Widow's Endorphins: Fifty Shades of Salmon

Widow's Endorphins: Fifty Shades of Salmon: It's late September, a time when a youthful Rod Stewart tells an aging Maggie May, that he "really should be back at schoo...

Fifty Shades of Salmon

It's late September, a time when a youthful Rod Stewart tells an aging Maggie May, that he "really should be back at school".  It's late September, and schools of fish are swimming for all their lives, up rivers which had taken them out to sea four years before.  

While skipping class, Stewart may have missed this science fact:  salmon have a four year life cycle, spending their first year in lakes and streams, before swimming out to sea until the fourth year, when they return to their spawning grounds to breed - and die.  It's a spectacular natural phenomenon which occurs every year.  Every fourth year, there's a super big "graduating class", or what is properly called, a "dominant year run".  This year - a dominant year run - British Columbia expects seven to 14-million salmon will make their way from the Salish Sea, back to their hatching grounds. 

The Adams River Run, in the BC Interior, is one of the world's biggest salmon runs.  The Sockeye returning home to the Adams River, on Shuswap Lake attracts thousands of tourists from all over the world, who come to see the "sea" of red coloured salmon.  Their ruby red skin is a sign of aging and near death (at least Maggie May only got wrinkled).  School groups gather on embankments to watch the salmon spawn...that is to say, millions of male sockeye salmon fertilizing the eggs of millions of female sockeye.  They sort of have sex and die, making it a powerful subliminal message in favour of abstinence.  

There must be fifty shades of salmon!  It is a colour midway between pink and orange, with a lot of white tone in it.  You may call it light peach, apricot, or frosted orange.  If you lived through the '80s you may have painted a wall in salmon, worn a dress or sported a golf shirt that was salmon coloured.  

Salmon is still a popular colour in flower gardens and floral bouquets...especially in Summer and early Fall.  On the colour wheel, the orange shades are opposite purples.  So it is, that in a garden, or bouquet, salmon colours pop alongside purples and lavenders.  At this time of year in the Northern Hemisphere, salmon colours are complimented by silver greys, golden pear, and plum colours, while readers in the Southern Hemisphere may use creams, pale yellows and lavenders.  

The next three weeks, are the peak time to see the sockeye run on the Adams River - more specifically, September 28th to October 21st.

It's also a great time to visit the McMichael Gallery in Kleinburg, Ontario, about an hour North of Toronto.  There, you'll see Mary Pratt's sublime painting of salmon fillets.  Sadly, my phone's camera does not begin to capture the transluscence of this work.  The Newfoundland Photorealist painter, who died earlier this year, is famous for making the everyday come to life in paint.  Her work is luminous.

The painting, Split Grilse (1979) depicts salmon fillets, from a young salmon caught and filleted by her daughter.  Pratt, the stay-at-home mother of four, used her camera to capture the light reflecting from, or enveloping food or objects in her kitchen, and later painted the highly realistic images onto canvas.

The McMichael holds the world's largest collection of Canadian art, and is a must-see for tourists, and Canadians, who, like salmon, make an annual run to the gallery to take in the art, and the surrounding colourful Fall leaves.  The leaves are beginning to turn yellow, orange...and sockeye red!

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Widow's Endorphins: My Husband, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley: My Experi...

Widow's Endorphins: My Husband, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley: My Experi...: My husband used to hang out with Jimi Hendrix.  It was the '60s, so details are...foggy...in a "purple haze".  That, and ...

My Husband, Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley: My Experience

My husband used to hang out with Jimi Hendrix.  It was the '60s, so details are...foggy...in a "purple haze".  That, and they're both dead.  I used to think Brande was confusing the rock legend from Seattle with someone else, until I learned years ago, that Hendrix' Grandmother, lived in Vancouver.

Zenora (Nora) Rose Moore was born in 1883 in Georgia, and raised in Tennessee.  She was over one hundred years old, when she died in Vancouver.  She was a flamboyantly dressed chorus girl and dancer in a travelling vaudeville Dixieland troupe, when she met her future husband, Ross Hendrix, a former Chicago policeman, turned stagehand.  When the vaudeville company came to an end in Seattle, Ross and Nora came to Vancouver, to establish a new life. 

