Coda: ripples into tsunamis

Of course, following my friend's advice about dropping pebbles into ponds is part of how we ended up moving here. When husband was offered the opportunity to be considered for his current job at the University of Toronto, he asked me for my opinion. I said 'Sure, why not? Hey, maybe you'll get a free trip to Canada out of it!' As it turned out, that was no pebble. It was a boulder.

Not about the house: pebbles and ripples

A very good friend of mine is a successful, smart, somewhat scary academic. She has a dream job now, one which she richly deserves, but before getting there she kissed a lot of employment frogs, so to speak. She did this from the vantage of someone who had a perfectly good post in a well-respected university. I used to wonder why she bothered accepting requests to apply for and then turn up at interviews for positions she had little intention of filling, sometimes traversing vast distances at inconvenient times to do so. 'Because,' she told me once, 'a lot can happen when you agree to an interview. I've met people and collaborated with them on some of my most rewarding projects. I've found opportunities for my students. It's like dropping a pebble into a pond; you don't know where the ripples will go.' (Probably physicists will tell me that they can in fact tell where the ripples will go but that would be missing the point.)

A few nights ago another friend, visiting from Durham, where we lived when my children were born (gee, I love writing that: 'where my children were born'. I have children! I bore them! It still amazes me) brought two of her own children to stay with us. When I met these little girls 15 years ago, they were aged 3 years and 1 year. At that time my eldest son was 2 months old, tiny, fragile, adorable, and endlessly precious. I had great difficulty feeding him. (Now he is muscular, sturdy, handsome and still endlessly precious. The only difficulty feeding him is in keeping the fridge stocked.) We were all attending a first birthday party, a party that constituted my launch into the social life of parenting, and set the bar for how I would be a mother.

Magazine articles and child-rearing guides always commiserate with new moms about the isolation they experience becoming parents. I was lucky to live in a small, friendly university town as a new mother, but not many of my academic friends had tiny babies. When my son was only a few weeks old and I was home on maternity leave, I decided to attend one of the mother and baby groups advertised in the local paper, where for the admission price of two pounds, I was offered a seat on a minuscule chair and given a lukewarm cup of tea. I perched there dumbly for a time cuddling my son; I might even have hidden away at one point to shed a few tears over my nursing troubles. But then I was approached by an amazing, dynamic and sociable woman, pregnant and with a toddler of her own, who greeted me, asked for my life story and then my telephone number. I gave them to her, surprised and pathetically willing. She listened, smiled, and left me to chase after her little girl. Finally the children and their mothers gathered in a circle, clapped to 'If You're Happy and You Know It', donned coats (it was May, in the north of England) and said good-byes. I struggled home in the rain with a crying baby and no dinner planned, feeling rather silly. What had been the point of taking a 5-week old infant to a playgroup? He didn’t care about seeing other children, or having a biscuit and a cup of juice. But a day or two later the friendly woman called, asked me to her house, and made me part of her group. The party invitation followed. I met the friend with the two daughters, and her friend, and hers. We gathered regularly. We compiled a cookbook. These friends commissioned a song to be written and recorded for me, about me, for my fortieth birthday, the most creative birthday present I've received since my father quit smoking when I turned twelve.

So, it was a pebble. And this week, watching the two chattering teenagers set off on public transport to survey the lights of Toronto from atop a 550 meter tower thousands of miles away from northern England, I felt a tidal wave of love and wonder rush over me. So this is how life works. Pebbles make ripples. Our children grow up. We move around the globe-- the Pebble Woman now lives in Switzerland-- but we don't have to grow apart.

Moving on. Part 1.

Date: 23 April 2013

Something just happened as I looked out my window. It wasn't the thing that was supposed to happen, which was receiving inspiration about how to pull together my presentation abstract, due tomorrow. Instead, I watched a father park his silver Plymouth Voyager and help his little daughter out of the car, on the street side, right into the bike lane (only a dad...). I held my breath, but all was okay; he was watching carefully. A good dad. Oops, they forgot something. He opened the car's front passenger door and retrieved a water bottle, which he handed to the child. She smiled up at him and they trotted into the University Athletic Centre, the sequins on her purple trainers flashing in the low sunlight. They're late for her swimming class. Or maybe it's dance, or track and field. Not gymnastics; that entrance is around the corner. The man hasn't bought a pay-and-display parking ticket, so clearly he feels lucky. Very lucky. His chances are not good.

I knew all that. I've made the same dash, from right across the street, with my own children. I've been looking out this self-same window for almost three years, and I feel I am part of the view. I look down into open sunroofs (a black Volvo station-wagon) on to the tops of busses (good old number 94, always early or late, never on time, plying the currents of Harbord Street). In the winter, even now in the 'sprinter' (spring resembling winter), the trees bear only thin dark boughs, no leaves to block my sight. But the tips have buds. Spring will come.

And I thought, suddenly, 'I love this city.' And then a split second later, the shock hit. Whose words were those?

We did fall in love though, 10 days ago, with a little bit of the city. It was with a house. After a month of dogged hunting, we walked into a house that felt, right away, like home. Our realtor, Kate, had commented many times in the preceding weeks about how 'open-minded' husband and I were. That was a polite circumlocution for 'lacking discrimination', we knew. But in fact, almost every house she picked out for us to view had some redeeming, appealing feature, usually more than one. Maybe it was a crappy building but in a lovely little cul-de-sac of a street, with a little library box at the end.





(It turns out that this is a whole movement, the Little Free Library thing. Get yours here: http://www.littlefreelibrary.org/index.html)

But after viewing 24 houses, some more than once, many of them utter wrecks that would take months or years of work, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and bucketloads of imagination to put in tolerable order-- and others so polished and grand we feared our tattered furniture and selves would degrade them unforgivably. We made tentative offers on a couple of houses, one of which we actually liked a lot. The way it works here, offers are binding contracts in themselves, made with documents in triplicate, signatures, drops of blood, etc. There's no willy-nilly of England: 'oh, yes,' I'd say over the phone to some seller's estate agent, 'tell them we could offer £350,000,' before ringing some other agent and putting out a tentacle in a different direction. No, in Canada, or at least Toronto, once an offer is accepted, earnest money immediately follows and any breach of agreement is treated seriously indeed. So although you might see two lovely houses in a week, if they have the same offer date-- and generally these seem to be on Tuesdays-- you don't dare make an offer on both or you could end up having promised to buy both (worst case, but still). But still, just because we had made offers on the previous two Tuesdays, we did not *have* to go through it again on the next Tuesday. Only if we found a house we really wanted to live in.

Then one grim and rainy Saturday we set off with the hero of the piece, Kate the Realtor, to see another batch of houses, starting with one we had seen a few days earlier and after a few days away from it, had convinced ourselves it was really rather appealing. Back we trekked to 'Little Italy' into a wonky structure with missing floorboards and odor of rodent, trying hard to believe we could make it our family home. 'When is the offer date?' husband inquired of Kate.

The selling agent told Kate that he had received a couple of 'bully bids' already, so the offer date wasn't really relevant. 'What? What's a bully bid?' we asked, innocently, unaware that within a very few hours we ourselves would not just understand the strategy, but deploy it to wondrous effect. First though we had our list of viewings. Next up: a tiny little treehouse in Regal Heights. What a nice name for a neighbourhood; it even included a vague upward slope. We loved the street but the house, although listed as four-bedroom, was really only big enough to house The Borrowers. It was one of the very few houses we saw that we were able to reject out of hand.

‘Kate,’ I asked, as we left. ‘There’s a house for sale on Brunswick. I have seen the for-sale sign a couple of times. Probably there’s some reason it’s not on our list but perhaps you could check?’ Oblingingly, she did so; nodded into her phone a few times, disconnected and said, ‘Actually that one sounds like a possible. Their agent will be there for another half-hour so if we go right now we can see it. Meet you there!’

‘Okay,’ we agreed, though this would mean criss-crossing town again in order to see the others on our list. ‘See you at Brunswick and Lowther.’

‘What? No, at Brunswick and College.’ She paused with her hand on the car door.

‘Really? That’s not the one I asked about.’ I was dubious.

‘Well, never mind; the agent is waiting for us now. Let’s go have a look.’

So off we headed, with no high hopes, since this wasn’t the house I’d spotted, almost feeling irritated at the extra driving on such a chill, wet day. When we found the house, I was surprised; it was on a lovely block, around the corner from our rental home, and in fact I had cycled down the street only two days earlier en route to middle child’s school. There had been no ‘for sale’ sign then, just an unbroken row of graceful semi-detached homes with lawns and a wide grass verge. A true avenue.

‘No,’ the agent agreed. ‘It’s only just gone on the market.’ We walked in and all three of us thought, ‘What a great house!’ This was the one we had been seeking. Tattered and shabby round the edges, certainly no show home, but not a wreck either; proper Victorian (for husband), a double garage (for me), lots of rooms, four bathrooms, a sundeck with a view over downtown and a west-facing front porch and a little park across the street and a set of back stairs. We knew as we wandered through it that we could never afford it; it was much bigger and more desirable than the house we’d lost out on the week before. I admired it, and loved it, and mourned its loss all in the 15 minutes we explored it. I kept running to the front windows to check on the car, which was illegally parked across the road. This felt like our house, but we knew we couldn’t have it.

‘Kate,’ I whispered, ‘Would you want to go in on it with us?’ I was formulating a plan.

She laughed. ‘I’d love to! Unfortunately it’s not ethical.’ Oh well.

On the way out, Kate asked the young, smiling seller’s agent about the offer date. He named a day almost two weeks away. ‘Why so long?’ Kate inquired.

‘The owners are going away; they won’t be back until then,’ he explained. Kate persisted. ‘When are they leaving?’ Tomorrow, as it turned out. Husband and I sighed again, and shrugged. After 10 more days on the market, everyone and his brother would have seen the house and entered a bid; we would absolutely not be able to compete. Someone else was going to get our house. But Kate wasn’t done.

‘Would the owners consider an offer tonight?’ She held the other agent’s eyes. ‘Tell them we’ll make it worth their while.’ Husband and I exchanged glances. What was going on?

‘I’ll ask them,’ the young man agreed. ‘I can let you know in the next couple of hours.’

‘Fine,’ Kate said, handing him another card. ‘We look forward to hearing from you.’

She pulled us outside. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘Let’s throw everything we can at this one. You want it, don’t you? If you do, we have to get it before it goes to open bidding.’

A bully bid! We were making our own bully bid!

To be continued.