You may have noticed our website has been redesigned. After a good few years of use, the original Alberta Views website is being retired in favour of a new format with significant updates and features. This will not only make the site easier to browse and search, but provide you with helpful links and other resources to enable citizen involvement.

So what’s new?

• Highlights from past issues are now posted online.  A feature from our previous issue and content from the archives will be updated for you to read and share.

• Meet the Minister and Postal Code departments from our print edition are online to provide you with links and contact information.  Tell us about your community or respond directly to the Minister.

• Our Letters page is now online so you can more easily join the conversation.

• Brews & Views updates to keep you informed of our upcoming events and issue launches.

• A brand new Blog sharing ideas, stories and information on what’s happening in our province.

• The same compelling, award-winning, proudly Albertan magazine is now also available in digital. Visit our Digital Edition Preview! You can also purchase digital single issue copies.

We want our new website to be everything you want it to be and would love to know your thoughts. Please tell us what you think by emailing any constructive comments or questions to webmaster@albertaviews.ab.ca.

There will be more updates and exciting features added soon, so please visit often and pass the news on to your friends.

Subscribe to Alberta Views and support local, independent media. We are devoted to our print publication and will continue to create 64pages of compelling, thought provoking content 10 times a year!

Among other things, you may have noticed the magazine’s online visage has undergone a digital facelift. We also recently went “under the brush” last week, painting the office (and while away from work for the day, the town) red. And in continuing the surgery analogy, we’re perhaps proudest of all of our two fine new office-mate implants, ad sales manager Jen and bookkeeper, Melody.

For those interested in knowing more about what’s new at the magazine—and agreeable to seeing what else I can cram into a thoroughly stretched-out, under-researched health/medical analogy—how about some other ways we’ve freshened up our appearance.

Looking around, the gentlemen for starts are all clean-shaven after a bewhiskered and futile Movember. Also, the embarrassing scent many of us were too polite to mention that emanated from the office fridge has since, as mysteriously as it came, dissipated. The Office’s Handy Coffee-Related Accident Promulgator (OHCRAP) shows that we’ve gone a record 22 days now without a coffee-related accident in the office. And the inordinate amount of kitchen Tupperware has been purged, disposed of and subsequently replaced by … an inordinate amount of more Tupperware.

In short, life is good.

Certainly, however, the newest and the most important thing about the upcoming year is our new theme, “newcomers.” Beginning in the new year, the magazine will look at all the same topics you’ve come to know and love but with the undertone of “the changing face of Alberta.” And where better to start than on a new blog on a new website wearing new underwear?—speaking personally.

Q: What is the freshest thing you would like to see in Alberta this year?*

*Be the first person to respond on this blog and we will award you the prize of a large, lidless Tupperware container filled with smaller lidless Tupperware containers.

The winner of our 2010 contest (and recipient of the $1,000 prize) is Kristjanna Grimmelt of Peace River.

Her story Northern Vegas is published in the December issue of Alberta Views. Congratulations, Kristjanna!

The final judge in this year’s contest was Canmore’s Katherine Govier, award-winning author of nine novels and three collections of short stories.

We received 82 submissions this year, from writers of every level of experience and from every corner of the province. It wasn’t easy to choose a winner from such a rich crop of writing.

The deadline for next year’s contest is June 30, 2011. Complete rules will be posted on our website in January 2011. All residents of Alberta (save Alberta Views employees) are invited to enter. Good luck!

On October 18, 2006, with six dollars in my pocket and with no identification, I set out to document life in all the men’s homeless shelters in Alberta. Through December, during a winter of record lows, I hitchhiked to the six municipalities in Alberta that have shelters, lived in those shelters and worked the jobs that are available to men in shelters. What I observed, I wrote in a notebook.

