthritis, and you need a hip replacement,” said Cyndi.

Or two hip replacement surgeries, as the case might be, slowing her down that year. At least, until she was back on her own two feet. And back on the mat, back in action.

“I was a professional dancer for almost twenty years,” she said.

Twenty years of two-stepping is a long time. Dancers often sound like a box of Rice Krispies, snap, crackle, and pop. Ankles click and knees go crunch. In the morning, on the way to get a bowl of cereal, their joints click, clack, and squeak on the way to the kitchen.

“I wasn’t an aggressive yogi, I didn’t push it, but the vinyasa style that I practiced is a dynamic, rhythm-based movement system. There is a sense of carving space, of feeling wind and water on your face, of an earthy downward connection and an uplifted sense of goodness.”

Nevertheless, in the flow of time the on-the-go has morphed into slow flow. Cyndi Lee now offers a “practice you can carry with you for decades to come.” It has been reborn as Sustainable Vinyasa Yoga.

By the time OM Yoga closed its doors she had been practicing yoga for more than 40 years. She took her first class in 1971, her first year in college. “I don’t remember having a moment of great inspiration and knowing that I had found my path, but somehow I just kept doing yoga and meditation and I’ve been practicing steadily almost my whole life now.”

Cyndi has an MFA in Dance from the University of California at Irvine. Her graduate thesis was “Women, Spirituality, and Indian Dance.” She won an Art History Fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

She moved to Greenwich Village in 1978, footless tights in hand, to an animated dynamic dance scene. It wasn’t just the Funhouse, Club 57, and Paradise Garage, either, although you can’t beat clubs full of late 70s pointy-toed hipsters and girls in thrift-store stiletto heels at three in the morning. It was Twyla Tharp and Merce Cunningham and the modern dance scene.

“Yoga started out in dance, both in-depth studies of the integration of body, breath and heart,” she said. “They are opposite, too. As a performing dancer, the goal is to offer a visceral experience. But yoga is a personal practice, always.”

She became a professional dancer. She had been dancing since she was a tot. “I learned the waltz by standing on my dad’s feet,” she said. Hoofing it became her life. She danced up a storm. She became a professional choreographer. She performed with XXY Dance/ Music and Cyndi Lee Dance Company/Big Moves. In 1994 her own dance company staged its last performance. The show was called “Dharma Dances.”

It was influenced by meditation philosophy and the choreography referenced yoga poses. The performance featured Allan Ginsburg singing songs and accompanying himself on harmonium. The word of mouth about the show was good, although Allen Ginsburg’s singing was left unsaid. The less said the better, God rest his soul.

After “Dharma Dances” Cyndi Lee kicked up her heels and became a professional yoga teacher.

OM Yoga was a successful studio in arguably the most opinionated and competitive city in the country because it was authentic, clean and bright, with a diversified schedule, offered special events and teacher trainings, and featured a snazzy retail space. The teachers were hard-core enough to specialize in their craft and soft-core enough to connect one-on-one. The studio became a community and the community became the studio’s dedicated core. Over the years many people unrolling their mats at OM Yoga became the studio’s heralds and evangelists.

“Whenever I am feeling like crap I don’t mind making the long commute to OM because I know I will feel peaceful and happy afterwards,” said a woman from the Upper West Side.

“One of the better, more genuine experiences I’ve had in the city,” said a Manhattan native. “The instructors are knowledgeable and not pushy. If you’re a newcomer to yoga, take the beginner classes, as the intermediate classes are very, ahem, thorough. And they have showers!”

“Keeping this place open and going,” said Cyndi when the studio was open and going. “I get wrapped up in the business of it. But just having a yoga studio, it’s a real Dharma community, it helps a lot of people.”

“The only negative comment I have is that this place is a little too business-like, which, in my opinion is not very Buddha-like,” said a young woman across the river in Brooklyn, where capitalism is occasionally frowned upon.

“Work out your own salvation,” said Buddha. “Do not depend on others.”

But even he had to eat so he could get his message out. If most successful businesses are owned and operated by people who are the first to get to work and the last to leave, then OM Yoga was a successful business because someone did that, and Cyndi Lee was the person who opened the doors in the morning and turned off the lights at night.

As home away from home wrapped up its tenure, the e-mails started rolling in. “I’ve gotten hundreds,” said Cyndi after word about OM Yoga’s sign-off hit the streets. “I’m sitting there crying. The things that people are saying and sharing. I’m just feeling the love.”

When one door closes and your brick and mortar has been mortar and bricked up, it’s time to open a new door.

“We’re excited about our online presence expanding. We’re excited about putting classes and trainings online and developing an app. We’re going to go full speed ahead on that and develop our teacher network.”

At the same time the Cyndi Lee bus was moving ahead full speed, gathering momentum going from here to eternity, it was slowing down to Buddha-time. Between gangbusters and reflection she traveled and taught and put pen to paper.

Her think pieces, write-ups, and how-to articles have appeared in Yoga International, Yoga Journal, and Tricycle. The magazine isn’t about the three-wheel bike kids ride. It’s known as The Buddhist Review, or the independent voice of Buddhism. It’s won the Folio Award for “Best Spiritual Magazine” three times, which since Buddhism is a win or lose struggle, is faith in Buddhism manifested.

She has written several books, including “Yoga Body, Buddha Mind” and ”OM Yoga: A Guide to Daily Practice,” as well as the recent critically acclaimed “May I Be Happy: A Memoir of Love, Yoga and Changing My Mind.”

It was Buddha who said, “What we think, we become.”

She has been seen frequently on TV as herself, including The Dr. Oz Show, Live with Regis and Kathy Lee, and Good Morning, America. During her days on the dance scene she worked on music videos, choreographing for Rick James, Simple Minds, and Cyndi Lauper. She choreographed the ‘Girls Just Want to Have Fun’ music video.

The video won the 1983 MTV Best Female Video of the Year award. Cyndi’s just want to have fun and celebrate. When the working day is done Cyndi Lee just wants to ride her red bike. She rides with mindful awareness, however, mindful that a bike’s passenger is its engine and that to keep your balance you must keep moving.

Cyndi got started in the practice of Buddhism in 1990. Over time she became the first female yoga teacher in the western world to integrate yoga asana and Tibetan Buddhism in her practice and into her message. When asked what her aspirations were, she said, “To get better at balancing on time and off time and to get better at understanding that they can be the same thing, if I can live like a yogi/Buddha.”

The four points of order she brings to meditation practice might as well apply to smooth sailing on two wheels like it does to mindfulness. “Sit up nice and tall. Feel your seat on the cushion. Feel the space all around you. Slowly begin to deepen your breathing, little by little, breath by breath.” Meditating when out of sorts is recommended, but meditation when out of balance and out of breath is like a fish pedaling a bicycle.

She has recently been ordained as a lay Buddhist chaplain.

“I met a man at a retreat at Upaya and we hit it off. At the end of the weekend he said, ‘Why don’t you sign up for chaplaincy training with me?’ I wasn’t interested, but then I was. I decided to do it. That guy did not take the training and I haven’t seen him again. Somehow he was the catalyst, like an angel.”

One of the ideas embedded in the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism is that everyone should take responsibility for their own lives and actions. One of the right ways on the Eightfold Path is living honestly and helping others. One of the basic tenets of the practice is that everything in life is impermanent and always changing.

“One thing I’m good at is being brave and riding the winds of change,” said Cyndi. “To keep on keeping on with a real aliveness to how life changes and how I change.”

Life isn’t lived by mottoes, no matter how trenchant they are. Travel like a pro, not a hobo, is as good a motto as any. Cyndi Lee goes like a pro.

She doesn’t live by mottoes, but one of her favorites is, “Just show up.” When you show up day in and day out, whether at your big city studio or helping a hobo on your chaplain rounds, you’re staying true to yourself, not anybody else’s version of you. “In the end you’re still stuck with yourself,” she said.

“Knowing others is wisdom, knowing yourself is enlightenment,” said Lao Tzu.

In Cyndi’s case, when she shows up, it’s her good better best real self.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Cross Walk

On the Wire

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By Ed Staskus

   “For you,” Bettina Goertzen said, frowning, putting her hand over the handset. “He said it was about Dottie and you would want to talk to him. It’s not the school.”

   “Police? Hospital?”

   “I don’t think so, didn’t say, doesn’t sound like it.”

   “Young or old?”

   “Younger.”

   Stan Riddman glanced at his watch and noted the time. “Listen in to it, Betty.” He waited for her to pick up a pencil and pull a notepad close. When she quietly put the phone to her ear again, he picked up his receiver.

   “This is Stan Riddman,” he said, his voice flat.

   “We’ve got the girl,” the voice on the other end said. 

   “What girl?”

   “Your girl.”

   “Why do you want her?”

   “We want you to take the cure for the next couple of days, put everything on hold, don’t do nothing about nothing. You do that, you get your girl back. You don’t do that, you don’t ever get her back.”

