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

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

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












  

Self Portrait

Me in Berczy Park in front of half of "Jacob's Ladder": photo by A. Bates.

"Never felt more alive" is what people say at pivotal points.  It's how we find expression for the tremendous thing that has just happened to us. Women who have just squeezed another human from out of their bodies might say this. 

Of course, you don't have to have a baby or climb Everest or win at Wimbledon to be exquisitely aware of the astonishing notion that in the vast empty mass of the infinite universe you have consciousness, agency and senses. 

Feeling more alive than ever can come many ways, for example:

I was at a meeting officially hosted by something we call our internal audit team. It was supposed to be a workshop, but the questions shared just an hour before by the internal audit team were terrible. I knew they were terrible; my team knew they were terrible; the people there from a third party agency knew they were terrible. 

The internal audit people did not know they were terrible. 

It was too late to reschedule. There was no time to revise the questions. I had to save the meeting. Apologizing for my own inexperience in these matters (a very Canadian way to start an open assault), I said I thought the workshop questions were off the mark as drafted; could we use the time we had to collectively develop a better set. Everyone, including the supple internal audit crew, said "yes." 

Then we had, as they say in the business, "a good discussion." And I saved eleven people from wasting two hours (for a total of 22 person hours) on a poorly conceived and worse executed piece of crap of a workshop.

I never felt more alive.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Stay Woke

About 100 people are sitting, six to a table, in a cavernous room. They are participating in a workshop. A man and a woman stand at the front of the room. They are the facilitators.

The workshop is about privilege and power. The crowd is made up entirely of public servants, so the topic is something they know a bit about. This does not keep the facilitators from treating the crowd like they don't know anything.

A black, middle-aged woman in the audience raises her hand to ask a question about the definition of privilege projected on two large screens at the front of the room. The definition says privilege is "unearned and unasked for." She says, "I'm an assistant deputy minister and I am aware my privilege - but I worked to get where I am."

One of the facilitators assures the woman that she should not conflate "privilege" with "status." 

I wonder why not.

I also wonder what the point of the workshop is. Painfully earnest seminars on understanding ones privilege seem a bit out of step with the rest of the world, where privilege is staging its most recent comeback.

These days, the mentally ill are back to being crazy and twenty-six-year olds are appointed to plum positions they are not qualified to hold. After an anomalous period when women were in charge of some of Canada's provinces, the reins of power have been returned to the hands of their rightful owners.

I attended the workshop because I have lots of room in my calendar. - I also thought I might learn something, which I did: a new word, cisgender.

I'd heard the term before. It struck me as one of those words that doesn't connote its own meaning (like quotidian, for example) -- but was too lazy to look it up. Now I don't have to.

A couple of days after the workshop, I got an e-mail from the facilitators inviting me to another workshop, this time on anti-racism. I'm still mulling it over whether I'll go or not.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen


















  

Popular Politics

Detail from a painting by Dana Bhatti, a painter prominent in the 19th Century court of Maharaja Man Singh, part of the Treasures of a Desert Kingdom show at the Royal Ontario Museum 

I made an uncharacteristically substantial commitment to popular culture this past week. For example, I've hand-peeked my way through two seasons of Stranger Things (more about which later) and, because there was nothing else to watch and I could get the tickets for free, Bruce and I went to Late Night with Emma Thompson and Mindy Kaling.

Late Night's positive reviews helped me overcome my usual misgivings about going to see situation comedy movies. But, having seen the movie, I can say my misgivings were right. Emma Thompson will always be great, but the movie was not. Finding it hard to put my dissatisfaction into words, I took another look at the less positive reviews of Late Night and found one that summed up my feelings about the movie. This is by Louisa Moore writing for Screen Zealots:

...“Late Night,” [is] a disappointing, tepid film... It’s great that Amazon Studios took a chance on a comedy that conveys a minority woman’s point of view in a male-dominated world, but... the scene where Molly is hired on the spot by an older, white male simply because she’s brown-skinned, happens to be in his office, and can fill a diversity quota, is offensive.

The film wants desperately to be more relevant, witty, and meaningful than it actually is....The supposed insights are inauthentic and forced, and the characters are either under-written or outrageous caricatures..... Kaling and Thompson are well cast, but they have little chemistry. Everything about their relationship is off-putting at best and disingenuous at worst.

I went back to the positive reviews, too, and found in them an inclination to praise the film because of the strong female presence in its writing, direction and performances. 

Women are making inroads in the lucrative and culturally influential realm of popular movies. That's amazing. And they will well and truly have arrived when they are called out for their poor efforts as much as praised for their great ones.

Hurry Up and Wait

The Ontario legislature has been recessed until after the federal election.  The reason for this extended vacation has to do with the fact that the government worked through most of last summer. But, the timing is awkward, so assertions abound about how the Ontario conservatives want to free up their schedule to help Andrew Scheer win the federal election in the fall. Either that or stay out of the papers so as to not screw up Scheer's chances for a win, though I doubt the Toronto Star will support them in that plan.

Whatever the reason, there's not a lot going on at Queen's Park right now. Everyone who had been scrambling now has the mixed blessing of more time to actually think about what they are doing. 

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

  

Earthquake

From the Brian Jungen show at the AGO.
If you haven't been, you gotta go. It's brilliant.

Five weeks after I swore off sleep deprived Fridays, I'm back at another writing class. But this one's on Wednesday nights, so now Thursday will be the day I struggle to stay awake during mid-afternoon meetings (more than I do already). 

The format for this class is completely different from the other. We don't get homework assignments. We (there are 10 of us) get a "prompt" - such as "tell a story where the character hears a deafening noise" - and then we write for fifteen or twenty minutes. When we're done writing, we read, if we want to, what we have written. 

The rules are that those listening can remark on what stood out for them in what was read ... and that's it. No suggestions. No critiques ... which is humane given that the writing is just off the tops of our heads.

I attended the first class this past Wednesday. During the class there were three prompts. So the combined creative effort after two and a half hours was thirty hastily composed pieces, including one poem and a short essay on society and culture. 

The variety is remarkable - for example, the "deafening noise" prompt inspired stories about a lightning strike, an alien invasion, a plane crash, a bear attack, a shattered door, a rock concert and four more I can't remember, but they were all entirely different. Humans are amazing.

Heartbreak

A colleague at work spent Friday afternoon on the Internet, watching the path of a private jet flying from Los Angeles to Toronto. Rumour had it that the plane held the family of Kawhi Leonard, the Raptors MVP. They were coming to Toronto so they could be there when Kawhi announced he was going to sign with the Raptors. My colleague was spellbound by the prospect.

Sadly, the rumours weren't true.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

"Vienna": made from lawn chairs.