I have been poor my whole life. I’ve worked and had a home at times, but I’ve been unemployed and broke, too. Looking for seasonal work, I’ve often come to Alberta. I always found work here, but I also found a poverty that doesn’t exist elsewhere in the country. From the point of view of the poor, Alberta’s poverty seems more systemic. When you find yourself at the bottom of society, you find tremendous forces that conspire to keep you there. Homeless shelters can act as a stepping stone, but they can also act as prisons.

EDMONTON
It’s 15 below zero when I get to the Herb Jamieson Hope Mission, known to residents as “The Herb.” (This is the shelter where Ralph Klein arrived on December 2, 2002, to curse and throw $20 on the floor.)

Inside the front doors it can’t be much warmer, but people are curled up sleeping on the mud- and salt-smeared stairs. Through the next set of doors is a reception area with a water fountain and an office encased in Plexiglas. Around the corner from that is a 40-foot hallway. Down one side of the hall is a lineup for beds; the lineup down the other side is for food. In the “recreation room,” beat-up chairs and tables line the walls. Men smoke. There is a radio. From the waist up the air is stale and hazy, and beneath that the air is icy cold.

After 30 minutes waiting for a food ticket, I stand 20 minutes in another line to trade my ticket for a tray of pork and beans, a little scoop of defrosted vegetables and a stale bun. I sit next to a blind native man who shot his face off with a shotgun in a failed suicide.

To get a bed I line up in the hallway at 5:30 and secure fifth place in line. An Irish guy behind me tells me how last night he was eighth and they only had seven beds. Many men have given up on ever getting a bed, and get their sleep on the floor of the hallway, curled up next to each other while people thump past them to and from the recreation room. At 10:45 a man behind the Plexiglas window takes my name and gives me a blanket, two sheets, and a ticket with my bed number. There are 16 dorms, and mine has 36 men in bunk beds. The light from the hall shines perpetually on half of them. Men are joking around, blaming their flatulence on an old British man who gets very upset as everyone laughs. Every few minutes there is a loud BOOP BOOP BOOP from the intercom, followed by announcements from head office. A man tells me that if they call your name, it’s probably the police. There is only one really loud snorer in my dorm. By 1 a.m. I fall asleep listening to guys in the hall playing cards in French.

I wake up at 4 as the guy in the bunk above me steps on my foot with his workboot climbing down to go to work. Before 6 the lights come on and a man comes around hitting a metal rod against the metal bunk bed frames. One resident wakes up to find his workboots have been stolen. He just swears at the floor where his boots used to be. He is now without a job.

FORT McMURRAY
Fort McMurray’s shelters are across the street from the police station. An old native man lies down in the parking lot despite the 20-below temperature and incredible winds. Deep in the basement of the building I get a mat and no blankets. All my belongings must be left in a cubbyhole by the front door. The man two feet from my head snores like he has a mega-phone. For breakfast there is a slice of fried bologna (“Newfie steak,” the man in charge tells me). Everyone has to leave before 7, when nothing is open. I follow men who sneak through the back door of a hotel and wait in a stairwell for the employment centres to open up.

The Salvation Army shelter is upstairs from the Mat Pro-gram. The old man in the parking lot tells me it is next to impossible to get a bed here. But just as I come up to apply, two men get kicked out for fighting and a lady checks me in. She makes it very clear that if I ever have a drink of alcohol I will never be allowed back into the shelter. There is a good meal of meat loaf and mashed potatoes with assorted cakes. My dorm has 10 men. The wooden bunk beds are built into the walls. I get sheets, a good blanket and a pillow. The man next to me is from the former Soviet Union and has come in search of thousand-dollar-a-week work in the tar sands. He warns me of the Fort Mac “Sally Ann cough” that starts as a tickle in your throat and reduces you to a fit of hacking and wheezing until tears are rolling down your face and your body aches from gagging. Through the night several men erupt in such fits and some of the other men yell about how they’ll never get to sleep with all this coughing. Then other men yell about the yelling. Nearly all the men at the Sal have jobs to go to in the morning.