They settled a few blocks from Hogan's Alley, which was close to Vancouver's two railway stations, Great Northern and Canadian National, and a place where Black men could find work as porters.  Nora later worked in Vie Moore's Chicken and Steak House, in Hogan's Alley.  Vie's Granddaughter, Bertha Clark says the place was famous for great food and great musicians like Louis Armstrong, and Ella Fitzgerald:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_khoX5h2FkQ

Nora and Ross had five children.  The eldest died just before his twentieth birthday, and the youngest died at the age of two months.  Nora founded the first Black church in Vancouver.  The Fountain Chapel was African Methodist Episcopal, and Nora led the choir.  Ross would become a porter with the prestigious Quilchena Golf and Country Club.  After Ross died suddenly of a ruptured aorta, their son, Al, moved to Seattle, where he met sixteen year old Lucille Jeter.  Soon after, their son, Johnny Allen Hendrix was born on November 27th, 1942.  Jimi would be 75 today.

As a little boy, Jimi travelled back and forth between Seattle and Vancouver (about a three hour trip by car), often staying with his Grandmother.  For a short time, he attended elementary school at Dawson Annex, in the city's Westend.  It would have been a bus or streetcar ride from Nora's home at 827 East Georgia.  In 1968, when the Jimi Hendrix Experience played the Pacific Coliseum in Vancouver, Jimi asked rock jock Terry David Mulligan if the school still existed.  It was the first time Vancouver media realized that Hendrix had Vancouver connections!

Jimi's parents divorced when he was nine.  He lived with Nora in Vancouver, because his Dad didn't want him becoming a latchkey kid. By the time he was ten, Nora had moved from the old house in Strathcona, which is now a Vancouver Heritage House.  My husband would have been two years old, and playing in the snow in Quebec City...so, they didn't hang out back then.

Record producers spend millions creating a potent mystique around rock songs.  They would consider my experience an epic fail, because I will forever link Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower, with doing my homework.  It was September, and my first week in Grade 7.  Our teacher, a part-time opera singer, assigned homework - something we had never had to do before!  As I sat on my bed, in the upstairs bedroom I shared with my sisters, I heard All Along the Watchtower, playing on my transistor radio.  Staring up at the windowsill, into the twilight sky, that night more than half a Century ago, I daydreamed that the windowsill ledge was the wall and turrets of a castle watchtower.  I was that princess keeping view.  That's how I heard those lyrics.  What Bob Dylan actually wrote, and Hendrix sang, was, "all along the watchtower princes kept the view".  I still see a princess, and she is me.

Meanwhile, my knight in faded blue jeans, had already been travelling back and forth from Quebec City and Montreal to Vancouver, or San Francisco North as it was then called.  The first time, when he was a young teenager, he hitchhiked and jumped railcars to get to the Westcoast.  Jericho, Kits Beach, and the Kitsilano neighbourhood were his idea of Utopia.

Brande told me of hanging out with a young black guy named Jimi, who played guitar.  Long after his Grandmother had moved from the home Jimi knew as a child, he would continue to making trips to Vancouver to see her.  Jimi had a girlfriend with long, blonde hair, he nicknamed Creamy.  They'd sit around in a house, or on the porchsteps, listening to Jimi play guitar.  One time he heard his friend perform at a concert, and remembers hearing him "bend the sound" in that concert space.  That sure sounds like the Jimi Hendrix Experience to me! 

Jimi's Grandmother was at the Pacific Coliseum that night in 1968, if only briefly.  In an interview years later, she said, "went out there to the Coliseum, and had a seat right down in the front, almost in the front, and it was so noisy.  I said 'well, I've got to get out of here', and so in the meantime my Daughter-in-Law says 'Mama, you have to get out of this, it's too much noise for you'.  I says 'yes, I was gonna move if you hadn't come and got me, I was gonna go anyway'.  So I says this noise was too much for me.  All those drums.  And the way he was picking that guitar, my gracious life, I don't see how he could stand all that noise...and I was so surprised, you know, to see him, he had grown up, you know, to be a young man, and all that musical talent...well I knew he had music in him, because when he was small, his Daddy bought him a guitar, an old guitar for him to play on, you know, 'round with the boys and one night they had a little party somewhere and he played for this dance and they had a lovely, lovely time and everything, so I knew he was musical, but I didn't know he had that much music in him, you see."

