In Which My Colon and I Offer Thanks to David Sedaris

I'm a David Sedaris groupie. And this week I've had cause to be grateful for it.

Only Mr. Sedaris told me the truth about having a colonoscopy. His essay 'The Happy Place' (in Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls) describes his own experience of the procedure. I don't understand why no one else, those near and dear to  me, bothered passing on such crucial life information. My parents, for instance, explained sex to me in nearly forensic detail, back when I was too young to need it. Perhaps modern parents could amend the lecture and call it 'The Birds and the Bees and Colonoscopies'. Many of my friends and relatives in the US and Canada have undergone the investigation, and no one, not a one, described it as thoroughly as did David Sedaris. The only problem with his rendition is that because it is so funny, my laughter undercut my comprehension. I didn't actually believe much of it. I should have.

***

I got a letter in the mail notifying me that my time had come and I was due for some bowel inspection. My family doctor referred me to a local centre which he said was the High Temple for dealing with all aspects of the gut.  I shall call it God’s Clinic. "That's what they do there, day in and day out," said my doctor. "That's the place to go." I agreed, and shortly had an appointment with a Dr. Moses (not really), who asked me when I'd last had a colonoscopy.

"I don't see it on our records," he said, flipping pages. I confessed that the answer was never.

His glasses nearly fell from his nose. "What? And how old are you?" He looked again, tutted, and said, "At your age! We need to see what's going on up there." 

"I once had a screening test,” I offer, knowing this will be seen as weakness. “My family physician says there's a small but significant chance of perforation..."

"Your doctor is wrong," said Dr. Moses. "It is not significant. The risk is 1 in 3000. I will see you next week." And out he marched, leaving only the whiff of burning bush behind. In the literature given me by the clinic staff, the risk is listed as 1 in 4000. So Dr. Moses may be wrong, too.

***

The eight pages of instructions for preparation look draconian, and indeed, when the time comes to implement them, they are. For four days before the procedure, I am allowed no nuts or seeds or anything that might contain them. No tomatoes, no cucumbers, no strawberries, no blueberries. No watermelon. In summer! It's hard to remember. And ambiguous. Is tomato sauce allowed? To be on the safe side, I scrape it off the chicken parmigiana served at a work lunch.The salad has cucumber in it. No, thank you.

The day before the procedure, the going gets really tough. No solid food; clear liquids only. I learnt afterward that I could have included chicken broth and Jell-O in my diet but instead I subsisted for forty hours on PowerAde, ginger ale, sweet tea, other sugary liquids, and water. I am not a fan of sugary liquids (unless they incorporate vodka or rum). Forty hours felt like forty days. I could definitely have done with some manna. And then worst of all is the purging, aided by the consumption of laxative tablets and four litres of a disgusting electrolyte solution designed to clear the entire gut. Awfulness on top of horribility. For the final two hours, not even liquids are allowed to pass my lips. By the time I got to the clinic I resembled a limp rag, barely able to locomote, and quite unable to be civil to anyone who mattered (ask my husband).

"How are you today?" asked the chirpy receptionist at God’s Clinic, when I staggered in the door, and because she didn't matter, I managed a polite reply. Nonetheless, she understood. “I guess you've been better.”

A nurse, or at least a female in pink scrubs, escorted me to the exam room, where Dr. Moses sat at his desk drinking coffee right in front of me. How could he? It was fromTim Hortons, but still. I sat in the upright wooden chair across from the desk, ignoring the vast plane of the paper-lined table across the room, clinging to dignity until ordered to relinquish it. As I sat down, the doctor rose in response to a summons at the door, and departed. In his absence, one of the nurses (another had appeared) instructed me to climb upon The Table, and I obeyed. When Dr. Moses returned, however, he scolded them. "You can't just jump the gun like that. I have to talk to her," he said. 

"But you talked to her last week," protested the one in pink. 

"Never mind. Sit there!" he said, pointing me at the wooden chair. Obediently, I crossed the linoleum tiles again, perching while the doctor sipped his coffee and looked at a piece of paper. In fifteen seconds he nodded and then said, "Okay, now." And I walked for the final time to the seat of operations. It was a lot of exercise for someone in my condition.

"Oh, has she signed the consent?" one nurse asked the other.

