Saturday, August 31, 2019

Blast From The Past

The monster on his 62nd birthday: Bruce at the ROM, 24/08/19
Suddenly, it's the Labour Day weekend. I haven't felt this unambitious since my third birthday. 

For today's blog, I thought I would share this fragment of a sketch I wrote 20 years ago about a character named Peter: 
Peter grew up in the 60's and 70's in the Leaside neighbourhood of Toronto with his parents, Ian and Agnes, and his two brothers, Gerry and Stephen. 
Peter's oldest brother Gerry was a clone of their father, slight, fair-skinned and foul-tempered. Gerry, like his Irish dad, had a singing voice that could make you cry, though his temper more often did. Peter spent his early years fleeing the terrible wrath of his eldest brother and his father. 
Stephen, Peter's other brother, was more like their mother, Agnes, who came from Jamaica. She was one part African, two parts Spanish, one part Chinese, one part Tamil and the rest who knows. She smoked a pipe and worked as a plumber.   
Stephen was spindly thin, with long arms and big feet, and almost six feet tall by the time he was fifteen. Of the three boys, Stephen took most after his mother; he was the family poet. His experiments with sexual behaviour in early adolescence made him think he might be gay. Stephen confirmed his suspicions in his eighteenth year, during his first summer away from home planting trees for the Ministry of Natural Resources with one of work crew, a kid from Halifax.  
Stephen kept his sexuality secret from his family. They never knew, until Stephen died from AIDS in 1987, at the age of 28. Stephen's father was ashamed, and did not go to the funeral. Agnes went, and had her two remaining sons help to hold her up, because of her grief, yes, and because she was too drunk to stand. 
Peter's parents forged their soul bond with alcohol. They met drinking in a bowling alley in New York City. She was on a visitor's visa. He was staying with his brother who had come over from Ireland six years before, and who told him that it was easier to get into Canada than the United States. He said, "the weather's worse, Ian. It gets cold like you'd never expect to live through it, but, they'll pay your health care there, and your kid's university. Think of that. A college education for each of your kids, just for putting up with six months of freezing hell." 
Ian thought about it, but looked around for work in New York, too. His brother's friend ran a dry cleaners, and took Ian in under the table. Ian forgot to take the boat back to Ireland when it embarked. 
That was because Ian had met Agnes. He'd seen one glimpse of her and fallen hopelessly. They sat at the snack bar counter at the bowling alley drinking whiskey glass for glass and never bowled even one ball down the lane. 
When Ian and Agnes crossed the border into Ontario, she was six months pregnant. They'd been told about immigrant amnesty. They forged their own documents (with help from some friends in Toronto) to prove that they had been illegally in Canada for two years. 
Ian had a little money saved, Agnes a lot, and they put a down payment on their split level in Leaside, a then-young suburb with tiny trees and small houses that they lived in until after their son died of AIDS and they finally paid off their mortgage. 
Stephen's death sparked a rage between Agnes and Ian. But their marriage had never been peaceful. Alcohol had long incited their fights, contaminated their children and unfocused the best parts of their life together. Shortly after his middle son died, Ian suffered a fatal heart attack. Agnes buried her husband in the plot next to Stephen's, and died herself of cirrhosis of the liver a few months later. 
After Stephen died, Gerry, the oldest son, fled to Africa to work with the Irish organization Concern.  Caring for emaciated, vomiting, bleeding, crying children, Gerry feared body fluids more than anything. He did not want to die like his brother. 
 Had he had the chance, Gerry might have felt relieved it was a rebel bullet that took his life, zipping in through his left eye, exiting by way of his spinal column just below the seventh vertebrae, laying him dead in the dust, but not from AIDS.
And that's how it happened that Peter lost his whole family in less than two years, and left him the beneficiary of four estates. By the beginning of the nineties, thanks to spiralling real estate values, Ian and Agnes' house in Leaside sold for more than half a million dollars. Thanks to a burgeoning interest in gay literature and a script Stephen had sold, Stephen's estate was worth almost as much as his parents' house. Gerry had left all his worldly wealth behind him when he fled to Africa. 
Peter, after all the wills were probated, was a millionaire. 
The combination of extreme bad luck and good fortune had less impact on Peter than his conviction that his mother was the cause of all the bad things that had ever happened to him and the chief reason he would never know happiness in his adult life.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great long weekend!

Karen 



Peeking through the trees:
the high-rises at Jarvis and Dundas

Saturday, August 24, 2019

Managing Expectations

Still not quite getting the hang of this selfie thing: me in Ottawa, August 19, 2019.
For the first time in a couple of years, I travelled for work this past week.

