Summer nights at the football. Our little band of TSS Rovers ultras celebrates one of the 9 goals our teams scored on Wednesday night.
The summary of notes and links published on the Parking Lot blog over the past week:
- July 7: heavy lifting. A new phone, a new US political party and a new season
- July 8: annals of democratic renewal: political violence, democracy, youth engagement and the role of community foundations
- July 9, 2025: here’s what I’m reading: A review of Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light and short story season begins
- July 10, 2025: playing at home: my Rovers win big and send a couple of players off to the professional leagues.
- July 11, 2025: the Kanesatake resistance: personal reflections on the events of this day, thirty five years ago.
Thirty-five years ago I awoke to this broadcast coming in over the CBC airwaves during the 8am news. Laurent Lavigne narrated the moment at which the Mohawks of Kanesatake were forced to defend their territory against the Surete de Quebec who were forcibly removing barricades that were set up to defend their lands. One police officer was killed (and the story of how his sister reconciled that death is interesting) and a summer of hatred, racism and resistence began. At Trent University we kept a fire going and raised supplies for the Mohawks who were besieged in the Kanesatake treatment centre. Across the country First Nations rallied in support of the Mohawks and the standoff itself and the defence of the land led directly to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and subsequent intergovernmental negotiation processes including the modern day treaty process in British Columbia.
The best record of the Kanesatake resistance is still Alanis Obamsawin’s film, Kanehsatake: 270 Years of Resistance which includes footage from inside the treatment centre where the Mohawk land defenders were trapped. You should watch it.
It was a summer that changed the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Canada, and it changed my life. I later went to work for Terry Doxtator, one of the Oneida chiefs who served as intermediaries between the Army and the Mohawks. He and I actually watched the premiere of Obamsawin’s film together in 1993, the evening before a meeting of provincial Aboriginal Affairs ministers in Toronto. It was incredible watching the film and listening to Terry’s narration of the events from his perspective, and then going to meet with the ministers the next day and watch them still struggle to understand why Indigenous rights were an essential part the fabric of Canadian governance.
Don’t build beautiful things that need to capture life before they are functional. Start with life.
Celebrating a victory with our women’s team in our last home game of the season.
Our little supporter owned football club, TSS Rovers played our last home games of the season last night against our local rivals from Burnaby FC. The women clawed out a 2-1 win while the men broke their rivals apart with a 7-1 win on the back of a four goal performance from striker Koji Poon. It was a much needed win for the men. Going into the last two games of the season for the men we sit on 29 points, two points above Langley United, who have a game in hand. We need them to slip up and we need to win out our season on the road to have a shot at retaining our title. But last night we made it a three-horse race for first place, as Burnaby can no longer catch us.
One of the sayings at our club is “you’re always welcome back but we never want to see you again.” This reflects our commitment to giving players a platform to move on to the professional game. But our players and supporters often retain a strong attachment to one another as we are the only club in our second division League 1 BC with an active and rabid supporters group. TSS Rovers is a community-owned club with 477 community owners many of whom invested in what we are doing because of what it means for the women’s game. This league structure sits below our new professional women’s league in Canada, the Northern Super League and several of our former players including League 1 BC players Stella Downing, Tilly James and Kirsten Tynan now play in that league.
Two of our current roster of women’s players, Erin van Dolder and Delana Friesen are headed back to Europe for next season. They played together last year at Treaty United in Ireland and they are on their way to a new adventure in professional football. Delana came to us in 2023, and rediscovered a love of the game in a stellar season in which she led the team in goals and was named our Swanguardians Player of the Year. In 2024 she went overseas to play in Limerick and united with Erin, both Calgarians. In the meantime the Northern Super League was formed and both came home hoping to land jobs on one of the six new professional women’s teams. It was not to be, so they joined our club and kept themselves playing and in the shop window. And after touching back home they are off again.
Coming home. We are a club where young players can take the step up to the next level, or where they can come home and reground to get out there again. Because football is poetics, it puts me in mind of this recent Patti Digh post:
And yes, sometimes home is what we make in the aftermath. After the fire, after the grief, after the leaving. Maybe we build it in the quiet companionship of a friend. In the rhythm of morning routines. In the poems we write when we don’t know what else to do with our hearts.
What I know now is that home doesn’t have to be perfect to be real. It doesn’t have to be whole to matter. It just has to hold enough of you that you can recognize yourself in it. And if it doesn’t? Then we write our way back. We build with what we have—memory, language, love—and make something sturdy enough to come back to.
I finished Matthew Quick’s We Are The Light last night. The book is an epistolary (I love epistolaries), composed of letters from Lucas Goodgame, a former school counsellor and teacher who is present for a mass shooting at his hometown’s movie theatre. I had no idea of the subject matter before I started reading it; I picked the book out from our community book share shelf, located in a shelter near the ferry dock. Lucas is writing to his Jungian therapist about his post-event trauma, and as the story progresses, reality seems to shift ever so subtly like watching the world through a window that increasingly warps. It’s quite a book, and has a significant twist in the tail too so worth following the story through the slow and bewildering turns it takes. I appreciate a story written from inside a PTSD mind, a character who is reaching out to find purpose and life again, experiencing moments of love and joy and absurdity while missing the chances he has to turn.
I was struck by the fact that the characters in the book have names that evoke characters from the Hebrew Scriptures. Eli, Isaiah, Jacob, and Lucas himself who immediately evoked for me the story of Lucifer, the fallen angel. This is almost certainly deliberate (the book explores Jungian archetypes) and reading these characters as having dual functions in the narrative really deepened the work for me. That Lucs/Lucifer has a central role in a book called “We Are The Light” is no surprise, but if you read it, do familiarize yourself with these Biblical characters first, and especially with Lucifer, who is not probably who you think he is.
It’s the time of year for short stories now and I’ll be diving into a collection I also found in our community free book shelf, Cork Stories. These are all stories by different authors set in the county and the city of Cork, Ireland. In the introduction to the collection the editors quote one of the greatest Canadian short story writers, Alistair MacLeod: “The best fiction is specific in its setting but universal in its theme.” Macleod’s own seminal collection of stories called Island is one of the best books I have ever read, a collection of 16 stories mostly set on Cape Breton Island in the 1970s and they are dark and moody and beautifully crafted. Short stories of the very best kind live in the world between a novel, poetry and a good joke. They establish a setting and characters quickly, use concentrated language and crafted cadence to move the story along and usually end with a twist, or a sting or a punch line that is unexpected, or perhaps inevitably foreshadowed. I plan on reading these Cork stories and then diving back into the Journey Prize collections for the summer to find more great gems of Canadian story writing, a form that, thanks to people like Mavis Gallant and Alice Munro and Alistair MacLeod, became associated with Canadian writing in the 1970s and 1980s when I was first discovering literary fiction.\
What’s on your bedside table this summer?