Scoring points

Somewhere I used to live-- US? UK? -- has bumper stickers on trucks reading 'How's my driving? Call...' (Must be America.) I could do with a tee-shirt similarly asking for judgement : 'How's my Canadian-ness?' (A sweatshirt would be more appropriate, regardless of the fact that it's MAY. Grrr. See below.)

Scoring:

1) We're buying a house. That's pretty much a commitment. 10 points.

2) The local hockey team, the Maple Leafs, are in the National Hockey League playoffs (which are, confusingly, international, comprising both Canadian and US teams). The format is best-of-seven and the seventh game is tonight. I won't be watching, as I'm chairing a school council meeting. Nul points. Possibly negative points, because my main reaction is irritation that they are called the Maple LEAFS rather than the Maple LEAVES.

3) I am a co-chair of the middle school's parent council. 10 points.

4) I neither have, nor want, a canoe, and have nothing to contribute to discussions of fibreglass versus non-fibreglass construction. Some friends keep theirs strapped, upside down, to the top of the children's climbing frame in the back garden. I thought this was a sweet, creative addition meant to increase the children's climbing pleasure. Not in the least. It's for storage only. Nul points.

5) It SNOWED and HAILED yesterday, in May. On Mother's Day yet. We enjoyed a lovely lunch in a bland strip mall in the small, unremarkable town of Orangeville and then, to the children's dismay, persevered with our plans for a hike in the 'Forks of the Credit' Provincial Park. (Where might we find 'Spoons of the Debit', we wonder.) The dog, who is Canadian, loved it. The rest of us would have been in tears, except we worried they would freeze on our cheeks. 5 points.




So, how's my Canadian-ness? Waiting for your call.

Walking to America for hot chocolate

Sometimes I love being in Canada. There are things you can do here that are not possible in England. For instance, last month the kids and I and some friends visited Niagara Falls to become deafened in a large indoor water park for two days. (Okay, that you can do in England. But wait.) When the fun finally palled and our hearing had begun to return, we ventured out the door of the hotel/park complex and saw the gleaming, snowy banks of the U.S. of A. across the narrow Niagara River, with the charmingly named Rainbow Bridge providing a connection. We could walk it. And, armed with passports, we did. But first we had to pass through a turnstile costing 50 cents per person. One of our group, who shall be nameless but is a teenager, decided that leaping over the barrier would be both economical and entertaining. Out from behind a mirrored door came a severe voice reprimanding said teenager and threatening deportation. Well, not exactly, but the voice's owner was seriously displeased.

A short walk commemorated by a lot of cellphone snapshots brought us to the American side of the falls. US passport control welcomed the kids and me with smiles and warmth. They were less friendly to our companions, traveling on Canadian passports.

It also seemed to be a lot colder now that we were in the north. Not much in the way of shelter or commerce beckoned at that time of year but as luck would have it, we found a Hard Rock Cafe perched on the perilous shore, and we tumbled gratefully in to consume hot chocolates with lots of cheap American cream. Yum. Then back out into frigid air, across the bridge, into southern Canada, where the weather seemed warmer but the the border guards cooler, at least to me and my kids. We endured a series of suspicious questions about our right and reason to enter the country. They let us in, finally, clearly unimpressed with our yen to walk to my homeland for no better reason than to say we had done so. And of course for the hot chocolate.



PS Youngest child, a girl, commented that for the second year in a row we went to the water park without her father. Her father hates such places with a passion, so the timing was in fact both not coincidental, and in his favor (he was in Portugal at the time). Daughter looked at her 2 elder brothers and said 'I feel sorry for you.' They asked why. 'Because when you grow up you'll be dads, and you will have to miss all the fun things.' I wonder if that counts as turning her into a feminist.

A very Good Friday

The whole family was invited to a party last night. Our Evite read 'It's that time of year again! It's time to nail cheeses to the cross. Cheeses welcomed. Hammer and nails provided.' And so they were, on the kitchen island, along with a wooden cross made of two-by-fours, all narrowly overseen by a tiny molded-plastic dashboard-style Jesus. Guests did their own hammering.

An evening of wine, women and whiskey ensued. (Some delightful men and children attended too, including my own, but they don't alliterate.) The whole thing was a blast and bordered on the sacrilegious--very much outside my experience, so far, of Canadian social gatherings. I loved it.

Leaving Eden

In five months, at the end of July, we will have been in Toronto for three full years. It is scarcely credible; I still feel like such a newcomer. What looms now, and why that three year mark is critical, is that we will shortly be kicked out of our residential playpen, aka 'New Faculty Housing', and have to make our own way in the big bad world of real estate. We will have to get our own house, our own account with 'Toronto Hydro' (electricity company), heating company (not sure what that one is called), and whatever else is required of home-owners.