RED DEER
I apply for a bed at The People’s Place. I meet a man at a picnic table who has been waiting three weeks for a bed. He has a tent in the bushes up the river. Inside the building, two ladies take my name and tell me that if they get a clean criminal record check back in time, they will get me on the bus to the Inn from The Cold program, which drives 12 people to a different church every night. An hour later they tell me that they don’t have space and direct me to the Mat Program on the other side of town. There, a young lady tells me that the shelter is full, and I ask her what people do in this situation. She offers to show me Rotary Park, where homeless are permitted to have a fire.

Beneath a cone roof that keeps off the rain and snow but lets out the smoke, we find six men curled up on the cement around a roaring fire. An old man named Frodo tells me he participated in a survey in which he was asked what the community could do for the homeless. “More wood for Rotary Park,” he told them. He gestures proudly at a heap of wood 50 feet away. A well with an old fashioned pump provides water. All the men’s sleeping bags have holes burned by embers popping out of the fire.

At midnight, six young men show up to drink beer at the gazebo. They spit and yell, horsing around drunkenly. One of them hands out cigarettes to the grateful old men sleeping on the ground. After the kids leave I drift to sleep behind a bench, only to be woken up by a visit from the police. They circle the fire from out of the shadows. An old man mumbles something inaudible which sends one of the cops into a yelling fit. “Fuck you!” he screams at us, “You know there’s no fucking drinking here! How’d you like it if we kicked you all out of here?” He goes on yelling for five minutes while his partners kick at our belongings and spill out the beer the kids left. The ground is covered with foaming puddles. After 15 minutes of yelling, the police leave and we go back to sleep.

The next morning, park workers pressure wash the entire gazebo. I sit at a nearby picnic table with a young man who works nights cleaning McDonald’s and sleeps in parks during the day. Sometimes he doesn’t sleep at all.

That night I line up early at the Mat Program. A lady comes to the door and lets us in one at a time. She asks me in a whisper if I’m aware that the program is for people who are “on something.” Two staff sit me down and give me several papers to sign that authorize them to search me and to discuss my identity with several government agencies. My belongings are taken, to be returned in the morning. They pat me down and search my things. To get in, I have to say that I have been drinking. Inside the room where we sleep there are two dozen mats that go fast. Against one wall is a row of four mats designated for women. One couple has moved their mats so that their heads are next to each other. No one seems to be on any substances.

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MEDICINE HAT
The Salvation Army is in a residential neighbourhood with several new condominium developments going up. Staff mem-bers scrutinize me from behind a huge window. They buzz me in and a man with a bushy moustache stops me at the door. “Ever had any trouble with the police?” “No.” “Any warrants out for you?” “No.” “Have you done any drugs?” “No.” “Have you had anything to drink?” “No.” “When was the last time you had a drink?” “I don’t drink.” “Okay,” he says, “go sit down over there and have a coffee.”

The place is immaculately clean. Several men and women sit on new couches watching the CFL game on a brand new big screen TV. There is a big picnic table for eating at. The kitchen looks more like a kitchen in someone’s house than one you’d find in a cafeteria.

After I sit for 15 minutes the young lady calls me into the office. She sits me down in a chair, takes a pen and looks down at her clipboard. “Any warrants out for you?” “No.” “Any problems with the law?” “No.” “Probation officer?” “No.” “Been in a prison?” “No.” “Will you consent to us running a criminal records check?” “Yes.” “Are you on medication?” “No.” “Drugs?” “No.” “Alcohol?” “No.” “Cocaine?” “No.” “Heroin?” “No.” “Crystal meth?” “No.” “Opiates, barbiturates?” “No.” “Prescription drugs?” “No.” Marijuana?” “No.” “Ritalin?” “No.” “Inhalants?” “No.” She turns a page on her clipboard. “So when was the last time that you used?”