   “Where is she?”

   The phone went dead.

   “Somebody’s got Dottie.”

   “Why? What we’re doing?”

   “They didn’t say, not exactly. They want me to sit on my hands for a few days, don’t do anything, and I’ll get her back. Or else. It’s got to be that wop we’re after. Nothing else that amounts to anything is going on except the Jackson Pollack business. Goddamn it to hell!”

   “What are you going to do?”

   Stan stood up and went into the utility room. He spun the combination on the office safe and removed two handguns. They were Colt Commander models, aluminum framed, with short barrels and rounded hammers. The plastic grips were brown. The guns were unloaded. He put four 7-round magazines in his pockets. He reached into the safe a second time.

   “Get hold of Ezra, tell him what’s going on, that I’ve got our .45’s, and to meet me at the house. If I’m not there, I’ll be talking to the neighbors, tell him to find me, the sooner the better.”

   “Be careful,” Bettina said.”

   “You too,” he said, handing her a snub-nosed .32 and six rounds. “If you have to, shoot first, never mind the questions.” She didn’t ask if she should call the police. She knew better than that. This had nothing to do with them, even though they would have to clean up the consequences afterwards.

   “Somebody’s a dead man,” Stan said. “They just don’t know it, yet.”

   There were two beat cops, two more uniforms standing beside their radio car, and a plainclothes car on the street when Stan’s taxi eased up to his Hell’s Kitchen walk-up.

   “We don’t know much,” one of the plainclothes men said. “Lots of people saw it happen, but nobody saw anything useful, except that there were two of them and they drove a black panel truck.”

   “Thanks,” Stan said, and walked up to his apartment. It was neat and clean, the windows open, an autumn breeze cooling the rooms. He walked into Dottie’s room and saw Mr. Moto lying in a heap on the bed. There was blood on the bedspread. The cat lifted his head and Stan saw the blood was from his paw. When he touched the cat, Mr. Moto hissed. Stan could hear his breathing was fast and choppy. He saw the bloodstained scrap of paper and the letters and numbers scrawled on it. When he picked it up, he knew in an instant that the cat had scratched out the message with his paw and it was the license plate number of the black truck.

   Stan got a bowl of milk and crumbled up a chunk of tuna, put it in the milk, and placed the bowl on the bed. “Ezra and I will take it from here,” he said to Mr. Moto. “You stay here and take care of yourself.” The cat eased himself over to the bowl and lapped up the milk, nibbled at the tuna, and went back to sleep, curling up into a ball.

   By the time Ezra came through the front door, Stan had the address the truck was registered to and was sitting in an armchair waiting for him. They talked it over for a minute and five minutes later were in a cab. Stan gave the cabbie an address in Gravesend three blocks away from where they were going. 

   It was a single-family house that had been converted into a two-family house. There were unkempt bushes on both sides of the concrete front porch. The only anything in the drive was a black panel truck. There were closed blinds in every window. “I make them on the ground floor, in case they have to leave quick,” Ezra said. “If they were upstairs, they might get stuck.”

   “You take the back door,” Stan said. “I’ll go in through the front. The doors will be locked, maybe chained. When you hear me shoot into the lock, you do the same, kick out the chain, go head over heels.”

   The two men, one of them his face slathered in iodine, barely had time to lunge up from the card table they were sitting at, reaching for their guns, when Stan and Ezra stopped them in their tracks. Their drop-in visit was breakneck. Nobody exchanged greetings.

   “Throw those on the floor in front of you and kick slide them to me.” Stan’s face was the hard face of the Old Man on the Mountain.

   The men did as they were told. One of the guns was an Orbea Hermanos, a Spanish handgun. It was a Smith & Wesson copycat. It was a piece of junk. The other one was a Smith & Wesson Centennial. Stan kicked the Spanish handgun under the sofa. He picked up the Centennial, opened the cylinder, saw it was loaded, put his own gun away, and trained the honest Smith & Wesson on the men.

   “Both of you on your knees, hands behind your backs,” Stan said. “Where is she?” 

   “Who the fuck is where, fuckface?” Iodine Face spit out. One of his eyes was swollen shut. The other eye was a cesspool.

   Stan whirled and shot him twice in the chest, the two shots following so fast upon the other it sounded like one gunshot. The man toppled over backward surprised and astonished, the sneer still on his lips, too late to say his prayers, a blink of an eye away from dying, which he did when he hit the floor, a puddle of blood forming under him, the two holes in his chest leaking the life out of him.

   “Jesus Christ!” the other man blurted, jumping to his feet, crazy to run, a stain forming at his crotch. “Why did you do that?”

   “It’s like they say in Chinatown,” Stan said, deadpan and wrathful. “Sometimes you’ve got to kill a chicken to scare the monkeys.”

   “What the fuck are you talking about?”

   Ezra clubbed him on the back of the head with the butt of his Colt and the man went down moaning with a concussion in the making. 

   “I said, where is she?” 

   “I don’t know.”

   Stan jerked the moaning man’s head up by a handful of hair. He held tight, shaking the man’s head, tearing out a tuft from the greasy thatch. Red and brown spittle ran down the man’s chin. His eyes started to focus slightly when Stan loosened his grip.

   “Last time, or you join your friend,” Stan said. 

   “Not my friend,” the man mumbled.

   “I’m not asking for explanations. Where is she?”

   “At Luca’s place.”

   “What place is that?”

   “The house, next to the mattress shop.”

   “Where?”

   “I don’t know the address.”

   “Let’s go, you can show us.”

   “Luca will kill me if he sees me.”

   “You’ve got the brains of a crayon. You’re halfway to the boneyard right now.”

   “My head hurts bad.”

   Stan wiped the handle of the Smith & Wesson clean and threw it to the side.

   “Where are the truck keys?”

   The still living man pointed to the dead man. “On him.”

   Ezra felt for the keys with the toe of his shoe, probing the dead man’s pockets.

   “I’ve got them,” he said.

   Ezra drove the panel truck, the hoodlum in the passenger seat, and Stan crouching behind the passenger seat, the barrel of his Commander pressing into the back of the man’s neck. The man was bound at the wrists and ankles.

   “Slow down and don’t bang into any potholes,” Stan said to Ezra. “We don’t want an accident.”

   “Business is booming,” Mario Pugo always said. His place was Always Tire Service on Atlantic Avenue. “The roads are good for my business but they’re bad for my customers. I repair blown tires and bent rims daily. One customer, he picked up his repaired car and drove straight into another pothole. He was back in five minutes.”

   “You know how this gun is, loose as a goose,” Stan said. “We blow a tire, it could go off just like that.”

   The man in the passenger seat stiffened. The truck hit a pothole and shuddered. Stan kept a grip on the man, his hand tight on his shoulder. His Colt stayed quiet. The man told them the store was a front. A steel door in the middle of the store led into the house where they lived. The brothers might or might not be there, but the mother was always there. 

   “She’s more them than all of them put together, including the lion in the basement,” he said.

   When Ezra drove past the Murphy Bed store across the street, Stan threw it a glance. It was flush to a three-story brick brownstone. Ezra downshifted into second, turned the corner, and found an alley. He parked and Stan dragged their hoodlum into the back of the truck. He found a pile of oily rags, stuffed one into the man’s mouth, gagged him to make sure, blindfolded him, and tied two rags together to fasten him to a u-bolt.

   “He might have trouble breathing,” Ezra pointed out.

   “That’s not my problem,” Stan said.

   Going towards the door of the store, Stan and Ezra had their handguns in their hands and their arms down at their sides. They moved slowly, but once they stepped across the threshold, they moved fast. Ezra flipped the open sign the other way, stayed at the door, his back to it, and Stan strode straight to the only man in the store, sitting behind a desk at the back of the store. He was a big man. It was Big Paulie. His hands silently slid off the top of the desk.

   “Don’t,” Stan said. “I won’t stand for it.” 

   Big Paulie eased the top drawer he had been sliding open back until it closed. He looked at Stan with hollow eyes. They were hollow with rage.

   “Get up, come around to the front of the desk, rest your ass on it, and talk to me like I’m looking for a better night’s sleep.”

   “The big sleep is what you’ll be getting,” Big Paulie hissed.

   “Shut the fuck up. I would just as soon finish you and walk away, but I want my girl back. Where is she?”

   “You don’t know what you’re getting mixed up in.”

   “I don’t know, and I don’t care. I want my girl. Where is she?”

   When Kid Blast came through the steel door briskly confident smug, he saw the two guns first, then the two men, and could have killed himself for not bringing his gun with him. He could have killed himself for not whirling and running, although that would have gotten him killed on the spot.

   “Next to the fat man, junior,” Ezra said. “Same rules.”