Yes, we hope to be home-owners. It may be a stupid hope, because the real estate market here is in what people keep describing as a bubble, and it may be a vain hope, because we have no idea how much we have to spend. Our finances are in dire disarray and we are only starting to come to grips with the Canadian way of assessing and issuing mortgages. So far, it has not gone well. We contacted our bank to find out how much they would give us. An email from Our Man at the Teller's Window (let's call him Michael) pointed out, politely, that they issue mortgages up into multiple millions, and asked precisely how much we are requesting. There is some failure to communicate here, as this does not make sense to me. If Michael will lend us more money, we'll buy a better house. Isn't it up to him to calculate how much he is willing to risk on us? That's how it worked in England. I assume at some point, after circling each other a while longer, each of us will realize what assumptions the other is making that are not, at present, shared, and an actual amount will be mooted. Then we can go shopping.

Until then, I'm dreaming of Casa Loma, 'Canada's Only Castle,' just a couple of kilometers from our playpen. Michael, what about those multi-million dollar loans?




But I do wonder about the heating bills....

Spin

I just learned that what in the UK we called a 'gap year', a year off between school and university, in Canada is called a 'victory lap'. Love it.

Happiness Canadian-style

There's a feelgood story in today's newspaper about a local musician who lacked money to produce his album. So he crowd-sourced, in what sounds like a sort of cheap and cheerful way. The big difference: he did not solicit actual cash, as in that printed by the Bank of Canada, or indeed that of any other country. Instead, he collected 'Canadian Tire' money, which is more easily mistaken for the bills out of a Monopoly set than for legal tender. It is stuff given out by cashiers at the eponymous, nationwide chain of stores (which sell nearly everything, though I have not yet seen tires there) as a sort of primitive version of a customer loyalty card (without the self-interested benefit of actually getting market-worthy information about the customer). It appears mainly in denominations of 1 or 5 or 10 cents. So, the musician, Corin Raymond, collected more than $6,000 in real (Canadian) money in Canadian Tire cash. The total stash weighed something over 60 pounds and counted out at more than 32,000 pieces of paper, providing a good workout in addition to the capital for creating his appropriately-titled album 'Paper Nickels'. In the article Raymond seems delighted and talks about the enthusiasm with which his supporters donated to his cause. Says he: “It made them happy in such a Canadian way.”

It leaves me feeling good, of course, but also wondering: what is happiness the Canadian way, exactly? How does happiness differ nation by nation? How do I go about learning to be Canadianly happy? It seems important.

Ode to cold

I love scanning Twitter on the go, but lately the iPhone icon I click on more than any other is Accuweather. Who writes for them? There must be professional meteorologists(and what a great job title that is) on staff who fill in the blanks for temperature, precipitation, dew point and so forth. But who gets to write the pithy little descriptions? Today, Tuesday, Toronto is experiencing a low of minus seventeen (one-SEVEN) centigrade, and a high of minus thirteen (brrr-RRRR). The one-line description says 'brisk and bitterly cold'. Brisk? Brisk? Where is this writer from? Antarctica?

Tomorrow, luckily, with a forecast ranging from minus fifteen all the way up to minus nine, will be 'very cold with snow showers'. By Sunday, with a high of minus three, we will experience weather that is 'cloudy and not as cold'.

Break out the bikinis.

BBC v CBC

The old Beeb has been having a tough time lately. Jimmy Savile, now unmasked as a prolific horrific paedophile [what an odd suffix to employ; 'philia= friendship or affectionate love'], was before my time in the UK, so I never had a chance to form an opinion of him. Otherwise, surely, I would have been one of those saying, 'Ah, I always thought he was fishy.' Instead, my rather vague associations with the name were of haberdashery, maybe a Bond Street business tycoon. But sadly, no-- he was a villainous abuser. It sounds like a lot of people at the BBC knew about his predilections, or at least suspected them, but he was too valuable to be impugned. And so a venerable old institution is justly and duly tarnished. Or rather more tarnished. It was already dulling after encounters such as the nasty phone call by Russell Brand to that actor from Fawlty Towers about his granddaughter, and the Lord McAlpine scandal.

And yet still and yet somehow, the venerability remains. The BBC is the heart, the soul and the pride of the nation. It is scrambling now to clean up and make amends but its place is secure (though not, perhaps, all its personnel). 'The Archers' marches on (will Lillian choose Paul or Matt?); 'Any Questions' practically rubs its hands in glee, Jack Dee's deadpan grows even deadlier in 'I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue'.

