Happy New Year

2020 was the cause of such generally recognized consternation (as opposed to locally recognized consternation... see Syria), that its last day deserves some special mention.

Everyone seems glad that it's over, as if, somehow, everything will be different on January 1, 2021.

The whole slice of humanity included in "everyone" can be forgiven their understandable desire to load all their hopes and dreams into 2021. And if that doesn't work out, there's always 2022. 

***

Water, Three Ways

Here are some shots I took on the Leslie Street Spit on 27 December 2020.

Upside down icicles by the pedestrian bridge

Droplets decorating the already beautiful head of a male mallard

Rebar threaded with soft-cornered brick beads and snarling with dragon's tooth icicles

Thanks for reading!

See you (I hope) next year!

Karen

My favourite recent holiday
tradition. Tortiere du shack. If 
you like tortiere, you
really gotta try the recipe.

It's the End of the Year as We Know It

Christmas day dumped an attractive amount of snow on Toronto. My Facebook and Instagram feeds were full of shots just like the one above.

In the run up to the holiday lockdown, frenzied future self-isolators cleaned off grocery store shelves just like it was March 2020.

Street art on University Avenue complained that even record vacancy rates couldn't make up for income lost to the pandemic.

Most of the holiday messages I received mixed acknowledgements of how bad 2020 was with hopes that the coming year will be better. 

With everything that we know for certain is coming...

• the worst days of the pandemic
• the final death throes of the Trump administration
• a new, improved COVID variant
• Venom 2

... I think it's most appropriate to say...

Brace yourself for 2021!

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

Karen

Keep yer distance: lots of shoppers,
Loblaws Maple Leaf Gardens

Solstice 2020

Allan Gardens Christmas 2016

Allan Gardens Christmas 2014

Allan Gardens Christmas 2011

Allan Gardens Christmas 2018

Allan Gardens Christmas 2017

Allan Gardens Christmas 2019

On the shortest day, in the dead of winter before there was Christmas, people loaded what food they had on the table, lit all the torches, came together and defied the long night with celebration. 

It worked: the darkness receded, the days warmed, spring came.

Whipping darkness with joy is humanity’s best trick, even better than turning paper into money, words into song, plant sap and cow’s milk into ice cream. 

The genius of joy is the trick up your sleeve this dead of winter, the real magic of the holiday.

***

For everyone on my Christmas card list, the passage above should ring familiar. 

For everyone seeing it for the first time, it's my heartfelt wish for you on the shortest day of the longest year in living memory.

Have a safe and happy holiday!

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Christmas 1967

Not that Kind of Woke

Found in the Allan Gardens: someone shared their good news.

Monsters under the bed were not a problem when I was a kid. I'd heard of the bogeyman, but never met him. I slept like a stone my entire childhood. My sleep was so profound that sometimes I'd go for a walk while out like a light. 

Many years later, I joked that no one over 40 sleeps through the night. I don't remember when I stopped being able to land an uninterrupted sleep, but, for 'way more years than I was an effortlessly slumbering child, I've had the Wake Up Monster (WUM) living under my bed.

I have made sacrifices in an attempt to appease the WUM. I have sworn off caffeine. I don't even eat chocolate anymore. 

But the WUM's more like a bossy lifestyle coach than a volcano god. It wants me to exercise regularly, take yoga classes, meditate and avoid alcohol. 

No matter what I do, the WUM reaches out every night to wake me up. A hot flash. An ear worm. A full bladder. All of the above.

Some nights I get back to sleep; some nights I don't.

I imagine the WUM looks like Mike Wazowski in Monsters Inc. The one wakeful eye seems appropriate.

Because I'm retired, sleepless nights don't really matter, and, these days, any additional company at all, even in the form of an imaginary pest, is welcome.

The Rest of Our Lives

In the cold, dark, midwinter Toronto lockdown, Bruce and I do two things. We go shopping for food once a week; for the rest of the week, we eat that food.

Thanks for reading!

Stay safe and warm!

Karen  

Blade Runner and the Fermi Paradox

 

People like to imagine that there are thousands of worlds in the universe with beings on them that, like us, like to travel, trade goods and wage wars. At least that's one explanation for the popularity of Star Wars. People cling to this fanciful notion - the same way they cling to many others - despite growing certainty that it cannot possibly be true.

