Tag Archives: william crow

The Virgin Mary Gave Me The Finger

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Posted: June 13, 2016 at 9:32 pm

 

Did she wave at me? She may have waved at me. That nice Jewish girl, on the hill, I think she waved at me. Too bad she’s a statue and she’s already with another Guy.

It was the summer of 1985, and I was biking across Ireland, alone. It was a miserable trip; Ireland was all hills and wind and rain, and the first pleasure I had each day was a Guinness at 4pm. That beer, almost as good as the one in the locker room after playing hockey, was always in whichever pub I could find a meal and a room for that night. Once I had that first Guinness, I didn’t leave the building until morning.

There was a glitch one afternoon in Kinsale, a County Cork village at the end of my exhaustion. I couldn’t find a room in Kinsale, and I couldn’t ride further. All I could do was have a beer and chat with the locals in a pub.

“I have a room for you, if you want,” said a cloth-capped, 40-ish man with a blackened thumbnail, like he had a hammer mishap. His name was Paddy, which I thought was an Irish stereotype until I kept meeting Paddys in Ireland.

“Really? You run a B&B?”

“No, but it sounds like you’re stuck,” said Paddy. “We have an extra room. My wife won’t mind. She’ll make us dinner.” This sounded great, until he told me he lived 10 kilometres away, on a dirt country road, and he couldn’t fit my bike in his car. We had another pint before I saddled up for a weaving, dog-tired pedal to Paddy’s house, powered by Guinness-fuel.

Paddy’s wife served stew. I’ll let you guess which kind.

Dinner almost done, Paddy said, “So, have you see the moving Virgin?”

Virgin? Not at my university, I thought. “Uh, I’m not sure what you mean. Which virgin?”

“THE Virgin, of course,” said Paddy’s wife, named (what else could she be named?) Mary. “At the grotto.” As Mary dished out second helpings of stew and beer, she recounted the biggest story to ever hit the nearby village of Ballinspittle (the oddness of this name is your guarantee I couldn’t have made it up). While I biked through Irish storms for two weeks, I was unaware tiny Ballinspittle was the centre of national attention (remember, it was 1985, pre-internet). A dog walker noticed a statue of the Virgin Mary waving at him from a secluded hill. Word spread, and 100,000 worshippers and spectators flocked to Ballinspittle’s nearby grotto soon afterwards.

“Well, I have to see that,” I said. This was better than the face of Jesus on a piece of toast. “I’ll ride my bike over after dinner.”

“No, no, I’ll drive you.” Paddy sopped up the remains of his stew with a tranche of dark, dense bread. “I haven’t seen her move since last week.”

Shortly after, Paddy parked his car at Hurley’s Bar (est. 1864), because we could only reach the Virgin Mary’s grotto on foot. A bus idled at the side of the building and several attractive women stepped out.

“Oh, I see the girls are early tonight,” said Paddy.

“What?”

“That’s the hooker bus. They’ve been shipping in prostitutes from all over Ireland while the crowds are here to see the statue. Business is good.”

“That’s somewhat ironic, considering the event is sponsored by a virgin,” I said.

Paddy and I walked along a wide, dirt path through the forest. No moonlight could pierce the clouds or the canopy of branches and leaves interlaced above us. Hundreds (thousands?) of adults and children walked in both directions, silently. It was so dark we couldn’t see the faces of those returning from the grotto until they were very close; they had the open mouths and blank, eyes-wide stares of a zombie apocalypse. The hairs on the back of my neck danced. The trees opened to a clearing, bordered on one side by a ravine. Past the ravine was a low hill, and on the side of the hill was a life-sized, blue and white painted statue of the Virgin Mary. She would have been lost in the darkness were it not for the shimmering electric bulbs surrounding her head like a halo. Wooden stadium stands, constructed near the ravine facing the Virgin, were jammed. Hundreds of others crowded nearby, standing. A crazed-looking woman with wiry, exploding hair stood before us with a megaphone. She led the throng in a monotone recitation of the “Hail Mary” prayer like there were no spaces between the words. HailMaryfullofgracetheLordiswiththee. The crowd spoke in a spooky, robotic, my-brain-has-been-eaten tone. The prayer was repeated ten times, fifty times, without a pause at its end or beginning. There was a scuffle at the edge of the crowd as penitents jockeying for position came to blows, and two priests tried to break up the fight by threatening eternal damnation.

“See?” said Paddy, elbowing me. “See that? She just moved.” I missed it while watching the fight. I stared at the Virgin Mary but she didn’t react. I gazed harder, without blinking, like I was in a staring contest with my sister at our childhood breakfast table and the winner could punch the other in the shoulder as hard as they liked. All the while, the lights around the statue’s head flickered and wavered, and the crowd continued its pitchless mantra. I became drowsy, and fought to remain awake. I knew the statue couldn’t move, but I wanted it to move. After thirty minutes of concentration, I was ready to ask Paddy if we could go back to the pub. Sensing my weakening faith, Mary wiggled her finger, or the weird lighting wiggled her finger, or the hypnotic chanting wiggled her finger, or my sleepiness and 5 beers wiggled her finger, but I gasped just the same. Had her finger really moved? I still don’t know.

