From Window Number 3 to Studio Number 6: Passport to Creativity

Wassaic Project HQ: Maxon Mill

I am spending November in Wassaic, New York ("Home of the First Borden Condensed Milk Factory"). Wassaic is a self-proclaimed hamlet nestled at the foot of the Taconics, a stretch of low mountains that stitch eastern New York to western Connecticut and Massachusetts. New England, effectively. I am a Winter Resident at the Wassaic Project. The place is beautiful; the whole idea is beautiful. I have 3.5 weeks to spend writing. Almost a whole month! I have a studio, a shared house, and no responsibilities to anyone other than myself. Well, I did make a plan with my housemate to cook some stir-fry veggies with rice. But otherwise, it's just me and my laptop and some index cards, the odd happy hour gathering, a  yoga class, a brief presentation, studio visits...a dream come true. 

I don't fully believe I got here. My original plan--to attend in October 2020--was covid-cancelled. This year, too, there were obstacles: getting the right travel documents, a negative covid test, updated car registration, leaving home. The travel documentation was a close-run thing. I knew I could cross into the US with no problem--I may be a new Canadian, but I am still an old American, with a valid passport to prove it--but getting back home to Toronto might prove problematic. Ironically, becoming a Canadian citizen last month made me a captive in the country. Part of being sworn in required that we chop up, on screen, our permanent residency cards, which had for 8 years allowed us legally to re-enter Canada. In fact one of the instructions about preparing for the event read, "Bring a strong pair of scissors." We did. Red-handled ones. 

"You don't need to travel anytime soon?" asked Christine, our citizenship doula, when we joined her on-screen, nervous and eager. "It will take two to four weeks to received your citizenship certificate. Then you can apply for a passport."

"I do," I said, and explained about the residency, less than three weeks hence.

"You can postpone the ceremony, if you prefer," she offered. 

No, I said. No. We had waited too long, and I could not bear the thought of standing on the sidelines watching the rest of the family become Canadian without me. Well then, said Christine, write a note along with your signed form explaining why you need to receive your certificate quickly.

I did that. I described the Wassaic Project and my heartfelt desire to be here. I could see that it did not exactly come under the heading of hardship: please, let me go away for a month to write without the distraction of home and hearth. But miraculously, my note did the trick. Perhaps that's something special about Canada, accepting that the urge to creativity can in fact be urgent. Within four days I had my certificate, with which I could request a speedy in-person passport appointment. First I had to request a phone call.

"Oh, dear, there are none available until the middle of next month," said the woman on the end of phone, worry in her voice. It was Tuesday. "Not even in Kitchener." I have been to Kitchener and had no desire to go back, but I would if it meant getting a passport quickly.

I explained to her about the writing residency. "You see, I will have almost a month to work on my project," I told her. "It's really important to me."

"Oh yes, I do see, my dear." We had achieved a 'my dear' relationship; I relaxed. "Let me send them a special request. Let's hope they will see you." I was not sure who They were, but I had confidence in my interlocutor now. 

Within five minutes of hanging up, Someone More Official called and told me to bring my application to the downtown Toronto office on Thursday at 2:45. I was not being sent to Kitchener.

I rode my bike to the appointment and stood at Window Number 3. The man on the other side of the plexiglass (in the U.S. consulate it is bullet-proof glass) complimented my hummingbird backpack. He took my application and my money. "Can you come pick up your passport on Monday?" he enquired.

I told him it would be a pleasure. And it was. 

Passport in hand, negative covid test achieved, car serviced and its lapsed registration updated, I headed to New York. To the Wassaic Project.

I have never 'done' a residency before, unlike most or perhaps all of my seven co-residents. I'm the oldest by far and yet the newest at this artist business. At the Wassaic Project there are no demands, plenty of space, lots of opportunities. Social intercourse without social pressure. Yesterday I toured the woodworking and metalworking shop in a big old unheated barn, full of loud scary machines. I have no intention of touching any of them, but you never know; I might write about them (especially if I take up the horror genre). 

View from the barn

A friend messaged asking if I were allowed to read during the retreat. I am. I am allowed to read, write, roam, run, ride, tack index cards right onto the walls of my studio. I have a studio. It is Number 6. The other residents here are all visual artists: painters, sculptors, workers in miscellaneous materials; I am the lone writer. I notice them wandering around the barn and the converted mill which houses the heart of the operation, fingering bits of wood and twisted wire with a strange gleam in their eyes. They seem much more at home occupying space and taking advantage of resources.

Studio Number 6

I am learning from them. Yesterday I commandeered a spare table on which to lay out index cards. I checked with Will, the project director, about it.

"Of course!" he replied.

He's the one who told me to stick push-pins into the walls. And I will. I just need a day or two to really get into the spirit of the thing. I had better hurry, though. There are only 20 days left. 

The library

Today's writing station: insanely warm. Have swapped sweater for sunhat. 

Give her a centimeter: turning Canadian

Eli and the flag, turning Canadian, May.

The Toronto crew and the judge, turning Canadian, October.

So, we are all Canadians. All five of us. Eldest child got there first, turning Canadian in May of this year, in Vancouver. The western Canada immigration office works more quickly than the eastern one, it seems.