"No," whispered the first. 

"See!" barked the doctor, overhearing. "That's why you can't just rush these things. Put your name here," he said, dropping a clipboard in my lap. I paused to read the several paragraphs above the signature line and one of the nurses huffed noisily. If there's one thing I know, it's consent procedures, so I ignored her. 

"It says here that if I don't want a colonoscopy, I can have an X-ray instead. Would an X-ray do as good a job?" I asked. 

"No," Dr. Moses said. "Not as good." I sign. I’m a researcher; I know consent procedures, but I also know when I'm beaten. All I can do is try to remember this experience next time I’m the one asking for consent.

I have told the doctor, and the nurses, and written on my intake form at the previous visit that I am worried about sedation, that in the past I've had struggles coming out of anaesthesia, and that I think in my case, a little goes a long way. David Sedaris describes the sedative as the best part of the procedure, the route to the 'happy place,' so I don't want to forgo the experience, but I do want to survive it. I suspect that in my current condition a glass of wine would do the same trick as fancy drugs. I remind them again about my worries.

"Yes, yes," says Dr. Moses. “You can tell the anaestheiologist.” Meanwhile he inserts a needle into the back of my hand. "Roll onto your left side." I do so while the nurses work to ensure that my (still clothed) body remains covered by large paper sheets. My back is to the door so I can’t see anyone going through it, but a moment later a man leans over my shoulder and starts pushing an ampoule into the needle in my hand. I never even see the whites of his eyes. I never see anything of him, in fact, but his fingers. I say, as quickly as I can, slightly desperate, "I have concerns about the amount of sedation. I've had experiences before..."

"Why are you waiting until now to say something?" says the bogeyman behind me, irritably. 

"I didn't!" I protest. "I'm not! I told them, I told them all, many times..." I feel myself fading, and I contemplate death. Then I decide this might not be a good last thought, and instead, conjure up David Sedaris. Happy place, happy place. And I'm out.

***

I'm vaguely aware of being prodded into a wheelchair, but don't really come round until I'm lying in a La-Z-Boy in another room. There’s a line of them, in black vinyl, each slightly torn or scuffed, each with a vital-signs monitor beeping next to it. Without the monitors, it could have been a beauty parlor. I have a cuff on my right arm and a clip on my middle finger, and my machine is beeping too. I feel fine, pleasantly sleepy, and cold. A nurse reads my mind and puts a blanket over me. Is this the happy place?

Dr. Moses comes in holding a battered leather briefcase and wiggles my stockinged toes. “All good!” he says, cheerily. “See you in 10 years. Bye.” He disappears out the door, down the corridor. I drift off.

***

As I gradually awake, I have questions. Can I eat now? Drink? Yes. The nurse helpfully fishes out the travel mug I brought with hot sweet milky tea.  Why is my blood pressure varying? The nurse says she is not sure, but is not too worried; for the next few days, she suggests, I should go to Shoppers, a local drugstore chain, and check it again. I heard her give the same advice to the woman next to me and was not impressed.

I ask the nurse whether I can consult with a doctor about my blood pressure. Moses has gone but I know there is a doctor about the place, a thin man with white hair, white skin, and pale eyes. He made me think of skim milk. Earlier, I had watched him speak to a patient in another La-Z-Boy, a woman looking smarter than most of us, in a print wrap skirt, high-heeled sandals, and a neat chin-length bob. The milky doctor had rested both his hands on her bare shins and said “I bet you do a lot of walking.” 

The nurse fetches him. I see from stitching on his white coat that he is, in fact, Dr. God, the head honcho. In response to my query he says “Oh, it’s just nerves. You're a woman. You see, I'm married so I know all about you girls.”   I tell him he is lucky he didn't say so at a conference in South Korea, but apparently he has not followed the #TimHunt news. I ask when I can resume exercise.

“Two days,” says Dr. God.

“So I can play soccer the day after tomorrow?” I ask.

“Sure. Well, it depends. Do you know how to play soccer?”  Cute.

“Yeah, yeah. And doctor will I be able to play piano afterward,” I respond.

He takes this as humour. Fine, let him. “She's sharp, this one,” he says to the nurse. Annoyed would be closer.

Husband is in the waiting room, ready to escort me home. I’m a little slow, a little fuzzy, nowhere near as happy as David S. promised. (I knew I shouldn’t believe everything he said.) What I am mainly is starving, so we stop in the deli downstairs for a sandwich, which goes a long way toward waking me up. Within an hour, I’m feeling fine, and we head off to collect daughter from her friend’s house.  “Don’t turn left here. Take the next street,” I instruct. “Watch the pedestrian!” I’ve signed an agreement that I won’t drive for the next 24 hours.

“You’ve recovered,” sighs my husband, resigned.

***

David Sedaris lives in England but had his colonoscopy while he was visiting the US. According to the NHS, bowel cancer screening is recommended to people between the ages of 60 and 74, and by ‘screening’, they mean sending off a stool sample to a lab. If the sample is abnormal, only then does the NHS offer a colonoscopy-- eventually. Meanwhile, in Ontario, it seems, everyone over 50 gets a colonoscopy right off the bat (although the webpage for the Cancer Society of Canada says that ideally, the lab test should be offered first).

Does it make a difference, this widespread deployment of invasive investigation? I sure don’t know. There are lies, damned lies, and statistics, and the interweb has all of them ready for me. Five-year colon cancer survival rates are ever so slightly higher in Canada than they are in England, by about two percentage points. I don’t know the data and have no information about how the calculations were done or on what population.  I do know that googling ‘bowel cancer survival rates UK’ led me, at very first go, to an immaculate, easy-to-read table¹. Doing the same for Canada took me to pages within pages of text before I located a cautiously-worded rendition of (possibly) comparable information².

About the behind, Canada seems less up-front.

***

The ever-ready net tells me that, in fact, it’s perfectly okay to exercise the day after an uncomplicated colonoscopy, so I allow myself an easy bike ride and a Pilates session. I find myself looking at other people in the class, and wondering. Has she had one? Has he? We need a secret sign. “Arms out, and squat,” says the instructor.

That could be it.

1.        http://www.cancerresearchuk.org/health-professional/cancer-statistics/statistics-by-cancer-type/bowel-cancer/survival#heading-Zero

2.        http://www.cancerview.ca/idc/groups/public/documents/webcontent/rl_crc_snapshot_three_en.pdf

Beware Canucks on Wheels

I've noted in previous posts that Canadians, by and large, do indeed tend toward courtesy and politeness, in accord with their international reputation. But there is a glaring exception: Canadians operating wheeled vehicles. (Possibly unwheeled ones, too; I haven't had enough experience with boats or Skidoos* to generalize further.) Give Canadians a car, a bicycle, a motorcycle, or a truck, and they too easily switch from polite Dr. Jekylls to wild Mr. Hydes. Yes, even cyclists; they can be horrible to cars, pedestrians, and each other. Lately I notice that my tweets (@lectoronto) are all about safety on the streets. I started composing a Cyclists' Manifesto. Rule No. 1: 'If thou chooseth to ride the wrong way on one-way streets [and occasionally, I acknowledge, it is best], thou shalt give way to everyone and everything else: cars, bikes, pedestrians, cats, even insects. And thou shalt stop at every single intersection even though there is no stop sign facing thee (because thou art going the wrong way, ding-dong)'. I've become a real Disgusted of Harbord Village.


I espouse the 'go slow, be nice' philosophy of road use and try very hard to obey it, too, but the provocation is such that I often fail. A few weeks ago, en route by bike to collect daughter at school, a man with a stretched face and a ragged grey beard driving a silver tin can of a hatchback shouted at me. 'Stop, you dumb bitch,' he said, and, without indicating, drove across my path and turned left. Full of outrage, I gave chase, but he got away. Upon reflection I felt less upset at the 'bitch' part of the comment than at the 'dumb'. How dare he. 

In the last day or two, I've had several near misses on bike and on foot, involving drivers of trucks, cars, and bikes. The nice thing is that in summer, with windows rolled down, I can offer my feedback live and on the spot, as well as venting via tweets to @bikeTO or #cycleToronto. For example, yesterday, riding along wearing my day-glo lime-green jacket, I could ask the reversing truck driver whether I wasn't bright enough for him to see me. 'I saw you,' he admitted. I guess he just didn't think I would make much of a dent in his rear bumper.

