realia

Pati embarking...

Today I have a dinner party in honour of Pati, who is leaving the city to move home to Kingston in a week.  When I came to the city, Pati was one of two cousins who live here.  Having family available makes adjusting to a new city so much easier. Regular time with family makes all the difference in the world in how you manage in a big, bad city like this one.

It's three for three in the long weekend weather department - we get another summery day and are able to have the dinner party on my condo's rooftop.  Sherrill brings cheese dip.  I've made ahead asparagus-barley "risotto" and quinoa salad.  And serve crusty bread with butter, mustards and cold cuts.  Everybody approves, much wine is consumed and the celebration is great fun.

Bon voyage on this next great adventure Pati.  As I told you, I am a big supporter of adventures and fresh starts.  But we're really going to miss you.

daughters and windows and happy long weekend

 

Daughter Carly

Daughter Kelsey

Beautiful windows on King Street, from Fynn's of Temple Bar.

Beautiful King Street windows reflecting...

This filter worked out great for this windows shot! Duncan Street at Adelaide.

After work I meet up with Ceri, Carly, Kelsey and a couple of her friends for Beer O'clock - an extra happy one as it's a long weekend.  Pleased with myself for getting nice portraits of both my daughters.  I've had a nasty cold all week, and entering into the weekend feeling 100% better.  The three day weather forecast is stellar.  I'm blessed.

I could give them that, at least

I came across this picture a couple of weeks ago.  Ever since then I keep picking it up and looking at it.  Of course any mother gets wistful on looking at pictures of those who were once her babies, but this one has grabbed me in a way that’s not just nostalgic.

 

 

Yeah the picture is really sweet.  Carly sharing her favourite blanket (an old, worn crib sheet) with her brand new baby sister.  She is just awake from a nap, still sucking her thumb, sleepy and content.  Kelsey’s tiny, brand new head, still pink, is tucked near.  Her eyes squeeze closed,  still clutching to sleep and that warm place, unaware, uncaring of any world beyond that cocoon. 

I see both my grown up women-daughters in those faces.  And it moves me because  what I also see in their faces are sisters already acquainted in comfort and rightness.  One welcoming and one entering.  I see brand new sisters already glad to know one another, already together.   

Today they’re twenty-nine and twenty-seven, and all these years (decades) later I wish I could protect them from harm; wanting so much to shield them from those things that will hurt them.  Still aching to know I can’t do that. 

You bring a child onto the planet knowing she will have to navigate the waves of of the world; she will have to know hurt and pain, and ultimately these are among the things that grow a life.  Every harm that comes to her strips a little off you, and yet every year she is more beautiful for having sailed those seas. 

I can’t protect them like I could when I wrapped them up together on the sofa – but there was something I was able to do - give them a sister.  I was able to give them a place to go where they’ll get all the love and support and comfort they need.

Lately I've been really grateful for that.

Having a sister - beautiful thing number 86.

terra firma, rich fabric

Last night I had conversations with four of my oldest and most valued friends.  I wish we didn’t have the reason that we all talked, but that we did made me feel better than I had in the twenty-four hours previous.  I hope that was the case for all of us.  Mostly for Denis, because on New Year’s Day he lost his dad. 

I’d been feeling blue about it on a number of levels.  Mostly because someone I love is torn up; he’s been hit, unexpectedly, with life’s cruellest circumstance.  His dad was a really lovely man; a husband in a seemingly inseparable partnership, a good father and pépé and neighbour and respected teacher and now he’s gone.  

If I’m not censoring (it’s a start, Lisa), I’ll tell you that this is one of the two situations in the past year that threw my own mortality in my face.  Hard.  It sounds so selfish.  My heart is truly with my friend, but a feeling of scared came swift and forceful.  A parent is only one generation away. 

I have all my parents – and none seems like s/he is going anywhere soon.  But I got scared about losing them.  They’re still too young.  Like Denis’s dad.  He shouldn’t have gone yet; his family’s hearts shouldn’t be heavy now.  And yesterday evening I was wondering how to move out of the sudden funk – how could I call my friend and be supportive and somehow make it a little better when I felt like I was teetering on some thin emotional wire; psychically a piece of shit?

And then after supper I talked to Debbie.  And then Denis.  And then Robbie.  And then Lynn.  And at the end of the evening I was back on terra firma.  I’m sure it’s because each of them were part of the journey to now.  Last night I'd got away from the moment and they brought me back to it.   

