Bundles at Boyce Farmers’ Market

Now that the freeze has hit Fredericton for the season, lining up outside for samosas at the Boyce Farmers’ Market isn’t so much fun. Sure the queues are that much shorter since everyone’s thinking the same thing and shivering the same shiver, but it’s a good chance to check out what alternative handheld meat-filled pockets of other geometric shapes may be on offer at the Market – inside the Market, that is! (Brrr!)

Enter The Bundle Hut. For 1,25$ each or 10$ for a dozen, you can get your handheld meat-filled pocket fix – this time in a cylindrical form, in various varieties of chicken, from basil to Thai to teriyaki to souvlaki, among others. More importantly in the 20-below Saturday morning wind chill, you get it indoors, in the cozy huddle of fellow market enthusiasts cheek-by-jowl in the narrow aisleways. Watch your step!

I didn’t get to weigh the Bundle, but it seems about the same as either a Yummy Samosa or Samosa Delite. The wrapper is fluffly and doughy, not crisp and flaky like a samosa, and feels more clean and neat to the hands than a crumbly oily samosa skin, though it leaves a similar translucent grease window on the paper bag as you carry it out. At the seams, the doughy fold is satifyingly chewy.

Instead of samosa-style ground meat, it’s chunky chicken-salad-style meat that waits for you within – again, a cleaner proposition than the samosa, less likely to spill and crumble after each bite. Fortunately, the niblet-sized cubes are all it has in common with chicken salad; no mayo, no grease, just the light, faint flavour of whatever your pick. Thai tastes like red chili sauce; basil like a pesto basil dressing.

Though Bundles may not have the “exotic”ness of their triangular Indian cousins, objectively they’ve got all the same handheld-ness and meat-filled-ness of a samosa, with the same unbeatable value you expect from market stall takeaway. And with over a dozen different flavours on offer, you’ve a season’s worth of visits to try them all! Definitely worth a go – for a palate burned out from samosa spice, a welcome respite of savoury.

Looming disaster

“Battleground: War Rugs from Afghanistan” at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown. I stop by the Centre every time I get out to the Island and am never disappointed. The stark modern bunker of the Centre stands in polar contrast with the soft, sleepy provincial image of Green Gables and The Gentle Island – the moment you walk up to the entrance, it’s already promising exhibits and shows you’d never expect to see.

That there’s an exhibit of such timely ripped-from-the-headlines importance is itself impressive – galleries elsewhere across the country put on huge shows all the time, and the wannabe creative in me eats it up whenever the opportunity presents itself, but then the emerg doc in me asks the same questions I put to patients in the Treatment Room: Why are you bringing this up to me right now? Why is this important today? (Could/should it wait for an appointment later?)

The title pretty much sums it up: rugs from Afghanistan that depict the ongoing conflict. The gallery frontispiece tells the story

Modern warfare came to Afghanistan with the Soviet invasion of 1979. After the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, a decade of civil war piled disaster on top of catastrophe. Now the global war on terrorism continues to fill the land and sky of Afghanistan with the machinery of war.

As always, Afghans depict on their rugs what they see and what matters most to them. And so over three decades of chaos, the customary flowers on rugs have turned into bullets, or landmines, or hand grenades. Birds have turned in[to] helicopters and fighter jets. Landscapes have filled up with field guns and troop carriers. Sheep and horses have turned into tanks.

There have never been rugs like this before.

There’s a shock value to seeing rugs like this. I imagine it might be sort of the same shock to “mainstream” visual art with the arrival of any of the “revolutionary” genres. In their own time, styles like impressionism, pop art, etc all threw the conventions of the medium to the wind. Viewers approach with a preconceived image of “normal” art, come across the new, and ask, “What were they thinking?!” Rugs like this, to audiences accustomed to woven flowers, birds and landscapes, do the same. What is going on over there?

The exhibition asks rhetorically, “Are War Rugs pro-war or anti-war?” The weavers are anonymous and the stories behind them unknown, so it’s impossible to glean what the intentions are. Figures are shown wielding AK-47s (loomed in perfect detail) at each other and locked in conflict – depicting the Russian weapon is clearly an indictment of Soviet intrusion; then again, AK-47s are ubiquitous, found in the hands of both the invader and invaded – perhaps it glorifies the struggle to liberate. The rugs are as complex as the conflict itself.

In medicine, art can be a useful way to enable patients to tell their stories and better understand them, especially when more “conventional” mediums fail. Traumatised children depict scenes of horrible injury and pain when they don’t yet have the vocabulary to express themselves – that was the first thing I thought of when I saw some of the rugs. Exaggerated, cartoon-like caricatures to tell a story for which they lack the words.

