Free Health Care! Free of Smog!

I am going to enlist the assistance of the National Film Board for this week's post.  The link below takes you to a five minute short film featuring William Shatner "singing" O Canada.

If you've seen it before, please indulge me, because it's important that you have it fresh in your head as you read what follows.

If you've never seen it, well, there are worse ways to spend five minutes (make sure you watch the credits).

http://www.nfb.ca/film/william_shatner_sings_o_canada/

OK.  Now that you're back, let's talk about the line in Mr. Shatner's version of our national anthem that mentions free health care.

Healthcare is always a little humiliating, even when you pay for it.  The long waits plus the expectations of strangers that you will open up, bend over and strip naked just because they tell you to, all make otherwise high-functioning, self-actualizing grown ups feel a little less of each.

In Canada, of course, we have many of these humiliations covered by our tax dollars (which isn't the same thing as "free" but most people think this way anyway) and, as the population both burgeons and ages, the burden on the tax base has encouraged health-care providers to look for efficiencies.

So, Cancer Care Ontario (you can tell just from the name that we care about cancer in Ontario) has devised an ingenious means by which to routinely check for tell-tale signs of colon cancer without the fuss and expense of hospitals or waiting rooms or paper gowns.  

Once every other annual check up, I bring home a little kit with a ever-lengthening set of instructions for how to gather samples of my poo and put it all in another taxpayer-subsidized service (that would be the mail) and send it to a lab in Mississauga.

I have, over the past three times that I have done this since I turned fifty, found that securing the samples without regret is a bit of a trick. The process is not quite how they make it look in the easy-to-follow instructions, where little ping-pong-ball shaped brown blobs sit feather-light on two thin sheets of toilet paper floating in exactly the right spot in the toilet water, and where the little balsa wood sticks they give you to harvest the samples always get just the right amount.

I can't imagine what the lab technicians sometimes find when they slice open those postage-paid envelopes, though the instructions shed some light. My favourite: the instruction (in bright red letters) asking please DO NOT MAIL THE STICKS.

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Mr. Shatner in his rendition of our national anthem suggests that Canada should stay free of smog.

While not exactly on topic, I would like to note in passing that I think most people should, if given the opportunity, attend a funeral (though preferably not their own) on their birthday.

On September 23rd, I attended a service celebrating the life of Walter Chan who passed away suddenly on September 18 at the age of 64.  

When I joined the Ministry of the Environment in 2006, Walter was my boss. In fact, Walter was the person who made the decision to hire me. So, all the work I have had the enormous privilege to do over the past five years, I can thank Walter for.  

The one thing every reader should be grateful for is the work Walter did twenty years ago as the head of the Ministry's acid rain program. Walter was a scientist and he led Ontario's contribution to an acid rain pact between Canada and the US. Walter also pioneered new policies to reduce other kinds of smog-causing pollution. The quality of the air people breathe outdoors in Ontario is better now than it has been for the past thirty years (even with enormous growth in both the economy and the population) and Walter deserves a lot of the credit for this.

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Finally, Molly.

It has been not quite a year since we said goodbye to our little stinker. Yesterday, finally, we gave away her blankies, beds and crate to the Humane Society. 

Here's a rerun of an old bit about the dog:

Everyone has heard the faux factoid that “Eskimos have 200 words for snow.”

Of course this is not true, and, while the Wikipedia entry on the topic proposes a mention in the New York Times in 1984 as the first official sighting of the factoid (except it was 100 words, not 200), I know that my father, who travelled north to the land of the Eskimos many times in his career, told us that very thing when we were kids in Edmonton. So, easily a decade or more before the New York Times mention, families were gathered around the kitchen table wisely noting the remarkable fact that Eskimos have 200 words for snow.

Why would people light on such a fanciful notion? I can’t speak for any others, but I know why it appealed to me. It allowed me to imagine that there were people in the world so connected to their surroundings that they could see such distinct differences in a thing – frozen water that has fallen from the sky in this case – that they came up with myriad words for it. The factoid connoted a human appreciation for the world that I thought I would like to emulate.

Thinking on this recently, I noticed that, in English, we have a lot of words for money (cash, lucre, coin) and even more for being drunk (smashed, looped, pissed, pie-eyed, shit faced, hammered…). And, in the most localized argot I know, we have in this household approximately 200 (give or take) words for the dog. In no particular order, here are the ones used in the last forty-eight hours:

Molly – Molly-the-Dog – Molly Dog – Bug – Bed Bug – Bed Hog – Wart Hog (she has a lot of warts) – Little Bug – Sweetie Bug – Silly – Silly Dog – Silly Old Dog – Sweetie – Stinky – Tripod (she goes up the stairs on three legs) – Eye Booger Factory – My Girl – My Little Girl – My Old Girl – My Little Old Girl – Trip Hazard – Pup – Pup Dog – Twinkle Toes.

Please find attached a picture of Ms. Twinkle Toes and her dad taken on July 4 2009.  And have a great week!

Karen

Geography and the Age of Things

1.849 billion years ago, a space-borne piece of rock slammed into Mother Earth in the area we now know as Sudbury and environs.  

