Your Tax Dollars at Work - The Sequel

The Allan Gardens can also be pleasant: part of this year's Christmas display.

I live in downtown Toronto, so I've followed blood trails from time to time. When I see them, I wonder what misfortune befell the person who left behind bright red medallions on the sidewalk. I never know if it was a blow to the nose, or a cut with a knife...

Until now.

On Friday the 28th, while Bruce visited his dad, I headed out to see "Vice" at the Varsity Cinema at 55 Bloor West. 

Walking on the east-west diagonal path through the Allan Gardens, I saw in the distance two people fighting. A woman about my height and weight was having the better time of it with a smaller, lighter man. She had him by his hair and was pounding him with great big haymaker punches. 

I will walk by a lot of nonsense in this neighbourhood, but not fights. So, when I got to where they were - by three benches smack dab in the middle of the park - I stopped and called to them and said I'd call the police if they didn't break it up.

At this point, the woman had the man pinned on his back on the northernmost bench, his head very close to the ground. I'd distracted them from their fight and it looked for an instant like they would stop.

Just then, a man sitting drinking a Labatt's Black Ice beer on the middle bench, stood, took a step toward the two, lifted his right leg bent at the knee and with truly shocking force, stomped on the small man's head.

That ended the fight. I yelled at the man with the beer who, I think, up until that moment had not been aware I was there.

The female combatant came at me, protesting her innocence and lack of agency in the fight. I ignored her, fished my phone out of my pocket and called 911.  

The guy who had been kicked had a three or four inch gash on his left temple and was bleeding profusely. He was conscious but seemed stunned by the force of the blow.

For the record, I was not alone. At least three other people, two men and an older woman, were in the immediate vicinity of the fight while it was happening. They all saw the helpless small man get his head stomped by the guy with the beer. 

They were also all gone, the perpetrators, the witnesses - except for the older woman - by the time I connected with the 911 operator.

I told the operator I needed an ambulance at the Allan Gardens.

She asked me what the address was.

Good grief. 

The response of the paramedics was impressively swift. Mere minutes I'm sure. While they were on their way, and while the other witnesses fled, another crowd of people joined in, a couple of whom had some first aid training and helped the man while I conveyed instructions from the 911 operator.

One woman with a small dog came up behind me and demanded information - what happened to him; is he hurt; how did this happen - in the same tone and timbre as the tiny middle aged woman who was desperate to know if I was all right the night I took a tumble on Yonge Street.  

I lost patience with the woman because she made it hard to hear the 911 guy. I told her I couldn't answer all her questions. The 911 guy thought I was talking to him. He said he needed to ask me questions so they could help the assault victim. I said no, no, no I wasn't talking to you. It'd have been funny if it weren't so grim.

The paramedics were two strapping tall young women, calm and competent. They had the guy's head bandaged so fast I didn't even see them do it. They put a neck brace on him, which he did not react well to. He was struggling with it, trying to take it off, saying he couldn't breathe. Another young woman, just a civilian in the crowd I think, stepped in and started talking to the man, assured him the paramedics were there to help him, asked him what his name was. Incredibly, he calmed down, laid down on the gurney and let them get him ready to go into the van.

I'd hung up the 911 call when the paramedics arrived and watched from a distance as they prepared to take the man away. A couple of other emergency response types had shown up, one of whom had a supervisory air about him. I went up to him, said I was the one who'd made the call, and was it OK if I left.

He said, "sure" and then he said "thank you."

"You're welcome," I said, grateful after all the shock and upset for the small, civil exchange.

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

Karen

Two Days Before Christmas

Not My Thing, Really:
Christmas Baking my way - I took a recipe for Anne Murray's Christmas bundt cake published in TV Guide 45 years ago - and made it into mini muffins. They were a little dry.

Today's December 22. There are two days left before Christmas. In that tight little window, these are the things I will not do: write and send Christmas cards, shop for Christmas presents, wrap Christmas presents, play Christmas carol pod casts or decorate the place.

It's two days before Christmas and I feel like I've already had my holiday.

Here's why:

On December 8, Bruce and I hosted the third stage of a three-part holiday open house at our condo complex. Three units - 14, 7 and us - hosted for an hour each between 3 and 6 p.m. Our guests scurried in the underground passage connecting our units as the call came to move to the next spot. We also invited some friends because ours was the last party and we thought we'd lose a few revellers as the festivities progressed.

Turns out there was very little shrinkage in the crowd, and by the time everyone got to our place, they had already had a couple of drinks. So things were lively. 