I sign ten pages of rules including “You cannot quit your job!!!” and “You must report to a social worker within 24 hours or you will be barred for 90 days.” The girl searches through my belongings, confiscates my scissors, and shows me around. It’s like a basement suite: children playing on plush couches, a full home entertainment centre, and a smoking atrium in the backyard complete with shag carpet and cushioned benches. The only difference from somebody’s home is the video camera looking down from the corner.

LETHBRIDGE
It’s minus 40 with a howling wind. At the Lethbridge Shelter, a man takes my name, grabs me a mat, pillow, pillowcase and two wool blankets, then pulls it all into “overflow”—a big yellow room with tables of people watching an old TV. There are food machines everywhere but all they have are sesame snaps. At 11, they turn out most of the lights and I sleep with several feet between me and my neighbours. At 7 a.m., staff put out a box of baked goods that are gone in seconds. One of the staff says he has been watching that box sitting in the resource room for three days.

By my count, other shelters house about 30 to 50 per cent First Nations peoples, but in Lethbridge I calculate more than 80 per cent. Many are senior citizens. I sit down on a bench next to a very thin man with a cast on his arm. He tells me he was beat up. It’s been three weeks and he still can’t lie on his side because of his broken ribs, but it’s okay because the staff is watching out for those guys that beat him up. We watch someone vomit outside. I ask the man with the cast what language it is that everyone’s speaking. “Mostly Blackfoot and some Cree, maybe a little of the Sioux dialect from west of Calgary.”

People sleep sitting up at the tables. Lunch is served by volunteering senior citizens: one scoop shepherd’s pie; salad; cake; bread; grapes; a little juice; coffee or a tea. For supper there is a tiny Styrofoam bowl of soup and a bun. A phone call comes in from someone looking for an $8-an-hour labourer; many of the men rush to the front counter in hopes of work. I manage to get a mat in the “dry” room, where residents are sober. Outside the dry room, people joke and make silly comments long into the night. There’s an argument and the Lethbridge Police come and take away four guys.

CALGARY
Calgary’s New Drop-In Centre (NDI) is the largest home-less shelter in Canada. It made national news in November of 2004 when it was shut down for days due to an outbreak of Norwalk virus. As I wash my hands in the NDI washroom I hear violent diarrhea noises from the stalls. Sitting on a crowd-ed bench outside, a woman suddenly leaps up to release an explosive splash of diarrhea only four feet from the bench.

Nestled between two bridges crossing the Bow River, the NDI stands like a stuccoed castle with towers and faux arches. A high fence of black steel bars surrounds the building. On my way there, I’m stopped six times by people trying to sell me hard drugs. Despite the minus 10 temperature, many people sleep on the sidewalk by the shelter, nesting in heaps of blankets. Inside the shelter, foul smells drift down the stair-well. People are everywhere. The main hall is over 1,000 square feet and stuffed with people sitting at dozens of round tables. I stand for a minute until a staff worker directs me to a line of overflow clients. I follow the line past a row of washing machines and around a column of showers until it doubles back on itself. After 45 minutes in line, I receive a lunch of dried-out noodles, a thin sauce with bits of some kind of meat, and a tiny glass of juice. The man behind me says it’s a better meal than usual. Some meals are nothing more than a banana or a bowl of applesauce.

I apply for a bed but a staff member recommends I come back at 8 to line up for the bus to the Warehouse Shelter. “That’s where you go if you want to work,” he tells me, “they have food.” I line up with two dozen men in the mud outside the fence and an hour later two buses come; one to Sunalta House and the other to the Warehouse. The men climb shivering into the bus and we drive for half an hour through town to a building beneath two overpasses. The men are quick to stake out mats for themselves on a dark warehouse floor covered with more than a hundred thin blue mats butted up against each other. A line gathers in the dining area as men reach down into a 10-gallon bucket of lukewarm chicken noodle soup. There is a little yellow room where men can smoke, and on the walls are memos warning of an outbreak of head lice.

There is no room for belongings. One wall is lined with lockers but a long list of people are waiting for them, some-times for days. I notice most men simply put their things on top of the lockers and stuff their shoes under their mats. There is a cacophony of snoring, and when a big truck goes over the overpass the whole place rumbles, but I get to sleep by midnight.