The impact would have surpassed anything I could imagine with my teeny, watery brain, but the factoids perhaps speak for themselves. The force of impact drove the meteor 35 kilometres below the Earth's crust, assuming, of course, that the Earth had a crust back then.

A lot can happen in a couple of billion years, including the distortion of the circular impact crater into the more oval shape it assumes these days. Wikipedia reliably has a good picture taken from space and a good description: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Basin

Last week we visited the Onaping High Falls, the place where the waters collected by the Onaping river cascade over the rim of the ancient impact crater made by that wayward piece of space rock. It's a pretty place:

With intriguing formations in the metal-laden rock:

Lots of locally-grown graffiti:

And other signs of human habitation:

From the prospect pictured below, even my teeny, watery brain could imagine how first there flowed a river of elements made liquid by the violence of the impact and the heat of the Earth back then ... and which later became this welcoming spot for a lovely fall stroll through the woods. 

But even these lovely places -- 2 billion years after they were hot-as-the-sun planetary crucibles forming the future of Earthling mining companies -- hold perils for the unwary, or at least those wearing not quite the right footwear for the hike:

That's my friend Kate pointing to the spot on the trail where I lost my footing while descending on a steep incline and fell on my ass.

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1.849 billion years minus 55 years ago today, at 5:30 in the afternoon, I made my way onto the planet.

Happy birthday to me.

Have a great week!

Karen

Studies Show They Tend to Blow It All at the Track

The title of this post is a punchline from an old Doonesbury cartoon.  A couple of characters - Mark Slackmeyer's dad and someone else - are talking about Reaganomics.  

The punchline was the answer to a question about what happens if you provide tax cuts to the poor.

And in the era of Reaganomics gone wild, those study findings are still valid.

Here's my proof:

As hinted at last post, I'm away with Bruce on a trip to farthest Sudbury this weekend, so won't be blogging from scratch.

Enjoy this week's re-run, the well-received Mother's Day memory:

One of my staff recently returned from a four-month parental leave. He's originally from Australia and made good use of his time off, travelling with his family back home to introduce his parents to their new grandson. When he was back at work and we were chatting about how important it is to spend time with children during those early, formative, years, a long-forgotten memory popped into my head (as follows).

The first year my family lived in Edmonton (about 1966-67), we were on a waiting list to get a PMQ (Private Married Quarters) and took up temporary residence in a civilian duplex at the corner of 120th Avenue NW and 122nd Street.  

On Fridays during the summer of the year that we lived at that address, my older sister Cathy and I would walk about four blocks over to the Safeway on 118th Avenue, trailing a bundle buggy, and wait for Mom to get off the bus from work. Then we'd help her with the grocery shopping and go home together.

On one particular Friday, I was in the Safeway, waiting for Mom and minding my own business the way only a daydream-prone ten-year-old can, when a woman I didn't know and had never seen before grabbed my arm. She was very angry - with me apparently - and accused me of stealing her bundle buggy, meaning that the one I held in my hand belonged to her.

A note on my experience with grown-ups when I was a kid: grown ups came in many categories, but there were four main ones: my parents; my friends' parents; teachers and strangers.  I further categorized strangers into two groups: those who knew my name (so, some friends of my parents would fall into this category) and those who did not. All grown ups were skittish and unpredictable - I never knew what was going to set them off - but the most skittish and unpredictable were the "strangers who don't know my name" bunch.

So, back at the Safeway on that long-ago Friday afternoon, I was in the clutches of a skittish, unpredictable stranger who did not know my name, who was accusing me of a crime I barely understood (lady, I have a bundle buggy; why would I take yours?), my sister had disappeared and Mom was no where to be seen.

I think I tried to explain to the angry woman that the buggy in my possession actually did belong to me and that, when my mother arrived, she would say so, too.

Persuaded only by the conclusions she had already drawn about me, the angry woman enlisted the assistance of the store manager, who actually (oh my goodness how times have changed) took me into his office, sat me down and started to interrogate me about my desperate criminal scheme to steal the lady's bundle buggy. He was kind, but also convinced that I had stolen the buggy I still had in my possession and nothing I said seemed to change his mind.

Before long I couldn't do anything but cry and, between sobs, protest my innocence.

Then Mom and Cathy came into the manager's office and everything changed. The angry woman backed off completely. The kind store manager, hoping to find a resolution, apologized to my mother, and gave the angry lady a buggy from the store's display. He said, genuinely perplexed, "we'll never know what happened" to the angry lady's buggy.

Having related this story forty-five years later, I think I know what happened. The angry woman never had a buggy. Instead, she saw a defenceless little kid holding onto one and she hoped that prevailing social prejudices about thieving children would make her property claim to the buggy more powerful than mine. But she made a mistake in thinking I was defenceless. The difference between my parents and all the other skittish, unpredictable grown ups I encountered when I was a kid was that I knew that mom and dad were on my side. And I never doubted -- when I was all of ten years old, during those awful moments when that random stranger accused me of being a thief -- that my Mom would come and stand up for me.  

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Next week, nature hikes and gambling, together at last!

Have a great week!

