A Week In

It’s Saturday morning, one week into our new life on Major St, a great day to sleep in and enjoy the quiet of the neighbourhood. But perversely, we are awake and up by 6 AM, downstairs and already at the Saturday Globe and Mail over breakfast. It’s been a week of struggling through the accumulated baggage of decades, trussed up in various packages and strewn about our new abode in daunting profusion. I used the “free” option on Craigslist to download 15 boxes of books to a quick-off-the-mark lad, grateful for his sudden windfall. The fellah who showed up to fix the freezer was taken aback when I asked him if he would like a set of dishes. “Um,” he said, “um, well, could I see them?” I showed them. “They’re bee-oot-i-ful,” he exhaled, and left with four boxes from the cottage that my kids had eschewed. That was fun. Mostly though, it’s been one box at a time, loading the floor-to-ceiling shelves on both sides of our living room with first my books and then with Mark’s. Room left over for bric-a-brac/objets collected mainly from our travels.

Yesterday we met briefly with Mitch, our lawyer, to sign documents passing our house on Croydon over to the new owners. The bank holding our mortgage had been promising on a daily basis to send a final accounting for its repayment but had failed to do so. Without this piece in the vast jigsaw of lawyerly works, the deal could not close. Mitch used all the pressure the laws allow: if you don’t get this document to me this morning, the house will not close; the buyers will sue; the owners will in turn sue you for failure to comply with their request. They got it to him within the hour. The deal closed. The lawyer for the buyers then mistakenly sent the final cheque to a law firm representing other parties in a second deal that he was closing yesterday. Still, by late afternoon we were able to collect the residue of mortgage, real estate fees, lawyer’s fees, HST, and disbursements, and deposit it in my bank. Now begins the complicated dance of arranging payments for places Mexican.

Throughout all of the activities of this week we have sampled many of the delights of our new hood: food collection at the close-by Metro and Sobey’s, fruit from the Vietnamese market at Manning and Bloor, suppers on the go at Pizza-Pizza, Big Sushi, the Eastern Mediterranean kitchen by the Bloor Cinema, and even a breakfast sandwich at Tim Horton’s. In celebration of “closing day” yesterday we took in a documentary about the decades-long relationship between Liv Ullmann and Ingmar Bergman. Tonight we have been invited to dinner by neighbours across the street, alerted to our move by a mutual friend – how’s that for wonderful!!

Being here, just being back in Toronto I am aware of the difference in pace of the town from that of Puerto Vallarta. Years ago, about 35 or so, visiting Houston with Maurice, I was struck by the intensity of the lives of all his siblings. Everything seemed set to a faster tempo. The dominant explanatory theme seemed to be the threat of personal bankruptcy if one suffered a major health problem without insurance. We have to work and to work hard and be savvy to avoid that catastrophe. OK. But was that all there was? Could growing up under the threat of nuclear annihilation as did that generation be a part of the tension? Whatever. It was a puzzle to me. Now I sense the same intensity and consequent tension and anxiety here in Toronto. It has been building for decades, of course, and has done so despite our relative ease about the safety of our health system. I can feel it now that I have returned from the relaxed life in Mexico. I sense it right in my chest, a tightening that signals something like: hurry up, hurry up; what’s next? have I forgotten something? I hear it in the voices of friends and my daughters as they describe all they need to do just to keep ahead of their own lives. It’s exhausting. In the Globe this morning Elizabeth Renzetti who is married to Doug Saunders, another G&M smarty-pants, writes about this way of living as she reviews Brigid Schulte’s new book, Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has The Time. As she says, the wheel turns because we keep running. It’s actually quite addictive to live that way. We stimulate our adrenals, get hyped, and life seems boring or unsatisfying if there’s no buzz of action. A perfect recipe for the unexamined life. It’s not easy to back off succumbing to an accelerated pace either. It can only be done with deliberation, by as Schulte says, learning to say no, and I think also by deliberately taking times in which we do nothing and allow ourselves to catch up with whatever is going on in the deeper stream of who we happen to be, letting ourselves rest in a sense that who we are in ourselves is just fine, to paraphrase Winnicott, being a “good enough” person.

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