   Kid Blast joined Big Paulie, the young man’s face twisted, hatred burning in his eyes. There was a roar behind the back door, somewhere underneath them, followed by a loud yawn. It was Big Paulie’s lion, the beast he kept in the basement to preserve order in his world. Nobody moved, nobody looked anywhere else but where they had been looking. Stan took a few steps back, training his handgun on both gangsters.

   “Check the cat out,” he said to Ezra. “Be careful. And you two, squeeze a little closer together, and no lip.”

   Ezra opened the back door gently and immediately stepped away forced back by the rancid smell. He flipped the light switch and looked into the gloom, trying not to breath too much.  There was hay all over, a large cage, and a skinny-looking, tired-looking, sad-looking lion in the cage. 

   “She doesn’t look like much, like she needs sunlight and some fresh air. They’ve got a contraption beside the light switch, so they can open and close the cage from up here.”

   “Lots of people are breathing without living,” Kid Blast said. “You ain’t going to be doing either soon enough.”

   Stan stepped up to him. “I said no lip.” He hit him hard in the face with the butt of his Colt. It broke the young man’s jaw, some teeth, and laid him flat. Stan grabbed him by the scruff and threw him down the stairs into the basement. He sprang the cage door open and slammed the basement door shut, locking it with the skeleton key that was in the lock. 

   “Last time, big man, or you’re next. Where’s my girl?”

   “Upstairs,” Big Paulie said. Stan didn’t bother asking if anybody else was in the house. If there was anybody, it was going to be their problem.

   “Sit back down, hands on the desk,” Ezra said, seating himself at a table to the side, his gun nonchalant in his lap. “I don’t like what you did to me, so don’t tempt me with any monkey business.”

   Stan stepped into the house, up three steps, and into a dining room. To his left was a kitchen, to his right a living room, foyer, and a flight of stairs leading to the second floor. He knew the mother was in the house, maybe some more of her sons, and for sure somebody keeping the clamps on Dottie. He went up the stairs soundlessly. He smelled garlic seeping out from under one of the bedroom doors. A brown house spider made his way up the edge of the door frame. He watched the spider until it stopped. They both waited. He took a step, took a deep breath, and burst into the room.

   A late middle-aged mama in a black apron was feeding soup to Dottie, whose hands were free, but not free enough to throw hot soup in anybody’s face. The hand on the spoon was Raffaella Gravano’s hand. The gunsel was Italian, like the woman, but not one of the sons. He had the face of a ferret, not the family face. He was sitting in a chair next to the bed, and the instant he saw Stan he grabbed Dottie. The bowl of soup tipped and spilled all over the mattress. He lunged to his feet, Dottie held in front of him, a gun at her temple.

   “Drop the piece or the girl dies.”

   Stan lifted his gun until it was shoulder high, sighting it.

   “Put the gun down, or you go down.”

   “No, I’ve got the upper hand, you lay your no-hand down.”

   The stand-off lasted another few seconds before Stan fed the facts of life to the man. “You’ve got a losing hand. I can make another girl, but nobody is ever making another one of you,” he said, his Colt Commander pointed at the man’s forehead. “The only way you stay alive is the girl and I walk away together.”

   “Is that some kind of fucking joke?” the gunsel asked.

   When Stan shot and the bullet zipped whooshing past the man’s face so close he could feel the heat of it, and smell the burnt powder, it slammed into the plaster wall. Everyone in the room stopped hearing anything except the echo of the boom. The gunsel blinked. He kept his head, but his grip on the gun handle was tense and sweaty.

   “And you,” Stan said to the woman, “sit down on the bed and don’t move.” She had been slowly but surely moving. She sat down. “Turn so I can see your hands.” She turned slightly, her hands in her lap.

   “Whatever you’re thinking, stop thinking it.” He jabbed his eyes back at the gunsel.

   “Make up your mind.”

   The man hesitated. “Never get into a card game with the devil,” Stan said. “He will always deal you a bad hand.”

   The man wavered and finally lowered his gun. Dottie ran to Stan, clutching at him, bawling.

   “Dad, dad!” She was trembling.

   “You should be ashamed of yourself, taking a kid for a hostage,” Stan said to Rafaella. “Tear that bed sheet into strips.” He waited while the woman under his thunb did what she was told.

   “Stand outside the door, honey,” he said to Dottie prying her off of him. He hog-tied the gunman and Ma Gravano. He kicked the gunman as hard as he could. He heard something break. He didn’t give a damn. He spat on the floor an inch away from Ma Gravano’s face. He left both of them on the ground, slamming the door behind him.

   Down the stairs and through the house, keeping his daughter behind him, when he and Dottie stepped past the open steel door into the mattress shop, Ezra was alone. He saw the question in Stan’s face.

   “When I asked the big man who it was that we threw down into the basement, he said it was his younger brother. I thought he wouldn’t mind being his brother’s keeper, so I sent him down to join the family. The cat is harmless, anyway. It’s missing most of its teeth.”

   They left the store by the front door, shutting the lights off, walked to the alley, and rolled the tied-up man out the back door of the panel truck. Ezra found a scrap of paper. He wrote “I KIDNAP CHILDREN” on the paper and thumb tacked it to the man’s chest with tacks he found in the glove box. When they drove away a stray dog trotted up and sniffed at the hoodlum. When they spotted another alley, they abandoned the truck, wiping it clean, and hailed a cab on the street. 

   Dottie curled up in Stan’s warm embrace. Ezra stayed steadfast on her other side. “Dad, how did you find me so fast?” Ezra scanned the street behind them. He was ready to think slow and act fast if he had to.

    “Mr. Moto got the license plate number of the guys who grabbed you, and the rest was easy enough, once we knew where to go to find you.”

   “I saw Mr. Moto try to get at them, but it was two against one, and then they were shooting at him, and I was being gassed, and that’s all I remember. I woke up in that bed and that old witch came in with soup and then there you were. Dad, dad, I’m so happy, so happy you found me,” she said, squeezing him tight, crying again, a flood of tears. Stan let her cry, stroking her hair.

   When they got back to Hell’s Kitchen, after slowly wending up the stairs to their apartment, Dottie ran into her bedroom, and threw herself on her bed next to Mr. Moto. She reached for him. Startled, the cat jumped down to the floor, looked up at the girl, arched his back, yawned, and walked out of the room, his tail held high.

Excerpted from the crime novel “Cross Walk.”

Ed Staskus posts on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Dogs Never Bite Me

Jesus and Mary Chain

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By Ed Staskus

   Maggie Campbell and Steve de Luca’s good-hearted neighbors lived on the driveway side of them. They were elderly sisters. A woman who was mean-spirited lived on the other side of them. She was somebody who didn’t know how to laugh at herself. A Transylvanian man and his wife lived behind them, their backyards butting together. They were friendly and loved their dogs.

   Mariam and Josephine lived together in the two-story brick bungalow next door on the east end of West Park for more than sixty years. Neither of them ever married. Josephine cooked pigs in a blanket, brought them to the fence, and fed them to Maggie and Steve’s dogs every day. They hardly ever saw Mariam since she hardly ever came out of the house.

   After they departed this life Steve fixed up a timer and security light in their living room and mowed their lawn every Saturday. He parked Maggie’s Honda Element in their driveway to make it look like it wasn’t vacant, at least until the house was sold and being lived in. It wasn’t the kind of neighborhood where vacant houses were safe for long. If they stayed empty too long their world was brought down to earth. The angel sky was only so good for so long.

   There were statues of Jesus and Mary in front of a red hydrangea in the front yard of the brick bungalow. They were there for a long time, almost an eternity. There were chains attached to the bases of both statues. The chains were buried beneath mulch and led to a bolt fixed to the side of the house. Mary and Josephine were determined to keep the holy family where they were. They didn’t want them spirited away to a devilish place.

   Dolores lived with her husband Chuck. She was no Mr. Rogers. She was all about a million rainy days. Chuck bought his house before Maggie and Steve bought theirs. He had been a confirmed bachelor until he made a mistake and got married. Before Dolores moved in Chuck was their nice neighbor. She was not so nice, tense and quarrelsome.

   “She’s from New Jersey,” Maggie told Buster their Border Collie. He had memorized and understood hundreds of words. “She started in on us right at the start. Whenever we waved to her, she would never wave back. If she caught Chuck talking to either one of us, he had to pay the price. It got so he had to sneak over to say hello and chat. The things she says to him about us, I don’t even want to imagine.”

   “All my time in hell is spent right here with her,” Chuck said.

   Steve called her Cruella behind her back. After a while many of the neighbors on the street called her the same thing behind her back. The dogs thought the byname was fitting and would have called her that if they could. They growled at her instead.

   Dolores called the dog warden on Maggie and Steve every week-or-so, even when the dogs were sleeping in the heat of the summer. Her complaint was always about the dogs barking. It didn’t matter to her that they hardly ever did. She hated them for her own reasons. What she didn’t know was that the dogs were licensed and the licenses were renewed every year.