But on Monday, the other four of us caught up. We received emails telling us we had been approved for citizenship and that we needed to turn up remotely, via Zoom, to attend our ceremony and take our oaths. I have now sworn fealty to Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada. There is no comma in the text version of the oath we received, but we are fairly sure that one belongs. Although, as middle child points out, it is correct with or without the punctuation. Elizabeth II is in fact the second queen of Canada, Victoria being the first. 

I jest; but I was moved. I even shed a few tears. We were encouraged to decorate our Zoom tiles with red and white Canadiana; I wore a red sweater (from local clothing maker Terra Cotta) and white camisole peeping out (très chic). Off-screen, I wore my Good American jeans. Son wore a smart red button-down shirt and daughter a white blouse. She also painted her nails red and white. I grabbed the tiny Canadian flag that lives in our kitchen pencil holder. We were completely outdone, however, by the occupants of many other Zoom tiles, who had tacked enormous flags to their walls. A little girl wore a red-and-white bow in her hair. This accoutrement sailed a bit close to the wind, as we had been informed that we could wear religious headgear, but not 'casual hats'. No specific mention of bows, however.

We recited the oath in unison, unmuted, right hands raised. "Number 25, is that your right hand?" The judge inquired. "Number 31, please move your hand away from your face." They checked to see that we repeated the words aloud and correctly. Husband maintains however that Number 31, an older gentleman, did not speak at all. Or perhaps it was 25. 

After saying the oath in English, repeating each phrase after the judge, we recited it in French. "I know it's an unfamiliar language to many of you, but let's give it a try," he said. I don't know about everyone else, but the judge did a fine job of pronouncing the words.

And then we sang the national anthem, O Canada. I know all the words (in English) from the many days of standing stock-still in the corridor of the elementary school, Huron Street, after arriving late with daughter and needing to get her a late slip from the office. But no one in the office would help us until the strains of the national anthem, cast over the PA system, had faded away. So I began to sing along. Daughter cringed. She was very happy when, in Grade 5, her father took over the task of walking her to school. He never learned the song. The two of them arrived on time.

I like the melody, and I even like most of the words. It's oddly constructed, though, this song; like The Star-Spangled Banner, it is exhortatory and in the second-person, addressing the nation itself. (Perhaps all anthems are thus?) A few phrases in particular grated: "True patriot love/ in all thy sons command." Sons? Sons? What about daughters? Or the un-gendered? Also, "O Canada, our home and native land." I hoped that someday I would be a citizen (someday sooner than this) but it would never be my native land, nor my children's or husband's. In fact that is true for about half the Canadians in Toronto. Also, 'native'. Really? The connotation makes me cringe. Surely there's a better adjective. And finally, there's the line "God keep our land/ glorious and free..." Again. God? Canada, unlike the UK, does not have a state religion--though it does publicly fund Catholic schools in the eastern provinces, which annoys me no end. I queried it once, all unknowing, at a school trustee's meeting and generated vitriolic responses. 

Fortunately, enough other people found the 'sons' line problematic, and the anthem was officially changed to "True patriot love/in all of us command." Still a little mushy for my test, but at least equal-opportunity mushiness. 

So now what remains to be altered are 'native' and 'God'. I shall argue for 'our home and treasured land'. It conjures chests of gold and X marks the spot, perhaps, but what's wrong with that? Finally, I wonder if we can get rid of God and replace it with 'We shall keep our land/ glorious and free'. I think 'we shall' has a nice declarative ring to it, far better than a whiny plea to a dubious deity.

Yes, give me an inch, or a centimeter, and I'll certainly go for the whole kilometer. I hesitated to speak up on this issue when I was not even a citizen of the country. Now I am. Next maybe I'll take on the state funding of Catholic schools. What could possibly go wrong?

Poutine!

A Pandemic Proposal: International Travel as a New Olympic Sport

In December of 2019 our extended family--my parents, my sisters, our husbands and our children--gathered in Mexico to celebrate my father's 90th birthday. It was a gala occasion, a week of being together and enjoying sea, sand, and sunshine. When I hugged my parents goodbye it was with the promise that I would return to see them in a few month. March 12th. 

I did not. Essential travel only. We had some of that in our family and managed it as safely as possible, and stayed well. Seeing my parents could wait, or so I hoped.

Nearly nineteen viral months after that farewell, I returned. There had been several 'almosts' but each time something--family issues, climbing case counts, imminence of vaccination, confused government edicts, my previously-untapped ability to not travel--served to postpone the making of plans. How to measure the essence of 'essential'? I watched others travel, by car, by plane, within countries, across borders. They managed it. 

Then came my mother's 90th birthday, earlier this month. It felt essential to be there. Essential, and possible to manage safely.

And lo, it was possible. We did manage it. We jumped through numerous hoops and surmounted a variety of hurdles. In fact, as we sneaked peaks at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, it occurred to me that international air travel could almost be entered as a new Olympic event. 

We all got there, my whole family along with elder son's plus-one. We arrived in Woodland Hills, California two by two: my daughter and I went first. In the ever-changing landscape of government rules and edicts about crossing borders, information was as difficult to pin down as liquid mercury. 