At some point during the night I’m awakened by a man yelling at me, threatening to kill me. One of the staff comes over and listens to the man rant about how I had been touch-ing him. The staff kicks our mats apart until two inches separate us, and I lie back down next to the man who said he’ll kill me if I touch him.

At 5 the lights come on and staff start yelling to get up. Everyone rushes to the front door in hopes of getting on the first bus. At just after 6 the bus gets back to the NDI, but all the places at the tables are already taken.

For breakfast there is a small scoop of instant scrambled eggs and five tater tots. I sign up for a shower and receive a towel. The shower button must be kept pushed down and the water comes rushing out hot with an incredible pressure that splashes everywhere and soaks my clothes. I sign up for the laundry service and get in at 2 in the afternoon, but the dryer I get doesn’t work well and my clothes are even wetter when I’m done.

The Mustard Seed Street Ministry runs a shelter in an old building covered in Christmas lights with a glowing cross on its roof. The building sits at the base of the Calgary Tower. The Mustard Seed offers a “community meal” at supper that does not require clients to have valid Mustard Seed identification cards. In front of me in line, an old First Nations man tells of having made it a week without drinking. His friends con-gratulate him while someone jokingly offers the man a sip from a bottle of Alberta Premium Vodka. When we finally get to the front door, the man giving out tickets for supper stops the recovering alcoholic and says, “You look a little wobbly. I’m not going to be able to let you in.” The old man seems used to this sort of thing and walks away without argument. The man with the vodka gets in.

For supper we get a plate of pasta with hamburger sauce. Coffee is 10 cents, with the proceeds going to help a village in Latin America. Above the window where the meals are given out is a mural with the inscription “Bring me your weak and weary and I will give them rest.” In the mural, framed by a Calgary skyline, is an image of a man injecting a needle into an exaggerated vein.

The lights turn off at 10 but a bright light outside shines through the window onto my mat, which is wedged between the office and the fire exit. People who occupy the permanent housing upstairs use the area on the other side of the door to smoke and I hear them talking long into the night. Staff and residents walk to and from the office door all night, stepping on my mat. Despite all this, I get to sleep by 2. Just after 6 the lights come on and staff start yelling for everyone to get up. The man on the other side of the walkway from me, a young Québécois, tells me that he didn’t sleep at all, but spent the whole night watching mice climb all over me. “They were even nibbling on your hair,” he says, “I tried to wake you up, but you were gone.”

When temperatures drop to record lows, the Calgary Stam-pede opens a building to house the homeless. Mustard Seed staff announce again and again that “the bus to the Stampede is leaving; you better get on it if you want somewhere warm to be tonight.” I sit for an hour on the bus. Drunken men make the best of it, joking, picking fights that are resolved before they become violent, and yelling at the driver, “When are we leaving?” The bus driver doesn’t know. Finally, a Mustard Seed worker with a bright yellow jacket gets on the bus and writes everyone’s names on his clipboard. We drive to the Stampede Grounds. It’s only six blocks away, but the drive takes over an hour because a hockey game has just finished and the streets are jammed with traffic. We sit on the bus another 20 minutes after we arrive, while the staff makes sure we are at the right door. Finally, the men spill out of the bus lighting cigarettes. The only person there to meet us at the front door is a little lady with very thick glasses and the uniform of Calgary Stampede security, complete with cowboy hat.

On the floor in five rows are 300 mats sectioned off with curtains. Many people sit at tables drinking coffee. One side of the hall is dark and warm, but all the mats are taken. The other side of the hall remains brightly lit. A cold wind blows down from the ventilation system and from the door to the smoking area. About 30 staff members walk around: Calgary Stampede security, Mustard Seed staff, Red Cross workers and security guards from a private firm. Because of a complaint about a skin rash the night before, the staff tells us we will not have blankets tonight. Nobody can give me any more information about the rash until a homeless man says he heard someone complained of scabies.