Jimi died of aspiration from an overdose of barbituates.  It happened September 18, 1970, in Kensington, England, far away from Seattle and Vancouver. 

This Summer, I vowed to make a pilgrimage to the Jimi Hendrix Museum in Vancouver.  The museum's website showed a tiny, quaint, cherry red brick building with flowers, and a large painted mural of Jimi, and a blonde woman.  Is that her?  I'll never know, because in mapping out "my experience" weeks before, I discovered that the museum was moved from Stathcona, to an old building near the Cenotaph, in the Downtown Eastside, and was sharing a space with the Bob Marley Museum.  Would someone kindly inform their website.

Determined to see the museum, my absolutely fabulous and fearless friend and I ventured into the notorious Downtown Eastside, home of heroin addicts and destitute people.  We discovered that it is being gentrified.  Cafes with linen tablecloths are nestled side by side with abandoned shops in derelect buildings.  And so it was with the museum...

There's a sign on the door, just above the blue guitar...read it, and weep!

My own tribute to my husband was not in the form of a 32 foot statue, or a shrine.  Instead, I scattered some of his ashes in the water off his beloved Jericho Beach.  In the middle of the Vancouver Folk Music Festival, which Brande loved, I walked down to the beach, and blew a handful of his ashes into the wind.  There was a purple starfish at my feet!  Just at that moment, I could hear musician Alex Cuba, singing the lines from Bob Marley's, Three Little Birds, "every little thing gonna be alright".

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Widow's Endorphins: Marijuana in Abundance

Widow's Endorphins: Marijuana in Abundance: My Aunt Iris was the daughter of a Greek banker, and grew up in the social swirl of Cairo in the '30s, '40s and '50s.  O...

Marijuana in Abundance

My Aunt Iris was the daughter of a Greek banker, and grew up in the social swirl of Cairo in the '30s, '40s and '50s.  One of her favourite words, was "abundance", and it had nothing to do with money.  I have a vivid recollection of her enthusiasm for the farmers' market in Seattle's Pike Place Market (the ancestral home of Starbucks).  She delighted in the luscious and colourful fruits and vegetables, fish, and cheeses, found "in such abundance!"

There's an almost spiritual moment, when we acknowledge the abundance around us...our blessings.  I am blessed with wonderful people in my life.  Iris was one of my favourite people...

My Dad met Aunt Iris and Uncle Vic in a mining camp in Saudi Arabia, in the years immediately after World War II.  Before returning to Canada, in the early '50s, he would travel with them through France, Italy and England.  Iris, Vic, and Vic's mother (a Russian Comtesse), would later immigrate from the arid Middle East to lush, green East Vancouver, buying property two doors up from my grandparents.  My Grandmother - who loved reading history books and biographies - was blown away by a photo of la Comtesse and her husband, a Russian General, seated by the poolside with Nicholas and Alexandra.  Yes, the Nick and Ali!

For someone who grew up with servants, and going to restaurants, she was an excellent cook.  She was a foodie, before there were foodies.  From her, I learned so much about vegetarianism, organic food, meditation, yoga, astrology, and healing.

Iris always had time for me.  I remember being five years old, and sitting on the wicker chairs of her veranda, feeling so very grown up and ladylike, learning afternoon tea etiquette.  Years later, sitting outside our family tent at an ashram in the Kootenays, she would tell me stories of the elaborate parties her mother would attend in Cairo...and the dresses she would hand sew, letting seams in or out for even the tiniest change in weight.

I always felt so at home in Iris' homes - the one she shared with her husband, and the ones she lived in after her divorce.  She had a wonderful sense of style, combining antiques and Bohemian "hippy" pieces, with art collected from her travels around the world.

She spoke English, French, Italian, Greek, a little Russian, and some Arabic.  Her musical sounding voice, with its laughing lilt, is what I remember whenever I think of her.