As my eldest child takes more and more to using two wheels to get around town, I am both delighted and fearful. 'Be careful. Trust no one,' I counsel him. Especially not Torontonians on wheels. 

Go slow, be nice.

Deep breaths.

Ommm. 

The man in the silver tin can, by the way, had Ontario license plates beginning with the letter A. If you spot him, please tell him from me that he's a ding-dong.

*Canadian for 'snowmobile'

A Dragon No More

A year or two back, in the cold of a Canadian winter, my family attended a party. It might have been for Christmas, or New Year’s, or even Easter, since winter can last well into spring. In any case, we had decided to take the car to our destination, so there must have been snow.  What I remember is that as we got in the icy mini-van, I puffed a mist trail of breath that hung still between me and the windscreen. ‘I’m a dragon!’ I called to the kids in the back seat. ‘Look!’

‘Mom,’ the eldest chided me. ‘That was funny ten years ago when I was five. Not now.’

‘It wasn’t even funny then,’ said the middle one.

‘Teens,’ I groused to husband.

‘Hey, I’m not a teen!’ said my daughter, our youngest. ‘I’m still a kid. Treasure me! Treasure me!’  

We all laughed. But my heart broke a little, too.

I felt the same way last week, when daughter completed Grade 6 and celebrated her graduation from Huron Street Primary School. Here in Toronto, elementary education continues up to ages thirteen/fourteen, but a division occurs between ‘junior’ and ‘senior’ levels. Senior elementary, encompassing grades seven and eight, takes place in separate ‘middle schools’. It’s a breath-takingly short period of time—in one year, out the next-- but still seems to me a good idea, a system that worked well for our older children, launching them gently into high school at grade nine.

The Grade 6 graduation at Huron Street was emotional (of course) but also lots of fun. Daughter looked stunningly beautiful ( if I'm only the slightest bit biased). The lovely photos showed me what I’ve been denying for the last few months: I am the shortest member of my family. My parents came to Toronto from Los Angeles to join the celebration, which was wonderful for many reasons, including that the photos with them indicate that at least I am taller than my mother.

The graduate herself had a brilliant time posing for pictures with her friends and teachers, giggling with her particular ‘squad’ of girls, dancing, and eating chocolate-drenched marshmallow pops at the After-Party, held in one of the colleges at the university.

A devoted parent had created a slide show depicting the grads then-and-now, as babies and in grade six, provoking laughter and shrieks. A game of Truth and Dare began (and was aborted by a watchful mom). 

But late that night, my sleepy celebrant finally pajama-ed and settled in bed, tired and sugared and overwrought all at once, with the dog curled at her feet, the tears came. She is not ready to grow up just yet. ‘Grade 6 is a terrible time to have to leave your school, right when you get so attached. They should make you leave in grade 3,’ she sobbed. No, I thought; I remembered her in grade 3, a year after we arrived in Toronto. I remember my relief that she at last seemed securely attached, to new friends and new teachers and the new school routine, comfortable in her classroom and on the playground and in her own skin, after her precarious, anxious beginning in Canada. 

She is so much more solid now, entrenched. She sounds Canadian, unlike her brothers. Saying goodbye to Huron is tough, to be sure, but now so is she. Her connections-- like ours-- have grown, to wonderful friends and to our neighbourhood, which she can now traverse independently. Leaving Huron Street is a big wrench, for her and for us.  It’s been part of our lives since we arrived in Canada, the first centre of my immigrant's social universe, and now it bids us farewell. That in itself is a new experience for our family; in the past it was we who abandoned schools (by moving) rather than waiting around for schools to eject us.  And I am sad. My own tears came the afternoon after the graduation, on the last day of school, the last time picking up my baby, whom I do indeed treasure, at the end of the day when the 3:30 bell rang. Well, I actually got to the playground at 3:35. As usual, though rushing, I arrived late.

There are definitely aspects of primary school I won’t miss.

Adieu, primary years. Welcome, all the rest. 