The Air Canada website said we had to have a PCR test (that's the expensive one). The US immigration website said "PCR or antigen". Essential travel only, said a newspaper article. "US/Canada Border Re-Opening," Twitter chirped. "No one even asked me why I was going," reported someone who had recently driven across the Peace Bridge into Buffalo. Could my husband join me (non-American, holder of a British passport and Canadian permanent resident card)? Good question. Fully vaccinated--but with Astra Zeneca? Multiple types of vaccine? Shrug. I called Air Canada. No one at home to answer the phone. 

I turned to friends--mostly Americans--for their experiences. "How was it for you?" I asked several who had made the experiment at various points. Fine, they all said, but I could find no one doing what we were trying: flying rather than driving, a mixed bag of Americans and non-Americans, in a month without an R in it. So many variables. So many sources of data. So much disagreement.  A lot of shrugging.

So, full of trepidation, armed with certificates of vaccination and negative test results (antigen; the pharmacy said that's what everyone else was having, whoever and wherever those everyones were now), daughter and I, in the vanguard of our family expedition, trekked to the airport. My jittering nerves could have powered a small country. 

We sailed through security and approached Passport Control at Toronto's Pearson Airport, where US Immigration and Customs do their thing. The uniformed agent smiled at us--at least, his eyes did, above his mask. He waved us through. Welcome home, he seemed to say. We boarded the plane and found our seats, near the back where not many people had to pass by. For a long while the aisle seat in our row remained empty and I allowed myself to hope but then a young man, a perfectly decent and clean one, sat next to us. I was glad my mask (KN95, fitting snugly, thank you very much) covered my inadvertent glare. I was not glad, however, to see that his mask rested below his nose.

"Please, can you put your mask on fully?" I asked.

"Of course. Sorry." He complied. "Are you vaccinated?"

"I am, but we still need masks on."

"Of course," he nodded. "What vaccine?"

I wanted not to be facing this nice young man, not be chatting with him, not, of all things, to be discussing vaccination. "Astra Zeneca." It felt like a confession and I kicked myself for getting drawn in this way. I took the offensive. "What about you? Are you fully vaccinated?"

"Getting there," he said vaguely and alarmingly, his mask slipping down a little. What? I thought, drawing as far away from him as I possibly could. "What do you think about this mixing of vaccines?" he asked me.

"I think it's fine," I stuttered. "Whatever vaccine you can get, you should take."

He shook his head, murmured something in a tone of doubt, and took a phone call, pulling his mask up over his nose again. Daughter and I exchanged glances. The man disconnected and waved his phone in front of me. "And what do you think of this?" he asked me. I saw a screen full of brightly colored stiletto-heeled shoes.

"Uh. Shoes," I replied, stupidly.

"Not the shoes," he said with a touch of impatience. "Look. It's a shoe organizer." Indeed it was. "It's my product," he added. I saw a transparent acrylic board with narrow holes along its width and length; a pencil-thin high heel had been inserted into each one. It was in a way beautiful, like a Mondrian painting, and also the most useless object I could imagine. I surrendered to the inevitable. I would have to speak truth to Y-chromosome.

"Look," I said. "I'm pretty nervous about this trip. I don't think I can have this conversation any more. Sorry." 

"I'm making you uncomfortable," he said. "I'll move to another seat." 

Instant guilt. "Oh, no, you don't have to do that. I just can't make small talk right now." The guilt was compounded by the fact that the man and I belonged to different visible ethnicities. "Please don't move because of me."

But he did move. As I saw a little later he had found a seat with no neighbor where he could sprawl his not-fully-vaccinated self in comfort. Meanwhile, daughter and I had our row to ourselves now and watched Gilmore Girls in masked semi-privacy. Win-win (except for the guilt). 

Time passes quickly when you are watching trashy sitcoms with your teenage daughter, and we landed without incident--and after a car-service ride across the Santa Monica Mountains, I was reunited at last with my parents. Calloo, callay! 

More hurdles however remained. We were reunited, true, and under the same roof--but still physically distanced and masked for three awkward days. We stayed outdoors as much as possible. Antigen self-testing kits were procured from the drugstore and after 72 hours we hooked up our phones to our nasal passages by means of swabs and an app, and got the all-clear. At last: hugs! Touch! Dinner indoors! 

The other two pairs in our party arrived: first, elder son and girlfriend coming from Vancouver, followed two days later by husband and younger son; there was some truck with US immigration in one case, successfully surmounted, and a flight delay for the other pair. More masking, more separating, more testing, and then, blissfully, reunion. Hugging.

The visit was amazing. I am not sure I have ever appreciated a trip 'home' as much as this one. Maybe  my first return to LA after leaving for university decades (and decades) ago had a similar emotional impact. I marveled that everything was still the same--road signs, stores, office buildings--as my mother drove me home from Hollywood-Burbank airport. "You really should have achieved object permanence by now," I recall my mother saying with a slight frown. 

This visit, it was people, rather than things, that I marveled to see again. I woke up every morning with an urge to pinch myself just so as to believe I was really truly there, in my childhood bedroom, my parents next door, my family around me. Over the course of almost 4 weeks, I saw my sisters and nieces and nephews and brothers-in-law and some cousins and friends. I met in real life a new 'pandemic pal' who to me had only ever been the size of a tiny Zoom tile. 

With my family I swam and hiked and beachcombed and went running and rode bikes and clambered in caves and visited Hollywood's Walk of Fame for the first time in decades. We went to Muscle Beach. Some of us rambled around the Getty Center. We took silly photos. We swam in the sea and in swimming pools. Daughter took a Red Cross lifesaving course and made her own new friends. Son's girlfriend and niece's boyfriend joined in the family events and seem to have survived unscathed--kudos to them! Younger son had some driving lessons with his grandfather. 

I feasted my eyes on the landscape of the southwest, the jagged coastal range, the crumbly inland one, the ocean, the canyons, the cactus and the palms. The dry scents of sage and pine and eucalyptus and juniper and sandstone dust. The stunning western sunsets over ocean and chaparral. 

Our homeward travel involved more paperwork, more testing (and more expensive testing), and of course more packing. But it all worked in the end. And now we are back in our home(s), getting ready for our next chapters.  

Glut of miscellaneous photos:

The Piano Men

 

Farewell.

Long ago and far away, our middle child decided he wanted to learn the piano. He was about seven at the time, and one of his favourite schoolteachers, Mrs. Jay, offered lessons. We thought about it. There was space for a small piano in our square front room in Hove, in East Sussex, with its bay window overlooking a garden whose centerpiece was an enormous and brilliant fuchsia hedge. The room possessed a door that could be closed. Perfect. Now to find an affordable, available instrument.

One day soon afterward, wandering along nearby Portland Road, I spotted a piano of exactly the right size and constructed of a pretty dark polished wood. It sat on the pavement next to other items all apparently for sale, outside a narrow frontage labelled 'Furniture Removals'. I scribbled down the phone number. Poor orphaned piano. Over the keyboard an inscription in gold lettering read "Berry and Co., London, 1954." 

That night I discussed it with husband. "Let's see how much they want," he proposed. The hour was late, but being full of zeal I thought that at least I could leave a message on the office answering machine to indicate my interest before the hordes descended. I dialed. 

"Hello?" queried a sleepy voice. Eek. I checked the time: half-past midnight.

"I'm sorry," I stuttered, glad to have an American accent. In cases where I did something stupid like this, it generally got blamed on my nationality rather than myself. "I thought this was an office number. I'll ring back in the morning."

"Nah, love, you're all right. What is it I can do for you?" The erstwhile sleeper struggled to sound awake. I thought I might as well make it worth his while to have been roused.

"It's that piano on the pavement in Portland Road. I saw it earlier today and thought I might want it. How much are you asking?"

"Would you be wanting delivery, too?" the man asked.

"Yes, I guess so." The thing was small but definitely too big for our Renault people-mover.   

It's..." I almost heard wheels spinning in his sleepy head. "Seventy-five quid, with the delivering."

"Seventy-five pounds?" I thought I must have misheard. Pianos should cost more than that.

"Well, well, let's see. Where do you live?" I named our road, Amesbury Crescent, and he said, "Why, that's no distance. We can do that for seventy."

"Thank you. I appreciate it."

"Will it be going to the ground floor or higher?"

"Ground floor."

"In that case, I can bring it down to sixty-five."

"Wonderful."

"Front or back?"

"Front."

"Sixty, then. Any stairs?"

"No, just a doorstep."

"We can do that for fifty-five all in, if you're paying cash. When do you want it?"

We settled a time and I disconnected before the man started offering me money rather than vice versa. 

Hindsight is so wonderful. I ought to have known by then the way the world works: everything comes at a price. This piano would, one day, make us pay. 

But back then, in England, I woke in the morning thrilled by the prospect of a piano in the house, and hoping the man remembered our deal and not believe it to have been a dream, or perhaps a nightmare. Sure enough, that afternoon, two men in a van arrived and heaved the piano up our narrow walk, over the small hurdle of the doorstep, and deposited it in the front room with its bay window and view of the fuchsia. We placed it away from the party wall so as to minimize the noise percolating to our lovely semi-detached neighbors. (Also we did not want to clash with their son's saxophone playing, which came through the wall the other direction.)  I handed over the dosh. 

Younger son enjoyed his lessons with Mrs. Jay very much and did not require all that much nagging to put in practice time. A couple of years later, his little sister joined him as a pupil of Mrs. Jay. Even the eldest child, who played violin, got some benefit: he used the rack of the piano to hold his sheet music.

When we moved to Toronto in 2010, the piano (and the cat, and almost everything else not nailed down) crossed the Atlantic with us (though not, unfortunately, Mrs. Jay). The piano fit well into our front room in Harbord Street; the cat liked to perch on top of it; both served as comforting reminders of 'home' over the long months and years of adjustment. We found a teacher for the kids and a tuner for the instrument, who admired the piano's body, shook his head a little over the state of its insides, told us one or two keys could not be made true, and warned that it might survive only a few more tunings. Look for another piano, he advised. A year later the University's Faculty Club decided to replace its upright piano with a baby grand, and for $150--the cost of transporting it--their old one became ours. But we could not bring ourselves to part with Berry & Co., so now we had two pianos side by side in our front room. The children might play duets, I thought.  (They did. Once.)