   “Here’s the thing, lady,” the dog warden finally told Dolores. “Those dogs are licensed, and everyone’s dogs bark sometimes, so stop barking us up.” She finally got tired of her fun and games and stopped calling the dog warden.

   “Most of the rest of our neighborhood loves it when our dogs are out,” Maggie said to Buster. “It is Dolores who gives us the most trouble. I don’t care if you’re from the bottomless pit, or not. It doesn’t give you the right to be a son of a bitch. But that’s all changed now that she needs me. When she couldn’t afford to have her hair done at the Charles Scott Salon in Rocky River anymore, I became good enough for her.” Maggie was a hairdresser in Lakewood.

   “Chuck doesn’t pay for anything for the kids,” Dolores complained bitterly. She had two children from an earlier marriage. Her ex-husband had killed himself. She never said why. “Everything falls on me. I have to pay for their school.” They went to the West Park Lutheran School, even though Dolores was an atheist. She didn’t have much money of her own anymore. She had blown through her dead husband’s life insurance in Las Vegas. She depended on whatever she could  squeeze out of Chuck.

   Then, when Maggie started doing her hair, knowing that she didn’t have kids herself, it was kids in her chatterbox all the time. “Do you think you could come over and watch them for a few minutes?”

   “No,” Maggie said. “That’s why I don’t have kids of my own. I don’t want to sit yours.” She might have done it to be a good neighbor, but she knew Dolores would have started taking advantage of her, so she put a stop to it right away.

   The old couple behind them bought their house the year Maggie was born. That had been almost fifty years ago. They were straight out of Transylvania, which was a part of Romania. Their English was sketchy. Maggie and Steve couldn’t always understand them, her less than him. His name was Anthony, but they had never been able to make out what her name was. They called her Mrs. Anthony.

   Their big back yard was like a farm. They grew everything they ate, except for animals, in the back yard during the summer. When Maggie and Steve first moved into the neighborhood they already had grandkids, who fed their dogs doggie cookies.

   They would hear the pack of grandkids while sitting on their back porch. “Can we go see the dogs?” they shouted. “Go, go,” their grandpa said.

   The children had become teenagers, but they still came to visit their grandparents. The dogs ran to the back fence and lined up, waiting. “You can’t stop filling the feedbag now. You have to keep giving them cookies,” Maggie told the teenagers.

    Steve walked their dogs every day. He stopped and talked to their neighbors. They asked him about their dogs, some of whom came and went, so a lot of them found out they rescued the animals, finding them better homes. That’s how they came to be called the Dog People. One day a distraught woman was walking up and down the street looking for her lost Dachshund.

   “Try the Dog People,” somebody suggested.

   “Have you seen my dog?” she asked Maggie.

   “No, but I’ll keep an eye out for the wiener,” Maggie said.

   Sometimes neighbors donated dog food to them. They found forty pound bags of it left on their front porch. It was nice to have a little community support.

   They started taking their canines to the Lakewood Dog Park in the Metropark instead of walking them in the neighborhood because Rudy their Husky was a screamer. The second they put a leash on him the wailing started. It sounded like somebody was ripping out his toenails. Neighbors came out to make sure they weren’t torturing their dogs. Explaining got to be so embarrassing that Steve put their walks to a stop. He drove them to the dog park, instead.

   It turned out Rudy hated it there, too. He didn’t like other people or other dogs coming up to him, or even up to Maggie or Steve. One day they thought they would hide from him so he would learn to run around with other dogs. They hid behind a tree. But what happened was unsettling. He ran around like a madman looking for them.

   “Steve, we can’t hide from him,” Maggie said. “He’s never going to relax.”

   When they came out from hiding and he saw them he ran over right away. “He’s back to guarding us again,” Maggie told Steve. “He’s giving us his warm glow.”

   One of their neighbors fell in love with Grayson, their silver Lab, after he sniffed out who had bolt cut and stolen the Jesus and Mary statues. When Steve retrieved them he set them in cement so it wouldn’t happen again. Grayson had a great nose and was a cutie patootie, too. Their neighbor did everything she could to get them to give Grayson to her.

   “He’s not for sale,” Maggie said. “He’s my dog.”

   “But I love him.”

   “We love him, too,” Maggie said.

   One morning they took Grayson to Project Runway on Whiskey Island to a fundraiser for dog shelters. From there, later in the afternoon, they did Doggies on the Patio, another fundraiser. Afterwards they took him out for gelato. He loved it, the whole day, and the gelato, too. Maggie could not sell him. She couldn’t see that ever happening. It didn’t matter that he had a gluttonous food drive and was always sneaking upstairs to sleep on their bed, which was against the rules

   Besides, Grayson was their early warning system, barking up a storm whenever Dolores came within smelling distance. He knew bad news when he smelled the newsprint. As soon as she was in range the Lab got going on the firing range. He could analyze people’s intentions immediately. He never said a prayer or spit out a curse beforehand, knowing he would get it done without any help from Jesus and Mary. Dolores always went the other way when Grayson raised the roof. She had heard many dogs were all bark and no bite, but she wasn’t taking any chances. 

   “Barking dogs never lie” is what Maggie said.

Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com. 

“Cross Walk” by Ed Staskus

“Captures the vibe of mid-century NYC, from stickball in the streets to the Mob on the make.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Fiction

Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CRPSFPKP

Late summer and early autumn. New York City, 1956. Jackson Pollack opens a can of worms. President Eisenhower on his way to the opening game of the World Series where a hit man waits in the wings. A Hell’s Kitchen private eye scares up the shadows.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Ebb Tide

Over Hill and Dale

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By Ed Staskus

   When the Ford F-150 in front of him swerved suddenly to the left, JT Markunas pushed down on the brake pedal of his Police Interceptor. The pick-up stopped on the shoulder on the left side of Route 6 just as JT saw what it was that had made the driver swerve. It was a woman in a Mother Hubbard dress crossing the road, looking fixedly ahead but not watching for approaching traffic. She looked unsteady. He pulled off and turned on his flashers. The pick-up driver was already leading the woman by the elbow away from the road.

   “She almost walked right into my truck,” he said.

   “Do you know who she is?” 

   “No, I don’t know,” he said. “I’m making a delivery to French River, coming up from Stratford. I thought I would go along the coast. Christ, I almost hit a dog down by Oyster Bed Bridge and now this.”

   JT put the woman in the front seat of his car and radioed that he was going to try to find out where she lived and get her back to her home.

   “How are you feeling?” he asked the woman.

   “Good, but I’m cold,” Ida Thomson said.

   He turned the car’s heating on, directing the vents at her.

   “Where do you live? Here in South Rustico?” 

   She pointed up Route 243 in the direction of St. Augustine’s Catholic Church. He swung his police car around, turning in a tight circle, and drove slowly up the road. Overhead the Kulloo hovered over them. He had known the woman for a long time. He lingered until he was sure she was safe and sound. He didn’t know the man, although he had a feeling he had seen him before somewhere. Neither the woman nor the policeman noticed anything.

   “Along here?” he asked.   

   “No,” she said. “Up that way.”

   When they got to the church he stopped and asked again.

   “I don’t know,” she said. “Somewhere that way.” She pointed to the left.

   “What color is your house?”

   The woman looked at the church, ignoring his question. “Everybody went to church back when I was a girl. Especially here in a small community like this. My goodness, we all went. I just walked up the road from home to the church and the school. It was the same way we walked to the beach and went swimming. My teachers were Mother Saint Alphonse, Mother Saint Theodore, and Mother Saint Cyril, who was sort of icky. Kids came to our school from all over, from Hope River and Oyster Bed Bridge.”

   “You have a good memory,” JT said.

   “Oh, yes,” she said. “My school was run by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Most of them came from the islands.” The Magdalen Islands are an archipelago not far away in the middle of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “There were four classrooms and eleven grades. The nuns were one hundred percent French. My French is fluid to this day.”

   “Do you mean fluent?”

   “Yes, fluid.”

   South Rustico is where Route 6 and Church Rd. cross. There is a beach on Luke’s Creek, which is a bay on the far shoreline, near the National Park. The Rustico lands were some of the oldest communities established in La Nouvelle Acadie after the Treaty of Paris in 1763. 

   “I once went to mass at St. Augustine’s twice in twelve hours,” Archie Thomson said. He spoke from the hereafter. He was the woman’s dead husband. “We were dating, I was on the island and her mother insisted we go to church Saturday night before stepping out. So, OK, that’s it, we go. Sunday morning, they wake me up and say it’s time to go to church again. I say, what, did I die? When I did go, I thought, I got to be desperate for a girlfriend.”

   “You must have really liked me,” Ida said to Archie.

   Built in 1838, the oldest Catholic Church on the island, St. Augustine’s was an old church when Ida and Archie got married there in 1941. “Her foster mother hosted our dinner at the Charlottetown Hotel and the party afterwards was at their house,” Archie said. “The barn was behind the house and they brewed homemade beer. Ida and I didn’t have ten cents to rub together, but we were young and ready to go.”

