Saturday Morning at the AGO

One week ago today my friend Sylvia and I visited the Art Gallery of Ontario to see the Florine Stettheimer show before it closed the next day.

Nothing I could write would top the New York Times' gushing review of the show, which you can find here. 

From a less reverential perspective, I thought the pictures were charming, fun, sometimes complex in their composition and wilfully primitive, as if Grandma Moses went to Fifth Avenue. They seemed a window on a world of privilege, vast wealth and character untested by any of life's harder lessons. 

Shopping frenzy: spring sale at the favourite dress shop.

Florine liked to put her dog in her paintings.

Detail from Florine's self-described masterpiece: herself, her sisters and her mother high above Manhattan.

Detail from self-portrait.

After we saw everything there was to be seen by Florine, we wandered around the galleries for a while. 

One of a series of large panels in a room on the second floor.

Vast mural, dots of acrylic paint on black ground, simulating bead work. 

Wolves prowled among the post-modern art.

Two hours of gawking at pictures builds an appetite. Sylvia and I went to the AGO Bistro, which used to be Frank's. 

My lunch, pasta carbonara; yummy.

Sylvia's Za'atar-Roasted Portobello

Thanks for reading!

Karen

All Grown Up Now

Paul and Hilda Girdlestone, October 12 2008

In my late twenties, some time after my father had died, I was thinking about my favourite thing, me. I was thinking about success and accomplishment and doing things I was supposed to do. It came to me then that my greatest motivator to that point in my life had been to please my elders - my parents and one or two aunts and uncles, such as my Aunt Betty.

Then I wondered what would I do when they had all passed away. What would motivate me to be a better person then?

I imagine at that moment I decided I needed to find another reason to make me try harder, but I don't think I completely shook my small child's strategy for success in life.

As predicted, in a long line stretching from August 1985 when my father died, to this past week in January 2017, when my mother's sister, Hilda, died, each of the people in my life ahead of me on the timeline has shed their mortal coil and left me one less guide.

With Hilda's passing, I can no longer lay claim to having living aunts or uncles. 

Hilda's son, my cousin Paul Girdlestone, reads this blog. 

Paul lost his older sister and brother long ago, and his dad in 2000. Paul and his mom were a dedicated pair for the past seventeen plus years. I took the photo in today's post over the Thanksgiving weekend in Winnipeg in 2008. I had always intended to visit Winnipeg again, but I didn't.

After the pain of loss comes the resolve of solitude so that even when the ones we looked up to and loved and cared for are gone we still have the guidance they gave us. Those gifts remain.

My deepest condolences, Paul.

Thanks for reading.

Karen

Down Time

Late afternoon light: Lake Maggiore, Italy

Bruce's Eye

Bruce's recovery from eye surgery is progressing nicely. He doesn't have to hold his head like a drinking bird stuck in mid-sip anymore and sight is, ever so slowly, returning to the eye.

Rerun

This is the week we were to have been in Portugal. As we didn't go for the very good reason that Bruce couldn't fly, I've got nothin'.

Instead I offer for your reading pleasure this story from the fall of 2008 I released under the title 40,000 Car Crashes.  

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This Saturday a.m. was a perfect autumn morning. The sky was clear blue. The sun warmed the chill edge off the gentle breeze. The trees in Allan Gardens were a brilliant mix of gold, orange, red and stalwart unchanged green. I walked through the gardens on my way to shop on Church Street. I had company coming for lunch and was thinking happy thoughts about what I was going to buy to feed my guests. I had just come out of the dappled shade of the north west end of the park and was walking toward the intersection of Carlton and Jarvis Streets.

A small red car westbound on Carlton didn’t seem to notice the red light and T-boned at high speed a southbound grey van half-way through a left hand turn in the middle of the intersection. There was a horrible bang and a gigantic splash of pulverized car bits that caught the early morning sun and made a glorious aura around the shocking sight. Hit with such force, the grey van bounced out of the intersection and slammed into one or more cars on the eastbound side of Carlton.

“Oh my god!” I said, a time or two, not really adding much. 