At 11 a man gets into a fight with the guards. The police come to take him away. At 11:30 paramedics come and take away a man with feet so frostbitten that they’re black. The next day he is back at the shelter in a wheelchair.

I meet a lot of people in the smoking area that looks out over the racetrack. Men talk about the work they do: there is a carny, a drywaller, a dishwasher trying to work his way up to prep cook, and a 16-year-old kid volunteering at the Stampede shelter with his Christian group home.

Many of the clients are upset that there doesn’t seem to be a bus leaving early enough in the morning for them to get to work on time, and they are told that if they walk off the site they will never be allowed back.

It isn’t easy to sleep with the cold wind rushing in and the constant footsteps of people going to the washrooms or the smoking area, but I’m asleep by 2. I wake up at one point in the night to find the man beside me has rolled over on top of me. I try to wake him up but he doesn’t respond, so I roll him back on to his mat. At 6 the staff start kicking mats and announcing that the bus is about to leave.

The bus drops us off at the Mustard Seed. The staff at the front door have determined that there is a chinook, and that at minus 10, not including the wind chill factor, it is warm enough not to provide shelter.

A man on crutches with only one foot mutters, “They should put a plastic bag over the cross on the roof.” Another man says, “I liked it better when it was cold; they treated us better. Now it’s warmed up and we’re just cattle.”

By noon it is minus 15 again.

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Canada

1.

The downy hair that forms on a baby in utero is called lanugo; the soft spot on its head, the fontanelle. A pregnant woman is called a gravida, and the dark line that appears on her belly and traces a path down from her navel is the linea negra. The moment an expecting mother first senses her child move within her womb is the quickening. The rupture of membranes is the breaking of waters. A child’s final descent into the birth canal is known as the lightening. The cervix ripens. The baby crowns. We call the birth process labour, the same word we use for other strenuous and gainful work. At the end, a child is not extracted or removed but delivered. And when it ends badly, we choose stillborn, a tranquil and sympathetic word, rather than something clinical and cruel.
Poets must have conceived the language of birth. Only they could justify these metaphors, these end-vowels, this rich and musical lexis. For all its lyricism, though, birth’s vocabulary lacks the words for a man who is, or will be, a father.

2.

About a month before my first child was born, I discovered my brother was buried in St. Mary’s Catholic cemetery and that his name was Sandro. I knew my mother miscarried twice before I was born, and I knew both were boys. Until last year, though, she never told me their names or that the Grace Hospital buried Sandro in St. Mary’s. She named the second child Marco but no one granted him a burial. My mother doesn’t want to imagine what the hospital did with him.
My father and the priest at the Italian church arranged a funeral for Sandro. My mother, 20 years old and heartbroken, didn’t attend the service. No one did. She told me Father Lino brought her the tiny crucifix that lay on Sandro’s coffin. She kept the cross but never visited Sandro’s grave. “I couldn’t do it. Maybe one day I’ll go.”

Years later, my mother signed up to sponsor a child from overseas. When she opened the package from World Vision and read the card inside she began to cry. The child chosen for her was named Marco. His birthday was the same day in September of 1969 that Sandro had been due. This Marco was born in Peru and looked like he could’ve been Italian. He could’ve been my mother’s son. “I felt God was telling me that he was taking care of my boys, so I should take care of this one,” she said.

Sandro and Marco died without living, yet I’ve always pictured them slightly older than me. My big brothers. When I was 10, I imagined them in their teens. Sandro would have just turned 40 when my son was born, and that’s how I picture him now. Taller than me and thinner. His hair a little greyer than mine. Since I learned his name I imagine him more often.

I rode my bicycle to St. Mary’s to look for his grave. A woman at the Municipal Cemeteries office gave me the coordinates to his plot—Lot 42, Block 5, Section H—but I found no marker there at all. I called the cemetery office again to ensure I hadn’t made a mistake. A city clerk checked the records and confirmed that Sandro is, in fact, buried in that lot. So are about 20 other babies. Lot 42 and many of the nearby plots are unmarked mass graves for stillborn babies. “This is what was done in the ’60s,” the woman on the phone said. Then she told me she was sorry. I didn’t know what to expect, but I didn’t expect this. I hung up the phone and surprised myself by crying.

3.

The women who collect semen don’t smile. Not the receptionist who took my requisition form, and certainly not the stern nurse who handed me my clear plastic vial.

Since my wife, Moonira, didn’t get pregnant immediately after we started trying, and since she is a worrier, and since she was 36—old for mothering, according to the books she reads—Moonira wanted to confirm both our fertilities. She insisted the techs at the Diagnostic Semen Laboratory count my sperm. I didn’t object. After the humbling legs-aloft examinations Moonira endured, and would yet endure, masturbating into a cup was the least I could do.

A grey, vinyl-covered chair occupied one corner of my collection room. In another corner, on a counter, a spray bottle of disinfectant stood beside a roll of paper towels. A sign reminded me to wash my hands, to clean up after myself, and to inform the receptionist if I spill any of my sample. I sat on the chair and pulled a magazine from the rack hanging on the wall. It occurred to me that I’d not held a porn mag in my hands since my early teens. Babysitting my cousins meant long sojourns to the upstairs washroom where my uncle hid, poorly, his under-sink stash of Hustler.

The magazines at the clinic failed me. Thoughts of previous donors gripping the pages with their left hands doused whatever ardour the photos were meant to inspire. I didn’t bother with the TV bracketed to the wall. I suspected a perpetual loop of pornography would greet me if I switched on the set, but sitting back and watching movies seemed too much like leisure. I was here to work. To labour. Besides, I didn’t want to touch the remote. Instead, I closed my eyes and consummated a high school crush.

I produced a sample in good time, “deposited” it into my vial and screwed on the yellow cap. I didn’t spill; just the thought of having to admit this to the receptionist, or having to talk to her at all, trued my aim. Still, my offering didn’t please me. It didn’t look like much. I held the vial up to my eye to discern its volume from the graduations on the outside of the container. I read from the bottom of the meniscus—another high school memory—but the numbers were small and difficult to read. I didn’t know what qualified as a normal volume anyway.

I sprayed and swabbed the couch and left the room. I put my vial in a plastic basket on the receptionist’s counter alongside semen from other patients. I resisted the temptation to compare the volume of my vial with the others. I didn’t want the receptionist to catch me ogling another man’s sperm.

Moonira and I discovered she was pregnant before the fertility doctor had the chance to tell me my semen results. On the way out of her office, I waited until the very last moment to ask the doctor, “By the way, how were my numbers?” I wanted her to think the question had only just then occurred to me.

She said they were good. That was all I wanted to hear.

4.

I learn that the word “diaper” is also a verb, as in “it’s not my turn to diaper the baby,” and that modern parents don’t just buy diapers but “diapering systems.” Moonira and I choose the ridiculously named bumGenius brand whose washable diapers and adjustable liners cost $20 each. I list our bumGenius needs on a baby gift registry and am shocked when people actually buy them for us.

We inherit a second-hand crib which I assemble in the room that used to be my office. A few months later, consumer watchdogs declare the crib’s “drop-side” design to be infanticidal. Friends and family hand us down a bassinet, a glider and plastic bins heavy with onesies, rompers, receiving blankets and other items I’ve never heard of. We receive two infant car seats, three rubber giraffes named Sophie and two copies of Goodnight Moon. The receptionist at the radiology clinic wraps a CD of ultrasound photos in ribbon and coloured paper and sells it to us for $20. My mother buys us a Valco stroller, and my mother-in-law gives us a onesie that reads “All mommy wanted was a backrub.” Moonira and I aren’t sure her mom understands the joke.

