Memory lanes

Since the parks in my city are closed (including the glorious – and enormous – High Park, which has been sealed tighter than a federal prison), I have been walking the neighbourhood streets instead. These are familiar walks through a privileged upper-middle-class ‘hood, full of big well-kept houses from the turn of the last century; they are serviced by laneways where vintage garages lean against sleek new cinderblock-and-steel constructions that are bigger than many houses (and contain, no doubt, shamelessly valuable cars). These alleys have their charm, and there’s nobody in them, so the dog and I don’t have to perform the dances that are the latest craze: the Street Crossing Two Step; the You-Go-First Shuffle, and the Squeezepast Tango. None of this is anything like going to the parks – High Park, the lakeside parks – but the dog doesn’t care, and so I take a page from him, and say I won’t care either.

But this morning was the first day in 2020 with a forecast temperature above 20 degrees, and a promise of sun all day. The bad weather has been a blessing because it’s kept people from congregating outside, but every time the weather has improved in the slightest, housebound people have all tumbled outside, inevitably forming crowds. I didn’t want to be part of that, but I wanted to take a good long walk, and see something other than my immediate neighbourhood, and its threadwork of laneways. So I decided to walk up the “rail trail”, which is a broad bike-and-pedestrian path flanking the commuter train line north from the edge of my neighbourhood. I’ve walked part of it before, but this time I decided to take it to the end, where the neighbourhood is no longer cheerfully-entitled upper-middle-class century homes, but a mixed bag of more-modest houses, small industries, car repair outlets, converted factories, and community housing. The trail itself is pressed between a string of old warehouses and industries that had been converted into craft breweries and fashionable restaurants, as well as open construction pits where new towers are intended to be built someday when this is all over. That seems like rather a long way away right now.

So the dog and I walked. And walked. At one point I passed an alley which many years ago (but not so many) would have lead to the house of some good friends. Despite the passing of those years, my mind – by force of habit, and perhaps from subconscious longing – came up with the thought, “Oh, I must drop in on so-and-so!” I had a brief recollection/image of us sitting on their little sunken patio, having a coffee and a cigarette (but just the one). But then it disappeared, like they have, leaving in its wake a wellspring of grief. For a moment I hadn’t been a woman in a mask scuttling nervously past other people in masks, clutching my dog’s leash tight, but had been just an ordinary woman on a stroll, free to drop by on a friend. And then…it was all gone.

The walk changed after that. I passed into the “poorer” neighbourhoods, and saw all the CLOSED signs, and the hand-made notices on telephone poles offering community support (“ARE YOU ALONE?”) and saw no one – no one – at all.  It was very displacing, to be in what seemed like an abandoned city, on a cool spring morning that otherwise was entirely normal. And because I did know the neighbourhood – much of it being familiar to me, after living in this city for six decades – I kept getting those “flashbacks”, like I’d had about my friends’ house a mile or so back. I remembered this house and that house; that bus stop; this (shuttered) coffee shop. There was the house that so-and-so lived in, in that horrible apartment with the non-functioning toilet; there is the seafood warehouse where my first husband and I got the bad fish that time. There is the walkway over the railway tracks – an elevated ramp reached by two storeys’ worth of iron mesh steps – where I once stood and waited for a lover to meet me. There is Davenport Road, where my son’s girlfriend lived the year he first left home. There is the boarding house that –

It went on and on. I kept walking through memories in a deserted world. I stopped to read a historical notice that explained the presence of old train tracks embedded in the pavement. There since 1853, it seemed, those rails were now just a few twisted bars of iron, steps away from rows of narrow jumbled houses, near a chained-shut basketball court. I thought of how much this city had come through, and how much it still had to endure.