The Association of Municipalities of Ontario held its annual conference in Ottawa and I had to go to support ministers taking meetings. 

The conference is always a big deal for provincial governments. Municipalities, either by themselves or in small coalitions, ask for "delegations" with ministers. There they ask the government to help them to boost local prosperity, create jobs, promote growth - that sort of thing. In the meetings I attended, municipalities wanted access to more and better energy, either electricity or natural gas or both.

When I was working in climate change and had Glen Murray for a minister, all I had to do at these sessions was watch and listen as the minister talked and made big promises.

This time, I still mostly listened but the ministers (we have two now, Rickford and Walker) were more circumspect. If I had to sum up their message, I would say it was "don't get your hopes up." 

When I travelled for the previous government, it was OK to fly to Ottawa. From the island airport, it was a half hour flight, and less than two hours from door to door. 

This government frowns on flying. So I took the train, which normally takes four and a half hours to get to Ottawa from Toronto. But for this trip, someone in Belleville chose my train as the means to end their life.  

The train sat on the track for more than three hours while emergency response crews, investigators and the coroner did their jobs. 

It took nine hours to get to Ottawa. The VIA crew helped as much as they could, handing out free water and snacks three times during the long wait.

The hundreds of people on the train were - at least the ones in my car - without exception resigned to their fate. No one complained loudly. Everyone coped. Even when we detrained en masse and congested the station and taxi queue, no one pushed or squabbled or got mad.

The municipalities at AMO could take a page from this book. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen


   











Saturday, August 17, 2019

Sixty Plus


More than180 years of combined Clark sistering experience:
Kim, Carol, Karen at the Toronto Zoo, 14 August 2019.
As of 12 August, 2019, Kim's birthday, there is no member of my immediate family under 60 years of age. To celebrate the fact that the last of us has crossed the threshold to VIA seniors fares, Kim, Carol and I, plus Bruce and Kevan, hung out for a week. 

We engaged mainly in:
  • taking walks and comparing Fitbit step counts
  • visiting animals in captivity (the Toronto Zoo, Ripley's Aquarium, the Riverdale Farm Zoo)
  • watching movies (Bohemian Rhapsody, Captain Marvel and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood)
  • eating and drinking (running the gamut from Pizza Pizza on Shepherd Ave E., to Richmond Station, where the tasting menu is still amazing)
Two activities came together as we drove from Belleville on our way to the zoo when we brainstormed what I would make us for dinner. 

Even on a hot day in August, Kevan had an appetite for meatloaf with boiled eggs in the middle and ketchup on top. Seeing as we would already have the oven on, Bruce proposed baked potatoes. I asked if anyone would mind bacon on the meatloaf. No one minded.

And so a new meatloaf was born. See recipe below.

Memory Lane

To charge up the dying embers of our aging memories, we spent half a day at North Beach, the favourite hangout of our teenaged summers and where I stood on the shore of a Great Lake for the first time in my life. High lake levels have gobbled up the once-sandy lakeside beach, so we set up our picnic on the gentler "drop-off" side. Abundant dragonflies and monarch butterflies lulled me into believing we're not destroying the planet after all while lake gulls played power politics over who got to perch on which pole where. There were lots of happy kids splashing around in the warmish water, lots of little fish casting shadows on the silty, sandy bottom. 


Nothing - at least on the drop off side of the beach - has changed.

Kevan's Meatloaf

Pre heat oven to 425 degrees F.

600 g extra lean ground beef
600 g ground pork
4 peeled hard-boiled eggs
3/4 c. salsa (any kind is fine; I used President's Choice black bean and white corn salsa)
1 tbsp salt
1 tsp pepper
3/4 c. finely chopped onion
1/2 c. bread crumbs
4 tbsp ketchup
five slices of thick cut bacon

Serves 8-10.

Mix the ground beef and ground pork with the salsa, salt, pepper, chopped onion and bread crumbs until well combined. In a square, 2-litre corningware dish, shape about 1/4 of the ground meat mixture into a 4" wide, 3/4" thick layer along the diagonal of the pan. Place the eggs end to end along the middle of the layer of ground meat. Using the rest of the ground meat mixture, build the sides and top of the meatloaf around the eggs. Shape the meatloaf with your hands so that there is good clearance on the long sides - the short sides of the meatloaf may touch the corners of the dish. Spread the top of the meatloaf with the ketchup and lay the slices of bacon along the top. Bake at 425 for 15 to 20 minutes then reduce heat to 350 and bake for another hour. A lot of juice and fat will run out of the meatloaf, so you may want to take out some of the pan juices with a turkey baster half way through the final hour of cooking.