   Ida Arsenault was born at home in 1917. She grew up in what became the Barachois Inn on the Church Rd. A barachois is a kind of bayou, a coastal lagoon separated from the ocean by a sandbar. But the home she grew up in wasn’t where she was born, nor were her parents the parents she was born to.

   “When my twin sister and I were born, our mother died the next day,” she said. “It was too much for her.”

   Her father, Jovite Arsenault, a farmer with nine children, owned a house behind the church and all the croplands between Anglo Rustico and the sand shore. “Where the new school was built,” Ida said, “that was once part of his fields.” Suddenly a widower, he was unable to care for the newborns.

   Ida and her sister, Elsy, were placed with foster families. Her sister went to Mt. Carmel, on the southwest end of the island. Ida became a ward of the Boucher’s, a husband and wife in their 50s, who lived down the street, on the front side of the church. “It was just a few minutes away,” she said. “I saw my brothers and sisters, and my father, all the time, and my new parents made sure I saw my twin sister now and then.”

   The Boucher’s were islanders who had long worked in Boston as domestics, saved their money, and returned to Prince Edward Island, buying a house and farm. They kept cows and some horses. They were childless. “I was spoiled rotten since I was their only child,” Ida said. “They were older and well-to-do. We had a car, a black Ford. I didn’t do too much, although I might have milked a cow once-in-a-while.”

   Before mid-century most of the roads on Prince Edward Island were dirt or clay, muddy when it rained, dusty when it was dry. The first paved road, two miles of it, was University Avenue in Charlottetown in 1930. “They eventually paved the road up to the church,” said Ida. “We used to say, ‘Meet me at the pave,’ which was where the pavement ended.”

   One of her aunts lived a few miles away in Cymbria on Route 242. She washed clothes by hand in a washtub and dried them on the line. There were thirteen children in her family. They didn’t have running water or electricity. They had an outhouse. “When I went out to the well and pulled the bucket up, there was meat and butter in the bucket. That was their refrigeration.”

   “When did they get power and plumbing?” JT asked.

   “In the 1950s when they moved across the street into an old schoolhouse,” Ida said.

   “Where were you going when I found you on the road?”

   “I don’t know,” Ida said. “Maybe I was going to visit my auntie, but I’m not sure.”

   Archie was born in Thorold, Ontario a year after Ida. “My father worked on the freighters all the time, Montreal to Thorold, where the locks are, and that’s where we moved,” he said. From Montreal the passage is down the St. Lawrence River and across the length of Lake Ontario to the Niagara Escarpment. The Welland Canal is “Where the Ships Climb the Mountain.” Standing on viewing platforms, anybody can watch ocean-going cargo ships pass slowly by at eye-level barely an arm’s length away.

   He enlisted with the Royal Canadian Navy on his twenty-first birthday. It was 1939. During World War Two Canada commanded the fifth largest navy in the world. Archie met Ida when she was in nursing school in Halifax, where he was stationed with the fleet. “I was working a little job at the Charlottetown Hospital,” said Ida. “A friend of mine told me about the nursing course in Halifax. Right away I got the bug.” She and her friend enrolled and her friend’s father drove them to Nova Scotia.

   After graduating, as part of her scholarship agreement, she worked at the Christie Street Veterans Hospital in Toronto. It was a Gothic building originally built as the National Cash Register Company factory in 1913. “They gave us $45.00 a month to live on.” She and Archie dated long-distance by mail and phone. They got together when they could. When they did, they jumped into each other’s arms.

   “Whenever I got leave, I would pick her up in Toronto and take her to visit my parents in Thorold. That’s how I introduced her to my family.” At the same time, Ida was introducing Archie to Prince Edward Island. “You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression,” Archie said.  It was a long drive alone to the east coast. While driving he practiced making a good first impression.

   “I took the S. S. Charlottetown across the strait when we were dating,” Archie said.. “You had to sleep in your car if you missed the last one. We would be lined up single file down the road. There would be a hundred cars full of frozen men inching along in the morning trying to get on the first ferry.”

   In the gray of winter, crossing the Northumberland Strait from Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick, to Port Borden, Archie stood bundled up against the cold wind, hands stuck in mittens, leaning over the bow watching as the heavy boat broke through thick ice. “It would crunch ice into big blocks and turn them over like ice cubes as it went across,” he said.

   One afternoon, making his way from Halifax to South Rustico, coming off the ferry in December and driving up Route 13 from Crapaud, he was brought up short by a snowdrift in the road. “The road went down a valley and there was five feet of snow piled up,” Archie said. He reversed his 1935 Chrysler Airflow back to where the rear tires could get a grip on a stretch of clear road. “I hit the gas as hard as I could, went as fast as I could, hit the snow, everything disappeared, and I came out the other side. By the time I did the car was barely moving. I shut it off and caught my breath.”

   Archie gave Ida a ring. She gave him a stack of books for his next sea voyage. They hardly saw each other after that as her man sailed back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean in a warship. In June the ferry S. S. Charlottetown sank on her way to a dry dock in Saint John for an overhaul. The boat was four miles off the coast of Nova Scotia. The crew rowed to safety in their lifeboats. Two tugs tried to get to the vessel but had to turn around in the heavy fog. When she was finally refloated the flow of water getting into her couldn’t be stemmed. It was the end of her.

   “We were in Lisbon when I got a message from Ida that she and my mother had decided on December 8th for our marriage,” Archie said. The executive order from home base said to be ready. “I went to the radio communications on board and sent a telegraph confirming my agreement.” They were married the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed by the Japanese.

   “Stay in the car, Ida,” JT said. “I’m going to the church for a minute.” He was hoping to find somebody who would know where she lived. But there was nobody to ask. All the doors were locked and he didn’t see any vehicles anywhere. He went back to his police car.

   “That’s where I live,” Ida said pointing through the windshield at the Barachois Inn across the street from the church.

   “That’s a bed and breakfast,” JT said.

   “That’s where I live,” Ida repeated.

   When JT knocked on the door with Ida standing behind him, a woman wearing an apron answered. She was drying her hands on a dish towel.

   “Can I help you?” she asked until she spied Ida. “Where did you find her?”

   “Trying to cross Route 6,” he said.

   “Oh, dear.”

   “She said she lives here.”

   “She did when she was a child.”

   “Do you know where she lives now.”

   “Yes,” the woman said. She gave him directions, describing the house. “She has a neighbor by the name of Bernie Doiron. He tries to keep an eye on her, but he’s a farmhand and works most days.”

   “Thanks for your help. If you don’t mind my asking, how old is this house? It looks old but it looks like it has been restored.”

   “It was more than a hundred years old when we bought it,” the woman said. “It was built by a merchant back then, a man by the name of Joseph Gallant, so we call it the Gallant House. My husband and I at first only planned on living here, fixing it up, which we are still doing. It is an unending job. We converted it into a bed and breakfast to help with the bills.”

   Back in the car Ida said she was hungry. “We ate fish, mussels, potatoes, carrots, and turnips when I was a girl. That was about it. Whenever we went to Charlottetown we ate at a Chinese restaurant, but that was as much as I ever knew. Before I got married, I never had Italian food. After I got married, my cousin and a friend of hers said, we’re coming over to make dinner. We’re going to make spaghetti. I thought, yippee, what’s that?”

   JT found her house easily enough, helped get Ida inside, and boiled water in a kettle for tea. He waited until she was resting easy in her easy chair before leaving. He shot her a two-finger salute off the brim of his cap.

   “Thank you, Mr. Policeman,” she said. “Can you come back soon and take me for another ride?”

Excerpted from the book “Ebb Tide.”

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

“Ebb Tide” by Ed Staskus

“A thriller in the Maritimes, out of the past, a double cross, and a fight to the finish.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books

Available at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CV9MRG55

Summer, 1989. A small town on Prince Edward Island. Mob money on the move gone missing. Two hired guns from Montreal. A constable working the back roads stands in the way.

A Crying of Lot 49 Publication

Paperback Yoga

Until Triangle Do Us Part

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By Ed Staskus

There are many reasons men and women become couples of all kinds, and even get married, even when they know better. They grow up, the clock is ticking, or they get cold feet about staying single. It seems like the next step, maybe there’s a baby on the way, and sometimes, best of all, they’re in love.

However, about half of all marriages in America end up in divorce, according to the United States Census Bureau. The separation rate for subsequent marriages is even higher. The unmarried break up faster than the married. Cohabitating parents are four times more likely to split up than those who are wed.

Couples stay together because they have made a family, or they’ve made their love last, or because they simply have shared interests. When they do have similar interests they always have something to share together. They are able to understand one another better during hard times and have great holidays and weekends. What’s better than having a mate who likes to explore for antiques or go rock climbing, just like you?

Or practice yoga?