Thank the Lord and Logitech for internet radio. Thousands of miles away and five hours behind, I'm still tuned into Radio 4, or Radio 3, or occasionally Radio 4Extra, just as I was in England, where Radio 4 conducted my diurnal routine ('Afternoon Drama' ending? Get ready for the school run. 'Shipping Forecast'? Bedtime.) Occasionally I ring the changes by tuning into NPR or Pacifica (hello, America, how are you?). But in the car, I can only get CBC.

CBC's tagline is 'CBC: Canada lives here.' Cute, that is, and accompanied by a catchy jingle. It's a gentle pat on the back, with a mild exhortation thrown in. Join us! Listen! Be one of us, and one with us. Be Canadian! The network's local affiliate proclaims: 'We sound the way Toronto looks.' An advert for the station's newsy 'Metro Morning' show has a slightly-accented woman's voice confiding that when her husband brought her to Toronto from China eight years ago, he instructed her to listen to Metro Morning in order to learn to be Canadian. She congratulates herself that she did, and she has.

Me, I just cringe.

I am trying to imagine the BBC making a similar statement. 'Listen to us-- become a better Brit.' Everyone would either laugh, or assume that UKIP was behind it. Then they'd send Jonathan Dimbleby to remove all their foster children.

It's different in Britain.

And the livin' is easy...

Toronto has some problems. The mayor is a joke, the landscape insipid, the great lake hidden behind a wall of condominiums, house prices outrageous. But there are some things the city does really well, especially in the summer. It holds more festivals and special events than you can shake a ticket at. On a warm fuzzy August evening, husband and I cycled the flat straight roads, many with bike lanes (or at least stripes of paint) to a large central public square named after David Pecault, who founded a highbrow arts festival (Luminato). Chairs were lined up in neat rows facing a towering projection screen which showed 'What's Up, Doc?', a movie far funnier than I remembered. (Spoiler alert: scene at the end, where Barbra says to Ryan, 'Love means never having to say you're sorry,' and Ryan says 'That's the stupidest thing I ever heard.') We drank beers (surreptitiously though; it wasn't that sort of crowd-- most people wielded lattes). And except for the beers, it was all free! Wow.

We didn't really want to cycle downtown en famille, though. So another day we took public transit. Very handy. On an early summer weekend with kids and bikes we headed downtown on the subway. Dodging quickly under the crumbling expressway (have to watch for falling concrete) and foraging behind a platoon of condo towers, we found the lakefront. After scything our way through some industrial wasteland we at last emerged onto Cherry Street beach, scruffy but cheerful, and continued eastward, along a rustic, car-free, and surprisingly un-busy bike path, to Tommy Thompson Park, and out the (at weekends) also car-free road to the lighthouse at the end of Leslie Street spit. It was a gorgeously warm long sunny afternoon and we stopped for ice creams and poutine (very Canadian) at a food stall on the beach. Then back to the subway, and home to the wagging, happy puppy.

And then there was the evening after my soccer match when we stopped along College Street, at 11:30 pm, kids, dog, husband and me, and sat on a sidewalk patio eating the most delicious gelato. Tiger Tails: orange sherbet with stripes of black licorice. Heaven in a cone.



Won the game, too.

rocky mountain high

Someone, I forget whom, enthused to us about Toronto when we first contemplated moving here. Among other attributes, he (I remember it was a he) commented: 'It's great!You can get anywhere really easily from here.' H'mm, I thought. Talk about back-handed compliments. Toronto is a great city because it is so convenient to leave.

But he, whoever he is, was right; I have certainly come to appreciate that from Toronto, it is, or can be, pretty simple to get to the places I love best. It has been over two years since I gritted my teeth and fastened a seatbelt that would be mine for twelve straight hours, flying from the UK to California. Toronto is very much in the middle of my worlds.

One place I love is the mountains, an asset Toronto notably lacks. 'Flat as a pancake,' one friend described it. So what a delight when I arranged to meet Princess Kate (a different one) at her conference in Breckenridge for a gals' getaway and birthday celebration weekend. A weekend in the Rockies! I couldn't do that from England. The flight to Denver from Toronto took only 3 hours, once I convinced Air Canada to let me fly nonstop, rather than via New York and Chicago.

And the Rockies are truly amazing. I had forgotten how exhilarating it is to be at high altitude with one's feet on the ground. We spent three amazing days, first with me catching my breath (even without paying $10 for 10 minute of oxygen at stations conveniently scattered about the resort), and then, once caught, hiking ever higher. End of September, and the leaves were changing colour with gay abandon-- that is, where there were trees at all. By my third day there we had breath enough to hike from 9500 feet to just under 12,000, up so high there were no trees, just rocky Rockies and traces of old silver mines.

And all just 3 hours from home.

Nobody say 'Alps'.

