Is it Over? ... It Feels Like It's Over

Five days away from the city was all it took to end the pandemic for me.

I'm still wearing a mask in stores (and for four hours on the train back from Parry Sound) but I'm not staying the blazes home anymore. 

Also, we hugged our cottage hosts upon our arrival and again when we said goodbye. 

Proof that quartz is harder than granite.

Speaking of Parry Sound, if you're looking for an emblem of the decline of the northern economy, try this: Parry Sound once supported such freight and passenger traffic that it had two train stations, one for CPR and one for CN (now VIA). These days, both of these stations are derelict, but, they are the places where you step off the train from Toronto (the CPR station at 1 Avenue Road) and board the train to Toronto (the VIA station at 70 Church Street). The only trains that stop in Parry Sound, and only once a week, are the Canadian (Train #1) on its way to Vancouver and the Canadian (Train #2) on its way to Toronto.

I include the arcane details about the train station arrangements in the event that you ever decide to take VIA to Parry Sound. VIA does not provide this information on its website (but without it you can't book your ticket). I had to dig around online, talk to a VIA ticket agent and then dig around online some more before I had a clear take on how to both book the tickets and tell our hosts where to pick us up and drop us off.

***

Five days on Georgian Bay was a lovely change from the last year and a half. In the spirit of sharing, I offer the following:

Cottage sunset

Ever-present cottage spiders

A surprise guest: a Luna moth by our bunkie door

Thanks for reading!

One of these days I'll tell you about the 1997 trip to Peru!

Karen

As Promised ...

 

Water, trees ...  and rocks.

We're at a water access "cottage" - more like a Kennedy-esque compound - on Georgian Bay, half an hour north of Parry Sound.

The cottage has a kitchen the size of the main floor of our house. The "bunkies" would make a good home for a small family. 

So it's nice ...

The weather's grey. We'll leave the water sports for another day, and read books and play Scrabble instead.

Thanks for reading!

Karen

Lost to cottage lore: The meaning of
these enigmatic glyphs.

Right On Schedule

Blake House Pub, Jarvis Street, Toronto, 13 June 2021.
Ed and Judi Jewinski and Bruce

As predicted, in mid-June I sat on a patio with three friends. 

I want next to look forward to a haircut, but this moment feels a bit like the last time we let our guard down while a more transmissible COVID variant surged in the background. 

COVID delta, the airline you never want to fly on.

With my smattering of Internet-news-level knowledge of how viruses work, I find myself wondering if lockdowns, etc., aren't contributing to the emergence of these variants. You know, all the virus wants to do is reproduce. If its hosts are playing hard to get, then the virus will make itself harder to avoid.

Bruce, with a level of virus expertise to match my own, thinks we'll find equilibrium with COVID. Eventually more of us will get it, but fewer will die, so it will be more like the flu bugs that kill some people every year but don't drive countries to lock things down. 

Sooner or later we have to stop running from the virus. It’s proven itself adaptable. So are we. So let’s always wear masks in enclosed public spaces. Let's improve indoor ventilation in crowded workplaces and homes. Let's take special care to protect vulnerable people. And let’s give one another some space in line ups, at street corners and in restaurants. And everyone should get paid sick days so people with symptoms can stay home. 

Vacation Alert

We're headed to cottage country this week. If I can get my phone to link me to the Internet, there may be some mid-week posts featuring water and trees.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

The last time Bruce was
at the Blake House, 
20 March, 2021

Rage

Shoe memorial where Egerton Ryerson once stood,
Gould Street, Ryerson University Campus, June 7, 2021

I find comfort in piecing together rational explanations for upsetting or confusing things – like the Las Vegas massacre and the SNC-Lavalin controversy. Put in context, these events are easier to understand and the world seems less random.

But, it's hard to find comfort explaining the randomness of rage.

The counterintuitive finding of one study, for example, was that anger can be a good thing among humans. 

Under the right conditions, anger is a tool people use to launch necessary conversations that otherwise might not arise.

 

Human households use anger to clear up dissatisfaction among their ranks. You know how this works. Household occupant A does something that drives household occupant B crazy. The situation simmers and builds until B loses it. This precipitates a lively exchange, which makes A aware of the irritant. A promises to stop driving B crazy. A and B reach a new equilibrium.

While you could say that B could get the same result just by asking nicely, B might say that until they felt truly angry, they did not have the capacity to speak. 

The human-nature-based explanation for anger is that it can force a reckoning so that circumstances may improve. 

But not always. 

I can see how the rage displayed against the statue of Egerton Ryerson was an outburst in search of a solution. 

First Nations in Canada want redress for genocidal policies and they want respect. On June 6, some of them felt the way to start the conversation was to destroy a statue that no one wants replaced.The protest was peaceful. There were no arrests. No one was hurt. 

Harder to fit into the study's findings is the rage displayed against a Muslim family out for an afternoon walk the day after Ryerson’s statue’s head was thrown into Lake Ontario. 

The man behind the wheel wasn’t looking to start a conversation. The murder of innocents was his point. 

In the wake of the London tragedy, there have been a lot of public statements and calls to action, even by those who have in the past, out of political expedience, courted bigotry. 

We should do everything we can. 

We should call out Islamophobia as hate speech. We should call the attack an act of terror. We should seek out and destroy the sources of online hate. And we should amp up mental health resources so families can read the signs and seek help before their children decide their only redress is to become a mass murderer. 

Thanks for reading.

Karen

 

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