Two years later, booted out of our rental home, we and our possessions--two pianos, two cats, a dog, and multiple van-loads of other items--moved 700 meters away to Brunswick Avenue. The instruments did not fit side by side in this house's smaller front room, so one got relegated to a different space that we foolishly began calling the music room. No more duets. 

The 'extra' piano occupied space that was better suited to a large, comfy sofa. When we finally acquired one (thanks, Maggie and Kyle!) we knew the Berry and Co. piano needed to leave. We tried to give it away. No go. We managed to shove it out the front door as far as the porch, but the stretch of six steps down to street level defeated us. And so the piano sat there, covered by an olive-drab tarp, for two years, an ugly hulk occupying a chunk of our scarce outdoor space. "Why do you keep your barbecue at the front of the house?" visitors asked sometime. Vainly we wished someone would steal it. The cost of hauling it away seemed prohibitive. It languished. So did we.

Then something happened. I'm not sure what. The approach of a second pandemic summer, maybe. We had spent much of summer 2020 on our front porch, working, eating, having safely-distant chats with passing neighbors. This summer of 2021 held promise of moving on and yet here the tarp-clad piano loomed, blocking us in. It did not match up.

So I found a company called 'Just Junk' and they appeared the next day, two agreeable young men who gave us a discount on their fees because the piano was already outside. "I'm impressed you got it this far," said the driver. We were humble and grateful. Nonetheless, the cost was eye-watering. "It's not easy disposing of a piano," the man said. Tell me about it.

They worked quickly, efficiently, and irrevocably. Thunk, thunk, thunk, and into the back of their specially-equipped van. 

The cost to be rid of it, accounting for passage of time and change of currency, amounted to about four times what it had to acquire it. I wish I could find the removal man in Portland Road, Hove, and let him know. 

Farewell, O piano. The end of an era. We do still have the other one, unplayed, shoved into a corner of that ill-named music room, which now also holds a small convertible sofa and a mini-trampoline and the wi-fi router, which perches atop the piano. The cats now prefer the couch.

Thunk.

Just Junk.

Twice-dosed in Canada: vaccination and the middle way

Things are changing, even here in slow-poke Canada. Vaccines are everywhere. Pop-ups, pop-ins, walk ups, walk ins. As long as we all come out jabbed, it's okay with me. I watched the shenanigans in the US as people jumped through loopholes to get vaccinated sooner, and saw the orderly queuing in the UK, and I wondered in which camp Canada would fall when we finally got our act together and scored some vaccines. It turns out, as perhaps I ought to have guessed, to be in-between. There was order--sign up, get called or texted or emailed for your appointment--and there were loopholes: an app called VaccineHuntersCanada tweeted prolifically about which mosque or racetrack or school had a clinic with extra doses today, now, hurry! Do not pass Go, do not collect $200. Just jump in the car (if you have one), roll up your sleeve and get jabbed.

Our family served as a fair representation of the country as a whole, I feel. Some of us signed up and awaited the call while for others, it became a more active process of hide and seek. "Why is trying to get vaccinated in Ontario like playing a game of whack-a-mole?' someone tweeted bitterly. "Vaccination program is being run as a scavenger hunt!"said another critic. "If you elect a scavenger, expect a hunt," came one tart reply from a non-supporter of Ontario's under-educated, over-blustery, conservative, confused leader, Doug Ford. 

Eventually, all five of us--four in Toronto, one in Vancouver--got first doses, and we breathed a little easier. Then, ahead of schedule, I was offered my second dose of AstraZeneca. It came ten days too early for an ideal immune response, but a batch of the stuff was expiring and we who might were abjured to turn up. So I took one for the team, baring my arm womanfully even after the pharmacist acknowledged that doing so would, according to the current research, reduce my protection against covid-19 by 10%. I asked the pharmacist whether she herself would, in my place, accept a dose of AZ 10 days early and she said, ominously, that yes she would because who knew what next week would bring in terms of supply or availability. So I went ahead, on the philosophy of a bird in the hand (or a needle in an arm) etc. I can only hope that next week brings new findings that say that I am in fact as well protected as the next twice-dosed human being. 

So, big changes: fourteen days after my jab, I will be considered fully vaccinated. A positive vista of possibilities opens up. I am thinking like Wendy in Peter Pan and wondering whether I too might be able to fly.

Blame Game

Staying 6 feet apart inside does little to prevent covid transmission, according to a recent tweet from Business Insider (ironically)--unless masks are worn. Masks help with prevention of spread. I am in favor of masks, especially here in mainly unvaccinated Toronto. I wear them, sometimes two, on the rare occasions when I am indoors outside my home, and these days even outdoors while walking, running, or riding. It just seems polite. 