Long ago in one of the e-mails that preceded this blog, I considered the Fermi Paradox, which is the question "Where is everyone?" in a universe with hundreds of billions of stars and ten times that many planets. I reacted then to an article I'd read that said the Fermi paradox "proved" that societies capable of space travel destroy themselves before they develop the technology to travel to the stars (because, just like us, they would want to do that). 

I proposed some other "proofs": interstellar travel is not and never will be possible; or, aliens have found us and decided to leave us alone; or, still my favourite, giant space spiders.

Clever thinkers in the meantime have added to the already long odds of the enormity of space and time, the insane rarity of the evolution of space-travelling beings. Think about it this way: we imagine ourselves to be the most intelligent species ever, yet we've barely figured out how to get to the moon. 

It's hard to accept the evidence of our own eyes, but the Fermi Paradox is no more a paradox than "Where are all the unicorns?": there are no space travelling beings because, so far as we will ever be able to tell, they don't exist. 

Which brings me to Blade Runner.

Released in 1982, based on a story published in 1968, and imagining the world in 2019, Blade Runner mashes together a retro, hard-boiled dick sensibility with a brutalist Pacific rim aesthetic. I watched it last night. 

In 1982, it was possible to imagine that by 2019 there'd be flying cars and mass-produced artificial life, plus glow-handle umbrellas and stores that sell eyeballs. But it was not possible in 1982 to imagine that by 2019 no one would smoke indoors. Interior shots through veils of smoke make the movie look dated even more than its DOS-based computers. 

Because of these and other inescapable limitations wrought by time and space, the movie has transformed over the years from the vision of a dystopian future to a kind of parallel reality: Earth if you rewound the tape, played it back and got a different result.

Which brings me back to Fermi's putative paradox. Stephen J. Gould said in Wonderful Life (a study of the Burgess Shale fossils) that the results of evolution are improbable. If you rewound the tape of life on Earth and played it again, you would not get the same result. You might not even get humans. 

Our existence, let alone our intelligence, is a fluke the size of the universe. People looking for a source of wonder could just consider the fact that we are here at all. And anyone feeling alone in the universe should watch My Octopus Teacher.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Lockdown Miscellany

  

  

The Allan Gardens greenhouse, normally decked out in holiday finery this time of year, is closed for the duration. It will reopen with everything else (with luck) on the 21st of December, but, will then swarm with COVID-breathing humans, so, please accept the above shots of the backyard as my tribute to the season. Luckily we had some snow and, so far, the squirrels have not chewed through the decorations.  

What I Gave Up For The Lockdown

It was actually before Ford categorically admitted for the Nth time with the lockdown that he has no clue what he is doing that I decided to give up the news. I cancelled my subscriptions to the Washington Post, the daily news aggregator WTFJHT and to the several podcasts I listened to each day. Hysteria masquerading as news about the US election and the pandemic was making me crazy. Now I keep a healthy distance between me and most of the chatter, even the late night comics.  

I've also given up my FitBit, the bossy little friend that's been wearing a dent in my right wrist for more than two years. The gadget's getting long in the tooth. A push notification recently told me that I'd need to buy a new one if I wanted the latest innovation in more-than-I-want-to-know about myself. But it's not the 'Bit's planned obsolescence that made me take it off. It's the cheap-ass wrist bands. The one that shipped with the unit broke about a year after I bought it. The replacement band broke in less than six months. I'd kept and repaired the original band, so I used that next. It broke this past week. Then there's the fact that, after ten months of practically identical days, there's nothing the 'Bit can tell me that I don't already know. 

Book Plug

A couple of weeks ago, Bruce and I attended a friend's Zoomed book launch party. Jamie Dopp, whom Bruce has known since childhood and I've known since university, just published Driving Lessons, a lightly fictionalized memoir of coming of age in Waterloo, Ontario. The protagonist's perspective is, of necessity, that of a brattish boy, so some bits may rankle, but it's a good, solidly Canadian read. There's even a loving description of a game of road hockey.   