The invite said the party ended at six, but that did not persuade the last few partiers, who not only stayed for the "after party", they brought their own guests. Five extras stayed until we shooed them out at 11:30 p.m.

To prepare for the party, Bruce and I had cleaned and decorated the house. You saw the photo of our Christmas coat tree last week. 

I baked. No, really. I made the muffins in the photo above, snow ball cookies and bacon butter tarts that vanished in an eye blink. 

I also made an amalgam concoction, glued together with melted salted caramel chips (instead of white chocolate chips) and crushed candy canes. And I made something called Christmas Crack that was nowhere near as good as the other things. And I candied nuts.

The day after the party, I declared that I'd had my Christmas.

But there was one more thing ...

On Friday, December 14, two years almost to the day that his wife Marna died, Bruce's dad Ken moved into New Horizons Tower, a facility for aging gracefully, conveniently located at the corner of Bloor and Dufferin in Toronto.

He has a charming, spic and span, nicely appointed two-room suite with a mini-kitchen (no stove) and as much of the furniture from his old place as we could squeeze in. They serve three meals and have several activities every day for the residents. 

Bruce has gone to see him (it's an oh-so-easy twenty minute subway ride) every day this week to help him acclimatize. Ken had lived on his own, eating his own terrible cooking and only rarely interacting with other people for two whole years. Ken already looks and sounds better. 

The sweet Fillipina women who comprise most of the staff check in on Ken if he has not made it down for breakfast. When he does come to breakfast they make sure he eats properly (this involves prunes). They make him take a banana with him when he goes back to his room.

The relief I feel from all of the above -- Ken's close by; he's eating proper food; people are looking out for him; he's safe and comfortable -- is the best Christmas gift I could ever have.

I hope your holidays also bring you a good measure of fun, friends and peace.

Merry Christmas!

Karen

Maggie

Left to right: Bob, Maggie, Mike, Arabind, Renan. The team split two shifts: nine to noon and noon to three. I was on the morning shift; these guys, the afternoon.

This week, for the third time over the past five years, I took my team with me to volunteer at the Fort York Food Bank. The Bank has moved from larger premises on Dundas Street to the compact space of the former Amadeo's Pizza at the corner of Borden and College Streets. 

We were met, as always, by Maggie, the Bank's volunteer coordinator. Maggie is herself a volunteer, dedicated to the point of obsession with her work.

Maggie's somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. Five foot five or six in height, soaking wet she might weigh 95 pounds. From the back, she looks more like a large child than a small adult. Her wiry, scant hair falls past her shoulders. She sometimes pulls it to the front and twists it in her hands when she talks.

On Wednesday she was wearing a new-looking pair of jeans and a thin grey sweater. She always wears a hat because it gets cold in the back.

The past two times we've volunteered, we spent three very full hours sorting, packaging, unpacking and shelving food.

This time, we "made" lunch, by refreshing salad, reheating cooked chicken and frying roasted potatoes. This was all done and the food loaded in the steam table by 10:30 a.m. 

To pass the rest of the way to lunch time, we hauled food out of the back and put it on the shelves out front where people get their food baskets.

I helped in the back, as Maggie, muttering to herself about the kinds and quantities of food that she needed, pulled heavy boxes off of overloaded shelves, which I then handed to members of my team who carried them to the front. 

I thought about the logistics of food banks. Shipments arrive several times a week from the central Daily Bread Food Bank (the shipments balance protein, vegetables, starch), from the Ontario Food Terminal (Maggie had several huge boxes of green onions on Wednesday, two 100-pound bags of carrots starting to sprout and at least one crate of deeply rotten apples) and from donors (while we were there four young women arrived bearing large bags of packaged food). 

So, the inputs are hard to control. On top of this, food banks have no way to gauge demand. Over the past two months, crowds at the Fort York Food Bank Wednesday lunch had ranged from under fifty to more than 200. You never know, when you're running a food bank, what food you'll have available and you never know how many people you'll have to feed. "It depends on the weather," says Maggie, "if it's cold they'll come for lunch to get inside."

While I mulled all of this over, and helped lift more boxes off the shelves, I noticed my team members had stopped coming to the back.

Uh oh, I thought. They better not be shelving the food.

I'd long since learned that Maggie manages the chaos of the food bank by being very particular about how some things are done, especially shelving food.

So it was when Maggie and I brought out the last haul from the back that my team learned the first rule of the Fort York Food Bank: do what Maggie tells you to do the way Maggie tells you to do it or don't do it at all.