Endings

We just received our invitation to attend the youngest child's graduation ceremony. She is at the end of grade 6, which in Toronto, as in much of North America, marks the end of primary school. It is of course just what we expected, and at the same time, a complete shock. When we arrived in Canada, nearly five years ago, our daughter was seven years old, entering grade 2, and I approached her new school with interest, trepidation, and resignation. I knew I would be trudging to it and back for many years, many months, many weeks,  and many, many days of rushing to beat the morning bell (8:56), and charging hastily up Huron Street in time for afternoon dismissal (3:30), as well as attending music recitals and teacher meetings and drama performances and sporting events and field trips. And now here we are, with only two more weeks to go. That parenting thing again, where the days can stretch long but the years are so damn short.

I thought I'd scroll down to see what I'd posted on this blog, that first day of school:

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

First impressions

...So important, aren't they? Thus imagine my chagrin when I realised I'd accidentally told the principal of the younger children's new school that I was my husband's paramour. I didn't mean to say it, and I certainly didn't mean to say it to him, but out it slipped, on the phone. He rang up and asked for my husband, who wasn't home at the time. I offered to take a message. 'So, you're his... his... his...' he said, leading me on. 'Yes, I'm the mistress,' I said flippantly. What was I thinking? What is wrong with me? When will I grow up? Then he introduced himself as the principal, graciously accepted my apologies, and when we met today, seemed to hold no grudges. However, I would like to get a look at his marginalia. I mean the notes he keeps on his pupils' families.

(3 September 2010)

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

We had many more exchanges after that, most of them perfectly normal, and now Mr. S has become principal at a different school in the neighbourhood. I don't know what he thought of our initial conversation that September day, but frankly, I don't give a damn. I guess I still have not yet grown up.

Huron Hawks do Lunchtime Drama

O perfect day

Many thanks to those who have sponsored me for the upcoming Ride for Heart. Your donations are truly appreciated. The ride will take place this Sunday (May 31). Unfortunately, the current forecast is for rain, my least favourite weather. But as I've learned to say in Canada, "It is what it is." Rain or shine, we ride!

If anyone else would like to sponsor me, or perform a sun dance, please please do. Link (for sponsorship): 

http://support.heartandstroke.ca/site/TR/Events/RFH2015?px=1090641&pg=personal&fr_id=1070&_ga=1.139210225.338951223.1428368156

For sunshine, not a link but a poem, one that mentions heart as well as sun. Seems apt.

A Day of Sunshine

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

O gift of God!  O perfect day:
Whereon shall no man work, but play;
Whereon it is enough for me,
Not to be doing, but to be! 
Through every fibre of my brain,
Through every nerve, through every vein,
I feel the electric thrill, the touch
Of life, that seems almost too much. 
I hear the wind among the trees
Playing celestial symphonies;
I see the branches downward bent,
Like keys of some great instrument. 
And over me unrolls on high
The splendid scenery of the sky,
Where through a sapphire sea the sun
Sails like a golden galleon, 
Towards yonder cloud-land in the West,
Towards yonder Islands of the Blest,
Whose steep sierra far uplifts
Its craggy summits white with drifts. 
Blow, winds! and waft through all the rooms
The snow-flakes of the cherry-blooms!
Blow, winds! and bend within my reach
The fiery blossoms of the peach! 
O Life and Love! O happy throng
Of thoughts, whose only speech is song!
O heart of man! canst thou not be
Blithe as the air is, and as free? 

Fuel to the feu

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

Loyalty

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Riding for Heart

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

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

Thank you.

What He Said: Requiem for Joe Cassidy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

KD: Canada's soul food

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

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

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

See?

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

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

Not sure how I feel about that. 

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

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

East v West: the highlights

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

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

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

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

"Why?" Linda asked, puzzled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forcing the issue

We've been in Canada for four and a half years. This is our fifth winter. Long enough, one would think, that we'd have got the hang of it all now.

Not so.

In the midst of what turned out to be the coldest February on record in Toronto, our house was freezing. We would set the thermostat to 22C, then 23C, then even 24C. But the thermometer persistently stuck at 17C or 18C. Tsk, tsk, we said to ourselves. It's that cold outside. The poor furnace can't keep up. We donned layers of clothing, multiple sweaters, and set electric space heaters out. I huddled in the kitchen, one ring of the gas stove burning and the oven on. I cooked a lot.