Later I felt bad – pretty condescending to think of the scenes as something a child would draw. But maybe it’s not so un-apt an association. Childlike, in its innocence: before intrusions by foreign powers – from the Mongols to the Soviets to today, Afghanistan was a fiercely independent society, perfectly content to have been left to its own devices since forever. A society with no aspirations of empire or imposition over its neighbours, until corrupted by outside manipulation.

Other rugs are more subtle – you have to look a bit more closely, and have a sense of what you’re looking for, to pick out the underlying shapes and instruments of terror. In a way it’s more distressing to see – the realisation that what seems like familiar patterns of colour and nature, that you think would make a pretty addition to the living room, hides something so sinister and destructive.

Maybe as this trauma settles, peaceful imagery will make a comeback, the same way how survivors of childhood abuse gradually incorporate positive themes into their art as they recover. The techniques of how these themes will be represented, however, may be radically different from the traditional frame-border-field format of the Afghan rug. After a generation of Western intrusion you see echoes of modern media making it into the loom today: 3D birds-eye (?helicopter) perspective

and even CNN-style news ticker and split-screens

However the art of rug-weaving turns out, I like to think that the unsettling sight of those War Rugs of helicopters, hand grenades and tanks rolling over Afghan landscapes in place of birds, trees and sheep, will make us better appreciate those birds, trees and sheep – the signs of peace – when they make a long-overdue comeback to rugs from Afghanistan. There’s a spot in my living room that just can’t wait for a Peace Rug like that.

First house party

All dressed up, first invite to a house party since moving East – Old Government House, the New Brunswick’s Lieutenant-Governor’s residence. I run by the place all the time, stately on prime real estate by the Saint John riverbank (shame about the homeless tent city by the shoreline though), never thought I’d actually ever get to set foot inside. But every year the Lieutenant-Governor invites the city police over for the annual awards and presentations ceremony – another little perk you get for the coincidence of working in the provincial capital!

A nice personal touch for the 2009 edition: we’ve just got a new man in the house, Graydon Nicholas. Short, soft-spoken, smiling friendly man; he kind of reminds me of my father. Which is kind of what you want in your Lieutenants-Governor and Governors-General: a sort of detached, distinguished, parental figure to look up to, to offer guidance and oversight over the adolescent shenanigans politicians and the rest of society sometimes get up to. More to the point, he’s a former provincial court judge – with first hand knowledge and experience with the police force behind the bench, an especially appropriate man to have for the night’s ceremony.

At events like this it’s one thing to have someone in office deliver canned speeches in tribute to your job and your organisation; but when they actually have a story to tell, it means a bit more: back in his judging days, his Honour was just on his way to fly out somewheres at the airport. Two cops were sprinting at him as he was at the gate. Panic – just like anyone else, the sight of police running at you full-tilt makes your stomach turn and heart stop. “What did I do?” Out of breath, the cops rolled up, yelled out and drew their… search warrant, for his Honour to sign. “Phew, I thought I was in trouble!”

(My father tells silly stories like that too.)

JI, KY and OK all brought their significant others. I imagine it’s an amazing feeling to have a missus to share fancy dress ceremonies like this. Not just because it’s just inherently neat to say you’re on a date out to the Lieutenant-Governor’s, and it’s special to be all dressed-up together, but because it reminds you of what’s at stake when you put on the uniform. As a couple, you’re really in it together. Though it’s one of you on the beat, as a couple you share the call to duty, the risks and dangers. Rightfully so, with events like this you get to share the pomp and circumstance too.

“You’re going to have to stop coming to these things alone,” OK tells me. “You have to get your uniforms working for you!” Meh… you see what I have to work with, right? I’m doing the best I can! “Is this all you guys do – dress up?” went Mrs OK – really, with Basic Training still going on, all us new volunteers have done much so far is dress-up ceremonies like the swearing in at the courthouse, the Remembrance Day parade, and now this shindig at Old Government House. “Not that I’m complaining!”, hugging OK and his flashy new bling – the coveted crossed-pistols marksman’s patch.

Silently envious – both for the patch, and a significant other to hug. [sigh] Damn my crappy eyesight and my singleness! [shaking fist]

The Chief read out some of the citations for the year’s Silver Commendations: a nick-of-time grab of a lady trying to jump off the Westmorland St bridge; a head-first split-second dive after a car that’d just driven into the Saint John River; a quick-thinking finger-in-the-dike save of a man who’d managed to slash his brachial artery with a cleaver. It’s reassuring, especially if you’re new to a city, and to a police force, to see that police heroics here centre not on things like shootouts and takedowns, but what the caring profession’s all about – and it is a caring profession, at the end of the day – helping people at their most vulnerable.