Why the Lockdown May Not Work

Public health messaging and Christmas marketing campaigns are equal and opposite forces at work this holiday season. Everybody's best friend, Galen Weston, on the one hand urges social distancing etc., in Loblaw stores and, on the other, promotes purchases for large festive gatherings. And then there's this:

The first time I saw a truck like this 'way back in April, it was one of those previously non-ironic signs and advertisements. Now it's an incitement to anti-social behaviour.

Finally ... This

... in someone's window on Winchester Street. 

All that's missing is "U."

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Molson's Revisited

As Canadian as a red canoe: by HTO park, Toronto Waterfront, March 27, 2020

The perennial Canadian pastime of distinguishing ourselves from Americans has become more apparent to me these days.

For example, I took notice when Torontonians corralled an errant racoon with a bunch of leaf-filled yard waste bags, and BlogTO described it as a "Canadian" solution.

It may be no surprise that Canadians might want to differentiate themselves right now from the almost 74 million Americans who said they were ready for four more years of Donald Trump. I know I do.

So, along with agreeing that Canadians are resourceful and humane and have defined themselves in the past in beer commercials, I'd like to share some impressions that arose as I sat through an hour long web call with Margaret Atwood this past week.

The call itself was a joint project of the Canadian Writer's Union - of which I am not a member because I have not yet been paid even a red cent for anything I have written - and its British counterpart, the Society of Authors. The chat with Atwood was one of SoA's ten-part series of tea time conversations (not making this up) with various writers of English.

Atwood's massive fame notwithstanding, the host of the show asked her the same questions as all the other authors. So Atwood gave responses to, "can you show us your writing space and talk about your writing routine" and "what do you do with all your rough drafts," among other questions.

In response to the first, Atwood, seated in a room in her Toronto home, showed the 200 people on the call the desktop Mac she writes on, the feathers she's trying to make into pens, and her bookshelf with volumes of Canadian and international poetry, as well as books on palmistry and astrology, two abiding interests of hers.

In response to the second, she said, "I'm lucky because here in Toronto they have a handy thing, the Fisher Rare Book Library. I donate my old drafts and they are happy to have the stuff. I know I can find things there because they won't lose it and are taking care of it."

Atwood also talked about her preoccupation with totalitarian regimes, having been born in 1939 on the cusp of the second world war, the influence of George Orwell on her own writing and her certainty that if we don't fix climate change, we are as done as the mastodon, whose gigantism, she learned, preceded its extinction. 

When asked about Canadian literature, Atwood answered that you can find certain hallmark themes in the great literature of nations. For example, America's hallmark theme is money (think The Great Gatsby) and, when she wrote about Canadian literature in the 70's, Canada's was survival. She said she'd have to think a lot before she could say what Canada's hallmark theme is now.

When asked if she'd given thought to stopping writing, she said, "I trust my editors will tell me when I've lost it." She gave as an example of losing it Tennyson's late period poem Happy, (about a woman who scolds her husband, so he leaves on the Crusades, contracts leprosy in the Holy Land and brings the disease home with him; the woman sees this is all her fault and the poem closes with her commitment to be happy with her leper husband).

Atwood managed to insert a couple of product plugs - for Topsy Farms wool blankets (best for keeping warm in the back yard for wintertime COVID visits) and for Gil Adamson one of Anansi Press's award-winning authors. 

All of this came with insouciance and warmth from one of the world's most famous authors.

Other facts about Atwood shared on the call: she was instrumental in the 70's in creating the Canadian Writer's Union and Anansi Press so that Canadian authors could make a better living and have someone who would publish their work.

So there's a Canadian for you - a leader championing the greater good in her community, a hard-working senior citizen sceptical of authoritarianism, a writer with millions of fans around the globe who gamely sits herself down for an hour to have a cosy chat with a small handful of people, and whose one nod to how different she is from the rest of us is she has a rare book library taking care of her discarded drafts.

I imagine she'd know what to do with a stray raccoon, too. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great locked down week!

Karen

Photo credit: Junk Boat Travels

Back to Lockdown

Musta been some COVID party: one of two stacks of wine boxes by the curb
in front of an apartment building on Isabella Street. 

