riddle

Sometimes people use one of these to end an argument.

Royalty never touches them.

Could there be one without something on the other side?

It has one bulbous, stunted limb. I take hold and we do our brief dance -- swing your partner.

Always a means, never an end, unless you're at the one that belongs to death.

Saint Stephen's

Yesterday evening I attended a rare event: the deconsecration of a church.

Saint Stephen the Martyr Church was built in 1914. The building is in need of major repairs, and there isn't enough money to fix it. So the Anglo-Catholic congregation is moving to a new site and the old church is being torn down in a couple of weeks. Before that happens, though, it was necessary to deconsecrate the place, since there will no longer be worship there.

I haven't been a member of this congregation for many years, but I went to the deconsecration ceremony out of respect for a place that has had a lot of personal significance for me. I was married in that church, my daughter was baptised there, and Sharon's mother's funeral took place there. Sharon didn't come with me to the deconsecration because she knew it would be too sad for her.

Most of the interior of the church had already been moved to its new location, including the altar. The placed looked bare and sad. The bishop, Jane Alexander, led the ceremony, her voice breaking with emotion once or twice as she summed up what this church had meant to the people who had come here over the years.

My father-in-law Roy is in the choir. He's not usually the most sentimental guy, but afterwards he noted that the last song we sang at the end would be the very last hymn that would ever be heard in that building.

hello shyness my old friend

Shyness: the poet Shawna Lemay talked about shyness at a reading she gave the other day. She said that she used to struggle with her shyness, and try to get over it, but eventually she decided that shyness was part of who she was rather than something to be fixed.

I didn't get a chance to ask her if that approach actually helped reduce her shyness, though I imagine it did. Usually I find that's what happens with an emotion when I choose to accept it rather than struggle against it -- the emotion dissipates of its own accord, and then it becomes clear that the "problem" was mostly caused by the resistance itself, by the effort to get rid of an unpleasant or unwanted feeling.

I wasn't shy as a little kid. The teachers usually gave me the lead role in school plays because I loved to get up on stage and ham it up for an audience. Then a great big truck called puberty ran me over. I became crushingly self-conscious and self-critical. For years it was almost more than I could take to get up in front of people and speak. I felt exposed and helpless, panicky, nauseous. And social situations weren't much better. Becoming a writer and having to read in public forced me to face this fear. It took me a long time to learn how to relax in front of a crowd, to use my nervous energy positively rather than let it use me, to actually discover -- or rediscover -- that I could enjoy being in front of an audience.

So many movies lately about the end of the world, or about life after the end of civilization. Apocalypses of one kind or another. Supernatural omens. Cities turned into wastelands roamed by zombies, cannibals, fanatics.

And the story is always about a small band of survivors carrying the fragile flame of humanity in a ruined world.

Strangely comforting stories, then, because we all prefer the idea that the world will end and we, individually, will go on, to the far more likely scenario that we will end and the world will go on.

And of course with a story about the world ending there's always an audience. We get to watch it and still be here. When in fact the end of the world means, among other things, that there won't be any more stories.