The sins of the mother

Youngest child has been issued an orthodontic retainer. Yes, I had one too back in the day, but mine was a plain old workhorse of an appliance, not a fashion statement. The orthodontist stuck a plaster of Paris mould in my mouth, I threw up, they manufactured a retainer that fit my teeth. It was vaguely pinkish, as I recall, and lasted for well over a week before I accidentally threw it away in my brown paper lunch bag. An unsavoury hour excavating the school dumpster ensued.

Things have changed. My daughter got to choose the flavouring of mould she wanted (mint, though cotton candy came a close second). No vomiting. She was asked to decide the colour and pattern of her retainer from a menu of designs (Exhibit A). Not content with the FORTY possibilities thought up by the professionals, she devised her own combination: rainbow plus glow in the dark. We waited two whole days before the work of art was ready to be collected. By now her excitement was positively feverish. Bearing home the treasured appliance she bubbled with pride and joy.

Just over a week later, the dog ate it.

Exhibit A:

What is it they say about those who forget history? Something to do with destiny...

Hither, thither, and whence

When I'm stressed, I re-read Jane Austen. It's my tranquilizer: Pride, Prejudice, and Prozac. Lately, I've been stressed, and this time I plumped for Persuasion. The plot can no longer surprise but the narrative flow and the rhythm of the prose carry me soothingly along.

It's interesting. The words themselves are our own, and at the same time no longer ours. For instance, hither, thither, and whence. They are so useful, so concise, and so lost, yet not replaced. What have we got that substitutes for whence? For thither, or whither? With each re-reading, I feel their loss more acutely. Please, may we have them back?

Other vocabulary is lost by moving across space rather than time. Across the Atlantic, to be specific. I'm trying to drag these words with me. 'Loo' and 'queue' top the list, along with 'ring' as a synonym for 'call'. 'Swizz' and 'naff' are excellent descriptors. I'm doing my personal best to embed these terms in North American lingo. Mostly, people understand me, or at least are nice enough to pretend they do. I'm not sure, however, what reaction I'd get if I asked someone whither she went.

'Toilet', on the other hand, I'm happy to leave behind in Blighty. Give me 'washroom' any day.

Cottaging

I've done it, Canadian-style. And yea, it was wonderful. I'm starting to convert. Check it out: Christian Island, on Georgian Bay, the eastern bulge in Lake Huron (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Island_(Ontario)). The cottage belongs to a gracious and lovely friend who invited a group of us gals for the weekend. She said it would change my outlook on life in Toronto, and she was right. The scenery made a wonderful impression; the camaraderie a deeper one.

The Double Double

'What is it with this milk in bags thing?' asked a visiting friend this weekend. My goodness, I had forgotten that I too used to find it strange. Even stranger, this visitor is an old friend who has, like me, lived in California, England, and now Canada. But her Canada is Vancouver, not Toronto. So now I know that milk-in-bags is not a national oddity, but perhaps quite a local one. I still can't find anything good about it. Bah humbug.

In other beverage-related news, I happened to be in a Tim Horton's yesterday. "Timmy's" is a Canadian institution, wielding perhaps more influence over, and commanding more loyalty from the populace than, say, hockey. Or the government. It sells doughnuts, and coffee, and a few other things, but mostly doughnuts and coffee. I don't go there often because a) the coffee is bad and b) they don't have powdered sugar doughnuts, so there's no real point.

But on my way back from my FIRST EVER weekend at a cottage, we stopped along the motorway for a comfort break, and Timmy's was the only (polite) option. I had heard recently about the 'double-double' at Tim Horton's and thought that sounded both interesting and strong. I didn't see it on the menu posted overhead, but ordered one anyway. The server's look was enough to tell me I had blundered. I had asked for no sort of coffee at all, but two sugars and two creams. Perfect for my youngest child, but not for me. I settled for a cappuccino.

Drinking in Toronto

The provincial government owns the rights to sell alcohol in Ontario. In England I could order a nice bottle of Chianti or vinho verde to arrive with my groceries from Sainsbury's, or I could pop round the corner to pick up a six-pack of beer. When we arrived in Toronto, new friends came to visit and generally brought along with them a bottle of wine, so for the first few weeks, we did not really notice that things worked differently here.

Parents and in-laws arrived from afar to view us in our new habitat, and we wanted to serve them something convivial. Tea or coffee worked in the mornings but by nightfall we wanted (perhaps even needed) stronger stuff. At least, some of us did. Where to get it? I enquired of a local friend. 'Oh, at the Elsibio,' she told me, giving me general directions. 'It is big, you can't miss it, it has everything.' I did miss it, so got nothing. But never mind, more friends came for dinner, more bottles arrived, crisis averted.

It was in fact the 'L.C.B.O.' that we wanted: the Licence Control Board of Ontario (or maybe L is for 'liquor'). It is big, it has a lot, it all costs a fortune. It closes at 9:00 pm, it is shut on certain days, it requires some forethought to keep wine and beer in the house. I read a newspaper article this morning bemoaning both the expense and the paternalism imposed on Ontarians by the government monopoly of liquor sales. The primness of the province's imposition of temperance is out of step, out of place, out of its time, said the writer. I agree, I am outraged, I despise being forced to acquire alcohol at the LCBO. How dare they.

And yet I love to walk out my front door in the morning to pick up the paper, and not find beer cans or wine bottles strewn on our urban, downtown street. I love walking along of an evening and not fearing groups of men or boys approaching from the opposite direction. I love overhearing, from our window at midnight, cogent conversations, not shouted strings of slurred syllables. The discussions are sometimes about philosophy, or politics, or perhaps just the streetcar schedule, but the speakers are not inebriated.

People drink here, of course they do. Alcohol abuse is a problem, as is drug addiction, poverty, social injustice. What I notice in comparison with England, though, is that drunkenness is more unusual. It is unexpected, noted, censured. How different to the UK, with its much more liberal access to alcohol. Cause? Correlation? Imagination? I don't know. But I like it.

A week in the life

Lately, I seem to know my way about, both geographically and otherwise. I know odd things, like who is the right-hand woman to the school board council representative for Ward 10. The names in the paper are coming to be recognizable, and to have personal connections (sometimes sad ones, as in the case of recently deceased journalist Randy Starkman). I feel, if not quite yet at home in Toronto, at least integrated into it. I have my finger on the pulse, but moreover, I am part of that pulse. We all are, the whole family.

And I've got mixed emotions about that. There's a part of me struggling against becoming Torontonian. Why? For one thing, it's April 23 and freezing cold. Snow is forecast for later today. And yet a week or two ago, it was tee-shirt weather! You'd think I'd learned my lesson in the UK, but no. I still get fooled; hope, if not warmth, springs eternal. I want to believe in warm weather in spring and fall, hot in summer, surprises only in winter. That's the way the world should work. Or at least, southern California.

I've done a lot this past week or 10 days. In fact, I've been a real culture vulture, or as middle child says 'arty farty'. We took advantage of living in the heart of the city, travelling to every show, concert, or film on foot, by bike, or by public transit. At no point did we have to park a car. A week ago Friday, husband and I saw Bob Newhart, live. Yes, really! Mr. Newhart is 82 and as funny as ever. Kudos. I am still pinching myself: I saw Bob Newhart, live! The next day, husband left for Berlin. This was unfortunate, as some weeks before, he had sent me a link to a notice about an upcoming jazz concert at Koerner Hall, a ten-minute walk from our house. 'Doesn't this look interesting?' he emailed. Yes, I thought, and quickly booked us a pair of tickets. Only a day later did he mention that he would be out of the country that evening. I personally felt that was information he ought to have included in the original message, but never mind, I found a jazz-loving friend to join me to see Joshua Redman with Brad Mehldau. It was a spectacularly wonderful concert, and evening.

Later in the week, I accompanied middle child's class to a screening of the film 'King Siri', part of the TIFF Children's International Film Festival, held at the classy new venue, the TIFF Bell Lightbox. And the day after that, I escorted the eldest child and some of his classmates to observe a Mock UN held at the university, to which high schools from all over Canada send students for three days. We listened to mock Roman generals discussing their strategies for waging the Second Punic War. (I learned, incidentally, that the Second Punic War gets more play in the history books than the first for featuring celebrities such as Hannibal and Scipio, as well as for being the one the Romans won.)

After a birthday (mine) lunch date with husband, I went back to the middle school to attend a 'Poetry Cafe' during which 72 children recited poems.

Seventy-two poems is a LOT of poetry.

That evening, we returned to the medium of film, viewing a charming documentary called 'Sound It Out', about the last independent record shop in the depressed, and depressing, northeastern English town of Stockton-on-Tees, a town where husband and I once worked. In fact, that was the job that introduced us to one another. So we were heart-warmed and charmed in extra measure, and not at all depressed.

And the NEXT evening, husband and I dragged (there is no other word for it) middle child to an all-Russian piano concert at the Glenn Gould Studios, at the Toronto headquarters of the CBC. The piano-playing, by Russian prodigy Georgy Tchaidze, was virtuoso; behavior of middle child less so. He promptly, and characteristically, fell asleep in his seat and could not be roused. He missed entirely the singing by soprano Dina Kuznetsova.

And then today I saw the most amazing, heart-rending, unforgettable show of all: the film 'Paperclips', about the US rural south, the Holocaust, teachers, children, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Go see it. Take my car.

To round out the Week of Culture, husband and I watched a DVD of 'Toast', an adaptation of Nigel Slater's autobiography, a book every parent should read.


And that's it from me, here, very much here, in Toronto.

Back away

Hove again! So nice to be here, even in January. It still feels like home. How can that be, when Toronto (dammit) also feels very much like home? Two weeks ago I was in Los Angeles visiting my folks for a few days (jet-setting, me, albeit coach class, which wipes the shine off PDQ), beachcombing and bicycling in California sunshine, and, yep, that felt like home, too.

If home is where the heart is, I live in a jigsaw puzzle.

Does that mean my heart is broken?

Sign of the times?

When we first arrived in Canada, the phrase on everyone's lips was 'It's all good.' Or sometimes, 'It's all good!' This seemed to sum up a completely Canadian outlook. Business was booming, development flourishing, there was little indication of the economic hardships emblazoning the UK and US headlines.

Now I more often hear something different: 'It is what it is.' (Never 'It is what it is!') Are Canadians growing philosophical? Reflecting tougher times?

And on a completely selfish level, does it mean we might be able to afford a house next year, when we have to leave the warm cocoon of new faculty housing?

Taking stock

It's New Year! Happy 2012 to all 6 of my followers, their families, friends, pets, and assorted acquaintances. I'm watching the Pasadena Tournament of Roses Parade on TV, and coveting the bright warmth of a southern California January morning. Next up will be the Rose Bowl (football game), pitting the University of Wisconsin Badgers against the University of Oregon Ducks. Sports and wildlife all at once! May the best animal win.

We spent a wonderful 5 days in New York City. We drove there, stopping en route first for a delicious Christmas Eve dinner with friends in the charming town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, and second at the stunningly-lit waterfalls in the tacky town of Niagara Falls. Oh yes, we also paused in Rochester. I love the fact that I live in a place from which I can drive to New York City. It is such a great place, in and of itself, and also filled with memories and roots for me. I knew all that, but had forgotten. And New York state is pretty amazing too. I've driven across it 4 times in the last 6 months so I feel I can speak with some authority.

But, Toto, we're not in California any more. Nor in England. Looking at the sunshine and flowers and blue sky on the television, and comparing with the weak gray light at my window, I wonder, again, a bit, about the halfway state (or province) in which we've landed. Neither there nor there. O Canada.

Now there's a sprinkling of snow outside, so maybe the kids will get to try out the new sled they got for Chanukah. We've been skating at one of the wonderful free ice rinks sprinkled across Toronto. We've enjoyed some lovely parties and gatherings and dinners with friends. We do have wonderful friends here.

And there. And there.

Pidgin English

I was reading a book the other day. I do that occasionally. In it the protagonist says she is 'making a mental note' to do something.

This bugs me. If I say to myself 'I am making a mental note of this', it is equivalent to my saying 'I am going to forget entirely about this.' If I don't write it down, and put it in my phone with 3 reminders heralding its imminent necessity, it's just gone. It might be saved by a well-placed post-it note but otherwise, that ship has sailed. It was just a waste of perfectly good thought energy.

Another thing bugs me about this book, which is written by a Canuck. (A book by a Canuck!) It's an enjoyable novel, though inhabited by fairly repugnant characters, and set in 1950s England. The protagonist is an 11-year-old female, whereas the author is an adult Canadian male. What annoys me is not the unpleasant characters, nor the fact that an adult man is channelling a prepubescent girl, but the fact that a Canadian is trying to 'speak' English. He doesn't do too badly, really, but I can't relax while reading the book. I don't feel comfortable in his hands.

Which makes me wonder how I write. I know I never picked up an English accent during my 17 years residing in the country but my writing is a different story (so to speak). When I reread something I've composed, it sounds neither fully US nor fully UK, and it's certainly not Canadian (or is it? Who knows, eh?). Do I make my readers (the few of them out there) feel uncomfortable in my hands?

Toodle-pip for now.

Business as usual

At first, my new job seemed very like my old job. Research work in Toronto mapped nicely onto my previous working experience in Brighton. The same interesting mix of meetings and seminars, communion with the computer screen, excursions to the library. Enjoyable work, problems to solve, deadlines to meet. The office set-up, too, is quite familiar.

But now a critical difference has made itself apparent. It's a biggie, too. It's the attitude to tea.

Or coffee. Hot drinks in general. In Britain, no one would hold a meeting of more than 10 minutes without offering or at least inquiring about A Hot Drink. The response might be 'Oh yes, please,' or 'No thanks, I've just had one,' or perhaps, 'I thought you'd never ask!' if there had been a pause for drawing breath between 'please sit here' and 'can I get you...?', but there would always be some sort of offer made. Failure to do so would be a breaking of the social contract, and indicate something wrong. Danger, Will Robinson.