“When you merge your practice with another’s, you fall into sync with that person,” said Michelle Fondin, a yoga teacher and member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. “Your breath, movement, and body positions find a rhythm together.”

Couples don’t and can’t do everything together. Even if they have the most fun of all fun times together, they still need to give it a rest now and again, and have some fun with their friends. They have their own lives, a life for each of them, even though they have a life with one another.

Although common interests don’t have anything to do with compatibility, it’s helpful to have interests in common. It may be true that two dog-lovers who don’t know how to communicate are probably not going to make it, but it’s more true that a dog-lover and a dog-hater are certainly not going to make it, no matter what their communication skills are.

Unlike sharing a tub of popcorn and a movie at the multiplex, sharing a yoga practice and traveling the same spiritual journey are more likely to join couples closer together, uniting them in a similar flow.

The word yoga, itself, means to yoke or join.

“When you focus on the breath, body, and movement of another person in yoga practice, your physical body will entrain with the other,” said Ms. Fondin. “It creates harmony within the couple.”

When couples get together on the mat, instead of “me” time on the elliptical it becomes “us” time at the yoga studio. Instead of focusing on the flat screen in front of the NordicTrack, they share the benefits of drishti, which in yoga means concentrated intention, or a focused gaze. Instead of being connected to iPod earbuds, they are connected to their partner, not Justin Belieber, I mean, Bieber.

“Both partners come away with feelings of synchronicity, cooperative spirit, and shared passion,” said Dr. Jane Greer, a marriage and family therapist. “Then you throw in some spicy endorphins and it can be a real a real power trip for the relationship.”

Maybe that’s why there’s a kind of practice called Power Yoga.

There is a yoga crafted specifically for couples, called Partners Yoga. Unlike some rites of Tantra, which are sexual in nature, it eschews those aspects, although it emphasizes intimacy through touch and movement.

“Partners rely on each other’s support to keep proper body alignment, balance, and focus in a posture,” said Elysabeth Williamson, a yoga teacher and author of The Pleasures and Principles of Partner Yoga. “When you feel physically supported, not only do you experience a yoga posture differently, but you also begin to allow yourself to trust someone else.”

When you grab a loved one and hit the mat together good things happen, and it’s not just about creating shared moments. The power of touch alone is powerful, whether it’s doing double downward dog or simply a partner twist, cultivating emotional as well as physical support in the relationship.

“Partner yoga is the medium for building stronger communication and intimacy between human beings in any relationship,” said Cain Carroll, co-author of Partner Yoga: Making Contact for Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Growth.

When partners expand beyond the mat, delving into the other seven of the eight limbs of yoga, they often deepen their connection with one another. When they dive into the spiritual side of yoga they find there’s a lot more below the lotus floating on the surface of the swimming pool.

In many senses asana, or yoga exercise, is largely an external practice, a device or technique of disposing the body in postures to satisfy a hankering for loose hamstrings or to alleviate back pain.

The rest of yoga, from meditation to the morals of the practice, is largely an internal practice. One of the eight limbs of yoga is even called dharana, which is commonly translated as introversion. Another, meditation, is about as private as it gets.

Yoga is partly about what goes on when touching your toes on the mat, but mostly about what goes on off the mat. Standing on your head is one thing, but what goes on inside your head is the rest of the thing. It isn’t nailing headstand that’s important, even though nailing it is nice. It’s about keeping your peace of mind when you fall out of headstand that’s important.

“Spirituality and the spiritual life give us the strength to love,” said the writer bell hooks. Everyone draws strength from the people they love and who love them in return. When couples are on the same page in body, mind, and spirit, it’s as good as gold.

Except when it isn’t. “You can make your relationship your yoga, but it is the hardest yoga you will ever do,” said Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher and the author of Be Here Now.

What happens when one of the partners falls off the yoga wagon? What happens when the shared awareness of yoga goes downstream? What happens when yoga becomes a triangle and something’s got to give?

There are many ways that yoga brings mindfulness to a relationship. One of them is the idealism of the practice. There are also many ways that people break up, separate, and file for divorce. They’re always squabbling, or lying to each other, or they simply fall out of love. Communication issues are a common problem and infidelity has long been a betrayal that can’t be forgiven.

Balance in the bedroom can be tricky.

Losing interest in shared hobbies or interests might throw a relationship out of whack, or not. How we spend out spare time doesn’t necessarily separate us. Losing interest in shared values, however, is usually deadly. Values are beliefs that are a fundamental part of who a person is. They are important in the sense that they are a man or woman’s rules of life.

“The mind endlessly grasps after things, clings to expectations, and resents your partner if he or she doesn’t share the same values,” said Philip Moffitt, founder of the Life Balance Institute.

Yoga on the mat is exercise, which is valuable, but the rest of yoga is a value system. Practicing yoga is a way of trying to lead a conscious, ethical life. Staying in a relationship with someone who behaves and relates to the world in a completely different way than you do would take a saint, and there ain’t many saints in this world.

Any couple can get healthy by practicing Core Yoga together. However, if their core values are mismatched, it’s doubtful whether they can have a healthy partnership.

But, if three’s a crowd, when it comes to yoga, two’s a crowd.

Yoga is not a solitary pursuit. It’s a way of staying present, not just on the mat, but off the mat, too. It’s a minute-to-minute experience. But, at the same time, it’s a solitary pursuit in the sense that no matter how open to the day it helps one to be, it’s a deeply private, self-centered practice.

Even though being self-centered is often thought of as bad, it’s not necessarily the case. “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are, and that person is not to be found anywhere,” said the Buddha.

Most yoga classes start with a moment of focusing the mind and breath. It’s a way of centering, forfending the external and self-centering, setting a baseline for the practice. On the other hand, turning one’s attention during class to the birds and bees in the room will off-center anybody.

Triangles can be deadly, on and off the mat, but yoga isn’t just triangle pose, nor is it just a love triangle on which love can get caught on one dead side. Rather, if there’s anything that can help weather the loss of shared interests, shared values, and even the loss of a shared love, it’s the electric third rail of yoga, if only because it’s the practice of freedom.

Freedom for you and freedom for me.

A version of this story appeared in Rebelle Society.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Atlantic Canada

Born on the Barachois

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By Ed Staskus

“Everybody went to church back then,” said Connie Lott. “Especially in a small community like South Rustico. My goodness, we all went. I just walked up the road from home to the church and the school. It was the same way we walked to the beach and went swimming.”

Walking to the beach was easy. There is ocean to see and wade into on three sides of the school and church.

There were four classrooms to the school and eleven grades, overseen by the Sisters of Notre Dame. Many of the nuns came from the Magdalen Islands, an archipelago not far away in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. “They were one hundred percent French,” said Robin Lott. “Connie’s French is fluid to this day.”

“He means fluent,” said Connie.

“My teachers were Mother Saint Alphonse, Mother Saint Theodore, and Mother Saint Cyril, who was sort of icky,” she said, almost seven decades later. “Kids came to our school from all over, from Hope River and Oyster Bed Bridge.”

South Rustico is on the north-central shore of Canada’s Prince Edward Island, where Route 6 and Church Road cross. The Lion’s Club, caty-corner to the church, hosts ceilidhs featuring local talent in the summer. There is a handsome beach on Luke’s Creek, which is a bay on the far shoreline, near the National Park.

“I went to mass once twice in twelve hours,” said Robin, Connie’s husband. “We were dating, I was on the island, and her mother insisted we go to church Saturday night before stepping out. So, OK, that’s it, we go. Sunday morning they wake me up and say it’s time to go to church again. I said, what? I thought, I must be desperate for a girlfriend!”

“You must have really liked me,” said Connie.

Built in 1838, the oldest Catholic Church on PEI, St. Augustine’s in South Rustico was already an old church when Cornelia ‘Connie’ Doucette and Robert ‘Robin’ Lott got married there in 1960.

“Our wedding party was in Connie’s yard,” said Robin “The barn was behind the house and they brewed homemade beer. We didn’t have five cents to rub together.”

Connie Doucette was born at home in 1938. “I lived in what is now the Barachois Inn on the Church Road,” she said. A barachois is like a bayou, what Atlantic Canadians call a coastal lagoon separated from the ocean by a sandbar. But the home she grew up in wasn’t where she was born, nor were her parents the parents she was born to.

“When my twin sister and I were born, our mother died,” she said.

Her father, Jovite Doucette, a farmer with eight children, owned a house behind the church and croplands between Anglo Rustico and the red sand shore. “Where the new school was built,” said Connie, “that was once part of his fields.” Suddenly a widower, he was unable to care for the newborns of the family.

Cornelia and her sister, Camilla, were placed with foster families. Her sister went to Mt. Carmel, on the southwest side of the island, while she became a permanent ward of the Doucette’s, a husband and wife in their 50s, who lived down the street, literally down the street, on the front side of the church.