Karen

Off To The Races

I'll be spending Sunday, September 9 at the race track to help my sister Cathy celebrate her 56th birthday.

She has a blog, too.  It's here: http://torontocrossing.blogspot.ca/

Hanging out with horses and those who gamble on them means I won't be able to put together a proper post this week.

Rather than publish a rerun (look to the weekend of September 15/16 for one of those), I'll just keep this week's message short.

Here's a detail of another of the murals in the Allan gardens, a topic, you can tell, of enduring interest.  For me, anyway.

Enjoy the early fall weather and have a great week!

Karen

A Likely Story

I've been a manager at the Ministry of the Environment for four years. Four years less a month ago, I described what it was like to move from staff to management:

It’s like waking up one morning and finding that the house you’re living in is actually two stories high, not one as you’d always thought. And standing on the second storey gives you a full view of the first. And the first floor, from this new perspective, doesn’t look anything like what it looked like before when you thought there was just one storey. I’m still adjusting to the new view. 

Four years in, I am accustomed to just about everything in the new view. In fact there's really only one thing I'm not used to. And that would be how the people who work for me see me. I am very aware, painfully at times, of the fact - both according to simple laws of physics plus inscrutable bits of Buddhist philosophy - that no two of my staff see me as quite the same person and none of them see me as I do.  

Someone once gave me the advice that I could smooth out the various versions of me by telling my staff my story. This must have been very good advice because I reacted very badly to it at the time.

But, as does all good advice, it stayed with me. And I hope that it was that advice that led me to the odd circumstance this past week when, as we gathered for a staff meeting, I launched my team into a group project of guessing the time I was born.

The story about how I came to know when I was born goes something like this: 

Has this ever happened to you?  You start something as a bit of a lark, a fancy, a mild diversion, but because some of the details are a bit harder than you originally thought, the mild distraction becomes a daunting challenge, a serious undertaking, a controlling obsession….

Well, I’m somewhere between stages one (mild diversion) and two (daunting challenge) on something I thought would be a bit of a lark, and that is having a Vedic astrology reading by Bagavan Das. 

Bagavan Das is an American, about fifteen years older than me, who made his way to India at the age of 17 and after many adventures... is now a Kirtan (think gospel music for Hindus and Buddhists) performer. He’s come to play a time or two at the studio where I practice yoga and he’s going to be there again next weekend.

The other thing BD does is Vedic astrological readings, for a borderline ridiculous fee of $200. 

While I thought it would be fun to have a reading done, a not insignificant amount of hard-earned money is involved, so I asked a friend of mine at the yoga studio who has had a reading by BD if, frankly, it was worth the money. 

She said, “yes, absolutely.” 

“All you need,” she also said, “is the date, place and time that you were born.” 

“Time that I was born? I don’t know the time I was born!" I said. 

I was pretty stumped by that. All my subscribers know that the two leading experts on THAT information have long since gone on to their reward.

But, I have credentials as a researcher, so I waded onto the Internet to find out what I could. 

It didn’t take me too long to find the British Columbia (where I was born) Ministry of Health Vital Statistics Agency.  They have extensive “voicemail” services that told me everything I needed to know except whether or not they had records showing the time of my birth. 

For that, I would have to talk to a human being.  

After a try or two, I connected with one who perkily assured me that absolutely the “genealogical records” that I could order for an oh-so-reasonable $55 would include that information.  So I connected with another number and another – less perky – human who took my credit card number and all the information SHE needed before she answered my question about the time of my birth with a desultory “well, since 1944, the form’s required the record of time of birth.” 

Reasonably assured that I wasn’t just throwing my money down a rat hole, I asked “how long will it take?”

“Twenty working days.” 

In non-bureaucrat speech, that’s a full month, which was cutting it pretty close for ol’ BD’s next visit to Toronto. But, what the heck, I thought, once I’ve got the information about the time of my birth, if I don’t catch him this time, I can catch him next time. 

Less than fifteen working days and a full $55 later, I received the “genealogical record” in the mail, a certified official copy of a form filled out by my father the day after I was born. It was kind of wonderful to see a heretofore never seen example of dad’s handwriting.  It was funny to note that he identified his racial origin as “Scotch.”  It was faintly maddening to note that there was no record of the time, exactly, when I was born.  

Nuts.   

The follow up to my unsuccessful expenditure of $55 was that I wrote to the manager of the two people I spoke with on the phone and, in less than a week, she forwarded the document I needed.  I now know that I was born at 5:30 in the afternoon. 

Bagavan Das has not been to Toronto since, so I'll never know the story he would have told about me.

And as for my staff, those who gamely went along with the bizarre request expressed playfully strong opinions that I must have been a morning or a middle-of-the night baby but more than half guessed late afternoon. So I got that part of my story covered.

Next up, my favourite colour.

Allan Gardens Update

This is the Allan Gardens in January, 2012.  Work crews have installed a wall of boards to separate the park from a giant hole that will be there for the next three years.

The Allan Gardens on September 1, 2012, the boards now decorated with the work of aboriginal artists.

Enjoy your end-of-summer long weekend and have a great week!

Karen