Masks offer their own dangers though. I learned one of them the hard way. Recently I rode my bike to Canadian Tire--a mega-store that does indeed sell tires but mostly sells everything else--to pick up a single item at their lockdown-mandated curbside pick-up. When I made my online purchase of this item and five others, I had requested delivery, but an email arrived telling me otherwise. I was disgruntled. 

Canadian Tire's online shopping system (ie their only shopping system currently) requires customers to select 'delivery' or 'curbside pickup' individually for each item rather than at the end for the whole lot during checkout. Imagine doing an online grocery shop and choosing 'eggs', then having to click through the options and pick 'deliver.' Then 'milk'. Then 'deliver.' Etc. It's a stupid plan. I was sure I had chosen 'deliver' for all six items in my cart. 

"I paid for delivery," I said to the nice but gormless young man on the end of the help line. 

"Yeah, sorry, we get a lot of phones calls like this. I know already there's nothing I can do about it," he replied. "Except cancel the order."  I sighed.  I wanted this thing--a big silvery stainless steel bowl. It was going to be part of my low-tech, low-cost water feature for our tiny little back garden.

"You get a lot of phone calls like mine?" I asked. 

"Yeah, like, so many." 

"Maybe there's something wrong with the system," I suggest. "If it happens so much. Maybe Canadian Tire should do what other stores do and let customers choose delivery or pick up at the end for the whole order." I know my effort is pointless but I can't help making it. (Husband rolls his eyes.)

"Well, yeah, maybe, but you see, we sell things like bleach, which Amazon doesn't do, so we have to get people to pick that up themselves because you can't deliver it."

That makes zero sense. My supermarket delivers bleach. His words sounds like a misquote from a training session half-attended to, but never mind. I give up. (Husband applauds.) The weather is sunny and the bowl will fit in my bike basket, so I ride off to Canadian Tire. 

Halfway there I crash my bike. At an intersection of two small streets (Huron and Cecil, if anyone is interested) I stop at a stop sign. The car on the cross-street to my left is already stopped and it is his turn to go. I balance on my two wheels, wobbling, waiting, but the driver is insisting on being polite and letting me go ahead. (I hate when drivers do this.) So, unsteadily, I push forward and give the driver a thank-you smile. Then I remember the mask: he can't see my grateful expression! Instead I lift a hand to wave and simultaneously slide over a bit of grit in the center of the intersection. I lose altitude rapidly. Down go I, the bike and I hitting the ground and the things in my basket flying into the air. Two nice university students, a girl in a Kappa Kappa Gamma sweatshirt and her boy acolyte, are walking on the sidewalk and they run to my aid. Neither is wearing a mask. "Can we help you up?" she asks.

"No, thanks, I can manage," I say through clenched teeth and searing pain as I lever my way upright.

She clocks my covid concern. "Right, right. We'll get the bike." The boy hovers uncertainly until the girl directs him: "You take her bike to the sidewalk. I'll pick up these things." They do, and I limp toward a wrought-iron fence on which I lean, panting. "You have this," she shows me a little packet of alcohol wipe that had flown out of my bike basket. "Is there any blood?"

Not much. I dab at my scraped knee. Fortunately my favourite running tights have not torn; my skin will heal, but clothing won't. The driver, recipient of my ill-fated thank-you wave, has waited until the intersection is clear of bodies and then slowly leaves. I take stock. I've got bruises and scrapes but everything seems to work. I tend to crash my bike or fall hard about once a year and have come to regard these incidents as DIY BMD scans. If nothing is broken, my bone density must be more or less okay, I figure. (Don't try this at home, kids.)

I mount the bike and pedal onward, passing the Good Samaritan students at the end of the block. I shout my thanks but do not wave. I've learned. They, unmasked, smile back. 

Eventually I am in the queue at Canadian Tire. While waiting I text husband. "I crashed bike. Canadian Tire's fault." 

As I type the words I feel myself echoing what I dislike reading in the newspaper about Covid-related failures: the long-term care disaster. Whose fault? The childcare debacle. Whom do we blame? Ongoing school closure. Where to point the finger? Shambolic vaccine rollout. It's the province, or the feds. Subsidized sick pay. A no-brainer. You know who you are, conservative party. We all do. 

Taking it to the skies: paid sick days now.

Accountability is important, absolutely--but can we have action too? Maybe have it first? If it's broke--and it is--fix it. For my fall I can blame Canadian Tire, or the mask, or fate, or my own stupidity (yes that one), but it is me who bears the bruises. The same for us in Ontario and the rest of Canada. We are suffering.

They say get right back on the horse so the next day I join my family on a bike ride to celebrate husband's birthday. A text arrives: Canadian Tire is about to drop off the delivery. We are all in a park admiring cherry blossoms. Daughter is performing acrobatic maneuvers. It will be some time before we get home.

I message my wonderful next-door neighbor and ask her to check that the packages are in a safe spot, which she does. "Only one item," she tells me. And so it is. Although my e-receipt tells me everything has arrived, it has not. It takes a phone call, two emails, and two more days before the remaining items appear, heralded by no warning text and no message this time, just a big box blocking the front door when I open it to take the dog for a walk. While the dog crosses his legs, I check the contents and find all remaining purchases are present...plus another serving bowl, identical to the one I collected the previous week. 