We all exist here in this unstoppable march of time and we all have to face it, and most of us deal with loss when it happens and maybe we don’t get over it but we learn to move on and to be happy again even if there is a new hole in the family’s fabric.  But then again, isn't the fabric richer and more beautiful for that person having been a part of it?

The fabric is precious and beautiful and it’s all any of us has.  And I’m not that articulate, but I’m sure it’s pretty much the point of it all. 

boxing day

Today we loafed about visiting with my family, first over breakfast at Dad and Julie's and then over lunch of leftovers of what was a magificent meal at Jeff and Carol's.  Every Boxing Day it's the same: we're all a little tired and a little bleary and coming down off the big meal and glasses of wine and weeks-long build-up, and always I think this day is as good as Christmas itself.  It's the day in which we have time to process that everlasting lesson - how blessed we are.

*re-post* pinko is the new black

Re-posting.  Not because of any (tanking) mayor.  Because we're still remembering an awful night and thinking a certain critical and creative mind would be welcome today.  

 
(Originally published: 8 December 2010)  

Yesterday an entertainer in a Pepto Bismol coloured suit stood up in Toronto’s city council and ranted and raged about “left wing pinkos” to show his support for our new mayor.  It seems the mayor requested that this person – a national celebrity who has been known to rant his bigoted views on what is probably the nation’s most popular television show, causing many to question the soundness of his mind and his relevance on a show watched by many, many children – be the one to introduce him and decorate him with the chain of office on the first official day of the new council.

Yesterday’s show tipped the “cringe-o-meter” for many thinking people.  Here we had an entertainer in a pink suit taking that deplorable political tool – the sound bite – to a new low in stirring up anger and divisiveness, and helping this mayor move our city from world-class to class-less.

The same night over dinner my daughters and I had a conversation about John Lennon.  I said that the pink clad entertainer would call Lennon a “left wing pinko” with great glee.  Carly and Kelsey, in their 20s, had never heard the term “pinko” before yesterday; Carly said she'd Googled it.  I thought it was funny that a great many of the people the guy in pink was trying to insult would have had to research what exactly his dusty old slur meant since it hadn't been seen in a number of decades.

My girls - both intelligent, thoughtful, reasonable young women – were saying that they feel Lennon’s murderer robbed their generation of knowing a fine critical mind and thought-provoking artist.  He died before they were both born – but it just doesn’t seem like it – thirty years on Lennon’s persona looms still.  He angered many, but he inspired many more.  And that’s because he was a man with big ideas, and he worked them out and expressed them in truly original (and sometimes groundbreaking) ways.  None of his protest art included name-calling or trite clichés or sound bites, although the media loved to take sound bites out of his statements, like the infamous “we’re bigger than Jesus...”

Sound bites water ideas down to single layered messages.  Sound bites take bits of language and turn them into a symbol.  Given that humans process symbols before they process language, it’s not surprising marketers and politicians have turned it into a remarkably effective tool for persuasion.  We see the symbol – we don’t have to bother to think – the meaning is handed to us in a neat little package.

Fortunately, many of us still like to use our brains.  Many of us – like my daughters – stop and think about what is in, around and behind a message and work out its meaning for ourselves based on our learning and experiences.

One might say War is Over was a John Lennon sound bite.  But it was one of many layers – of contradiction, optimism, questioning the status quo, change, motivation, suggestive selling, opportunity, no, yes, maybe… Lennon’s War is Over might have made you think about a hundred things.  The point is, it was intended to make you think - not relieve you of the need to do so.

What were the layers of meaning in the “left-wing pinko” sound bite?  I don’t think more than one meaning was intended – it simply meant “the other side.”  It was easy for that guy’s fans, or the angry supporters of the angry mayor.  Who needs to think?  Yahoo – take that you Other Side!

Lots of Toronto people though – like my critical minded daughters – are wearing Left-Wing Pinko as a badge of honour today.  Especially given that it’s also the day in which many of us are thinking about one particular left-wing pinko and what might have been another thirty years of ideas and music and art - robbed, from a world that could really use them, in one violent moment.

John – I really wish my girls could have lived in the same world you did for a little while.  But your messages are not lost on them.  If you were here today, you might be as encouraged as I am that there are lots young people around who are able, like you once were, to think beyond a sound bite and imagine a world in which anything is possible.

 

 
 
 

mountains and a tiny queen far away

This week I’m in Vancouver with my job.  I’m feeling grateful that our office and my hotel are at the centre of the downtown core and, though I’m really busy with work, I get to look at some spectacular views even from the vantage point of the office.  My workload should ease up a little as the week progresses and I will get out and explore the city on foot and take some proper pictures.  In the meantime, despite the work, I’m enjoying the feeling of being out of my element – those large mountains being a rather imposing reminder.