We enroll in a weekly prenatal class. Among the facts we learn from our instructor, a lively Argentinean woman, is that sexual intercourse can induce labour. “Baby comes out the same way the baby goes in,” she says. We learn about the stages of labour and learn to fear the one called “transition.” We learn poetry-deprived terms like meconium, a baby’s first poop, which is greenish-black and resembles the opium-paste it is named after; and perineum, which should be softened with canola oil lest it tear. The women in the class stiffen at the word “tear.” We watch videos of unattractive couples sweating, panting and pushing. These videos made me nervous from the moment we signed up for the classes, and I watch the screen from behind my hand. The moment of delivery is not as gruesome as I suspected. I feel a strange sort of voyeurism, though, watching strangers on television squeeze out their slimy, umbilical-tethered progeny.

Most classes conclude with the dads-to-be fetching mats and therapy balls from a storage room where dozens of life-sized dolls are piled in plastic rubbish bins. We practise massage and comfort positions meant to ease the pain of labour. One session ends with a dozen women bent over tables or straddling their chairs, quietly moaning in the half dark as their partners caress their backs and murmur in their ears. I whisper a joke to Moonira about how the scene is vaguely pornographic, and she scolds me for not taking anything seriously. She doesn’t realize I am scared to death.

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Yes, Alberta Views was at it again–drinking on the job. Only, it’s OK when it is your job to generate lively discussion over a few friendly brews.

DEC 9

New, locally-owned bookstore. Three  writers. One darn good magazine—I’d say that’s reason enough to have a brew or two. Shelf Life Books hosted Brews & Views VI—”a three-ding,” that is, a three-person reading, by  Aritha van Herk (December feature of Robert Kroetsch), Kristjanna Grimmelt (winner of Alberta Views 2010′s short fiction contest) and Alex Rettie (books columnist, Rettie on Books.)

NOV 20

There are no such things as wait-rooms times at Brews & Views, come on in. It was a healthy dose of discussion and laughter (the best medicine in some cases) at the University of Alberta’s Dewey’s Pub for Healthcare-theme Pub Quiz. Expert panelists were the defib-rulating pundit Dave Cournoyer, author Cheryl Mahaffy with her prescriptive perspectives, and MLA for Edmonton-Centre, member of a healthy opposition, Ms. Laurie Blakeman.

AUG 19

Brews & Views Edmonton was based on an article written by Jennifer Cockrall-King in our summer issue called The Farm Next Door: How local food–really local food–is back on the political menu. It was a panel discussion and Show n’ Tell night with one guest even bringing a pig

The other (non-animal) guests for Brews & Views IV at the Dish Bistro were treated to the city seedsman, the Urban Farmer himself, Mr. Ron Berezan; the Best Beekeeper from Bon Accord, owner of Lola Canola Honey, Patty Milligan; and first-time gardener (though not her garden) the Commandeering Cultivator, Tracy Hyatt.

On the table last night were the topics of farmland development in the city, population growth, a perpetually elongating food chain and raising animals in the city.

A big thanks to Alley Kat Brewing Co. for supplying the ‘brews’ portion of the evening, the ‘views’ were allowed to blossom uninhibited into a generous thicket of ideas and solutions. This was all recorded by the good folks at CJSW who (check website) broadcast a good chunk of the talk.

Another fine evening of ventilating political exchange at the Canmore Hotel – only this time it wasn’t only tolerated by the bar staff at the Ho’ but in fact hosted!


JULY 29
Brews & Views in Canmore featured a panel of legendary mountain authors (left to right) Jeff Gailus (The Grizzly Manifesto),  Michale Lang (curator at the Whyte Museum and author of Bears: Tracks through Time) Bob Sandford (Water, Weather and the Mountain West) and Ben Gadd (Handbook to the Canadian Rockies).

If you weren’t there, you certainly should have. Planned subject: Alberta’s mountain parks and the long-time problematic balance of conservation and industry. Actual conversation: God, grizzlies, the human condition and how there are just too damn many of us.