I contact the Canadian Tire online support team to let them know. "You are welcome to pick up this duplicate item," I write. I do not offer them the option of delivery. 

So far, no reply. 

The first bowl is working well as as a water fountain in our tiny handkerchief of a garden, which is becoming a place where we can hunker down and wait out the slow resolution of the pandemic here in the True North. 

The fountain itself is solar-powered and only works when the sun shines. There's a metaphor there, probably.

Cleaning as we go: husband, dog, and I participate in the annual neighborhood trash pick-up

The Arm of Astra Zeneca

I'm half-vaccinated and so happy about it that I decided to share the experience with the whole nation. In fact, I briefly became the Arm of AstraZeneca in Canada.

Not exactly.

After Canada's slow and uncoordinated start on this "roll-out" business, we're getting going, but not quickly, and with incredibly poor organisation. Every day I check the little box in the newspaper that shows the percentage of the population fully vaccinated. We've been stuck on 2.1% for the last 3 days. It's not cheering. 

Damn, I thought, watching the news in the UK. If we still lived there, husband and I would have been jabbed by now. There is not much to admire in the way Britain has handled the pandemic, but its roll-out of vaccination has been a highlight. In the US, my parents, sisters, brothers-in-law, and almost all our nieces and nephews are vaccinated. 

Then a few weeks ago I learned that in Ontario, my age group could join a 'pilot' plan for administering AstraZeneca vaccines in pharmacies, rather than waiting weeks to attend massive community venues. I signed right up. Then came the bad press for AZ. I worried a little, but not that much. Public health experts I know at the university--an epidemiologist, a public health doctor, a biostatistician--not only reassured me, but got the vaccine themselves. I chose to go to our local independent pharmacy just around the corner from us.

When I arrived for my 12:20 pm appointment the place was very quiet. No queues, no crowds. A couple of people milling in the aisles. One person was in the small room at the back getting his vaccine while a woman with a serious-looking camera snapped pictures from the doorway. His wife, I thought. "Are you waiting for your turn?" I asked her. "Oh, no," she said. I'm with the CBC." She gestured to the other two people and I saw one with a clipboard and another standing next to a big-ass video camera. "Do you mind if we film you while you're getting vaccinated?"

"If it's okay with the pharmacy, sure," I answered. 

"And can we ask you a few questions?" Sure again. 

They then proceeded to enquire whether I was worried about getting the vaccine. Had I seen the news about the potentially fatal AstraZeneca side-effects? Did I really want to do this?  I told them what I thought about risk versus benefit, about my epidemiologically knowledgeable colleagues, about the importance of vaccination. I spoke cogently, I thought. Passionately, possibly. I argued well for the cause. The CBC appeared to listen. 

By the time I was sat in the chair in the clinic room, with cameras pointed at me from the doorway, I was not the least bit nervous. In fact I highly recommend having a news crew with you when you next get a shot. It's an excellent distraction. In gratitude on my way out I scooped up a few extra Werther's Originals on offer as post-vax treats to share with them. 

"You'll probably be on "The National" tonight or tomorrow," said the film guy. As I waited my 15 minutes for the anaphylactic all-clear he said, "So, are you getting better reception on your cellphone now?" Pardon, I asked him. "You know, because Bill Gates inserted microchips into each dose of vaccine." He grinned to show he was kidding. Probably. 

We don't generally watched TV news but we did for the next couple of evenings. I did not appear. Alas. 

And then I did. Not my interview, not the reasoned words about the importance of vaccination or the minuteness of the risks but a still shot (pun, yes) of my arm along with captions mentioning 'blood clots' and 'trouble'. Friends around Toronto and beyond began messaging me. "IS THAT YOU??" 

On second thought, maybe I'll skip the news crews for the second dose, whenever that may happen. I have no appointment, and according to the pharmacist, there are no plans in place. "They'll call you," she said. Who will call me, I asked. She shrugged. 

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

It's utterly beside the point but I keep looking at the blouse I wore. I chose it with care: cap sleeves to allow the needle easy access; buttoned up the front for ease of disrobing later if my arm hurt. Tinted red, to match any blood. And I thought how I came to own that top. A decade ago, very soon after we arrived in Toronto from England, Pamela, a new colleague of my husband's--and now a good friend of ours--invited me to her house for a women's clothing swap. "Bring whatever is in your closet that you don't wear anymore," she said. I almost declined because I had nothing to offer; in preparation for moving across the Atlantic I had discarded everything I could. "Come anyway," said Pamela. "You'll meet some people." 

I needed people, having just left so many treasured friends, and I accepted. The other women were lovely and asked me about myself and about life in England. It had been a couple of months by then and I thought I had adjusted to living in Toronto but it turned out my balance was still somewhat shaky. As I answered questions about my former life (my job, running at the seafront, walking in the downs, folding the laundry, taking the kids to school...) I started to cry and couldn't stop. I took myself off to a dark corner until I regained some composure. "Try this on," said Pamela, and I did. It was the cap-sleeved red-and-white pin-striped top. It fit and became my first item of clothing acquired in Canada. Who could have guessed that ten-plus years later, I would wear it to Snowdon's Pharmacy for a vaccine against a deadly viral pandemic and that the CBC would ensure it would be viewed across the country. 

