Fuel to the feu

Under the heading of #onlyincanada : our new cable television package includes 'The Fireplace Channel (English)' and 'The Fireplace Channel (French)'.

Loyalty

In the beginning, we had a telephone. In the nineties in the north of England, this was not a given; people in shops or offices would inquire 'Are you on the 'phone?' if they needed contact information. We had broadcast television, just the four terrestrial channels, eventually joined with much fanfare by a fifth. Later, we got internet. Dial-up at first-- eeeeyaw-eee-kkkk-eee-- then broadband. In our household, the silence of broadband was its most notable advantage; the squawking dial-up connection inevitably woke the sleeping baby.

With the arrival of children we also acquired a library of video entertainment: Teletubbies, Bob the Builder, Fireman Sam, Postman Pat (and his black-and-white cat), and our family favourite, Eddie Stobart's Steady Eddie series. Our VCR ranneth over. We were sated, and costs were reasonable. I do just vaguely remember wanting to pull my hair out at the tenth repetition of 'Can we build it? Yes we can!'

In Canada the ante got upped when we had to register anew for all services, all at once. As with so much else in Toronto, the price of the total package shocked us. But the kids were thrilled because we had cable. Hundreds and thousands of channels! And we got a PVR, which soon filled with recordings of 'I Carly' and Premier League football matches.

We moved house and lost the television service; something to do with the wiring. After a few months we noticed that we were still paying for it, and had firm words with the provider, Bell Canada, and felt grown-up and competent; we were keeping an eagle eye, or at least an eye, on our finances. And yet somehow the bill for telecoms services seemed to grow. Or had it always been thus? We thought it might be like those distorted memories of early parenthood, when babies chortled and cooed and never cried or pooed.

At last, with eldest son's gentle but firm guidance, we Took Steps. We contacted a new upstart start-up internet provider and asked what they could do for us. Quite a lot, it turned out, and, pleased with ourselves, we prepared a Dear John call to Bell. Sayonara, swindlers!

Not so fast, alas. We delivered our stern words.  'Oh, dear, you have an expired package,' said a friendly woman in the Loyalty Department, in New Brunswick, clucking sympathetically. She sounded so kind, and worked out such a shiny new deal, that she persuaded us to stay with Bell rather than switch to the new company, which could not match the offer.

But the plain truth is that we've overpaid Bell by hundreds if not thousands of dollars for the last two years, and they've happily allowed us to do so. In other words, we've gone right back to the abuser.

Riding for Heart

I have registered to do a 25K bike ride next month, to benefit Heart & Stroke Canada. My ride is dedicated to the memory of Joe Cassidy (see my previous post). Please sponsor me if you can.

http://support.heartandstroke.ca/site/TR/Events/RFH2015?px=1090641&pg=personal&fr_id=1070&_ga=1.105459009.338951223.1428368156

Thank you.

What He Said: Requiem for Joe Cassidy

On Friday, April 17, Emmeline Skinner Cassidy, age 20, shared a quote from her father, Joe Cassidy, on the meaning of life: ‘If it’s not about love,’ Joe had said, ‘well, it’s not about anything at all.’

https://twothousandfourhundredmiles.wordpress.com/2015/04/17/if-its-not-about-love-well-its-not-about-anything-a-tribute-to-my-dad/

Sadly, Emmeline was reading these words at Joe’s funeral, in Durham Cathedral.  

I wasn’t there; I was here, in Toronto, feeling that day particularly remote from England. Until he died on March 28, Joe had been principal of St. Chad’s College at Durham University and a Reverend and a Canon of the Cathedral, and the funeral was attended by many mourners in the majestic setting. I tried to follow proceedings on social media. One person tweeted ‘I’d guess about half the people who just got off my train at Durham are @ChadsAlumni, here for Joe Cassidy’s funeral.’ Later, the same man, @wallaceme , added that the funeral was ‘Sad but also a beautiful and fitting tribute.’ Later, Facebook posts appeared, agreeing with that description. A friend of mine in Durham who attended sent me a link to Emmeline’s eulogy and pictures of pages in the Order of Service. From such nuggets, and from my memories of many hours spent inside the Cathedral, I was able to imagine being there, sitting perhaps at the back, on the right, at the far end of a pew. I see the rows of fossil-studded marble columns, trilobites embedded permanently in the polished stone.