Hundreds of cans and jars and packages had been egregiously mis-shelved. They had to do it all again.

Maggie keeps up a steady stream of patter on the job, talking to herself if she doesn't have an audience. She mentioned a couple of times when we were there to listen that she has a thirty-year-old son who lives with her. According to Maggie, he complains that she spends too much time at the food bank. He asks her why she doesn't stay home more. "Because," she explains, "No one knows how to do it right like I do."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Learn How to Fall

Stunning transformation: Just the day before this ornamental cabbage
had been brilliant green and creamy white. 

It could definitely have been worse. The fall I took in the middle of the intersection of Yonge and Wellesley I mean.

It was about quarter after five on Wednesday afternoon. Dark, because it's almost the solstice. I was headed east, on the south side of Wellesley. The pedestrian signal countdown had started so I picked up the pace.

My forward momentum made it impossible to catch myself by a stutter step of my trailing leg when my right foot caught a rough spot in the pavement. Down I went. 

Did I mention I was in the middle of an intersection in downtown Toronto at the height of rush hour? And it was dark?

As I began my split second journey to meet the pavement a chorus of human voices rose around me. There were inarticulate calls and sounds of dismay. Two distinct voices rose above the ruckus. A woman kept asking me if I was all right. A man exhorted the crowds to "look at that!"

Anyway. 

As my body reacted to the sudden change in my relationship with gravity, I did both the right and the wrong thing. 

It was cold enough that I had my down-filled winter coat on, a  warm hat, my hood up and gloves on. It was not so cold that I had my hands in my pockets. So I did the wrong thing and tried to break my fall with my outstretched arms (in injuries from falls lingo this is FOOSH). That's the wrong thing to do. That's how people break their wrists.

I pivoted in mid-fall and landed on my left hip and shoulder. That's the right thing to do. It's better than breaking your fall with your face and distributes the impact across a greater area.

Once the fall was done, I became preoccupied with recovery. My greatest absolutely legitimate fear was that a westbound driver late to the scene would decide to use what seemed to them like a quiet moment in the intersection to make a quick left hand turn.

So I got to my feet. Easily. That was a relief.

Even though I'd stood up unassisted, the unseen woman still demanded to know if I was all right. The man still wanted everyone to look at that.

So I turned in the direction of their voices, smiled, thanked them for their concern and said I was OK. She was a tiny middle aged woman, he, a less tiny middle aged man. 

I finished crossing the intersection. The countdown was still running. The whole thing took four seconds, tops.

The gloves on my hands saved them from abrasions. My hat and hood protected my head and kept my glasses from flying off my face. My over-the-knee leather boots kept me scrape free.

The last lucky stroke: I was on my way to an appointment with my massage therapist. She assessed me for broken bones or serious soft tissue injuries. There were none.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Civil Servants

Mild-mannered fooling around: a pest spray bottle for irritating staff,
a gift from an irritating member of my staff. 

In another unusual turn for me, I quite like my boss at the Ministry of Energy Northern Development and Mines (hereafter Energy etc.). She was the director of legal services before becoming Assistant Deputy Minister. She's smart, dedicated to her team and fun to work with.

We're divided only by our perspective on the cause of chaos in our jobs. I tend to blame the politicians. She blames the bureaucrats.

We're both right.

This past week, my boss and I turned our different views of our world on what could well prove to be a classic in the annals of political/bureaucratic collaboration on gumming things up.

Twenty or so pages into the 55 page Fall Economic Statement, the government announced that it would start overseeing labour negotiations of all government agencies. 

This is part of the new crew's commitment to fiscal management and making sure the taxpayer is not being milked.

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this, but the government did forget to tell the agencies what they were planning to do.

So when I got on the phone with a couple of the agencies I deal with - one of which is in the middle of its labour negotiations - there were what I would describe as carefully contained reactions to my news.

To the element of surprise was added the extra fun that the internal department in charge of oversight had not figured out any part of the process. There were draft templates and vague notions about who should fill them out and who should sign them, but nothing had been approved....

Of course the deadline was three days before the release of the Fall Economic Statement. 

In chaos-rich situations like this, where everyone is stressed and angry, the bureaucracy erupts in a rash of civility, festooning the end of every e-mail with defusing bromides such as "should you have any other questions please do not hesitate to contact me" and "I can definitely make myself available if you require anything further."

I gave serious thought to asking the last guy to do my Christmas shopping for me, but decided not to break the mood.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen