Compare and contrast

Packers moved through the house at a rate of knots, wielding rolls of tape and Sharpie markers. The three women were efficient, friendly and calm, asked me for no hot drinks, and completed in one eight-hour day (including a lunch break) what it took three cranky men four days and multiple cups of tea to accomplish when we left the UK. Admittedly a proportion of our belongings has remained boxed up and stored since then, but we've also acquired three years’ MORE stuff. How to explain the difference? Gender, nationality, personality? (I couldn't possibly comment.) As the women left, with smiles and good wishes for our new house, they said ‘the boys’ would arrive on Monday to finish off the last bits (the kettle, the toaster oven, the furniture) and do the actually moving. Maybe that will give us an extra, critical data point.

Our house décor is now Modern Box. Eldest child and I quite like the look, as do the cats, who leap from one tower to the next. It reminds me of the first few weeks of living in Toronto, while our possessions were still on the high seas heading west. We wonder: do we really need all this chazzerai? Now, as then, we seem to be coping fine without it, although it must be said we have been subsisting on a raw-food diet other than when kind friends invite us round for a proper meal.

Thank you, kind friends in Toronto. And not just for the dinners.

Holes

Our new house looks like a colander.

Sixteen days until we are meant to move in.

Moving on. Part 2.

Where was I? Oh yes, the bully bid.

We had no idea if this mad idea (the one to buy a house that we had fallen in love with but seemed unlikely to be able to afford) would go anywhere, so we returned to our round of viewings, buzzing through another three or four houses that afternoon. A couple of them were quite nice, but our hearts weren't in it. And we never did get to see the one I’d originally spotted, which it turned out was already under offer, way WAY too expensive, and had no parking.

We said good-bye to Kate without having heard any news. We stopped for distraction at the pie shop before retrieving children from their various friends and tried not to think about the house. It was too unlikely. Then at 6:30 in the evening we heard from the sellers’ agent that yes, the owners would 'entertain' an offer! Our hearts leaped. But there was a caveat: they were obliged to contact everyone else who had viewed the house and left their details. Fortunately for us, the house had only been on the market that one day, and the weather had been chill and drizzly, so there were not many names to be reached. Further, it was a Saturday evening, so anyone who didn’t already have financing might be stymied. (In fact, as it turned out later, we ourselves didn’t have quite the financial security we thought we did. As it turns out, it was enough, but the possibilities still give me nightmares.) The agent commented in a by-the-way manner that his one-month-old baby (his first) was ill in hospital so there might be a little delay in responding to messages. That put the deal in perspective.

The roller-coaster ride began to get more exciting.

Kate joined us at our dining table and we all began to read the home inspection (72 pages—we didn’t have enough printer ink so we read directly from the screen) and then to construct an offer. What would constitute ‘worth their while’? How much could we throw at this? We calculated percentages, conjured with kabbala, read tea leaves, and signed our initials in the red circles Kate stamped on the forms. We tried to reach our mortgage man; he ignored our calls but answered Kate’s phone at 7 pm and said okay to our proposed offer. A few days later we found out to our horror that he was talking through his hat and that we actually had no guarantee of approval. But, confidently ignorant on that Saturday evening, we filled in the spaces after the dollar sign as if we had the blessing of a major bank, Kate took the paperwork off to wherever it is that offers go, we served two of the kids a hodge-podge dinner, and then I headed across town (again) to collect the eldest child from a birthday party. I was given several other party guests who needed delivering to their respective parents, and began weaving generally homeward, taking northern and eastern forays for the drop-offs. My phone rang and my son answered it. ‘It’s Dad,’ he reported. ‘He says to come right home. You need to improve your offer.’

Good grief. I pulled over and tried to understand; apparently, we were bidding against one other competitor, and if we could offer something convincing, the house might, just might, be ours. Unbelievable that we had gotten this far; I tried not to look too much further into the face of hope. It might blind me. For the time being all I could do was disconnect and hurry home, but hurrying is not easy, or wise, on a Saturday night in Toronto. After a somewhat dubious stop that required depositing two brothers on one street corner and watching them walk across the intersection to be swept into a taxi by a woman they had assured me was their mother, we got home. ‘Shoo,’ I told the children. ‘Go watch something.’


Husband was brewing tea. He, Kate and I looked for an ‘improvement’ that we might make. I asked about the unwell baby; no news, but Kate said she would find out. More money was needed; again, we called Mr. Mortgage, and again, he said ‘sure, go for it’. More red circles, more initials; I suggested that we make the offer amount end with the digits of the house’s address to try and make some sort of personal connection. We wanted that house. Not just any house. This one, tonight, felt already like our own and tears came to my eyes as I thought of someone else living there. I imagine that adopting a child is similar-- though of course much more profound-- in the stage before the paperwork is all done.

In fact this was an example of real estate recapitulating romance and the building of a family. We had already fallen in love with the house. Now Kate (the midwife?), raced off across town with her delivery, to the Place Where Offerings Are Made (Mount Moriah, perhaps). We had stipulated that our offer, this one, with our initials in half a dozen red stamped circles across the multiple pages, expired at 12:30 am. It was now 11:00 p.m. We sent our neglected (actual) offspring to bed and sat down to pretend to work and read. Now we felt echoes of the birth of our second child, with whom we went to the hospital a few hours too early and sat around watching a movie starring Debbie Reynolds and Rock Hudson as we waited for my labour to progress (and then progress it did, with a rapid bump and the precipitate arrival of an adorable baby boy, and we never saw the end of the film—we’ve always wondered what happened, but don’t recall the title). We looked at the online listing of the house, clicking through the photo gallery, wondering why none of the rooms looked familiar. We had a slight panic – are we making an offer on the right house? —and then recognized a bedroom with framed posters of anatomical drawings that we recalled from our brief tour. Relief. But really it was crazy; we had been in the house for no more than 30 minutes. I’ve spent longer choosing a pair of shoes.

Tick, tick, tick. Midnight. Twelve-fifteen. At 12:29 a text from Kate: ‘they are still deciding’. I flipped blindly through an issue of Bon Appetit; husband looked at his computer screen. The phone rang at 12:31 and we answered on speaker. ‘So,’ Kate enquired, ‘have you thought about which bedroom will belong to which child?’

O Joy! Jubilation! We couldn’t believe it. Shock, awe, laughter, tears, muffled so as not to wake the kids. Husband and I looked at the pictures on the screen again, then harnessed up the dog, left the children sleeping, and walked the five minutes to the house- our house (-to-be) just to look at it and reassure ourselves it was there. Our new arrival.

Of course, there was the afterbirth, the messy part about making a deposit and negotiating the mortgage. And it turned out this baby needed more than the average amount of postnatal care, because the mortgage was not in fact as fully formed as we had been led to believe. For several weeks after we had committed ourselves legally to buying the house, we were on tenterhooks waiting for the bank to grant us mortgage approval, something we believed we already had. ....[REDACTED AT HUSBAND'S REQUEST. I AM A SURRENDERED WIFE.].... Eventually, though, a manageable mortgage came through, as did one from another company, and we had the luxury of choosing the better deal. For a few weeks, though, I tried to imagine what life in prison might be like. I wondered whether it might be a productive place for reading and writing. Who would look after the kids? Could husband and I take turns serving our sentences? At this point, house-buying came to resemble those early days of infancy, with little sleep, unpredictable feeding times, and labile emotions. The phone would ring and anything might be happening on the other end.

But to keep a long story from getting too much longer, in this instalment anyway, we got our mortgage and our lawyer and all our papers signed and abracadabra, we own a tiny little piece of Toronto. (At least, our bank owns it.) In a few more weeks, we hope to move in.

Already I feel more as though I belong.

The poorly baby, the son of the sellers' agent, recovered and was absolutely fine.

____________________________________________________________

I looked out the window by my desk for quite a while. That man, the one with the little girl, came out of the Athletic Centre, walked to his silver Voyager, jumped in, and drove away, smiling at someone on the pavement. He didn’t get a parking ticket. Lucky duck.

Coda: ripples into tsunamis

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

Not about the house: pebbles and ripples

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

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

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

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

Moving on. Part 1.

Date: 23 April 2013

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

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

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

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





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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To be continued.

Matchmaker, matchmaker

In another lifetime, my chosen career would be matchmaker. I can see myself as the yenta in some shtetl reminiscent of the one in Fiddler on the Roof, without, however, the Cossacks, the cold, barnyard animals in the sitting room, and the poverty.

I can only practice as an amateur here in my world. One of the matches I've long yearned to bring about is between two of my favorite radio and newspaper personalities in England. The two of them do double- and triple-duty as entertainers, and can be described equally as comedians, radio and television hosts, newspaper columnists, and poker expert (her). It's one of the things I love about the UK; talent grows and flows and then overflows. Someone who is bright and funny can make a living as a humourist in multiple media and also as a thoughtful writer on issues of public policy and political contention. Sometimes they cook, too. David Mitchell and Victoria Coren both wear several hats, being hilarious, clever, right-thinking, and left-leaning. Victoria had a head start, coming from a family of pundits, writers, and opinion-makers. She is also a champion poker player who earns money at it, writes about it, and provides live commentary, in such a way that even I enjoy following the game. (If she covered cricket too I am sure I would be a fan, pleasing my husband no end.) Both of them host comedy game shows on TV and radio and have that wonderful, ineffable quality of being always on top of the conversational current; as a viewer or listener, you can relax and know that whatever happens, whatever gaffes or goofs occur, David or Victoria will remain serene and produce a funny, yet tasteful and not unkind zinger to get the audience laughing and the other guests back on track. Canada does not seem to produce or promote such individuals, or perhaps if it does, they leave. The US too seems to funnel its talent into single lanes; TV hosts host TV and that's it. They don't also write a newspaper column or dance professionally. (The two successful crossover-types I can think of on this side of the Atlantic are Garrison Keillor and Steve Martin. And I can see Barack Obama with a career in stand-up when this politics lark is finished.)

Thus it had long been my wish to match up Victoria Coren and David Mitchell. My goodness did they suit one another! Think of the fun to be had at their joint breakfast table! I harped on about this plan to my long-suffering husband, whose fondest wish is that I mind my own business. I may even have made the odd comment online in response to a column one or the other had written for The Guardian or The Observer, to the effect that each should seek the other out. I'm just saying maybe.

So,idly listening to the BBC Radio 4 show 'Heresy' earlier today (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01sjjyf), hosted by Victoria Coren, imagine my reaction to hearing her say to her guest David Mitchell, 'Remember when we were on holiday in Portugal and you ate meat on a skewer?' WHAT? One quick Google and I learned that the two of them got MARRIED 6 months ago, in November 2012! My dream come true! How did I miss it? I have lost out on half a year of joy, and also half a year of making jokes about another celebrity couple called 'David and Victoria'. I doubt anyone will confuse the two twosomes.

How wonderful. All is right with the world. But.... how is it that I did not know sooner? The internet is wonderful in so many of its incarnations. We can read The Guardian online, we listen to BBC Radio, the kids can watch Premier League football, we feel comfortably connected to the Old Country in a way that would have been impossible to emigres not so very long ago. It is indeed all good. Yet something like this brings home to me with a hard thud that I live here, not there. Here is Toronto. Here is now, for better or for worse, home.

We are connected by massless electrons, not by breath and flesh and atmosphere. From far across the Atlantic, belatedly and virtually, I send good wishes and mazel tov to David and Victoria the Second.

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?