But in fact I am far away, really far away. In miles: 3,404; in kilometres, 5,478. From the great distance, I have been feeling Joe’s loss. Our families have been friends for 17 years. I met Gillian, Joe's wife -- now, I suppose, his widow-- at a mother-and-baby group in Durham.  It turned out that Gillian and Joe and their two small daughters had recently moved to town and into the same house where my friend Kate and I first lived in Durham, in 1994;  a house intended as the dwelling for the principal of St. Chad’s College, which Joe was, and Kate and I were not. It was an amazing old warren of a building with endless rooms and multiple staircases and, we decided, a haunted cellar. Kate and I got it cheap because the college wanted it occupied until they found a new principal. Gillian gave birth to their third child in that house, a boy who became my younger son’s best friend for a time. Even after my family and I left Durham to move to Brighton, 300 miles south, our families visited each other, and Gillian and I saw each other in between, in London and Bruges and Harrogate and Edinburgh.

And most wondrous of all, when we moved to Toronto, Joe and Gillian and children were here waiting for us. Well, not exactly in Toronto, and not precisely waiting for us, but nonetheless, they cushioned our arrival in Canada immeasurably. Joe, who was born in Quebec, and used to live in Toronto, enjoyed spending summers in the town of Crystal Beach, on Lake Erie, a 90-minute drive from Toronto, where they had bought a house which we visited soon after our arrival. I believe we fell on them like long-lost family.  First, though, they came to Toronto to see us in our new university rental house, still empty, waiting for the arrival of furniture. ‘Warm in here,’ Joe commented, when they'd decanted themselves from their car.

‘Yes,’ we said. ‘We put the air conditioner on but it doesn't seem to be helping.’ I pointed at the thermostat. Joe nodded, then wandered outside to look at the air conditioner. The actual machine. That had not occurred to us. We didn't realise it was kept outside.

‘It’s not switched on,’ he reported. He turned a dial or flipped a lever, or something, and suddenly the house became cool. Afterward, we all went to dinner at a Hungarian restaurant on Bloor Street that Joe remembered from his student days. As we walked along, he pointed up one side street and said ‘I used to live there.’ Another block; he pointed down the road to the left. ‘I used to live there, too.’ And so on. Whenever we met up in Toronto, over the four summers we've been here, wherever we went, it was the same story. Joe, it seemed, had lived on every block in the university area. I asked whether he had had the habit of moving once a month. He laughed.

The thing about Joe that we learned from getting to know him in Canada is that he had done and been so many different things. I teased him about it last summer, joking that he had lived numerous lives, somehow telescoping time. Casual chats over dinner or during walks with the kids along the Lake Erie shore led to throwaway comments like ‘When I was teaching physics in St. John’s, Newfoundland…’ or ‘Yes, I remember living in Detroit…’ Joe had been a Jesuit, a philosopher, an ethicist, a teacher, a guidance counsellor, a volunteer working with street people, an economic modeller in Nicaragua, a college principal, a husband, a father, a Christian. A friend to so many. 

I’ve read a lot about Joe’s accomplishments since his death, many of which I didn’t know (for instance, the economic modelling in Nicaragua). He could operate air conditioners and cook chili; he took my son kayaking with his own. All my children have been shocked and saddened by his death. The youngest betrayed her creeping Canadian-ness by asking, ‘But now who will do the barbecuing?’ Joe could grill burgers and ponder ethics, discuss God and install new kitchen cabinets. He died way too soon, and at 60 years old, way too young. His loss is just so damn sad. I continue to see his shadow around the corners of our neighbourhood, in front of houses where he lived, once, in Toronto. I may be far away from Durham, but Joe’s memory seems nearby.

I am confident that Gillian and their children will continue to feel Joe's presence, to find the imprint of his love, around every corner in their lives, in all the recesses of their hearts, everywhere they go. Forever. Because as Joe said, it's all about love.

KD: Canada's soul food

Not that I gave it too much thought, but if you had asked me to name Canada's soul food, I probably would have said poutine, the Quebecois combination of fried potatoes, gravy, and cheese curds. I've seen the squishy curds in cellophane bags for sale in supermarkets, so I suppose you could prepare the dish at home, but I have only eaten it at restaurants or street stalls. Sometimes it is really good. My favourite version is at our local gastropub, The Harbord House, where they use a mix of sweet and regular potatoes, and make the gravy from a veal jus. Yum. In fact poutine goes some way toward helping me understand why anglo Canada is so keen to keep francophone Quebec in the federation. (Delightful though it is to visit Montreal, keeping a pet French-speaking province seems an awful lot of trouble: all that double-labelling and signage, having publicly to fund not just French programs in schools but a whole parallel Catholic school board... )

In any case, I found out recently that I'm entirely wrong about poutine being Canada's soul food. That accolade goes to Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, or as it is known here, Kraft Dinner. It's so well-loved it has a nickname: KD (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Dinner). Heart-and-soul food.

The inventor of Kraft's powdery mac-and-cheese in a box, James Lewis Kraft, was born in Fort Erie, Ontario. This fascinating or at least mildly interesting bit of history came to my notice recently due to the kerfuffle over giant food multi-nationals Kraft and Heinz merging, generating concern for Canada's KD factories. (Will they call the new corporation HeinzKraft or does that sound too much like a German architecture movement?) Feature writer Jim Coyle  in the Toronto Star abjures his readers: 'But, brothers and sisters, only from our frostbitten, orange-stained fingers will they pry the manufacturing plant that makes Canada's national soul food' (Insight, Sun Mar 29 2015, p IN3).

See?

I grew up with boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese stacked in the pantry; their contents often appeared as dinner during my childhood. I had no idea  mac and cheese existed without cardboard casing. I hated the stuff. Not until I moved to England the first time, as an undergraduate on a study-abroad program, did I discover the homemade version. A charming pamphlet of vegetarian recipes from a now-defunct Brighton health food store, 'Simple Supplies', provided one of my life's eureka moments: I adore mac and cheese.

And yet, today, I have a stash of (21st century) KD on my own pantry shelves. My daughter loves both to prepare and eat it.  Perhaps the preference skips a generation. Or, maybe, my children have become real Canadians.

Not sure how I feel about that. 

POSTSCRIPT: I recently came across this YouTube video, from a series called 'Box Mac', which compares and contrasts America's and Canada's versions of Kraft Mac'n'cheese. All you ever wanted to know about macaroni and cheese, and more. Much more.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TOZYESQVHxs&index=24&list=PLmqeFKoBmT0I_glrgD5zC8NEXgTQ_-Jx_

East v West: the highlights

When I was a child I subscribed to Highlights magazine, and waited with excitement for each month's delivery. It billed itself as 'fun with a purpose', which has an ominously earnest, almost Soviet tenor, but back then I didn't mind earnestness. The stories and even more so the jokes, letters, and drawings sent in by readers seemed like license to spy on the lives of other children (maybe kickstarting my career as an anthropologist). From Highlights, I learned that growing up in Los Angeles was different from growing up in Iowa, or Pennsylvania, or New Hampshire, places that to me constituted the 'real' America. For one thing, in Los Angeles, we didn't have snow. Highlights stories were full of children building snowmen and sledding and spotting the first red-breasted robin against a pure white drift. Outside my house, meanwhile, the leaves might turn urine-yellow and fall off the poplar trees in November, but in December the oranges and lemons ripened, and the palms and the pines and the eucalyptus stayed green all year round, so the scenery did not notably change. In the pages of Highlights, children picked apples and made their own cider. We had no apple trees.

"You poor things don't know about the changing seasons!" my Brooklyn-born mother lamented to her three daughters.How silly. I argued that of course we knew about seasons. In summer we wore shorts and sandals; in winter, long-sleeved blouses and sometimes a sweater or even a coat.  Occasionally in winter, on one of those chilly days in the 60s, rain came along with fanfare suited to an apocalypse: we would be driven to and from school rather than having to walk the half-mile and get wet, and any extra-curricular activities might well be cancelled.  The next day's newspaper likely featured on the front page a picture of a VW Bug up to its windows in water. In Highlights, I saw drawings of children wearing rainboots, carrying cheerful umbrellas, and splashing in puddles, and wondered what was wrong with their parents' cars. We kept a few umbrellas in our house but used them to run down the hill while trying to fly like Mary Poppins. My mother would tell us stories of her childhood, in which fell summer rains warm enough to play outside wearing only a bathing suit. Rain in summer! This seemed as miraculous and unlikely as a Martian landing.

Highlights never featured tales of children putting their treasured objects in boxes by the front door, ready to evacuate in case a brush fire came too close, nor of children cowering in doorways during an earthquake.

I moved to Northern California for university, just as a drought ended in the state. In early November of my freshman year I awoke to see water beating on the dorm window. "Oh well," I said to my room-mate, Linda, "I guess we'll have to miss today's classes." Luckily, I had only one lecture scheduled.

"Why?" Linda asked, puzzled.

I gestured. "It's raining. Who would give us a ride?"

She  laughed and of course shared my idiocy with the other girls on the floor. I was pretty wet when I got to my lecture, but learned quickly about raincoats and hats and umbrellas. And I sure have put that knowledge to good use over the subsequent, California diaspora years.

Recently, during my children's March Break, we made a family trip to the US Northwest (Washington), then northward to the Canadian West (British Columbia). (I am advised that Canada is unidimensional and has only 'east' and 'west'; without the attenuation of a northern or southern trope. The North is a category of its own.)

I loved re-visiting Vancouver, loved Victoria. It's Canada, Jim, but not as we know it. The Pacific Ocean! Mountains! Greenery and flowers  in winter. Just like California (except for the rain, of course).

Wreck Beach, Vancouver, at sunset. A naked man stands behind me.

Why do we not all live there? I asked my Toronto friends when I got home to temperatures hovering at 0C, and melting dirty piles of slush at the curb, and bare trees. Several of these women had lived in Vancouver for a number of years. They looked at me in horror. "I wouldn't go back. It was like exile," said one.

"If you're not involved in sports, you're no one. You have no friends and nothing to do," said another.

"All they want to talk about is their latest hike and where to find the best local organic mushrooms," scoffed the third. "And it rains five months of the year!" Someone else said that Vancouver is a great city for being outdoors, while Toronto is a great city to be in.

"In my book group in Vancouver," said one woman in my current book group, "none of the other members actually came from Vancouver." Implication: those durn Westerners don't read.  It reminded me of hearing, many decades ago, that serious thought couldn't occur in California, that real American intellectualism happened strictly east of the Rockies, where Best Foods mayonnaise was called Hellmann's. I didn't believe it then, as I earned my degree in Berkeley, but perhaps that contention, coupled with my memories of  the 'true America' as delineated in Highlights,  contributed to my desire to get out of California and experience the Great Elsewhere. (As they say, be careful what you wish for.)

And I don't believe it now. Folks in B.C. spoke warmly of Toronto. "Oh, it's a wonderful city! I love visiting." They had no desire actually to live here, though. "Couldn't do it. Too cold." I call that thinking.

A few years ago I got my own children a subscription to Highlights, but they never expressed much interest in reading it. Perhaps because they have the internet, or because they have already travelled so much, or because they are not growing up in America. To them the magazine opened no doors on wonders of life in the great elsewhere. We let the subscription lapse. I do wonder if these days, Highlights depicts children playing at the beach as well as on snowy hills in January.