There were quite a few people at the intersection (mercifully, there were no pedestrians in the middle of the mayhem) most of whom had cell phones and were already calling for help.  The rest were checking on the health of the people in the vehicles.

The fellow in the red car, the one who’d caused this mess, was stunned but unbloodied – his seat belt was on; his air bags deployed – and was sitting in the warm embrace of shock in his vehicle that was 50% shorter than it had been mere moments before. The front end wasn’t just smashed; it was practically atomized by the force of the collision.

There was nothing I could do, so I went and did my shopping.

Half a block from the terrible, horrible scene, the world was still bright and sunny and every person I saw was untouched, unconcerned and unaware of the awfulness less than 100 metres away. 

I, on the other hand, was really badly shaken. As I walked away from the scene, I wasn’t sure that I wouldn’t burst into tears. I felt I needed to hold my head. I heard sirens before I got to the store and I hoped the people in the vehicles would be OK.

Twenty minutes later, I returned home the way I came so I could walk back into the scene of the accident. All the people in the vehicles had been taken away. Just the ruined cars remained to snarl traffic and impede the progress of streetcars. Firemen had spread sand on the street to trap gasoline from someone’s shattered gas tank.   

I wondered if there had been other witnesses who had really seen how it happened.  All you have to do is look away for half a second and you miss things like this – they happen so fast. I really had seen the whole thing. At least I was very sure who had been at fault.

So, I approached a policeman and told him what I saw.  I gave him my name and phone number. I was afraid I was going to have to stay, or “go downtown” like they do on the TV shows and not be able to feed my guests. But he just said thanks and let me go on my way.

I’ve seen at least 40,000 car crashes on TV and in movies and, so I’ve heard, your brain doesn’t really distinguish between the make believe and the real.

Yes it does.

Drive careful.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Dumb Luck

More Queen's Park art: Niagara Falls, MacDonald Block, southwest corner, second floor.

Look at all the happy people about to toss themselves over the edge.

Last week I shared a story featuring some bad luck and some good.

This got me thinking about luck in general. 

I found a definition on the Internet: 

"the force that seems to operate for good or ill in a person's life, as in shaping circumstances, events, or opportunities."

Thinking of lucky people also got me thinking about how fortunate a person can be if they are physically beautiful. 

The internet gave me this definition of beauty: 

"the quality present in a thing or person that gives intense pleasure or deep satisfaction to the mind, either perceived by the senses - such as shape, color, or sound; a meaningful design or pattern - or an intangible characteristic, such as a personality in which high spiritual qualities are manifest."

And this got me thinking about another quality people have that makes them get ahead in life: intelligence. 

"having good understanding or a high mental capacity; quick to comprehend, as persons or animals: displaying or characterized by quickness of understanding, sound thought, or good judgment."

All this made me wonder what would be the most fundamental to success? Luck, beauty or brains?

Ambition, determination and perseverance would also matter, as would qualities such as talent and natural abilities that enable success.

Only a handful of humans are all three of lucky, beautiful and smart. Think Amal Alamuddin.

The next best combination is to be beautiful and lucky. Think Beyonce.

If you're smart and lucky, then you're Chris Hadfield.

But, if you have none of luck, beauty or brains, then hard work, ambition and perseverance can carry you a long way, as in, the harder you work, the luckier you get.

If you have talent and you have the drive, you can achieve greatness. Think Usain Bolt. 

People with drive but no talent can spend a lot of time failing to succeed. Think of Madonna's acting career.

Without ambition or perseverance, neither talent nor natural ability will do anything for you. Think of that guy you knew in high school who seemed so great but who never did anything with his life.

All things considered, I think the one thing that sends people into the stratosphere of fame and influence is luck, as in lucky enough to marry or be born into a royal family. 

Or lucky enough to win a presidential election you had every intention of losing.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Rare Luck

Holiday Classics: felled by food.
Ian and Marianne Brown after Thanksgiving dinner, 2010.

On Sunday, December 17, while driving home from visiting with his father in Kitchener, Bruce felt something was wrong with his right eye.