Bruce and I took a walk yesterday to make the most of what might be the last of the nice weather. We started the walk around 3:00 p.m., so the Premier had not yet announced what Ontario was going to do next about the pandemic.

We made our way north to Rosedale, along Glen Road, through Chorley Park, and down onto the Belt Line. We climbed back up to street level at Heath Street. Our long term plan was to take the subway from St. Clair station back downtown.

But first, we stopped at a local pub for a beer. Turns out the fine weather is not the only thing we'll be seeing the last of. Just as we left the tented patio, after we'd fortified ourselves with some pints of Guinness, we heard people talking about the lockdown like it was a coming storm.

When we got home, I looked on line. Because people have been gathering at weddings and home parties to spread the virus, Ontario is closing retail stores, restricting the numbers of people inside of grocery stores and prohibiting the consumption of food and drink on outdoor patios.

Makes sense to me.

The Sixty-Four-Year-Old Man and the Genie, Part Two

A sixty-six-year-old man was cleaning out the basement of his family's home. His wife of forty-two years and he were going to sell the place, downsize and move to the west coast where their children and grandchildren lived.

He'd already been at his task for the best part of a week. Every box he opened, every corner he searched, brought another flood of memories. It was slow work, but he wasn't in a rush. He'd retired two years ago. Since then, each day was better than the one before.

His health was good. He and his wife were as happy together as they had ever been. Their children were genuinely pleased their parents were going to move close to them. Everyone was looking forward to that.

The SSYO man had one last dark corner to clean. Digging through piles of stuff carelessly heaped against the wall, he found an old box, like a strong box, but the metal was shiny and its surface was etched with odd-looking marks. He brushed the surface with his hand to remove some dust.

WHAM! A blow out of nowhere knocked the box out of his hand and made the SSYO man fall back flat on his ass. Stacks of old magazines and board games broke his fall.

“Time's up” said a mild voice.

* * *

I never did find the second part of the story as I wrote it ten years ago, but I recall it landed in the same general vicinity as the story above. The sixty-four-year-old man chose happiness, of course.

Thanks for reading!

Stay safe!

Karen

$14.95 a bottle at the LCBO

Devolution

This seemed reasonable in late June when this signage first went up. Probably also worth mentioning: this will be the fourth restaurant to try and make a go of it on this spot at the corner of Bay and Grosvenor, at the base of a fifty-storey condo (strata for my readers in BC) built about five years ago.

Things are going sufficiently badly (the pandemic; the election; the end of the world as we know it) that I feel at a loss for words, which is strange for me, I know.

Rather than force the issue, here's something I wrote long ago. 

It's the first half of a two-part story. With any luck, by next week I'll have found the second half.

The Tale of the Sixty-Four-Year-Old Man and the Genie

A sixty-four-year-old man was cleaning out his basement one day. He and his wife of forty years were separated and in the process of being divorced. They agreed in their most recent amicable but sad conversation that they should sell the matrimonial home and split the proceeds. He was cleaning the basement to prepare the house to be put on the market.

    In a dark corner where he was sure he’d not been for twenty years, he found an old box, like a strong box, but the metal was shiny and its surface was etched with odd-looking marks. He brushed the surface with his hand to remove some dust.

    WHAM! A blow out of nowhere knocked the box out of his hand and made the SFYO man fall back flat on his ass. Stacks of old magazines and board games broke his fall.

    “What up?” said a mild voice.

    “Who’s there?” said the SFYO man.

    “You called me,” said the voice, “Tell me who you are.”

    It occurred to the SFYO man that he was in the presence of a magical being.

    “Are you going to grant me three wishes?” he asked.

    “Not quite,” said the voice, which the SFYO man could now see belonged to an average-looking person wearing a pair of denim pants, a white t-shirt and running shoes. The genie could have been one of the SFYO man’s students. “I’m going to give you three options.”

    “Oh,” said the SFYO man, a little disappointed as well as confused. “What are my options?”

    “You can live for two more years in perfect happiness. Or, you can live ten more years exactly as you are now. Or, you can live forty more years in sickness and in pain but also with great wealth.”

    “I don’t suppose I can pass on making a choice at all?” 