“It wasn’t traumatic,” said Connie. “I saw my brothers and sisters, and my father, all the time, and my foster parents made sure I saw my twin sister now and then.”

The Doucette’s she went to live with were islanders who had long worked in Boston as domestics, saved their money, and returned to Prince Edward Island, buying a house and farm. They kept cows and some horses. The Doucette’s were childless, and despite the surname, no relation to Connie’s family.

“I was spoiled since I was their only child,” said Connie “They were older and well-to-do. We had a car, a Ford. I didn’t do too much, although I might have milked a cow once in awhile.”

Before mid-century most of the roads on Prince Edward Island were dirt or clay, muddy when it rained, dusty when it was dry. The first paved road, two miles of it, was University Avenue in Charlottetown, the capital, in 1930. “They eventually paved the road up to the church,” said Connie. “We used to say, ‘Meet me at the pave,’ which was where the pavement ended.”

“Our generation, their children have built modern homes on the island, it’s not as basic as it used to be,” said Robin.

“Everybody’s got washers and dryers now,” said Connie.

Her mother’s sister washed clothes by hand in a washtub and dried them on the line. “We visited them in the late 1960s,” said Robin. “Their house didn’t have running water or electricity. I went out to the well and pulled the bucket up. There was meat and butter in the bucket.”

“That was their refrigeration,” said Connie.

“They finally moved across the road to an old schoolhouse that had power,” said Robin.

“They had thirteen children,” said Connie.

Although he was born in Quebec in 1936, Robin grew up in Ontario.

“My father worked on the boats all the time, Montreal to Thorold, where the locks are, and we ultimately moved there,” he said. From Montreal the passage is down the St. Lawrence and across the length of Lake Ontario to Niagara. The Welland Canal at Thorold, sitting atop the Niagara Escarpment, is ‘Where the Ships Climb the Mountain.’ Standing on viewing platforms, you can watch enormous cargo ships pass slowly by at eye-level a few feet away from you.

When he came of age Robin Lott joined the Royal Canadian Navy.

In the Second World War the Canadian Navy was the fifth-largest in the world. During the Cold War of the 1950s and 60s it countered emerging Soviet Union naval threats in the Atlantic with its anti-submarine capabilities. “We were off the coast of Portugal when my mother telegraphed me that she and Connie had decided I was going to get married,” said Robin.

The executive order said to be ready in October.

Robin and Connie met when she went to nursing school in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Robin was stationed with the fleet. “I was working a little job at the Charlottetown Hospital,” said Connie. “A friend of mine told me about the nursing course in Halifax. Right away I got the bug.” It was 1956. She and her friend enrolled and her friend’s father drove them to Nova Scotia.

After nursing school, as part of her scholarship agreement, she worked at the Sunnybrook Military Hospital in Toronto. “They gave you $70.00 a month to live on.” She and Robin dated long-distance style. “Whenever I got leave I would pick her up in Toronto and take her to visit with my parents in Thorold,” said Robin. “That’s how I introduced her to my family.”

At the same time, Connie was introducing Robin to Prince Edward Island

One afternoon, making his way from Halifax to Rustico, coming off the ferry in January and driving up Route 13 from Crapaud, he was stopped by a snowdrift in the road.

“The road went down a valley and there was literally six feet of snow piled up,” said Robin. He reversed his 1955 Pontiac back to where his rear tires could get a grip on a stretch of clear road. “I hit the gas as hard as I could, went as fast as I could, hit the snow, everything disappeared, and I came out the other side. By the time I did the car was barely moving.”

Commuting between Nova Scotia and PEI, Robin rode the Abeigweit. Before the Confederation Bridge opened in 1997, the ferry was one of the busiest in Canada, the island’s lifeline to the mainland. Commissioned in 1947, ‘Abby’ was in its time the most powerful icebreaker in the world, capable of carrying almost a thousand passengers and sixty cars, or a train of 16 passenger cars. Its eight main engines drove propellers both bow and stern.

“I used to take the ferry across when we were dating,” said Robin. “You had to sleep in your car if you missed the last one. We would be lined up single file down the road, there were no parking areas back then, a hundred cars inching along trying to get on the first boat in the morning.”

In the dead of winter, crossing the Northumberland Straight from Cape Tormentine, New Brunswick, to Port Borden, Robin Lott stood bundled up against the cold wind hands stuck in mittens leaning over the bow watching ahead as the heavy boat broke through foot-thick ice.

“It would crunch gigantic pieces of ice and turn them over like ice cubes as it went across,” he said.

After they married the Lott’s didn’t stay on Prince Edward Island. “Both of the family farms were no longer farming,” said Robin. “I had an offer to partner in a fishing boat, but I didn’t take that up.” They moved to St. Catharine’s, the largest city in Canada’s Niagara Region, not far from Thorold. They rented an apartment and got busy.

By the time Connie was pregnant with the second of their four children they had bought a bungalow with a 185-foot deep backyard, near Brock University. “We had plans about moving, but we had a low mortgage on this house, so we never did,” said Robin.

They still live in the same house fifty-five years later.

“Those days we used to all climb in our station wagon on a Friday payday and go to the grocery store,” said Robin. There was a meat packing plant in the city and an adjacent store called Meatland. “They sold hot dogs in three-pound bulk bags.”

It’s been said you know you’re from St. Catharine’s if you know the difference between Welland and Wellandport, were in the Pied Piper Parade at some time in your childhood, ate fish and chips at the north corner of the Linwell Plaza, can drive through downtown without getting confused, pissed in the Lancaster Pool, hate Niagara Falls, and bought cold cuts at Meatland.

“When we went on holiday we took our four children and went camping,” said Connie. “We had a hard top tent. We went all over, as far south as the Teton Mountains near Yellowstone Park and as far north as Peace River.”

It is almost two thousand miles from St. Catharine’s to Peace River, and another forty miles to Girouxville. Towing their hard top trailer, their four children in tow, the family piled into their station wagon to visit Connie’s four uncles living there. Her natural father’s brothers had all long since moved from Prince Edward Island to Alberta.

The Peace River valley’s rich soil has produced abundant wheat crops since the 19th century. The town of Peace River, at the confluence of three rivers and a creek, is sometimes called ‘The Land of Twelve-Foot Davis.’ Henry Davis was a gold prospector who built a trading post in Peace River after he made a fortune on a tiny twelve-foot square land claim. After his death a 12-foot statue of him was erected at Riverfront Park.

“It was one of the highlights of our trip,” said Robin, about their excursion out west in 1976.

Girouxville is a small French-Canadian community surrounded by enormous farms. A hundred years ago the local Cree Indians called it ‘Frenchman’s Land.’ Every four years Chinook Days are celebrated. Besides farming, there are thousands of beehives, hunting for elk and moose, and good fishing on the Little Smoky River,

“Three of the brothers homesteaded, the three stronger ones,” said Robin. “In those years you could go up there, it was all bush, and if you cleared the land and farmed it, it was yours. They pulled out stumps and ended up with farms so big they weren’t described by acre, but by section.” Spring, durum, and winter wheat are grown on almost 7 million acres in Alberta. The average farm size is close to double the size of farms on PEI.

The fourth Doucette brother became a schoolteacher, opened and operated a store, married, and propagated a large family.

“We pulled into this little town with our trailer and kids,” said Robin. “Then it occurred to us we had no idea where they lived.” Spying the town’s tavern, they parked in front of it. Robin went into the tavern. He told the bartender he was looking for Emile Doucette. The bartender looked at Robin and bobbed his head at a table set along the back wall.

“Why don’t you ask his brother Leo over there,” he said.

“He was a single man, quite a drinker,” said Connie. “What else do you have to do after working all day on a farm? He eventually bought the tavern.”

That night Doucette’s gathered from far and wide for a reunion dinner. “Everybody came, everybody got together,” said Robin. “We talked long into the night and it was still light enough to see.” In northern Alberta in the summer the sun rises at five in the morning and doesn’t set until almost eleven at night.

The night before they left to go back to St. Catherine’s Uncle Leo invited them to his farm.

“We were having a beer when he said he wanted me to go into his bedroom and pull the suitcase out from under his bed,” said Robin.

“Open it up and count out some money for Connie and Camilla,” said Uncle Leo.

“It was full of cash, honest to God,” said Connie. “We just about died.”

“I was nervous, what if somehow or other he thought I had taken one dollar more than he told me to do,” said Robin. “But then on the mantle in his living room I saw checks for crops he had sold, thousands and thousands of dollars, none of them ever cashed.”

Robin and Connie have gone back often to Prince Edward Island, most recently the past summer when they traveled to the island for the marriage of a granddaughter. They enjoy eating the local seafood, especially oysters, mussels, and lobster. At one time they ate as much whitefish as they wanted.

“When we first started coming back here I would go out with friends who were fishermen and it was nothing to hand line 1500 pounds of codfish in the morning,” said Robin. “But that was all shut down thirty years ago.”