Finally, our tenant, who is a Canadian, suggested that perhaps there was something actually wrong with the furnace. At first we said no, it must be fine, or we'd have no heat at all (like last year at this time, in fact, when the thing broke down). But then we began to wonder. She is Canadian, after all. So we dug out the name of the guy who solved the problem of the broken furnace last year (NOT the one who told us the only solution was to buy a new furnace) and he sent someone over. The very first thing he checked was the filter. 'This is filthy!' he exclaimed, showing me a fuzzy rectangle the same color as our tabby cat (a coincidence? I think not). 'When's the last time you changed it?'

Changed it? We're supposed to change the filter? How do people know these things? We had never changed it. It turns out that you are meant to examine filters every two months! For heaven's sake. If that's the rule, then put a sticker on the front door with instructions.

Over the weekend our friend Sue came  from Indianapolis to visit  our now delightfully toasty home. Sue grew up in the northeast of the US, and lived in the northeast of England, which is where we met her. We told her our furnace story and particularly addressed the question of how we could have owned three homes and never confronted the issue of furnace filters. 'Simple,' Sue told us. 'In England, it's all radiators. No filters needed. Here, you have forced air.'  Ah! It was true. We'd always had radiators, and the plumber looked after the heating as well as the taps.

In retrospect, it seems so obvious. We smote our foreheads. I still think houses should come with instructions, though, stuck somewhere sensible. Perhaps the fridge. Which, it turns out, is leaking.

The house: a never-ending story.

Degrees of Dissonance

How can outdoors look so bright, clear, sunny, and inviting through the window, when opening the front door feels like a punch in the face? I ask again (and again and again) what possessed Homo sapiens sapiens to settle here. Answers on a postcard please. Tickets to Tahiti also welcome.

View from my study window: 'witches claws,' say husband and daughter

The Long Weekend

It’s Family Day weekend here in Ontario; no school or work on Monday. Almost everything will be closed tomorrow: shops, recreation centres, provincial offices, and of course schools. It’s almost more sacrosanct than Christmas Day, I think. Across the border, the U.S. is celebrating President’s Day. In Manitoba, a friend there tells me, Monday is Louis Riel Day (raise your hand if you have heard of the 1885 Rebellion: http://library.usask.ca/northwest/background/riel.htm).  In Nova Scotia, it’s Heritage Day, and in the province of Prince Edward Island, what else but Islanders’ Day. I thus conclude that by the third weekend in February, most North Americans seem to be ready for a break. (This particular North American is ready by the first weekend of the month, so my artist friend and I have evolved a tradition of celebrating SuperBowl Sunday and Groundhog Day. Give it up for Punxatawney Pete and the NFL. Well, for Pete, anyway.)

This year’s long weekend corresponds with Valentine’s Day, which is awesome, as it means that there is no school, which means no last-minute rush to the shops to buy boxes of tacky little cards to stuff in minuscule envelopes which need to be labelled with the names of all the girls in the classroom, but not the boys, forgetting no one, and deciding whether to include the teacher, and if the teacher, then also the student teacher? The French teacher? The librarian? And so forth.  Check the list once more to ensure no one is forgotten, then dig up the remnants of last year’s box of pink hearts because there is always one more name than there are cards in the box.

Valentine’s Day also corresponded this year with a night when all three children happened to have invitations to be other than home, while husband and I had none. I cannot remember the last time the stars aligned so fortuitously and romantically. We cooked exactly what we liked for dinner (slivers of smoked trout with peppercorns and horseradish cream on cucumber slices--thank you, Irma Rombauer, grilled lamb chops, and Mediterranean vegetable stew, olive ciabatta, and for dessert, squares of dark chocolate with toasted quinoa). We got our very own choice of movie, though we did have to ring the middle child at his friend’s house before we figured out how to make it play. Youngest child attended a slumber party, and eldest child is at a yurt with half a dozen friends.

A yurt. In February. A February in which we are experiencing record cold temperatures. It is currently minus 22C in Toronto, and even colder out in yurt-land. In Fahrenheit that’s the less scary-sounding 1 degree but damn, it is so cold. I fear for the kids’ fingers, toes, and noses, to list just a few of the body parts I value in my son. The yurt is said to be winterized, but even our house is having a hard time keeping the outside temperatures at bay. How can the yurt manage it? I ask again, whose bright idea was it to settle in this arctic plain? Something has gone horribly wrong in human history, I tell you.

Son texted me that he is still alive and not frozen and please could I stop texting him? And by the way, he has learned to snowboard!

Oh good. Another way to freeze.

Take a frying puck

We have a lot of cookbooks in our house. Shelves and shelves of them. It is sort of a hobby; we pick them up on our travels though often end up cooking just one thing from each, over and over. Icelandic cookies; chicken casserole the Martha's Vineyard way; New Orleans gumbo. Then there are the cookbooks to which I turn all the time, again and again, familiar, reliable friends: Nigel Slater's Real Fast Food,  Pastability by Lizzie Spender, the San Francisco Chronicle Cookbook, and of course, Joy of Cooking (its first edition would be my Desert Island book). Another favourite is one called Sugar and Spice by 'Durham Expatriots [sic] and Friends', assembled from recipes chosen or created by a group of us about 15 years ago, most with small children, and almost all ex-pat(riate)s living in the north of England.

In fact, I made Irena's mushroom-and-pea risotto only tonight. In her recipe notes, Irena mentions her sneaky addition of peas to the dish because her little girl is 'going through a picky-eating phase'. That little girl is now at university. It's a book is full of recipes and memories.

Sometimes our cookbook choices misfire, as when we bought a book of Jewish Greek cookery in the only synagogue in Crete (Etz Hayyim, in Chania: http://www.etz-hayyim-hania.org/) and walked away with a copy written in German. My husband is particularly fond of cookbooks from days of yore (I note that we have, but never cook from, Mrs. Charles Darwin's Recipe Book), or from cuisines now dead and gone (Roman, for instance).Mainly, the recipes don't matter all that much; the books themselves are fun to read qua books. The best are both, like the new one I bought in Asheville, North Carolina last summer, produced by the local Junior League-- there are still Junior Leagues!-- called Mountain Elegance. Most of its dishes require some type of canned soup (which is good; I have canned soup), but the best part is looking at the names and affiliations. For instance, 'Dorothy Jane Schafly Brown (Mrs. Elbert S.)' contributed 'Crunchy Broccoli Rice Casserole', requiring a tin of condensed cream of chicken soup. My margin note reads 'add garlic'.

All of which is to say that I'm happy to contemplate almost any cookbook although, sadly, cost and space prevent us from acquiring all of the ones that catch our eye. We don't as yet have many (any?) Canadian examples.The cookbook advertised in yesterday's newspaper caught my eye, and could be a candidate, though I think on balance it is unlikely to find space on our shelves:

Being a 'hockey mom' is well-known here as a demanding and self-sacrificing role, and anything that relieves stress in that situation must be welcomed. I have to admit though to a dubious curiosity as to what recipes those pro players contributed. Puck in a pan? Or... I know! Frozen food! In any case, I'm filing it under 'completely Canadian'. 

My Life in Pictures

I like words. I write. I am writing. I have written. See what a dab hand I am at conjugating verbs. It turns out, though, that I do an awful lot of pictorial recording, too.

My laptop contains 21,076 photographs.

This fact came to my notice because I recently uploaded all of these photos to The Cloud  (funny terminology, isn't it; makes me think that if it builds up too much, cumulus-style, we could have a storm, coloured pixel-drops raining down and making puzzle-puddles on the pavement. Disaster.). A friend had mentioned a new app that safely, securely, and, critically, limitlessly, stores photos, cost-free if accessed prior to a rapidly-approaching deadline. 'Great,' I said. 'Please send me the link. I'll get right on it.' She did, and I did: I began uploading. And kept uploading. And kept uploading.

At first I thought there was some mistake, some glitch, and I emailed the company. 'I must have pressed a wrong button,' I told them  (using words, not pictures). 'Your program has been running for over 24 hours and shows no sign of finishing. And for some reason it reports that I have more than twenty thousand pictures. That can't be right. What to do?' Reassurance came from their helpful customer-service person, or perhaps persona.

'There, there,' Ariel replied (approximately). 'In fact, you do have more than twenty thousand pictures. It takes a long time. Sit back and wait.'