On the Westcoast this Summer, in the city by the sea she so loved, I finally met with her granddaughters, my beautiful "cousins" Tamu and Zia, known in Vancouver fashion, film and television circles as the Stolbie Sisters (Zia has done Meghan Markle's hair).

They have their own website, and clothing label:  Stolbiebrand.com  Their slogan is "Stolbie: for the socially a-wear".  They take their commitment to environmental and social issues seriously.  Over lunch at the Vancouver Art Gallery, they asked if I would like to design marijuana leaf inspired clothing, in time for Canada's legalization of cannabis, on October 17th.  Of course I said YES!!!  We three, each had a sense that Iris was present...that this was a full circle moment in our lives.

Who would have thought that a full circle moment would lead to such a run around?  Looking for a marijuana leaf to photograph was an adventure in itself...a trip, as we used to say back in the '60s!  I don't smoke anything, so I sure didn't have any plants on my balcony!  I called the Toronto Botanical Gardens to ask if they had a plant or two to photograph...the guy on the other end of the phone, laughingly admitted that while cannabis is a botanical, they don't grow any!  Next, I nervously called the Toronto Police, explaining my mission.  When the officer stopped laughing, he explained that while marijuana won't be legal until mid October, I would not be arrested for taking pictures.  He couldn't tell me where to find a plant, and suggested I just Google "Dispensaries". 

To save you the trouble, clinics are basically doctors' offices, where you can get a prescription for marijuana.  They don't have plants, not even to pretty up the office.  Dispensaries are like pharmacies, filling those prescriptions.  They dispense the packaged product.  They don't have fresh plants either.  Head shops are like funky kitchen supply places.  They don't have plants either, at least not out front.  You can blow out a lot of birthday candles waiting for some people to call back...

I even went down to Toronto's Kensington Market district, and asked around.  You would have loved to see the expressions on people's faces, when I asked if they knew where I could find a marijuana plant to photograph.  No one - not even the hydroponics guy next to the smokin' living room - had seen a plant.  Do I look like a narc?

The opposite of abundance is scarcity.  Just as I was becoming paranoid about the scarcity of marijuana in Toronto, and whether I'd ever be able to create a marijuana dress design, a Facebook friend invited me to her home.  Nicole is the beautiful mother of a boy who was waiting for a liver transplant at the same time as my late husband was waiting for his.  It's wonderful to see her son thriving!  As a teenager, Nicole had surgery for scoliosis.  She is in severe pain, and medical marijuana is an enormous help - she doesn't have to take opioids, or liver-damaging Tylenol.

I imagined Nicole would have a plant or two on her kitchen windowsill...not the enormous plants growing in her backyard!  Marijuana in abundance!  They're the size of Beefsteak Tomato plants!  I have renamed Woodstock, Ontario - Weedstock!  The leaves were large and healthy, and I photographed whole plants, as well as single, twin, and triple leaves, in both brilliant sunlight, and shadow.

The elongated geometric shape of the cannabis leaf is ideal for clothing design.  Just as marijuana is coming out of the closet, I've designed canna leaf inspired dresses, draped kimonos, belted kimonos, long, flowing peignoirs and other items to fill your closet!   

This has been a harsh and cruel Summer in British Columbia.  Soon after I left the clear, blue skies behind, heavy smoke from wildfires blanketed the province.  There were weeks, when the sun was a coral coloured ball in a smokey grey sky.  Weeks, when the sky appeared to look like sunset...at high noon.  More than 1,252 million hectares of forest have been burned.

This is close to my heart.  It is close to the hearts of Tamu and Zia, too.  For every item purchased on Stolbiebrand.com, one tree will be planted in British Columbia.  I am so proud to be even a small part of the reforestation of BC.  Please support this project, that trees will once again grow, where fire raged.  Abundance!

Photographs Copyright of:  Ruth Adams, Widow's Endorphins Photographic Images Incorporated.

Widow's Endorphins: Love, Love, Love Lavender!

Widow's Endorphins: Love, Love, Love Lavender!: I know where there are lavender fields, kissed by the sun, and the salt air of the Salish Sea...where gentle breezes carry the sw...