Last night around eight o’clock I’ve had enough of the current proposal and go down to the hotel bar to have a glass of wine and order some takeout for my room.  I’m distracted by some not-quite cringe-worthy lip smacking, and I turn to look at the man sitting next to me, and admire his impressive looking cheese plate.

The fellow, who looks to be in his late fifties, asks the bartender in an Italian accent what the soup of the day is.

“Fennel. It’s not one of our usual ones, I don’t know what it tastes like so I can’t give you a recommendation one way or another.”  Then she says, “I’ll go back and taste it and give you a report.”

I joke that she’s going above and beyond the call of duty, mostly because I’m not a real fan of fennel soup.  The bartender comes back saying she didn’t really like it, and gives the man a little taster sized dish of the stuff.  He doesn’t like it either. 

He says to me, “I love soup” and I tell him what a fan of it I am too, and we agree that we could both eat it every day.  He says his wife makes great soup, even though she doesn’t like it as much as he does.  He says he misses her (and her soup).  I ask him where he’s from and he’s from the Toronto area too.

He’s been here for more than a week and will be until the second week in December, and he’s not enjoying being out of his element as I am.  He pulls out an i-Pad and starts to scroll some pages and I sip my pinot noir and idly watch some hotdogging snowmobilers on the sports channel above the bar. 
The man utters an audible sigh of pleasure and I turn to see him beaming at the little screen, on which is a tiny new baby with a tuft of black hair.  His demeanour seems to indicate a welcome of eavesdropping, so I ask, “Is that your grandchild?”

Of course it is and she’s only two weeks old.  He said he’d emailed his daughter asking for the photos, and she responded with some beautiful, quite artistic shots.  He scrolls through them, sharing each with me; I “ooh and ahh” and he beams longingly. 

Again the man complains about having to be out here, away from this new little queen adjusting to life on earth back home.  After a moment it seems clear he’s forgotten I exist, and my food has arrived, so I finish my wine, thank him for sharing and turn to go back to my room. 

As I glance back at the man gazing at the i-Pad propped in front of him on the bar, with the wide windows revealing the magnificent Rocky Mountains behind him, I’m thinking those mountains could be paltry anthills a million miles away for all he cares.  But I’m sure those mountains are about as big as his heart is feeling.

little boy whistling

That crazy mess posted this morning has to do with a number of things.  I'm not going to explain all of them.  But I will say, I've been away from my home for the better part of a week and won't get back there for a number of days yet.  Part of that is because I was in Chicago last week with a work training thing.  Part of it is because this week I'm staying with young Sam again while his mother is away on business. 

Suddenly my world is revolving around kid homework and getting him out to school on time and conversations like “yeah, well Kid, grade four girls won’t like you when your fingernails look like THAT.”  And the accomplice, Sam’s dog, whose primary concern in life is SQUIRREL!

Today, after the dog was fed and had barked all the squirrels their final warnings for the morning, and the kid, in some clean clothes with a full belly and more or less tamed bed-hair sauntered off into the schoolyard, I took with me into my day the sounds of whistling I'd heard from him as he played over the weekend.  The kind of whistling that comes from a happy boy inventing remarkable inventions in a fantastic world in his mind.

Little boy whistling. Beautiful thing number 73. 

two and a third days and a little more

Last weekend was delicious. The days were a blessing; crisp and sunny, the kind of autumn days you need to be out in because you know that with every weekend that passes, these kinds of days are less likely to occur for... well you don’t want to think about how many months.

And it was more than that.

It started with spontaneous “beer o’clock” on Friday with family, then moved into a weekend that was about wandering around, changing minds, making diversions, sharing meals, turning your face to the sun and letting it slide its arms around your shoulders against the cool air, exploring neighbourhoods, watching diamonds floating on the lake, taking pictures of freighters, long kisses, longer conversations, sharing old pictures, beholding skylines, sleeping in, drinking cesars with big breakfasts, standing on the street corner deciding which way to walk home and then a crying like an idiot in the middle of a busy station as you collect your long-away sister.

That weekend – lets not bother to quantify the beauty. Lets call it all beautiful thing number seventy-two.

To my non-Canadian friends - the reason you don't have Cesars in your country is because we're not willing to share them.


A sunny patio on a late Saturday morning in late October looking at diamonds on the water on Lake Ontario.

I get that

"I don't want to analyze myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends, I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing, suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a high-enough level."  —Aaron Sorkin