Three days later, program still running, the purple pop-out window cheerfully reported that 18,072 of the 21,076 photographs had reached their heavenly destination. I sat back and continued waiting. And wondering. This laptop is only about five years old. Downstairs, buried in the basement, is my old desktop hard-drive, which stores photographs from the days when prints came back from Boots or Costco or Walgreen's along with a CD of electronic duplicates. And there were another two thousand-odd pics stored on my iPhone (four years old).  Plus of course the endless boxes of antique, solely-paper-printed pictures.

Why, I ask myself? Really, why on earth do I take and insist on keeping so many pictures? Is this urge to preserve images to do with human nature, an imperative that has been with us since we adopted and adapted to the practice of using tools? I wonder just how many cave paintings actually existed. Or does my photo-mania reflect a modern culture-bound syndrome? I know I'm not alone, though perhaps I am on the extreme end. Surely some anthropologist-- not me, obviously-- has given these questions some serious thought.

Lascaux ...or iPhone? 

I told the friend who first pointed me toward this wonder-app about my horror in confronting the results of my snapping habit. 'Ha!' she retorted. 'I've uploaded 82,000 images.' I'm not so extreme, then. Is this cause for relief, or for greater concern?

Really, we're all nuts. And that's my professional anthropological opinion.

Listening to The Archers in Costa Rica

On Monday, as I sat looking over the wine-dark Pacific Ocean, and listening to the day's episode of the BBC Radio 4 soap opera, The Archers, I thought 'what a brave new world that hath such technology in it.' I really can't do without my Archers fix.

When I first moved to England, I could not understand the national obsessions with Radio 4 and with gardening. Gradually friends (including one who later became my husband) lured me in, explaining the joys of Radio 4 generally, and in particular of knowing and caring about the Archer family and its neighbours in the fictional village of Ambridge, the ongoing saga of the 'everyday lives of country folk'. It takes some concentration to catch on. How well I remember the first time I listened to one of the thirteen-minute episodes and was able to say with confidence, 'Ah, that's Eddie Grundy.' We have in our home in Toronto a tea towel depicting the Archer family tree; it is tacked to our kitchen door. It puzzles many a guest.

(I did also learned to appreciate the planting of bulbs and the pruning of roses, but that's another show--GQT, to be precise.)

Thanks to internet radio, The Archers were able to follow us to Canada. Luckily! And now they are with us in Costa Rica. My wonderful parents have brought our extended family, the whole mishpucha, 'The Sixteen', on holiday in celebration of my father's 85th birthday. Here we are on the west coast of Costa Rica, in Guanacaste province. It's a dream come true.

Now, on Saturday, I think 'what an amazing world that hath such wacky creatures in it'. And such beautiful landscapes. It has been quite a week-- replete with sun and beaches and pools and monkeys and snakes and crocodiles and waterfalls and iguanas and toucans and parakeets and hot springs and thrills like boating down the Tempisque River amid crocodiles, zip-lining through a canyon, riding horses beneath a volcano, and drinking pure sugar cane juice (really hope my dentist does not read this post).

But after all the wild rides and wild animals, the memories that seem likely to stay with us longest are after all of the tame and the domestic.  The tame: Mischka the kitten, who enchanted my children and became bosom companion to the youngest, years younger than her cousins and brothers and as such without a constant human playmate. We are endlessly grateful to Luis and Carol, the kitten's owners, who brought Mischka daily to the shaded beach, and let our not-quite-12-year-old look after her while they did business with tourists. Today, our last, they were so busy that they even gave her the keys to their car so she could retrieve Mischka herself. The parting this evening was sad and sweet;  Carol took photos and said she would post them on her Facebook page (CarolsanchezBustos) -- I must remember to check!

The domestic: my family, nuclear and extended, 'The Sixteen'. Here's to all of us, for getting the best from the week, for not going nuclear (touch wood--- there are still a few hours to go), and for enjoying one another's company throughout.  We're not The Archers (thank goodness; as Ambridge seems constantly in the midst of disaster-- for example, poor Tony Archer may not recover from his run-in with Otto the bull), but I am beginning to think we really ought to design our own family tea towel.

Meanwhile, happy birthday, Dad! Y muchas gracias!