Back at the cosy, packed Hurley’s Pub, everyone was talking about the Virgin.

“I’ve seen her move her hand three times.”

“She smiled at me and nodded her head last Sunday.”

“I saw her step down from her pedestal, pick a few flowers and shake a stone out of her sandal.”

The evening ladies were plying the oldest trade. Replica statues of the Virgin, each a foot high, stood at attention on the bar, unmoving. They were for sale, along with t-shirts, keychains and snow globes of Mariolatry (a word I just learned, but you can figure it out). The GDP of Ballinspittle trebled overnight. After a couple more Guinnesses I was telling everyone the Virgin Mary had given me the finger.

Leaving Ballinspittle, I had no idea the moving statue was more than an Irish curiosity. Days later, I called Canada for my weekly check-in with my parents (texts, emails and cellphones remained in the realm of science fiction). I told my father I was still biking through Ireland, and before I could mention Ballinspittle, he asked, “Did you see the moving virgin?”

Back in Canada, I heard the Vatican closed the Ballinspittle site for a day, and surreptitiously replaced the statue with a fake. The Vatican took the moving statue on a whirlwind international tour of which Ireland was unaware. After a lucrative run of cities with huge Catholic populations, the Vatican threw the statue in a dumpster, having found a prettier, and more animated moving idol in Rio de Janeiro.

Shockingly, I have been accused of exaggerating some of my stories in the past. But I swear by the Virgin Mary that this story, coincidentally about said icon, is true.

Like A Virgin

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Posted: May 26, 2016 at 9:48 am

 

There’s Madonna, and there’s the Madonna.

On a European vacation, parents feel the compulsion to take their children into the hushed and extinguished-candle-smelling confines of major churches. Every child on a European vacation is desperate to avoid all churches. They look the same, having all been built for the same Client. Eight-year-old Devon and I stood in a darkened church alcove, at the foot of a bigger-than-life statue, under its beatific gaze.

“Dad, who’s that lady?” asked Devon.

“That’s the Virgin Mary.”

“Who’s that?” The sound you hear is Sister Theophane, approximately 115-years-old when she was my Grade Four catechism teacher, spinning in her grave.

“She’s Jesus’s mother,” I said.

“Ohhhh…that’s why you say, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph’ when you swear.” I saw a retired American couple, each wearing their fanny packs in the front because that’s just SO cool, look sharply in our direction. Oh, great.

“Is Joseph the dad?” asked Devon.

“Well, yes.” I paused a moment. “Uhhh, no, not really. Joseph’s not the real father because Mary’s a virgin.”

“What’s a virgin?” The backward-fanny-packers pretended to be engrossed in a nearby plaque dedicated to Saint-Somebody-of-the-Something, but each surreptitiously turned up their hearing aids.

“She gave birth to Jesus without having sex. Joseph was just the husband. Maybe they weren’t even married at the time…I’m not sure. But she didn’t have sex with Joseph until much later. Which somehow hasn’t impacted her title of ‘virgin’ for 2000 years.”

“Aw dad, do I have to know all that? Why do you always give me these long answers with too much information?”

I ignored Devon’s complaint. “Anyway, God is Jesus’s father.”

“Grandma said Jesus was God.”

“Well, he is,” I said. “But God is also the father of Jesus. It’s all a little confusing.”

“Is this why we don’t go to church on Sundays, dad?” I heard disgusted tsk-tsking from the sartorially-challenged eavesdroppers nearby.

“Something like that,” I mumbled.

Feeling A Little Query

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Posted: May 13, 2016 at 11:18 am

 

People have been saying to me, “It’s been THREE years! When are you going to finish your book?” When they say “book” they do the air-quote thing with their fingers to emphasize it’s not a REAL book because they’re not holding a copy in their hands. Or they have no faith that I’m capable of writing a real book.

To these people I say, “My book is done, so please quit bugging me.” What I actually think is much ruder than that, but you get the idea.  I finished Draft #9 about a month ago, gave it a title page, put in the chapter numbers, ended it with “La Fin” and printed all 278 pages. I’m tempted to write one more draft, but I’d also like to stay married, so that’s it for now.

With a  completed manuscript burning a hole in my laptop, my options are:

(1) Upload my book to Amazon and make it available for 99 cents on-line tomorrow. This has the advantage of instant gratification (people can immediately give me money and enjoy my book). The disadvantage is that these people immediately giving me money and enjoying my book are mostly related to me or have learned how to snowboard from me (owing me a favour). It is very difficult to stand out from the MILLIONS of on-line books offered each year. There are exceptions….The Martian and Fifty Shades of Grey both started as on-line books. Unfortunately, I wasn’t smart enough to write the first one and I’m too good a writer to write the second.