    “No,” said the genie. “You woke me up; you must choose.”

    “How much time do I have?”

    “Decide now.”

    The SFYO man mulled over his options. The third was a puzzle: 40 years in sickness and pain sounded awful but great wealth could buy a lot of pain killers and health care. The SFYO man had often wondered whether or not he would live to see seventy. Both his parents passed in their mid-sixties and two of his older siblings were already dead. Heart disease ran in the family. So forty more years would be a bonanza. It wouldn’t hurt that he’d be rich, too.

    Ten more years of life sounded OK, especially without sickness and pain. But if he had to spend it all in his current state, that was less OK. A question occurred to him.

    “Is the length of time guaranteed? If I choose the second, does that mean nothing will be able to kill me for ten years?  What if I try to commit suicide?”

    “The length of time is guaranteed. You won’t be able to kill yourself,” replied the genie. 

    “Decide,” the genie added.

    The SFYO man wondered if he could bear ten more years as he was. His wife had left him. His kids never talked to him. Every year, his students seemed more bizarre. He had not felt happy for a very long time. But ten more years, guaranteed. Maybe he could outlive his remaining brother and sister.

    As for the first option, perfect happiness sounded great, but two years! That was so short! It seemed to him these days that years flew by in the same time summer afternoons used to take when he was a kid. And he could not imagine what perfect happiness was.

    “Decide,” said the genie.

***

I wrote that ten years ago, when 64 seemed very far away ...

Thanks for reading!

Stay home, wash your hands, wear your mask, keep your distance!

Karen

They're ba-a-a-ck. Lineups
return to Women's College Hospital 

Anything But The Election

Bruce with old oven. So unhappy

Because of the
wrench, you see

 

Bruce with new oven. No wrench! So happy! 

Toaster Oven News 

The Kitchenaid toaster oven we've had for the past I'm going to say fifteen years finally blew a knob - the one that sets the elements to "broil", "toast", "bake" and "warm."

After a day of turning the control with a wrench, we felt we'd suffered enough. I searched on line for a toaster oven without digital controls (the reason, I am sure, for the longevity of the old one), found a Hamilton Beach model for pretty much the same price I paid for the Kitchenaid fifteen years ago and ordered that from something called Cookstore, which along with sending our new counter appliance with dispatch, is 100% Canadian.*

Heart Surgery News

My brother-in-law, the one who I can't stop talking about in this blog, was ordered by his doctor to go to the hospital late last week. He's had for the past I'm going to say twenty two years an artificial valve in his heart that finally - ten years past its best before date - was showing signs of failure. After several days of observation while (I imagine) the hospital searched on line for a new valve that worked as well and was pretty much the same price as the old one, the doctors dropped by to tell him his surgery was scheduled for Friday - that is to say, yesterday. His operation went well. He's recuperating in hospital for the next seven days, then at home for the next three to six months.

Other Health News

My sniffles have all but dissipated. Thanks to those readers who wished me well and cheered me up with pictures of their dog. To celebrate my return to health, I've restarted my daily walks, which I missed, and my daily rounds on the step treader, which I did not.

Thanks for reading! 

Have a great week!

Karen

Good advice, end of May 2020.
Still seems relevant.

*Also delivered this week: a bed frame from IKEA, a mattress from ENDY, homemade masks from my sister Carol, a box to send back my old iPad for a trade-in, several books on the writing craft, sheets for that new bed and "five pounds" of letters I wrote 30 years ago to friends who have recently needed to downsize. Returning my letters made a sizeable contribution to that task. The most remarkable thing about this frenzy of spending, shipping and receiving: not a single item came from or by way of Amazon.com.  

Fatigue

Beltline hillside four ways

We're at the point where "pandemic fatigue" has replaced "unprecedented times" as the dominant cliched phrase in media reports about the Coronavirus.

Public health policy hoped in the early days of the pandemic to frighten people into supporting economy-wide lock downs and severe restrictions on meeting in groups.

That worked for a while. Then, as is so frequently the case (see smoking, speeding and needle drugs), the fear wore off. 

"Unprecedented" is a poor way to describe something that has happened to humans over and over again.  And "fatigue" hardly begins to describe where we are now. Rather than being tired of the pandemic, people don't seem to be able to get enough of it. 

The urge to throw weddings and family gatherings is, evidently, irresistible. The growing case numbers - twice and three times what they were when we were in lock down in April, May and June - do not seem to be scaring anyone but the Democratic party in the US, and, as always, the health scientists who wish they could protect us from ourselves.

The worst parts of the pandemic, along with the sorrows of great illness and unnecessary death, are the toll on health care workers and on the health system in general, causing delays in treatment for other ailments.

There's no easy way through this. 

As for me, I'm sitting here with a slight sore throat, a few sniffles and a clear social calendar because I have cancelled everything I was going to do in person next week.

Readers may recall my death-defying meal from my last post. That might be where I picked this bug up. Now that I have it, I resolve not to share it. My symptoms are mild. If they get worse, I'll get tested. 

Thanks for reading!

Happy Hallowe'en!

Karen

Seen on a transit stop community
bulletin board, Sherbourne Street

 

People Who Need People

No such thing as too many pumpkins. Front step in Cabbagetown.

Last night, I and about eighty other people had the exact same idea: we all wanted to eat dinner and drink a beer on a patio for possibly the last time this year.

Bruce and I and a friend sat at a socially distanced table on the patio in front of Blake House, one of the last grand mansions on Jarvis Street, a relic of the time before Jarvis became a barely habitable four-lane highway cutting from the tony homes of Rosedale to the high rise office towers downtown.

We wore our masks as we waited in line for a table to be ready, but, like everyone else except the wait staff, took them off when we sat down. For the first time this year, I had to strain to hear our conversation because of the roar of the crowd around us.

It dawned on me that I was not 100% comfortable. The situation was higher risk than anything we'd done since the first days of the lock down. These were the complicated thoughts that went through my head:

• I'm glad to be giving the restaurant some business before the winter comes and their income stream is reduced to take out orders
• I'm happy to be eating a tasty meal I did not prepare myself and drinking a draught beer I couldn't pour at home
• It's nice to see so many people
• I wonder if any of them has COVID
• We're outdoors, but there's not much of a breeze and we're under an awning and everyone's laughing and talking loudly
• Case numbers are higher now than they have ever been, so the chances are good that someone here is a loaded virus gun
• But even with the case numbers, hardly anyone gets COVID
• And even with the case numbers, all these people - some of them with small children and some of them elderly - seem prepared to take the risk
• Maybe we put millions of people out of work and drove thousands of businesses into the ground for no good reason
• I'm still not going to hang around here any longer than necessary
• There are still people waiting for a table
• There's still a pandemic

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

 

We Don't Need Another Hero

Allan Gardens chrysanthemums

Some of my readers know that I'm writing more than just the mini-memoirs that make their way onto this blog every week. There's a book in the works, some short stories and maybe a play.

To help me with these projects, I've been reading something called My Story Can Beat Up Your Story, a book better than its title that provides a by-the-numbers breakdown of screenplay writing. The formula goes in part like this: your sympathetic hero works her way through a series of increasingly difficult obstacles as she progresses through four stages of character type: the orphan, the wanderer, the warrior, the martyr.

You may be thinking now about the Harry Potter books, or The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The movie exemplum of this structure is the first Star Wars movie. Luke Skywalker is orphaned, joins up with Obi Wan to wander, fights the Empire, and willingly risks his life to destroy the Death Star. 

There. Now you don't have to buy the book.

I found an ad in the back of My Story Can Beat Up Your Story for Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey, a venerable standard textbook in screenplay writing classes that does the same thing as the other book, but also cribs from Joseph Campbell's The Hero With a Thousand Faces. I'm reading it now.

Both these books are good guides for thinking about what drives a story (hint: it's the characters), what happens next (hint: it needs to be more challenging than what's happened before) and what are all the other characters doing (no hint; I haven't read that far in Vogler).

So even though I'm not writing a screenplay ... screenplays are old hat by the way; now everyone's doing one hour pilots for Netflix ... it's useful to have these concepts in my head as I write the book and the short stories.

After these are done, I'll try the one hour pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen