Being in Vancouver

 Each of eight or nine times that I have visited Vancouver over the decades I have thought to myself, “Why doesn’t everyone live out here?” Last week was no exception. It truly is one of the most beautiful spots on the earth, perhaps especially in the North Vancouver area where my daughter, Elizabeth and granddaughter, Billie live. They are within a mile of the Lynn Valley headwaters/forest, a place that could be used (and sometimes is) as a backdrop for films of every genre. Elizabeth put me through my paces on my third day there, getting me to climb one of the foothills of a mountain that lurks over her home. It was a stretch but we made it, accompanied by her 11 month “puppy,” Sadie. I use the term “accompanied” loosely, as Sadie more precisely ran both ahead and behind us, seemingly simultaneously. The next day on a less challenging trek she managed to roll her entire person in some disagreeable materials, necessitating a trip to the baths on our way home.

On the second day of my visit Elizabeth and I drove to Anacortes, WA to visit Betty Anne Bone – now Ely, a gal who was the best buddy of my 15-year-old self. Betty Anne’s dad was involved with air transport safety. The family had moved from Edmonton to Ottawa earlier that year and they returned just a year or so later. One lovely summer I spent a great deal of time at BA’s place playing rummy and canasta by the hour. She would take me over to the near-by Westgate Shopping Centre to look at clothes – her interest, not especially mine at the time. She was jolly and lively with her bright blue eyes and shiny black hair. We hadn’t seen each other for over 50 years. So it was a distinctly surreal experience to sit opposite her at a posh restaurant ocean-side in Anacortes, trying to sum up my last decades and hearing about hers, looking into the face of a woman who was at once familiar, and, a total stranger. But we made our way through it and managed to see something both old and new in one another.

On my fourth day I went to Deep Cove, a gorgeous inlet spot in North Vancouver, its turn-off just before one crosses the bridge to Vancouver itself. There I had a visit and lunch with Karl Laskin, a friend that we made while in Puerto Vallarta. Karl is originally from South Africa but has lived in Canada for many decades. He comes to Puerto Vallarta usually for a month each winter, his respite time from the loving care that he and two helpers give to his wife, Beverley who was felled by a debilitating stroke three years ago. Karl is a passionate animal rights advocate, a lover of opera, and so much more. He took me down to the village of Deep Cove set along the waterfront, a place favoured by kayakers because of its beautiful setting and relatively calm waters. We had coffee and cake at his regular hang-out spot, walked around the cove area and briefly into the adjacent forest, before returning to his home for lunch on the deck, and, a walk about his ¾ acre garden. In this garden he grows every imaginable herb, fruit, and flower. He took me around, giving me bits and pieces to sample, challenging me to identify each. It is a magical place.

I saw little of Billie during my visit as she was either at school, after-school program, soccer practice, on her computer, or at her dad's. We did get in a couple of card games though, each winning one. It was special spending time with Elizabeth, both out with the doggie and just hanging around her house or catching a bite to eat. She had lived in Vancouver for about nine years before she came back to Toronto with 1 ½ year old Billie 10 years ago. With years of independent (of the parents primarily) life under her belt and with a baby in tow, she was a decidedly different young woman to deal with than the 20-ish girl who only wanted to go west and be with her good buds who had moved there. All of us had changed and were more open to resolving whatever challenges there had been to easy parent-kid relations. By the time that Billie and she headed back to Vancouver last summer we had carved out a wonderful way of being together. She had completed a four-year degree in psychology and had become an addictions counsellor. She and I had had many fruitful talks about working with people. It was hard to see her go even though it made good sense for her and Billie. She had a job open with the umbrella group who offer SROs – single rooms only – to the hardest to house homeless of Vancouver’s east side. Billie would be able to regularly be with Clayton, her dad, and, Elizabeth could give up her position of a single parent. She and Clayton are good friends and have made the complexities of the situation work for all concerned. I’m proud of her and support her as she goes forward as an always interesting person.

On one walk in the forest I told Elizabeth how conscious I was of how we are more or less moving past one another in life. I was for so long “above” her, in the sense that I was not just older, but I was more financially secure, and, physically and mentally more or less in (as Jean Brodie would say) ‘in my prime.’ Elizabeth will turn 39 (Jack Benny’s perennial age!) next month, whereas I am now seriously entrenched in what I call the ‘middle senior years.’ On our walks I had constantly to check where I was putting my feet, least I stumble or slide. She on the other hand bounced gracefully along at a pace that took into account both mine and that of Sadie. I am aware of variously diminishing capabilities in many and varied dimensions and see clearly where I am heading. I have to say, however, that I find this part of my life to be wonderful in many respects and that I am enjoying it. Elizabeth would put out her hand to me at different points on our trek and would stand by patiently when I needed some time to rest and lower my rapidly beating pulse. She was and will become even more in some yet uncharted future the one who looks out for me, even as my siblings and I took some care of my mother in her last years. The cycle of life, no getting away from it.

And now I’m back in Toronto, glorying in the Blue Jays wins (I watched the games out west also), studying the various reports about polls and trends in our election just three weeks away, and out walking our multi-national streets and chatting with my neighbours from so many lands. Yes, I love Vancouver and may someday spend more time there, but as cities go, Toronto is also one of the very best.

Being At Home

I’m in Vancouver for a few days visiting Elizabeth and Billie. Once these guys get up and going E and I are driving down to Anacortes, Washington to visit a gal whom I haven’t seen since we were about 20 years old. Despite all those years and all that space between us, the affection that we felt toward each other during the relatively brief period that we lived close to one another, has endured. I look forward to seeing her.

Last Tuesday I attended the first of a series of gatherings of a memoir writing group, a “class” offered by the Academy of Life Long Learning at U of Toronto. All of the teachers or facilitators of the Academy’s offerings are volunteers and the classes are not for credit (in the academic sense). Rather they fulfil the desires of the participants for intellectual and social connection and stimulation. All of the roughly twenty-five people present for this course, including the facilitators, are about my age – i.e., retired folks (as they say in the US). The first hour was spent hearing about the format of the course and in introducing ourselves briefly – name and reason for joining the group or what we wished to derive from it, followed by a tea break. In the second hour we were given an eight minute period of writing from the prompt: something that used to be but is no longer. I wrote about the steel tub in which my grandmother washed bedding and clothing for eight children and a host of employees who bunked at the farm to help in the lumber mill. Each person read his or her brief piece. So many of these brought old memories to us all; there was much humour and delight in the sharing.

The group will meet every second Tuesday morning for the full academic year. Because I will be away from mid-November until the end of April, I will only be there for five of the sessions. I explained this to one of the facilitators by phone a month or so ago when I was deciding whether or not to even begin. She was most encouraging despite my situation, so based on my conversation with her, I decided to go. I’m very glad that I did. Over half of the group has been a part of this little writing community more than once. I quickly felt at home and at ease with the entire group and with the facilitators: all were welcoming and friendly and the brief readings that we did were varied and interesting. We have been given an “assignment,” to write a brief piece on “home.” So I sit here in my daughter’s living room on the west coast, still in Toronto time (9:42 AM) as she and my granddaughter snooze on in Pacific time (6:43 AM), thinking about home and what that term means to me.

While still lying in my made-up bed earlier, I did a rough calculation about the number of places I have called home. At last counting I would say there have been 39 moves. As a kid with my family I lived in eight different homes – two in Belleville, one in Brockville, three in Ottawa, and two, briefly in Toronto. As a young adult – 19-35 there were 13 different places, mainly in Toronto’s Annex area. Since there have been 18. When I add it up it looks like my life has been terribly fragmented and chaotic though I haven’t experienced it that way. Each move happened for particular reasons that are clear to me and that had meaning at the time. Because of this multiplication of residences I have no enduring sense of location over long periods as would someone who has essentially lived for a long time in one house and one city. The multiplicity has given me something else, however: I am able to pinpoint with fairly reliable accuracy the periods in which various things happened and the reactions that I had to them. I am in a stage of my life in which I look over the past as I have experienced it. I find myself able mentally to as it were “walk into” one of the places where I have lived at another period, to walk about there connecting with those others with whom I shared that space and time, to recall not just specific events, but even the feelings that I experienced during and after them, as well as the ways that I dealt with those feelings and experiences given the capacity I had at that period to process, to understand, and to articulate to myself or to others what was happening.

There is another dimension to the meaning of home that is important to me: it relates to what we mean when we say we feel “at home.” Learning to feel at home with myself and with others has definitely been a life-long learning process and not an easy or painless one. To feel at home, at ease, one must feel safe. Reaching the place of relative safety that I experience at this stage of my life has been hard won. It has been facilitated by many people and experiences. One important experience of this kind over the past six or seven years has been my involvement in a writing group with six other women whom I have known for decades. It was there that I especially have found my own voice. Discovering over time through trial and error, sometimes through writing out or talking out my feelings with these women, I have come to a sense of much greater freedom about expressing whatever is there within me to express, without (at least so far as I’m aware!) editing myself out of a fear of censure, attack, or rejection. When I came to the first session of this Academy writing group, I quickly felt “at home,” at ease, and safe. That I was able to do so is the result of the work I have done but also because of the tenor of the group set by the facilitators and the other participants. Like me,  those present appear to want an environment that is accepting and safe, where judgement and competition, such large components of our earlier lives, can be set aside. Few things in life are as sweet as the sense that you can be the whole of yourself, truly “at home” with others.

Seeking India

Mark and I will be spending about three weeks in India while on our long voyage this December/January. We’ll fly to Delhi after a week in Istanbul, spend a few days there, then fly to Calcutta (now Kolkata) where we will join a GAP tour for two weeks, travelling by train up the Ganges, stopping along the way at several cities, and ending back at Delhi. From there we will visit Bangkok, Vietnam, and Hong Kong. We travelled in South East Asia in 2000, the first of our every-five-year long trips, visiting Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Mark has travelled in India. When he was just a lad of 24 to 26, he lived in a small city in Thailand, constructing an air base and other pieces of infrastructure as the US built up its presence in that area, readying for the big push on Vietnam. He and his first wife Bobi had access to the American services flights throughout the area when he was on leave. They took advantage of that largesse, dropping about five times into India and seeing Delhi, Mumbai, Agra, Chandigarh, and[Kashmir.

I have never been to India though for decades I have been interested in its long history and diversity. Much of my early knowledge and sense of it came through reading the novels of people like Paul Scott and EM Forster – in other words I imbibed a distinctly British Raj sensibility with respect to the sub-continent. Over the years though, through films, documentaries, more recent novels, and reporting by writers like Stephanie Nolen of the Globe, I have developed a more realistic perspective on the present day conditions of this enormously populated country. On our visit to Egypt in 2010 I had an experience of these perspectives intersecting. The tour along the Nile that we took included a three day cruise. Our group was slightly too large to be seated together at one of the circular dining tables. Most of our fellow travellers were about the ages of my daughters. They secured a table together; we sat nearby with another couple about our age and a family of five from Bangalore, India: parents about our ages, their son and only child, his wife and five year old daughter.

I was pleased by this arrangement as the Indian family held great interest for me. I had an opportunity on several occasions to talk with them, especially with the mother. She was quite forthcoming about her background, caste, and family customs. She and her husband were Brahmin. Their marriage had been arranged in the ways of their people (which she detailed for me), as had that of their son. This lady had grown up under the Raj. Her father had held some important position in the British government there and they had lived during her youth in a beautiful mansion in Bangalore. She seemed to me the quintessential upper class British Empire/Indian woman of whom Paul Scott wrote in The Jewel in the Crown. Though she was about seven years younger than me, she appeared to be some years older. Her demeanour was entirely gentle and kindly. We took to one another quickly and had a series of talks about her life and her family.

Her husband, by contrast, seemed inserted into the life of the modern, burgeoning India. He was an engineer who owned a company that made doors for airplanes. Their son, also an engineer, worked for the firm and clearly was positioned to take over from his father when he retired. The son’s wife, though well-educated and also of the Brahmin caste, did not work outside the home (the home, I hasten to add, shared by all five of the family members). At dinner this lady was quiet to the point of being mute. Her sole duty seemed to be the care and (literally) the feeding of her young daughter. She cut and gave each morsel to the little girl, who seemed to take no initiative whatsoever in her own nutrition. The child and her father also were quite silent during the meals, though the young man would talk with us if his parents had left the table. The entire situation seemed claustrophobic in particular for the younger generation, though it undoubtedly replicated that experienced by the older lady in her own early marriage.

All of the above detail is by introduction to the day I spent on Friday “seeking India.” Our visit there requires visas. I had tried to apply on line but had run into snags that were frustrating. I tried to call their consulate but there was only a series of messages to listen to. I phoned the organization to which the Government of India has given the on-line business of arranging passports and visa, again with no satisfaction. So I determined to go to them. I started from home about 9:45 AM, going by subway and then bus to an office in Don Mills on Lawrence Ave E. I arrived about 10:55 and spent the next half hour standing in line to speak to the receptionist. There were about 30-40 people either in my line or waiting in chairs to my left to be seen by case workers facilitating their requests. Other than one other lady I was the only non-South East Asian person present. I minded none of the above circumstances. I was on a mission to get into India and this was all part of the process. My turn: I produced passports and tiny (ugly photos) and requested visas for our trip. Where was my application form? I hadn’t one—wouldn’t that be provided there? No, one could only get one on-line. Ouch! All that way, all that time, to simply be sent home again.

My mood was considerably less up-beat on the journey back into the center of the city. But no matter, I would get Mark to work on the application process with me this weekend as his grasp of up-loading tiny pictures is superior to mine. In the meantime I headed downtown to the Carlton theatre to see an Indian film called “Court” that I had read about. This was no Bollywood movie. Its story was of a somewhat rabble-rousing poet/singer who was arrested and accused of abetting the suicide of a sewer worker who, it was alleged, had been moved by the lyrics of one of his songs heard two days before his death. The singer, an older man known to the police for his incendiary, anti-establishment musical rants, rarely appears in the film, other than on two occasions when he was performing with his troupe of singers and musicians. The real focus of the movie is the Indian court system, its inefficiency and interminable delays.

Most of the (in)action was portrayed in the courts themselves. The judge, prosecuting attorney and the counsel for the defence are shown again and again for brief appearances with witnesses. Some missing information or unexamined issue always provoked a delay sufficient to have the case put over to a later date. In the meantime the poet, having been denied bail, was incarcerated. Various points became clear as the “trial” continued though they seemed to have little effect on the judge or the disposition of the case. The police accepted the word of a man who was known to have acted as a witness for the prosecution in several unrelated cases, always those investigated by the same police officer. The “proof” that the sewer worker had committed suicide lay in the fact that he had worked there for three years without injury, yet had been found dead in the sewer tunnel with no protective gear, something alleged to only have been possible if he had deliberately entered the tunnel to take his life by inhaling the poisonous fumes therein. Testimony by his wife, however, made it clear that the man had never been issued protective gear. He had always gauged the levels of noxious gases by looking to see if there were live cockroaches close to the entrance! The city agency responsible for sewer workers, undoubtedly Dalits, formerly called “untouchables,” did not provide adequate working conditions for its employees. No piece of testimony appeared to make any impact upon either the judge or the prosecutor. The trial simply continued at its glacial pace to the on-going frustration of the defence attorney, the poet’s supporters, and I must say, the theatre audience.

There were side scenes showing something of the lives of the three main players: prosecutor, defence, and judge. The prosecuting attorney, seemingly secure in her adamant defence of the laws of the land – even of statutes enacted over a century earlier – went home to her family in the evenings, cooking supper while supervising her son’s homework, and giving some legal advice to a friend by telephone. The defence counsel, a bachelor with his own place and friends with whom he enjoyed evenings out, contended with his nagging and demanding parents. The judge, seen at a day-long party with family and friends, gives advice to a young man who is concerned about the behaviour of one of his children: have a ring made for him with a particular gem-stone.

The film ends with no resolution to the case, in fact, with a fairly clear idea that it will continue for years. In all likelihood the poet, whose health is not strong, will die in prison. When the screen darkened and the credits began to roll, the small audience for the film united in a half-groan, half-laugh. The point about the ineffectiveness of the court system was clearly made. Still, it was an interesting movie, not showcasing the exotic beauties of India, but rather, in muted shades giving a slice of post-colonial day-to-day life within one sector.

I continue to seek India, clear that my roughly three weeks in the country will only give me, as did this film, windows into small slices of the vastness of this ancient land and people.

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A Toronto Weekend and the World

When Mark and I still commuted weekly to our place in Orillia we saw little of Toronto weekend life. For close to fifteen years we would leave the city after supper on Thursday evenings and return on Monday mornings. We were “imbedded,” in Orillia cottage weekend life for all those years. In some ways we carried on the same activities that dominated our Toronto lives – i.e. work. Mark was involved in the on-going Elgin Bay condo building and he maintained connections by phone and the internet with other projects he had on the go. I saw a few clients up there, most of them sent to me by a counselling organization that had contracts for short term therapy with major companies or institutions. It was during that long period too that I discovered a love of auctions, especially and in fact mainly, at Dubeau’s Auctions held on Friday evenings or on Saturday or Sunday daytimes just outside of Orillia. There I indulged myself: buying, learning about antiques and collectables, and finding venues in which to move them on to new owners. It was fun and a great learning opportunity. The kids came up often, a whole other dimension that we really enjoyed.

In those days Toronto, The Big Smoke, as our Orillia neighbours characterized it, was a place to escape on the weekends. Six or seven years ago we sold our cottage and purchased one of the condos at Elgin Bay. It was a beautiful place with open vistas of the lake from every room. As I gave up my involvement in antiques – it just became too exhausting to be constantly schlepping boxes of dishes etc – and as the kids got more involved in lives of their own, our time there became less interesting. There was also considerable wear and tear simply in the packing up and driving approximately 150 kilometres twice a week in ever increasing traffic. We rented our place and last winter sold it to our long suffering real estate agent, a fellow who had always loved the unit, and who finally convinced his wife that it was time for them to move from their constantly-requiring-up-keep home. The Orillia chapter of our lives is well and truly over. And now we live in Toronto for most of the year and in Puerto Vallarta for the winters – a significant shift in focus.

Last year we settled in the “South Annex,” the area directly south of the true Annex which is boundaried by Bloor in the south, Dupont in the north, Bathurst to the west, and, Avenue Rd. to the east. Our Major St. address was only five or six houses south of Bloor. We enjoyed that whole strip: from Christie over to Yonge. It gave us the fruit and vegetable markets, my bank, the Bloor Cinema, the Dollarama – great inexpensive source of many needed items, lots of great restaurants, the subway, ROM, the Varsity theatre, and on and on. Our new place, of just two weeks occupation is at the extreme western end of what still gets monikered the “West Annex.” The strip of Bloor from Bathurst to Christie is called “Little Korea,” because of the substantial presence of Korean shops and restaurants that line its blocks. There are other businesses along this section of Bloor, of course: Honest Ed’s famous emporium – designated for demolition at the end of 2016 to make way for the mammoth redevelopment of an entire block into a combination of affordable rental accommodation, some condos, and other businesses; a large health food store; a great used book store; and etc. At the corner of Christie and Bloor one building houses Baskin Robbins, Tim Horton’s, and a convenience store. Next to the latter is the subway and then our building.

The area west along Bloor from here is another neighbourhood altogether, much changed since I lived on Hepbourne Ave with Michael Bergot thirty years ago. As Christie St has become more “gentrified” over the decades, so has this area. On this past Saturday as Mark and I carried on our daily efforts to put our new place in order, we were aware of the constant thrum of sound coming from the Christie Pits Park opposite our building. When we went out later by car to return some things and to make new purchases at IKEA, we saw that a considerable celebration was being held there. We got back about dusk, parked our car in the underground garage, and walked over to the park to investigate. There we found a party of several thousand people covering the entire southern section of the park. Bold letters over the erected bandstand proclaimed The Ethiopian Canada Day. The music, loud and full, broadcasted the band and the voice of a lovely, full-bodied woman who sang and shook her body with great abandon to the delight of the crowd dispersed in a large semi-circle. With few exceptions this crowd was African, north African, many of them no doubt brought into Canada a few decades ago when wars created so many refugees in that area.

We walked about through the whole of the area set aside for their celebration, seeing the places where children were involved in games, the fenced off beer garden that looked from the outside like a cocktail party, the stands selling both Ethiopian and North American foods, each with its own long line of patrons, and kiosks with clothing and jewellery from the region. People were enjoying themselves, happily chatting, introductions being made. It was a wonderful event, the kind of hyphenated Canadian celebration that finds venues throughout this large, multi-faceted city. I loved it.

On Sunday morning I headed for the Y to do some kind of dedicated workout. Because we are about a 50 minute walk from there now, I decided to go by subway. When I exited at College and Yonge, however, it just felt so good to be outside that I decided instead to walk home from there. Along my route I discovered that Yonge and Bloor Sts. were blocked of traffic and were open only to pedestrians and bicycles. On Bloor in particular lots was happening. In front of the greatly expanded Royal Conservatory of Music volunteers had corralled passers-by into doing simple dance steps to music from a boom-box. At least 20 or 30 were moving in time with them as I approached the area, little kids, their parents, and older people as well. Large signs trumpeted the idea of the importance of music for body, mind, and spirit. It was a thoroughly delightful scene. Further along Bicycle Toronto people were demonstrating a new kind of bike that I think could be folded for easier storage.

At the corners of St. George and Bloor and of Bathurst and Bloor costumed Morris dancers were performing their versions of this traditional form of English dancing. Groups of eight or twelve accompanied by a variety of instruments moved in patterns about a section of the road luckily still in shade (as the day was becoming quite warm.) Each group had its own costume, instruments, and sets of movements. They were colourfully attired; many wore small bells attached to their stockings that added percussion to the music; each member of some groups held a wooden stick about two feet long which he or she would rhythmically bang against that of another as they wove and ducked about one another. It seemed a form of exercise and communal fun which had the added benefit of preparing its practitioners for war! I spoke to a member of one of the groups which was clearly awaiting its turn, asking her about the activity. A Finnish girl who lives in North Carolina, she explained to me that each year Morris dance groups in North America go on tours to different cities where they perform publically. She gave me a button emblazoned with the name and logo of her North Caroline people. She was lovely. All along the route Open Streets Toronto volunteers encouraged people, holding placards congratulating us for walking along, making Toronto a healthier city. It was a wonderful and fun event.

The further west one goes along Bloor St. from about Avenue Rd., the more diverse the crowd. On our strip of “Korea Town” that diversity is particularly in evidence. It is emblematic of the success of Toronto, of Canada in some respects, to be able to hold within its bounds people of all religions, colours, and ethnicities in an easy-going, accepting manner developed over decades of trials and errors. We found little of this diversity in Orillia, where as in so many small towns, newcomers to the country have to gradually make their way into a comfortable position in the community. I love being a part of the mix that I experience each time I walk through my neighbourhood. Even though I’m Old Country “white bread” through and through, I rejoice in my location of just one of the many beautiful colours of Toronto.

I’ve been thinking a lot in the past week especially, as have many Canadians, of the terrible struggles of the refugees pouring into Europe. I am interested in gathering a group of at least five willing to sponsor a refugee family through Lifeline Syria, an organization spearheaded at Ryerson University. I encourage all of you to think of some way to give in your own fashion to assist these people. We must be some of the most fortunate people on the face of the earth. Perhaps we can help a few others to share in our bounty.

Moving Once Again

A week ago Mark and I moved into our new condo. It’s been a week of the usual chaos – still not entirely resolved though the spaces have been made livable. It’s a bit like camping out for the first while. Let’s see: where did we put that? How does this stove work? And so on. It’s a homey space, our accumulated possessions more or less having found their own appropriate spots. We purchased a number of book shelves, a couch, two desks, and a small chest of drawers from IKEA. They arrived on Tuesday. Yesterday afternoon a handyman named Ata – found on Google under “IKEA assembly” – arrived to tackle our new furniture. He made his way through all but the book shelves and will return today. 

Ata was born in Iran but moved with his family to Turkey when just a baby, growing up in Istanbul. While a university student he acted as a guide in the city and on the tour boats that ply the waters of the Bosporus, the Golden Horn, and the Black Sea. Two or three years ago he immigrated here with his wife – also Iranian but brought up in Istanbul. They have a one month old son. When I told Ata that we will be in Istanbul for about a week in December, he said jokingly that he could give us a lot of numbers to call! His family, still in Istanbul, have told him that his recent immigration was fortuitous as Turkey is changing so rapidly right now. The country and the city are inundated with refugees as are most countries anywhere near sites of conflict in the Middle East and North Africa. I’m certain that we will see the ramifications of this tide of humanity while we are there.

Our third floor condo has a small patio which faces north and east. As we are at the back of the building we are sheltered from most of the street noises of Christie St. Looking straight ahead from the vantage point that it affords are several large trees sheltering a line of garages along the laneway between Christie and Clinton Sts. To the left is the backside and parking lot of a fairly new seniors’ home. My friends have kidded me about being carried over there when I get too old to manage my space here. My intention though, is to pass that part of my life in Puerto Vallarta where I can go out or at least sit out daily in the lovely ocean air and sunshine, cared for by kindly Mexican women, who like the Philippian women who come to Canada as caretakers, enter in such a loving manner into the lives of their charges.

Each day when I sit on the Christie St. patio to eat my breakfast or lunch, I witness pieces of the organizational life of the seniors’ home being enacted in the parking lot area: staff coming or going from a shift drive in or away with their cars; enormous waste management trucks come to spear dumpsters with a set of forks on a moveable forward platform, lifting them high into the air to pour their contents into the trucks’ interiors. Delivery trucks back into a loading dock. The driver alights, opens the sliding rear door, pushes a button that releases a folded platform; another button lifts the platform to the level of the truck’s carriage; hopping up, the driver manoeuvres a flat of boxes onto a wheeled trolley, pulls it onto the platform, and pushes another button to lower his cargo to the yard level; he moves the cart into the building’s interior, returning shortly to replace his cart in the truck; taking the manifest from the cab of the truck, he retraces his steps to confirm the delivery and get a signature from some unseen person within. Job completed, he manipulates the rear platform into place, pulls the sliding back door down, locks it, and in a moment is back in the truck and gone. These activities are unremarkable but they interest me nonetheless, as they are reflections of processes repeated in so many places in the city to keep wheels moving along.

To the right from the patio I can see a line of eight tall and slender town houses on Clinton, built sometime in the last couple of decades. In the mid-1980s I lived briefly in a house on Barton Ave and regularly passed by that site on my way to the Christie subway. An abattoir, undoubtedly grandfathered in as the area was developed during the early 20^th century, continued to assert its powerful olfactory presence. Particularly when the atmosphere was muggy, the odour given from its processes permeated the air for blocks around. It was staggeringly repulsive. Local citizens had lobbied the city council for years to rescind the abattoir’s licence. The only way to rid the area of its activities and its perfumes, however, was to buy the owners out; they were demanding over a million dollars. I moved before the issue was settled but clearly it did happen and voila, town houses. I smile over at them, wondering how many of their inhabitants know the history of the site: the squealing and crying of pigs and lambs brought by truck-loads to the slaughter; the pernicious odours that blighted the entire area; and, the struggle of locals and council members to rid that little corner of the city of a business which had been entirely respectable and necessary in earlier days.

So here I sit in my partially organized new home, quite pleased with its long term possibilities, aware that my habits of cyclical moves have pretty much come to an end for the foreseeable long term. The body and the mind begin to rebel against so much upheaval. I have friends who have lived in their homes for the past thirty-plus years. I recommend that they give themselves months before any actual move to sort the accumulated possessions of those decades into their essentials. Bette Davis (or possibly some other wit) is reputed to have said, “Old age is not for sissies.” A move in the middle-senior stage of one’s life is a clear challenge to intestinal fortitude!

E M Forster and Me

Some time ago an article in one of the many newspapers that find their ways into my home, suggested that it was not only important to read, but also to re-read. The author spoke of the value one can derive from reading again, perhaps in another period of one’s life, books that have influenced or moved one in earlier days. This summer at a sale in the basement of a nearby church I picked up a new biography of one of my all-time favourite writers, Edward Morgan Forster. A Great Unrecorded History by Wendy Moffat, takes the reader back again through the fairly well-known story of Forster’s life in England and abroad. But writing in an era of greatly increased acceptance of homosexuality and having access to letters and diaries not available to Forster’s earlier biographer, P. N. Furbank, Moffat is able to penetrate more deeply into Forster’s inner life. One cannot read her book without being profoundly moved by the courage and fidelity to his own sense of who he was evidenced throughout his life by, as Wendy and all of his friends called him, Morgan. An astute social critic, he was nonetheless a person who valued human relations above ideology or personal gain.

Forster, or Morgan as I now also think of him, is one of that group of writers who have profoundly influenced me in my own journey toward greater understanding of myself in the context of life as I have known it. Finishing Wendy Moffat’s book, I embarked upon a re-reading of Morgan’s works: Where Angels Fear to Tread, The Longest Journey, A Room With a View, Howard’s End, and A Passage to India. I have also sent for some collections of his short stories and for a copy of Maurice, a book which he wrote in mid-life but allowed to be published only after his death because of the overtly homosexual relationship at its core. At the moment I am re-reading Furbank’s biography, many parts of which are now quite familiar to me. Looking especially through the lens afforded by Moffat’s book, many aspects of Morgan’s stories become more intelligible.

