I dislike:
- Music that stops three notes before the end.
- Horror films. “Shaun of the Dead” doesn’t count.
- Chartreuse, the colour.
- Auto seats designed for people with no backsides.
- Scented air fresheners.
- Road signs turned the wrong way.
- Any green dessert. My sister won’t eat them either. We don’t know why. She and I are twins you know. Fraternal. We both have doppelgängers somewhere. Not each other. We look like sisters, not twins. Hers is in Toronto, last spotted near the University of Toronto campus. I have at least two. One in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and the other seems to be everywhere. Strangers come up to me on the street and talk to me as though I know them. This happens more often than you’d think.
I like:
- The scent of vanilla. As a kid I kept an empty vanilla extract bottle on my dresser.
- Rocks. Rolling them especially. In the garden the flowers are nice, but building the rock walls, well that’s satisfying. A stone story: My husband was out with a fisherman buddy to check the weirs at The Wolves, some islands off the New Brunswick shore, 30 or 35 years ago. He came back far too late but he brought me back a stone from The Wolves as a peace offering. The perfect size to fit my hand, the perfect weight, the perfect silky texture. I still have it around here somewhere.
- The absurd. That may be why I have so many Douglas Adams books on my bookshelves.
- The sound of a pipe organ at full crank in a place where the acoustics are half-decent. It’s thrilling to feel the different tones through the floor, through my skin to my bones, filling the room right up to the rafters. The deep, composite sound seems to support the very building. Digital is fine, but even with the best speakers, it doesn’t come close to the real thing.
- On the same note (pun intended) interesting chord progressions. When the movie “A Beautiful Mind” came out, my sister told me to buy the soundtrack. She knew I’d like the chord progressions. I was a teen when the Beatles, the Stones and the Beach Boys were coming up with new stuff all the time. But I was raised to love the classics too, and swing, and silly old tunes from the early 1900’s. Mom taught us to read music before we learned our letters.
- Being pressed back into my seat as a plane ascends. After a steep and fast ascent to altitude on one trip, my sister turned to me and said, “That was worth the price of the ticket all by itself.”
- Similarly, the sensation of someone writing on my back for lack of a flat surface.
- Books. Reading. As a kid I promised myself that one day I’d have a house full of books and I’m happy to say I do. Yeah. Paper. You can’t take an iPad to the tub. Well, I can’t anyhow; my hardcover copy of The Hollow Hills by Mary Stewart is a lot thicker than it used to be. Some of my books were my Dad’s. All have been read and many have been re-read.