“We ate fish, potatoes, carrots, and turnips when I was a girl,” said Connie. “That was about it. Whenever we went to Charlottetown we ate at a Chinese restaurant, but that was as much as I ever knew. Before I came to St. Catharine’s I had never had Italian food. After I married, my cousin and a friend of hers said, we’re coming over to make dinner. We’re going to make spaghetti. I thought, yippee.”

In the years since, the Lott’s have discovered fare across Canada and the United States, in Spain, England, Austria, and Denmark. “I like to travel,” said Connie. “We’re going back to Mexico at the end of the year.”

“It all started when she came to St Catharine’s,” said Robin. “Our community has every nationality you can shake a stick at, Irish, Italians, Russians, because of the construction of the canal system. There are cabbage rolls and pierogies and souvlaki.”

When Connie’s daughter travels to Prince Edward Island on business, she has stayed at the Barachois Inn. “She told me my old house has changed a little bit, one of the rooms now has an en suite bathroom, but it’s still owned by the same people who bought it,” said Connie.

Not much is better than going from one home to another home to family and eating good food. When Robin and Connie Lott are on PEI they sometimes stop at Carr’s Oyster Bar in Stanley Bridge, zigzagging up the coast to the other side of the Rustico lands, and have lunch on the ocean.

“We love seafood,” said Robin. “It’s our heritage,” said Connie. They eat on the sunny open deck overlooking the dark blue water of the New London Bay. The dark water isn’t new. It’s been there a long time.

The being on the seaside, mind’s eye on the barachois, when it’s a living heritage, is like slipping into the long time ocean and being able to see how deep it is. Or it’s kicking back, having a plate of mussels lobsters white fish right now, watching kids jump off the Stanley Bay bridge. It might be both things at once.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

Paperback Yoga

Blinded By the Light

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By Ed Staskus

There are many reasons men and women become couples of all kinds, and even get married, even when they know better. They grow up, the clock is ticking, or they get cold feet about staying single. It seems like the next step, maybe there’s a baby on the way, and sometimes, best of all, they’re in love.

However, about half of all marriages in America end up in divorce, according to the United States Census Bureau. The separation rate for subsequent marriages is even higher. The unmarried break up faster than the married. Cohabitating parents are four times more likely to split up than those who are wed.

Couples stay together because they have made a family, or they’ve made their love last, or because they simply have shared interests. When they do have similar interests they always have something to share together. They are able to understand one another better during hard times and have great holidays and weekends. What’s better than having a mate who likes to explore for antiques or go rock climbing, just like you?

Or practice yoga?

“When you merge your practice with another’s, you fall into sync with that person,” said Michelle Fondin, a yoga teacher and member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association. “Your breath, movement, and body positions find a rhythm together.”

Couples don’t and can’t do everything together. Even if they have the most fun of all fun times together, they still need to give it a rest now and again, and have some fun with their friends. They have their own lives, a life for each of them, even though they have a life with one another.

Although common interests don’t have anything to do with compatibility, it’s helpful to have interests in common. It may be true that two dog-lovers who don’t know how to communicate are probably not going to make it, but it’s more true that a dog-lover and a dog-hater are certainly not going to make it, no matter what their communication skills are.

Unlike sharing a tub of popcorn and a movie at the multiplex, sharing a yoga practice and traveling the same spiritual journey are more likely to join couples closer together, uniting them in a similar flow.

The word yoga, itself, means to yoke or join.

“When you focus on the breath, body, and movement of another person in yoga practice, your physical body will entrain with the other,” said Ms. Fondin. “It creates harmony within the couple.”

When couples get together on the mat, instead of “me” time on the elliptical it becomes “us” time at the yoga studio. Instead of focusing on the flat screen in front of the NordicTrack, they share the benefits of drishti, which in yoga means concentrated intention, or a focused gaze. Instead of being connected to iPod earbuds, they are connected to their partner, not Justin Belieber, I mean, Bieber.

“Both partners come away with feelings of synchronicity, cooperative spirit, and shared passion,” said Dr. Jane Greer, a marriage and family therapist. “Then you throw in some spicy endorphins and it can be a real a real power trip for the relationship.”

Maybe that’s why there’s a kind of practice called Power Yoga.

There is a yoga crafted specifically for couples, called Partners Yoga. Unlike some rites of Tantra, which are sexual in nature, it eschews those aspects, although it emphasizes intimacy through touch and movement.

“Partners rely on each other’s support to keep proper body alignment, balance, and focus in a posture,” said Elysabeth Williamson, a yoga teacher and author of The Pleasures and Principles of Partner Yoga. “When you feel physically supported, not only do you experience a yoga posture differently, but you also begin to allow yourself to trust someone else.”

When you grab a loved one and hit the mat together good things happen, and it’s not just about creating shared moments. The power of touch alone is powerful, whether it’s doing double downward dog or simply a partner twist, cultivating emotional as well as physical support in the relationship.

“Partner yoga is the medium for building stronger communication and intimacy between human beings in any relationship,” said Cain Carroll, co-author of Partner Yoga: Making Contact for Physical, Emotional and Spiritual Growth.

When partners expand beyond the mat, delving into the other seven of the eight limbs of yoga, they often deepen their connection with one another. When they dive into the spiritual side of yoga they find there’s a lot more below the lotus floating on the surface of the swimming pool.

In many senses asana, or yoga exercise, is largely an external practice, a device or technique of disposing the body in postures to satisfy a hankering for loose hamstrings or to alleviate back pain.

The rest of yoga, from meditation to the morals of the practice, is largely an internal practice. One of the eight limbs of yoga is even called dharana, which is commonly translated as introversion. Another, meditation, is about as private as it gets.

Yoga is partly about what goes on when touching your toes on the mat, but mostly about what goes on off the mat. Standing on your head is one thing, but what goes on inside your head is the rest of the thing. It isn’t nailing headstand that’s important, even though nailing it is nice. It’s about keeping your peace of mind when you fall out of headstand that’s important.

“Spirituality and the spiritual life give us the strength to love,” said the writer bell hooks. Everyone draws strength from the people they love and who love them in return. When couples are on the same page in body, mind, and spirit, it’s as good as gold.

Except when it isn’t. “You can make your relationship your yoga, but it is the hardest yoga you will ever do,” said Ram Dass, a spiritual teacher and the author of Be Here Now.

What happens when one of the partners falls off the yoga wagon? What happens when the shared awareness of yoga goes downstream? What happens when yoga becomes a triangle and something’s got to give?

There are many ways that yoga brings mindfulness to a relationship. One of them is the idealism of the practice. There are also many ways that people break up, separate, and file for divorce. They’re always squabbling, or lying to each other, or they simply fall out of love. Communication issues are a common problem and infidelity has long been a betrayal that can’t be forgiven.

Balance in the bedroom can be tricky.

Losing interest in shared hobbies or interests might throw a relationship out of whack, or not. How we spend out spare time doesn’t necessarily separate us. Losing interest in shared values, however, is usually deadly. Values are beliefs that are a fundamental part of who a person is. They are important in the sense that they are a man or woman’s rules of life.

“The mind endlessly grasps after things, clings to expectations, and resents your partner if he or she doesn’t share the same values,” said Philip Moffitt, founder of the Life Balance Institute.

Yoga on the mat is exercise, which is valuable, but the rest of yoga is a value system. Practicing yoga is a way of trying to lead a conscious, ethical life. Staying in a relationship with someone who behaves and relates to the world in a completely different way than you do would take a saint, and there ain’t many saints in this world.

Any couple can get healthy by practicing Core Yoga together. However, if their core values are mismatched, it’s doubtful whether they can have a healthy partnership.

But, if three’s a crowd, when it comes to yoga, two’s a crowd.

Yoga is not a solitary pursuit. It’s a way of staying present, not just on the mat, but off the mat, too. It’s a minute-to-minute experience. But, at the same time, it’s a solitary pursuit in the sense that no matter how open to the day it helps one to be, it’s a deeply private, self-centered practice.

Even though being self-centered is often thought of as bad, it’s not necessarily the case. “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are, and that person is not to be found anywhere,” said the Buddha.

Most yoga classes start with a moment of focusing the mind and breath. It’s a way of centering, forfending the external and self-centering, setting a baseline for the practice. On the other hand, turning one’s attention during class to the birds and bees in the room will off-center anybody.

Triangles can be deadly, on and off the mat, but yoga isn’t just triangle pose, nor is it just a love triangle on which love can get caught on one dead side. Rather, if there’s anything that can help weather the loss of shared interests, shared values, and even the loss of a shared love, it’s the electric third rail of yoga, if only because it’s the practice of freedom.

Freedom for you and freedom for me.

A version of this story appeared in Rebelle Society.

Ed Staskus posts stories on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com and Cleveland Ohio Daybook http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com. To get the site’s monthly feature in your in-box click on “Follow.”

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