Still Winter

Looking out my back door: the view two weeks ago, before the rains fell.

The Gym v. Yoga

For all the months since my hip surgery in August 2016, my friend Sherree has been nagging me (gently) to go to the Yoga Centre Toronto. 

They teach Iyengar yoga there, after BKS Iyengar, one of the greats in the yoga lineages.

For most of those months, fearing injury, I demurred.

I finally went three weeks ago for my first stand-on-your-feet yoga class in almost three years.  

The good news: I didn't break anything. 

Now that I am back at the yoga studio, I feel compelled to compare it with the gym. 

At the gym, people seek distraction from the boredom of exercise. In the "membership plus" workout room, there are seven TVs, two suspended from the ceiling, five mounted on the treadmills and elliptical machines. There's loud music. People wear headphones. In between sets on the exercise machines, people stare transfixed by their glowing handheld devices. 

I especially don't enjoy the oblivious conversations between people who have stopped their workout to have long, loud, personal chats right next to me. 

At the yoga studio, people having quiet conversations are softly shushed and told to enjoy the quiet before the class begins. There are no TVs. The class' focus is on the teacher's voice and whatever horrified signals they receive from their bodies.

The gym is full of giant pieces of machinery. The yoga studio has mats, bolsters and blankets. 

The gym is bustling, teeming with kids, old folks and everything in between plus a zillion staff, both paid and volunteer. The yoga studio is quiet, never crowded and while there's a good age range, there are no kids. There is usually only one teacher plus one person working the front desk.

The gym is a wet environment: the pool, the showers, the steam rooms. The yoga studio is dry. 

So they are different, but they serve their purpose. The gym has given me back the strength and stamina I lost after two years of osteoarthritis-induced immobility. The yoga studio, after exactly two classes, has almost completely resolved a chronic pain in my left shoulder that I thought I would carry to my grave.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Changes

Shop window: Saint Mark's Square, Venice

Bruce's Eye

Readers are aware that Bruce's right eyeball went kerflooie just before Christmas last year. The retina in his right eye had torn in multiple spots. After a vitrectomy and the insertion of a bubble of propane gas in his eye, Bruce spent four weeks bent forward and off of work to help the bubble help his retina heal.

After a week, the retina was reattached and starting to heal but Bruce's eyesight was still a mess: blurry, watery, and that damned bubble was always in the way.

Bruce went to the eye doc this week for a status check. The doc said Bruce's vision in his operated eye - with his corrective lenses - is 20/20, the best possible indicator for the best possible recovery, which is still some weeks away.

My Job  

Technically, in a period of just under one year, I have had three jobs. I started as the Director of the Air Policy and Climate Change Branch at the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, then became the Director of the Strategic Policy Branch, which job title I held for about six months and then I became the Director of the Corporate Policy Branch. The change to Corporate Policy was cosmetic: it's more or less the same job.

Now I have a fourth title - and, really this time, a new job. On March 19, 2018, I will become the Director of the Distribution and Agency Policy Branch at the Ministry of Energy. The first item on my list of things to do will be to reform the Ontario Energy Board.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Ancestors and Relations

A sweet relation photo: Bruce's dad and Bruce's second cousin's dog on Christmas Day.

While riding the stationary cycle at the Y, watching 24-hour news stations on a muted flat screen TV, I've seen about a thousand ads for the two commercialized DNA companies, Ancestry.ca and 23andMe.ca. 

Succumbing to the pressure, I sent away for the 23andMe package. I filled the spit sample tube and dropped it in the mail more than six weeks ago and still have not received a report.

I am an impatient person. So a couple of weeks ago I also signed up for Ancestry.ca and have set about learning about my ancestors the old fashioned way, by searching for them in a networked database with millions of digitized records and the searches of others who have relations in common. 

Also a relation photo, less sweet. Kevan MacRow, my brother-in-law in mis-matched gear.

The results - in a matter of mere days - and thanks primarily to the work of three Ancestry genealogists who have generously made their searches public, are that I have records back to my great-great grandparents.

My father's great grandad came from the Isle of Mull in Scotland and died in Grey County, Ontario in 1913. The details of my mother's great grandmother are not so clear, but she was married to a man named K.J. Vader Schmidt in Alexandrow, Poland. My mother's grandmother was born in Zabianka, Poland and died in Dafoe, Saskatchewan, in 1938. My mother's mother, the youngest of nine children, was born in Alexandrow, Poland in 1892 and died in Winnipeg, Manitoba in 1933.

I'm glad to have this dim glimpse of the people whose genes I share but who I will never know. 

What is overwhelming about the experience of poking around in the data bases is seeing how many people there are who are connected to me.

It is a fanciful notion that people have family "trees." I assume this trope originated from royalty - the legitimacy of the heirs being determined by their forebears. 

The rest of us belong in a unbounded but finite web of relatedness.  

But, there are dark parts in that web. My mother's father, for example, is a complete cypher. 

The August 24, 1942 Lethbridge Herald, reported on its back page the casualties at Dieppe. Among the wounded was my mother's older brother, Alfred Kurt Lohse. The list notes Alfred had a father, Bruno.

Other than that single record, there is nothing about Bruno Lohse anywhere, so you miss the irony of these two lines of type on the back page of the Lethbridge Herald: at the same time that Uncle Alfred was wounded in the line of duty protecting his country, his father Bruno was cooling his heels as a dangerous alien in an internment camp set up by that same country.

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

Special Edition: Eyeball Update

After a month off work Bruce is ready to rejoin the economy.

His progress is good. The retina is re-attached. The bubble is shrinking, his vision ever so slowly improving.

His eye doc said Bruce could go back to work full time this coming week if he wanted to, but should probably wear an eye patch.

The patch in the picture is a four dollar piece of crap from Rexall Pharmacy. We're on the lookout for a sturdier model with a better, looser band, and a human-sized googly eye attachment so Bruce can cosplay Mad Eye Moody (even though it's the wrong eye).

Thanks for reading!

Have a great week!

Karen

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.  

***************************************

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