Assuming his prosthetic lens -- installed years ago to treat cataracts -- needed some stray protein scrubbed off, Bruce made an appointment with his doctor at the Kensington Eye Clinic.

"Nope," said the eye doc, "What you got I can't fix." 

He sent Bruce to see another eye doc, who declared Bruce's retina badly torn.

The new eye guy, Dr. Yan, put a small bubble of gas in Bruce's eye, told him to stay home and hold his head so that the bubble floated to the back of his eye (think of how your head sits in a massage chair) and come back on Friday.

On Friday the 22nd, Bruce got the full vitrectomy treatment, where you voluntarily let a person stick a needle in your eye and suck out some of the viscous goo in there so as to make room for an even bigger bubble of gas. In case you're wondering, the gas is propane. It is nonreactive and will slowly absorb into the body, so the bubble dissipates without further surgical intervention.

But you can't fly with a bubble of gas in your eye.

This was sad for us in that we had planned, and I had already paid for in full, a week away in Lisbon from January 14-21.

I hadn't gotten insurance, so was prepared to take the 50% penalty for cancellation three weeks before departure. But fortune intervened. 

On December 20, I got an e-mail from Air Transat saying they were very sorry but they needed to cruelly snatch away the Club Seats I'd booked for the return flight. 

They gave me three options: fly economy and take the refund for the downgraded seats; change the dates; cancel for full refund. 

Sweet.

Better still, when Bruce went back to the eye doc between Christmas and New Years, the doc declared the retina reattached. 

Bruce needs to take 4 (!) weeks off of work and continue to hold his head so the bubble stays at the back of his eyeball.

Same as with my hip replacement, the surgery fixed the problem almost right away. The long recovery is from the procedure.

Thanks for reading!

Stay warm!

Karen

Notice

In my 'hood, every other block or so, you see signs like the one above. This particular sign is at the intersection of Carlton and Yonge Streets, on the site of a building with a distinctive mid-century-era facade since obscured by advertising. You can see it next to the brightly illuminated Toronto Hydro building in the photo below, taken in February/March 1967.

The new 73-storey structure is going up across Yonge Street from another giant tower currently under construction and is one block north of the newly-built Aura tower, which is, for the time being, the tallest residential condominium in Toronto. That will change when a 96-storey tower, kitty corner to the Aura at the intersection of Yonge and Gerrard, is built. There's also a new tower going up one block north of the 73-storey structure, and another a block north of that. A seventh towering monolith is slated for development just north of the one currently under construction across the street from 2 Carlton. 

If each of these new towers holds about twelve hundred  people, that's 8,400 new people added to a four-block stretch of Yonge Street.

If all these people want to get around by car, the streets may get a bit congested. And that may explain the surmise in the sign below, that, even though only 2% of Torontonians currently ride their bike or walk to work, all of that is about to change.

Also Noticed

Early one Saturday morning, on my way to the gym, I saw this on the steps leading to the courtyard of the condo complex we live in.

Leaving behind something like a hidden object puzzle (can you find the sock, the hairbrush, the apple, the five syringes?), a local had strewn the contents of their bag, and their bag, on the steps.

This is not trash. People don't pick up litter in my neighbourhood, but by the time I returned home, all the pieces, and the bag, were gone. 

Thanks for reading!

Happy New Year!

Karen




  

Joy

I think I was in the Allan Gardens when I heard two people wish one another a “Happy December," an interesting avoidance of the whole denominational aspect of what people are celebrating this time of year.

I was definitely in the Allan Gardens, along with dozens if not hundreds of others, when I enjoyed the seasonal display in the fine old greenhouse.

On that day, through some arrangement of Toronto Parks and Recreation (I imagine) people from all over the city who had come to see the greenhouse could also take a sleigh ride through the unsnowy park.

Two draught horses and a grumpy driver with a wagon full of Muslim women having the time of their lives.

So here’s my version of “Happy December’

"May this season bring you the joy you’d feel on the very first sleigh ride of your life."

Have a Happy New Year!

Karen