Here, as there, my desk is in a shared office. When I get up from the computer, stretch, and head for the small staff kitchen, I always offer to make a tea or coffee for my office-mates. In the UK I'd get a yes, or a no (and a yes or a no-- there were a lot of us in there sometimes). Here in Toronto when I make such an offer, I generally feel that I've caused more consternation than satisfaction, breaking into the peace of the office, presenting a dilemma where none existed before. I've broken a different sort of social contract.

There are other conventions that I took for granted in the UK and now realize how peculiar they are to that nation. The office Christmas party, for instance. In England they've been planned, reservations made, invitations sent, RSVPs received, menu choices decided, Secret Santas assigned. Here? Nada.

And another: in England, anyone who left town, on holiday or business, always brought back some food item to share, by placing it in the office kitchen. Anything will do: Hershey's bars from the US, shortbread from Scotland, maple candy from Canada. The airport shops were invented for the British.

The office parties, the foreign sweets, these I don't miss terribly. They were nice, of course, but I can survive without them.

However. The tea issue. That is a problem. I will have to work on that. After I put the kettle on, though.

@lectoronto

I'm now on Twitter. Thanks to Anne, my friend, guru and part-time personal shopper (Costco division), I've been initiated into what Sensei Anne calls the 'real-time' communication modality of tweeting. I mentioned my achievement to another friend, Jim, and asked him if he felt Twitter really was an improvement over email. Jim looked at me pityingly. 'Email is just so... 1990s,' he said, gently enough, but the point hit home hard. Ouch. That's me. So 1990s. If you too have moved on from last millennium, do look for me out there in Twitterland. Though perhaps I should change my name to @So_1990s.

I can laugh at myself over this, but overall I am feeling rather somber. The cue to my joining Twitter is sad. A local mom, Jenna Morrison, was killed last week in a cycling accident. Aged 38 years, she was 5 months pregnant, cycling to her son's kindergarten to collect him at lunchtime. She overbalanced near a truck and was crushed horribly under its rear wheels. I didn't know her, but her son attended a playgroup with children of friends of mine, a parents' cooperative playgroup, hence a fairly tightknit community. The whole city, especially the cycling population, has been shaken, and the parents in the playgroup just devastated. I joined Twitter so I could keep abreast of cycling groups and their reactions to Jenna's death. Should the truck have had underbody side-rails? Apparently they do in England (though I can't say I noticed, nor did I feel any safer around trucks there).

Catherine Porter, a columnist for the Toronto Star, herself a 38-year-old mom who cycles, wrote movingly of the memorial bike ride instigated by a cyclists' group (http://www.thestar.com/news/article/1086949--i-saw-nothing-but-bike-helmets-for-blocks?bn=1). Porter joined the thousand or more riders who accompanied a 'ghost bike', painted white, which was placed at the site of the accident. She described feeling committed to continuing to cycle, because of its benefits to health, the environment, and the sense of community. At the same time, she wants to live, and to survive to raise her children. I completely, completely empathize with this. I too want to keep on riding. I ride to work, I ride to the kids' school, I ride to the grocery store (I love the basket on the back). One of the great things about downtown Toronto is its cycleability. And I want my kids to have that joy too. But I'm also petrified for myself, for my husband (another cyclist), and for them. Why can't we each have a piece of the road, and peace on the road?

On a mildly humorous note, the way that Porter phrased her own heartfelt dilemma over this issue really highlighted for me, again, that sense of 'We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto' She wrote of her children, "I want to be there for everything:the first sleepover, the first canoe trip, the first love". Beg pardon? It's a canoe trip that comes between 'first sleepover' and 'first love' in Canada? H'm. Ah well. At least she didn't write 'first time wrestling a polar bear.'

RIP Jenna Morrison.

Be careful out there, people.

You'll Always Know Your Neighbor

We recently flew to the west coast of the US. For one reason and another (let's call them cost and outrageous, because that's what they were), we decided to begin our journey in Buffalo, New York, rather than fly from Toronto's Lester Pearson Airport. Who wants to fly from an airport called Lester, anyway, eh?

Middle child and I drove across the border in the dead of night, like fugitives. When we got to the edge of Canada there were no other cars queuing to leave. I sailed right up to the agent's booth. 'Is America open?' I asked him, suspicious that we'd happened upon a national or international emergency. 'America is always open, ma'am,' he replied brusquely.

On we traveled, reaching in under two hours an uncharming but sufficient airport hotel that promised to give us a place to lay our weary heads for the night, look after our car, drive us to departures, and collect us upon our return, all for the sum of about a hundred bucks. Why don't we just live there, I wonder?