(2) Send my book to publishers and tell them it’s the next Eat, Pray, Love.   Every writer thinks they’ve written the next Eat, Pray, Love, will sell 10 million copies and will be played in the movie by Julia Roberts (or in my case, Brad Pitt, obviously). Those writers are wrong, because there hasn’t been a phenomenon like Eat, Pray, Love since, well, Eat, Pray, Love. Complicating this dream, unsolicited manuscripts are relegated to a publisher’s slush pile where they languish until all the vowels slide off the pages, rendering the book only slightly less comprehensible.

(3) Hire a printer to print and bind 1000 copies of my book so I can sell them in parking lots out of the trunk of my car. Not exactly the dream I had when I gave up a successful legal career to become a writer.

(4) Crawl into a cave and never show my book to anyone. Not a serious option, because then I would fail in my goal of making enough money on my book to pay for all the coffee I consumed in Delany’s Coffee Shop while writing the book. I know, that’s ironic, or a circular argument, or something that makes the last three years look pitiful.

(5) Query my brains out. To have any chance of attracting a traditional publisher and having my book on the shelves of a bookstore not in my hometown, I’ll need a literary agent. And to get a literary agent I have to “query” 500 of them. A query is a one-page letter, possibly with a book excerpt attached, that is so enticing and mind-blowing that the agent begs me to immediately send the completed manuscript. Remember, literary agents receive thousands of query letters every year, and take on two or three new clients. Consequently, my query letter has to be the best 300 words I’ve ever written, as good as anything in my book. If the agent decides I can write a book as well as I can write a query letter, he or she will offer to represent me…which is no guarantee of success with any publisher with more than two employees.

As you may have guessed, I’m opting for Number 5. I’ll let you know how it goes. I may end up buying a car with a bigger trunk.

Nine Reasons My Book Is Not Finished Yet

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Posted: January 7, 2016 at 11:30 am

 

1. MY EDITOR IS A SADIST

I called my editor a sadist only for shock value. Actually, he’s an engaging, gentle fellow who likes dogs. But he’s also a demanding, meticulous taskmaster, much smarter than me. After a month reviewing my manuscript, he produced 60 PAGES of notes, single spaced, outlining my deficiencies as a writer and a human being. He didn’t say, “put a comma here, and choose a different word there.” It was more like, “the entire structure of your manuscript sucks, and here are the 5000 things you must do in the re-write.” I highly recommend him.

2. PEOPLE KEEP ASKING ME WHEN MY BOOK WILL BE FINISHED

It takes a lot of time to answer the same question, several times per day. I wish my mum would stop calling.

3. WORD COUNT

My book is a memoir, and the book industry has decided memoirs by non-famous people (me, so far) must be 80,000 to 90,000 words to sell. No one in the industry talks about the number of pages…my book would fit on one page if the type was really, really tiny. A 90,000 word book will be about 275 to 300 pages, depending.

My first draft was 140,000 words. I cut it to 120,000 words before I gave it to my editor, knowing it would be cut further. My editor told me to cut about 40,000 more words because they were either crap or the stories didn’t fit my narrative arc (I didn’t know I had a narrative arc). That got me down to 80,000, but my editor also said I had to fill in all the missing parts to make the story flow. That got me back up to 130,000. I’ve been cutting for the last three months, almost there with 102,000 words.

See why it’s taken so long? I’ve already written two books’ worth of words.

4. PERIODS OF DEPRESSION

Everything I read on publishing tells me it’s impossible to get published, that most writers starve. Except the Chicken Soup For the Soul series has sold 500 MILLION copies. That’s not even literature, just a set of worn stories and platitudes collected by the “author.” Understand the depression now?

5. SOCIAL MEDIA

Time spent on Twitter, Facebook and designing and feeding my website is time spent not writing. However, every agent and publisher will enquire about my social platform, my “personal brand.” As my wife says, “Billy, I think social media is cheesier than you want to be.”

6. WILLIAM

I share my given name with the greatest writer in the history of the English language. That’s a lot of pressure.

7. TOO MANY CUTE BARISTAS AT DELANY’S COFFEE SHOP

8. ADVERBS ARE NOT MY FRIEND

Writing guides have established that adverbs are for lazy writers (so I must be lazy). I shouldn’t use, “walk slowly,” but rather “saunter.” I should substitute “sprint” for “run quickly.” I spend a great deal of time searching for more descriptive verbs. I’ve cut thousands of sneaky adverbs since reading the writers’ bible, “On Writing” by Stephen King.

And the main reason my book isn’t finished yet:

9. CAT VIDEOS