In a way I have more or less spent the summer with Morgan and in some fashion this experience has encouraged me to write my own “biography.” At so many junctures in my life I have felt under particular forms of threat, inner as well as outer, that disallowed me from speaking, even often from thinking, with complete openness and honesty. In a post-Wildian world, Morgan was under enormous constraint to keep a central feature of his being, his sexuality, hidden not only from public view, but even from his family and most of his acquaintances. Still, over time he did find people with whom he could completely share his inner self, releasing himself in this way from a terrible life of loneliness.

I have also been blessed with ever-developing friendships that have given me the space and the courage to no longer hide behind my fears. The things that I am writing now may be rarely read by any other than particular people who care about me, but none of that matters to me. I know that there is little point in writing about my life with an agenda to hide particular facts, really to be dishonest in any fashion. It is a spectacularly freeing experience to write in this way. Maybe that is one of the blessings of getting older: you know yourself better and you have a lot less to lose.

Starting Again

I have not written any posts since Mark and I came back to Toronto at the end of March. You may or may not have noticed. I was simply disinclined to do so, feeling so much less certain what I was about than I had been the year before when we returned. Then I was profoundly energized and ready for our move from what I had experienced as the desert of Croydon Rd to the pulsing energy of Bloor St and the Annex. During this past winter I had planned to continue to learn and write about the Holocaust, less as an historical event and more as a profound window into some of darker aspects of what we humans are about. In the last weeks in Puerto Vallarta, however, it became clear to me that I had flown one league too closely to the material and had become overwhelmed by its sheer horror. There was nothing more that I could say about it without myself dwelling in a space like that I had experienced immediately after our visit to Auschwitz. The process of letting it go was painful and somewhat protracted.

Back in Toronto I have more or less busied myself in ways I would be hard put upon to recall. I joined the YMCA and go over there a couple of times a week to walk the treadmill and to use the weights machines. I’ve seen a lot of documentaries at the Bloor Cinema, and etc., and etc. I’ve greatly enjoyed watching the Pan Am Games and of course, the recent ascendancy of the Blue Jays. Then there is the up-coming election and the Duffy trial and all that their outcomes portend for our future as Canadians. Events within our families have also impacted Mark and me in unexpected ways.

Like everyone my life goes on at different levels – the practical, the physical, the emotional, the social, and at times, the inner. A couple of months ago I began to experience a sense of frustration, a kind of inner itch that told me that I needed to develop some new focus in my life. But what should it be? I love to read biographies, well-written biographies such as those by Michael Holroyd, that take the reader not just into a sequence of events involving the subject, but rather into the whole context of his or her life, culture, historical period, and as much as possible toward an understanding of the multi-faceted person of whom he is writing. I have a dear friend who is developing some renown for her mystery novels. My suggestion that I write about her was met with a decided, “Oh please, no”! She did agree though that it would great for me to be engaged  in a writing project and encouraged me to find another subject. I then decided upon myself.

So for the past several weeks I have tried to dedicate some time after my breakfast to writing what I have called “A Biography of Myself.” I’m aware that when we write or speak about ourselves, we are in a way objectifying ourselves, not just being in ourselves, but looking at ourselves and our thoughts, feelings, and experiences as it were from the outside. We work with the memories we have retained and the narratives that we have threaded over time to ourselves and others about what we consider to be the central components of our beings and our histories. That is what I have been writing about.

For the most part I have been enjoying the exercise though laziness can easily kick in when it comes to this or any other task. I find that if I spend time on it in the morning, it will happen; otherwise, it’s not too likely. I began at the beginning: born in the Belleville General Hospital on August 18, 1940, the second daughter of Mary Craig Doyle and James Timothy Doyle, and so on. Then follows all that I recall from the almost six years that we lived in Belleville after I came along, on to the next four years on Renfrew Ave in Ottawa, and to the following four years in Brockville. Each section or chapter gets longer than the previous one as my memories grow more distinct. I have written about 60 pages to date and I haven’t quite left Brockville behind. Some of the material is the homely details of family and school existence and some of it is more personal to my own experiences.

Mark and I are moving in a couple of weeks to the “West Annex,” as opposed to the “South Annex” where we have lived for the past year and a bit. We have purchased a condo in a building to the left of the subway station at Christie. The next few weeks will focus a fair amount on the packing, moving, and resettling necessary to this endeavour, but I will try to keep some time to carry on with writing as I find such satisfaction in doing so.