I got interviewed by the newspaper at the ceremony: “Why did you want to join the Police Auxiliary?” I think I managed to mumble something about how the call to policing isn’t all that different than the call to medicine: that old cliché, “To help people.” In medicine, you realise that the poor and disadvantaged bear the brunt of illness in society – three-quarters of the cost of illness in society is borne by the lowest 25%. Same thing with crime – 75% of crime affects those in the poorest quarter of society. So you get into medicine, and the police, not just to help “people”, but especially the ones who need it most. I thought it kind of made sense, the reporter at least nodded and smiled.

I also think I said something like And being a new immigrant to Fredericton just a few months, there’s probably no better way to get to know the city, the people, the streets, through the eyes of a police officer on the beat. In this uniform you meet so much of the community you wouldn’t otherwise get to see. Warts and all, you know the place inside out. She still seemed to follow, and jumped on the immigrant part of that: “How does it make you feel, being a representative of a visible minority, working in the community?”

It’s funny, questions like that. It’s not “racist”, of course, simply to bring up race in a question (the reporter was herself a “visible minority”), and the intentions are good, no doubt, about showing interest into the “minority experience”. But at the same time, they reinforce the idea that there is such thing as a “minority experience”, distinct from the experience of a regular Joe Frederictoner or New Brunswicker. That, whatever my experience is Being In This Place – a doctor, an auxiliary constable, a student, a shopper, a tourist, a cyclist, a protester, a friend, a boyfriend (well, one can dream), whatever – I’ll also always have that unshakeable label, “visible minority”.

So I think this is where I lost her: Well, in the uniform I think of myself simply as an Auxiliary Police Constable, not as an “Asian” Auxiliary Police Constable. And I hope the public will see me that way too, someone in uniform and in service to help. When people turn to the Police, they don’t think about things like “is the police officer white or Asian” or whatever, they just ask to be Served and Protected as they need to be. It’s not a question of race; it all comes down to professionalism. That’s when she said “Thanks” and went off to the next guy.

I guess I blew a chance to talk about some of those multicultural ideals they used to bring up in Canadian Studies: proportional representation of minorities, integration of cultures into traditionally “conservative” institutions like the police, the need for citizens to “see themselves” in the public services they use and fund. And it’s too bad, because I was just reading about CS and the idea of identity on Schema. I could’ve been all over that question and had the chance to “represent”. Oh well.

Maybe if I wasn’t able to actually talk the talk about multiculturalism, at least I’ll be able to walk the walk when I’m out there, in uniform, being an auxiliary constable – and Asian.

It’s not easy being green

Leading up to the Navy’s Centennial in 2010, sailors landlocked on Army and Air Force bases – and us hangers-on also assigned to the Senior Service – are going back into naval uniform. But don’t go start looking for Cracker Jack whites and crisp JAG-style black tunics at a base near you though – for most of us, we’ll be swimming around instead in the blue-and-black Naval Combat Dress, hot off the loom in a minor design refresh this year.

Most everyone in the military has been sporting the same relish-green combat uniform for the past few years, no matter what your job, whether you’re Navy, Army or Air Force, or where you work. An initiative to remind everyone behind a desk or in a cubicle that we are part of the same team, all on the same mission, and focused on the business-end of things: operations around the world.

When I traded in my shirt and tie (or scrubs) and white coat for the combats last year, definitely took a bit of getting used to. I know other bases in Canada often keep their military doctors in dress shirts and ties – not only more traditional for physicians to have that stuffy “professional” look, but also cheaper to issue. Lots of expensive research and production has gone into creating a uniform suitable for the extremes of combat conditions – which in the benign setting of a hospital and clinic, is a bit overkill.

Maybe it’s because we’re a training base, one of the largest in the Commonwealth. Soldiers, tankers, combat engineers and artillery crew all start their careers here – that culture and military ethos of teamwork starts here – maybe having us all in field combat clothing is all part of that team-building, family-building function. Overkill for office family medicine it might be, wearing the combat uniform is part of our military function: to not only be part of the team, but to be seen as part of the team, to show we’ve a complete Force from the front-lines to the rear support.

“Are you a better doctor when you relate closely with your patients, or when you maintain more of a detachment?” It was one of the questions I got back in residency interviews. Like most things in medicine I figured the “right” answer is It’s a matter of balance, but I mentioned the uniform – by sharing the uniform and being in the military, it’s a short-hand way at a glance of saying we relate: “Yes, we have the same values and ideals; we both believe in something beyond ourselves”.

It might take a lifetime to know what your patients value and stand for in civilian practice; but in the military, you almost have that relationship simply by virtue of having sworn the same oath of service. I like to think that connexion trickles down to the trust I hope my patients have in me, and my own motivation in keeping them healthy and fit for service. It’s a cliché, and it’s hard to make the comparison not regularly working civilian office practice, but because it’s a cliché, there must be some truth to it, right?

But there’s a flip side – the difference between a uniform, and a costume. Could we be triggering resentment and losing respect playing “dress-up” in a uniform we neither have need for work, nor have earned through the same field training? Any combat arms veteran can spot the difference between a real front-line pointed-end-of-things soldier, tanker, engineer or artilleryman, wearing a combat uniform designed expressly for them, and a hanger-on like me in a hospital, in the same threads.

I like to think I know better than to take myself too seriously in combat gear – still just a scrawny short Asian boy in glasses; a lover, not a fighter.

But what’s more, there are some patients I follow for PTSD sustained whilst in combat – whilst in uniform – who get triggered and turned on-edge at the mere sight of relish green threads and buzz-cuts. (We actually have our Mental Health clinic in town, nowhere within sight of the base gates, partly for this reason.) Could our being in this combat uniform not only conflict with earning our patients trust, but be entirely counter-therapeutic?

I suppose the “right” answer is the other fundamental tenet of medical practice: Follow the protocols, and hope for the best. Individual mileage may vary, and flexibility is important, but at least regulations and protocols at least do provide the guidance when there are no obvious answers.

Who knows what impact sticking out wearing Naval Combat Dress amidst the sea of green combats on an Army base will have on medical practice and therapeutic relationships? Guess we’ll find out soon enough. But until I get issued the new uniform, it’s steady as she goes – pardon the rig.

THIS IS MY STETHOSCOPE! IT IS MY LIFE! I WILL MASTER IT AS I MASTER MY LIFE! WITHOUT MY STETHOSCOPE, I AM USELESS! WITHOUT ME, MY STETHOSCOPE IS USELESS! MY STETHOSCOPE IS A PART OF ME, IT IS MY LIFE! I WILL KNOW ITS STRENGTH, ITS WEAKNESS, ITS PARTS, ITS ACCESSORIES, ITS BELL AND ITS DIAPHRAGM! I WILL KEEP MY STETHOSCOPE CLEAN AND READY! WE ARE THE MASTERS OF OUR ENEMIES! [ie murmurs, bruits and adventitious sounds] WE ARE THE SAVIOURS OF LIVES!

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Except tonight – the unit Christmas party. Will I even recognise anyone outside of uniform? Just hope not to embarrass myself and show the obvious around c8. “Be yourself”, they always say at these things – yes, insecure, shy, nervous and second-guessing. Business as usual! A foreboding fortune cookie from lunch the other day

It burns

Caught under a pile of paperwork at work and missed the Olympic Torch relay when it passed by the hospital this afternoon, but managed to catch up with the convoy in Fredericton’s Officers’ Square tonight. I can see the Olympic Flame from my bedroom!

After the crowd warmed up with some platitudes on “the spirit of the flame” and sang Bonne fête to some guy in the band named Chris, Frederictoner and 1996 Olympic silver medley swimmer Marianne Limpert ran the torch into Officers’ Square, alongside Mayor Brad Woodside – sporting the very same Calgary ‘88 Olympic jacket he wore when he was city mayor 21 years ago. Still fits!

The Community Celebration was exactly that – happy smiles, cheers, cameras snapping away, kids on parent’s shoulders, and immediate “woohoo!”s on cue whenever the host yells “blah blah blah… in Fredericton!” (In French too: “patati patata… à Frédéricton!” Youpi! Another triumph for Official Bilingualism.)

And of course, it wouldn’t be Fredericton without a red-coated guardsman standing stoically by the stage

With all the free Coca-Cola bottles and RBC tambourines going around you can’t help but feel those corporate clutches sinking themselves in… but if you can suspend your Adbusting spidey sense for a little bit it was a lot of fun for us thousand or so Frederictoners in the square. “Open Up Some Happiness” with the Coca-Cola acrobats

And when the RBC artist broke out the spinning canvas, the Royal Bank corporate blue and yellow colours and started hand painting, “I Gotta Feeling” it was going to be something pretty neat (though switching the lyrics to “Tonight’s the night, RBC / I got my money, let’s spend it up” – whatever that means, not so neat)

Fun times. I love living Downtown, close to the action. Now as long as they whisk the flame away from my bedroom window by bedtime – it’s still a school night after all!