To complete the K. Macrow menu, serve with beef gravy,   baked or mashed potatoes and a salad.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen


Saturday, August 10, 2019

Out of Touch

Dylan, Andrew, Charlotte at the Allan Gardens
Gossiping about stakeholders at the end of a briefing this past week, I had occasion to use the phrase "dog in a manger." As soon as I said it, I regretted my choice.

"Does anyone know what I just said?" I asked the very young people across the table from me. "No," they said, not unkindly, or even pityingly, but quite definitely.

"You know, it's an Aesop's fable.." ... no reaction ... "about a dog" ... still nothing ... "in a manger? It means someone who spitefully withholds from others something that they themselves can't use?" 

No light of recognition shone in any eye, not even the Deputy Minister who had at the very same meeting told us he was 54 years old. 

Later that same day I checked with another not-all-that-young person in the division. Had she ever heard of Aesop's fables? 

"No," she said. 

"You've heard of sour grapes, though, yes?" I asked.

"Sure," she said.

"That's an Aesop's fable."

"Oh," she said, probably finding it hard to care.

So it would appear that one of the literary mainstays of useful instruction in my youth has passed from mainstream culture. 

But fables still abound.

At the meeting where the dog in the manger reference fell flat, I had just told the story of the good Mayor of a small Ontario town, who was lobbying the government aggressively to have a decision of a tribunal overturned.

The Mayor told a widely reported story of how one company had advocated for the good people of the Mayor's town, but another company had come along and argued against them. And the evil tribunal hearing the arguments had sided with the second company, thereby denying the good people of the Mayor's town a benefit they all wanted and sorely needed.

It's a moving story. When it came across my desk, I knew I needed to understand the details so I could advise the government on its options. I checked in with the tribunal. Turns out everything the Mayor believed to be true was not. The first company had not advocated for the town's people; the second company had not even been involved in the hearing so it was an impossibility that there could have been a decision by the tribunal against the good townspeople.

Here's another old saying: "Don't believe what you read in the papers."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen



Saturday, August 3, 2019

Two Classes

South east corner of the Allan Gardens: a piece of guerrilla artwork strapped to a power pole. Someone had removed the little car a while back and someone else affixed a new one.

I've been at my second writing class long enough to be able to draw some comparisons with the first.

The points in common won't surprise anyone: the participants write, share and comment on each other's work. Each class has a facilitator: the person who makes money from convening the class. 

Both facilitators apply a method they learned elsewhere. One teaches in the style learned at Bennington.  The other trained to be an AWA Workshop leader. They are both located near Bloor and Bathurst.

Aside from these superficial points in common, the facilitators could not be more different. Roxanne Snider, who led my first class, is a non-stop talker. It's just as well that no one can get a word in edgewise, because anyone with a different opinion is wrong. 

After someone reads their piece in her class, Roxanne exhaustively critiques it, picks it apart kindly and cruelly and when there is hardly anything left to say, she opens the floor to the rest of the class to comment. Only the very bravest contradicts anything Roxanne has said. 

Roxanne holds her classes in her home which is the kind of place, if you have to use the bathroom, you will wait until you get home.

Roxanne teaches writing, but she herself has not written anything in 25 years. 

Roxanne is a popular teacher. She has many repeat students and holds several workshops a year.

David Bester leads the course I'm in now. He hardly says a thing. He just gives us our "prompts" and tells us how long we have to write. He holds his sessions at 720 Bathurst in the Centre for Social Innovation Annex. We sit in the room named after June Callwood. There are lots of clean washrooms. 

The group, which has whittled itself down to 7 from the original 10, does its writing in class and David writes along with us. He reads his work out, too. 

David actually is a freelance writer. 

The feedback in David's class comes almost entirely from the participants, who are supposed to focus on what stands out for them as they listen to a writer read their work. I find this very difficult. Sometimes someone can read their whole piece and I will not have figured out what it is about. I am thankful that there is one person in the class who is both an avid listener and animated commenter. She takes up a lot of slack for the rest of us.

The differences in the instructors are notable but not significant. I've enjoyed both classes but not the fact that they are held after 7:00 p.m. on weeknights. Due to circumstances beyond my control I am going to miss the next two classes with David. There's just one left after that. And then I think I'll coast for a while and see what life is like without a writing class.

Thanks for reading!

Have great long weekend!

Karen