Now husband has an appointment to join the AZ pilot on Easter Sunday. I wonder what he will wear. 

PS He's now been done. We went for a walk on the beach with the dog before his side effects kicked in.  For the record, he wore a blue tee-shirt.

So. A Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew walk into a Zoom.

One year since the pandemic took hold. Almost eleven years since we moved to Canada. I conclude again that time flies whether you're having fun or not. I was reminded of the passage of time recently when a colleague at work emailed me to ask for a meeting. This is a woman who practiced medicine in her home country and then came to Canada to do a Ph.D., which she completed a few months ago. Huzzah, we all said. We'll celebrate you together--someday. 

She wanted to meet by zoom, of course. A paper had been rejected, a grant proposal denied. The typical slings and arrows of academic life. She asked me along with the distinguished, accomplished head of our research lab to join her in thinking about what to do next. How, she wanted to know, do I succeed?

Of course I agreed to meet. But at the same time I thought: me? Why ask me about academic success? My route has been unorthodox, indirect, and above all, not above all. I have not risen, per se. I do not have tenure. I am not a professor. People don't fly me around the world to address their conferences or convocations. Nor do I want them to. I like what I do and how I do it and who I do it with. I have been lucky to have congenial work situations in academia, engaging colleagues and interesting research projects across four universities: Durham, Newcastle, Sussex, and now Toronto--the latter three secured from the relatively precarious position of 'trailing spouse'. It's a little miracle, I suppose. I like the work-life balance I have achieved, possibly tipped a bit more toward life than toward work, but my career has always been essential to me. I am an anthropologist. Still, I have never considered myself an exemplar of professional success. I am a good-enough anthropologist, just as I am a good-enough mother and a good-enough wife. 

So this meeting gave me pause for thought (good-enough thoughts). 

The advice we counseled, the distinguished researcher and I, amounted to patience and temperance. Don't judge yourself so harshly, we said. Remember the papers published, the grants gained, the positions offered. List them, I said, in writing. This recent Ph.D. has accomplished much of which she can be proud. "And," said Distinguished Head, "Now that you have finished the degree, you can find time for some other activities in your life." As soon as I submitted my own Ph.D., I recall, I got engaged. I might be a good advisor on finding other activities. 

What also struck me about our gathering was its very Canadian, or perhaps Torontonian, character: a Muslim, a Christian, and a Jew joined on a screen, all women, immigrants who came to Canada from three different continents. Now here we were, discussing tips for life, success, and happiness in Toronto. L'chaim. 

My career in a bookcase.

Victory

Happy demo-cat 

When Barack Obama won the US presidential election in 2008 I felt euphoric. We lived in Brighton-Hove-Actually and my children remember that when the results were announced the next day, late afternoon for us, I opened the front door of our house and yelled "Y-e-e-e-e-s! Obama!". When The Guardian arrived the following day, I perched my then-five-year-old daughter on the kitchen counter and had her spread her arms wide to show the headline: Obama Wins! while I snapped a photograph.

In 2012, in Toronto, we hosted an impromptu election-results watch party in our rental house; the happy outcome pleased but did not surprise us, and the party doubled as a celebration of our puppy's first birthday. Win-win. 

And then 2016. The plummeting of spirits, the shock of despair, the bitter reality. We mourned collectively. We joined the Women's March in Toronto, daughter and I and husband too, alongside Democrats Abroad Canada and thousands of others who gathered at Queen's Park, the provincial capitol building. We carried placards down the wide boulevard past my office (the building next to that other building, as younger son calls it for its undistinguished frontage) to the US Consulate and on to the plaza in front of City Hall. On January 20, 2017, the day Obama had to cede the presidency to Trump, I joined a sad and sober read-in hosted by the anthropology department, where Latinate words and a lot of kleenex got us through the noon-time ceremony. "I'll be the most boring president you ever saw," Trump had assured us. Like nearly everything else out of his mouth or in his tweets, it was a lie. The bastard. 

And then, last week, January 20, 2021, piercing the heart of darkness that has been the previous four years and especially the last ten months, glory! A frabjous day if ever there was one, all the sweeter for the bitterness in which we steeped before it, culminating in the shambolic mean-spirited January 6th attempt at insurrection. The fear of more violence produced such agony of anxiety that the perfection of the day was almost difficult to believe. Such joy. The songs, the Pledge of Allegiance in sound and sign, the presidential speech, Amanda Gorman and her brilliant poem, the Field of Flags, the good ex-presidents present and the evil one absent. The amazing coats, Bernie Sanders and his homespun mittens. Kamala Harris, Vice-President, wearing purple, a blend of blue and red, subtle echo to the new leader's call for unity: "Disagreement must not lead to disunion," said President Biden. Amen.

Final thought: I hope that President and Dr. Biden did not suffer from the freezing weather. I wanted to send them mugs of hot tea. The specter of William Henry Harrison ("Tippecanoe and Tyler Too") hovered in my mind (1841 Inauguration).  Be well, Bidens. 

Now, do I need a new coat?