We flew west to San Francisco, my birthplace, and stayed in Berkeley, my true spiritual home, with beloved family. Two days later we headed north to Seattle, passing volcano after volcano, till we landed between Mt. Rainier and Mt. Baker. The rest of the family joined us there for niece's bat mitzvah. All was swell; ceremony, celebration, and niece equally superb.

Three days later, we flew back to Buffalo. Blessed Buffalo! It begins to seem the center of all earthly delights. Home of the Albright-Knox Art Museum (the what?) and Frank Lloyd Wright houses (really?). We collected the car and made our way to Wegmans. Wegmans! Ah, supermarket of my heart's desire. Next door was Kohl's, where husband selected a sweater. Then, after acquiring a tank of All-American, inexpensive (well, it's relative) gas we drove home, arriving two hours later. Two hours. I live two hours from Buffalo, and I'm grateful for it! It was a city that once upon a time felt as remote as the moon and an equally unlikely place for me to visit. (Did Neil Armstrong ever hit a golf ball in Buffalo?) Before I moved to Toronto, all I associated with Buffalo was its spicy chicken wings dipped (oddly) in salad dressing, the Bills, cold, and the Erie Canal. It's true that I've always loved the song about the mule named Sal, who plied fifteen miles on the Erie Canal, where you always know your neighbor, you always know your pal, as well as every inch of the way from Albany to Buffalo. Still, I never expected to see the canal any more than I planned to meet the mule. How did it come to pass that it's now a source of true pleasure to know that in only two hours, with good luck and a following wind, I can be in Buffalo?

Low bridge, everybody down.

Of course there are those wings. Pass the dressing.

So this is why we are here

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here's a quick three times ten cubed.








And in conclusion, let me just say that it was even more beautiful than my piddly iPhone shots convey. The secret recipe included a warm, sunny, Thanksgiving weekend, some lovely friends, and Mono Cliffs Provincial Park. Don't add (rain)water.

Embracing uncertainty

Yesterday was Rosh HaShana, the Jewish new year (well, so is today, if you are of a more religious bent, but as it happens we are not that way bent). Last year, mere weeks after arriving in Toronto, we attended High Holiday services hosted for many hundreds, possibly thousands, at the Jewish Community Centre quite close to our house. This plan made sense then, as both sets of grandparents had descended on us and we were a rather unwieldy mob of disparately adherent Jews. We enjoyed the services but felt like very small fish in an enormous pond-- however wonderful to see how full that pond was, after the puddle in which we splashed in Brighton. (Sorry, I have beaten that metaphor right into the ground. Or perhaps I drowned it.)

This year we tried a different, and smaller tack: the Danforth Jewish Circle. We knew a few families there and ran into some unexpected familiar faces as well; always a good feeling. One part of the New Year service involves reading from the Torah, an honor generally bestowed on particular people. At the DJC, while such individuals did the actual recitation, segments of the congregation were invited to step to the front and to join in the aliyah, joining the blessing over the Torah. These divisions were defined by our relationship to uncertainty. Have you struggled with uncertainty in the past year? Or, have you embraced and relished it? Or, would you like to learn to live with and love uncertainty? I had to declare myself. In the end, I went with the middle group: I think I've spent this past year very much embracing the sense of being new, of not being sure of the route, of relishing the discovery of new people, places, and coffee shops. At least, I hope so. I fear that a critical review of these entries might not put my attitude in such a positive light (so I won't do it just at the moment).

Especially lovely was the DJC's 'tashlich' service in the late afernoon. This ceremony has something to do with dispatching one's sins and burdens while standing by open water. In this case the open water was a quarry pool at the Don Valley Brickworks, a revered Toronto location that we had none of us managed to visit yet. We very nearly didn't visit it this time as we became extremely lost. After abandoning the car, finally, in a neighbourhood of vast houses (I quickly added 'real estate envy' to my list of sins to be discarded) we wound our way down through field and wood to the former brickworks, where middle child spotted the congregation gathered by the pool. A heron joined us, standing silently by during the singing and talking, then taking flight as we did. (Can herons be Jewish? Sounds a bit close to 'Herod'. He was Jewish, I believe. Herod, not the heron, that is.)

A less pleasant encounter with water this morning: yet more flooding in the blasted basement. Several boxes lost. Carpet muddy where I dragged the wet monstrosities out to the street (not a clever move). The property manager maintains I'm cursed and the basement haunted. This time they will try to put in a new door. I asked the manager she knew where our Persian rug might be-- she had taken it away after it suffered basement-linked water damage during the summer. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'It's still at the cleaners. He couldn't bring it back because his van exploded.' It's the curse.

Happy new year!