Before long I was at the north end of a major street that leads into my ‘hood, and I was heading south towards home, away from the railway tracks and closed stores and houses with front lawns too small to plant flowers. Soon I was back in the privileged area that I’m lucky enough to live in, where there were joggers and cyclists and many many dogwalkers. The weather was indeed bringing people out in droves, all of them dancing around one another, ducking their faces into their masks. I started stooping to take cellphone pictures of the flowers people had planted in their yards: forsythia bushes, tulips, daffodils. Bold little pansies posing for the camera.

I feel today that I have lived so long, and that there are things I might not see again. 61 is not old (my mother, after all, is 95) but from the moment I had the passing thought that I could not see those friends again – that they were gone – I could not shake the feeling that things have changed forever. Things do change forever, of course; they do that all the time. But the suddenness of this change has brought home that there are things I will never see again, and not have the chance to do after all.

But there is no other life but this one, and when disaster happens, we must take it one moment at a time. So I am home now and I am going to have breakfast with my husband – croissants from the still-open bakery, that we queue up to visit – and I am going to work on the grief. I am going to work it in with the gratitude, like the ingredients to the bread so many of us seem to have taken up baking. I have bouquets on my cellphone. I will look at them and remember them, and share them with my friends. And maybe next year at this time, there will be crowds in the streets again, and maybe there will not. We never know what will happen. We never know when railways will disappear, and be nothing more than a few bits of iron poking through the pavement of a sprawling and eclectic and silent city.  We can only hope that tomorrow morning, we will still be able to get up and walk the dog, through the lanes behind our houses, on the streets where the pansies grow.

Here There Be (Were) Dragons

Photo by Daisa TJ on Pexels.com

Holy shit, you never know what you’ll get emotional about. A friend is setting up a 5e online D&D game, and I was just at the level of familiarizing myself with the chat format etc., looking at the manuals, blah blah…

…and suddenly I remembered all the guys I played with years (decades) ago, at least one of whom is dead now, and how young we were. And how much fun we had (when we weren’t on the edge of fistfights), and how the game mostly took place in our heads, but how we could “see” it anyway: the mountain passes, the sheer castle walls, the swamps and fells and narrow city streets with slippery cobblestones and mysterious wooden doors opening into mysterious passageways; how we were devoted to our characters and knew them like friends, and how I would do elaborate illustrations of the characters, and we would put them in our binders where we kept all our stats. How we had all the monsters memorized; how we would be genuinely afraid sometimes; how we cheered our victories and despaired our injuries and deaths. How we met every weekend and never missed; how we spent hours drawing dungeons and coming up with ridiculous new weapons that never would have worked (like a shield that shot stones). How I was the only “girl” playing, the other women getting pretty tired of the yelling and swearing and drinking; how we could play for hours and hours and HOURS. How we all had jobs and some had houses and even kids but on those Game Days how it would all slough away and we’d be there in our armour, in our jerkins, riding our warhorses, waving our staffs and scimitars. Discovering caches of treasure; being ambushed by monsters whose breath we could feel as we fought them – I swing my broadaxe! I cast my spell! I throw my dagger! Did I hit him? How much damage? Am I still alive?

It was so much fun, and I loved it and I loved those young men with their energy and their long 80’s hair, slugging back their bottles of Brador and filling up the ashtrays and passing the joints a little too slowly. I can still see them, in my mind’s eye, much the way the game itself was played: in the mind’s eye. I can see them getting out of their cars on a Sunday afternoon and heading up the steps of one of our houses, carrying a six-pack and their character binders and their personal copies of the Monster Manual, their names written in ink inside the cover. Their figurines, carefully painted, which we would examine and admire and set carefully down on the table, on the graph paper on which we would map our campaigns. We were more than engaged; we were more than involved. We were enchanted.

I am glad to be playing again, in this strange world we live in, where we are not even in the same room, and there are no little figurines lovingly painted, and no pencil drawings, and no dogeared Players’ Manuals being argued over as if we were ill-tempered Talmudic scholars. But as I checked out the chat room today, and skimmed the reading, I suddenly missed my old friends SO much – those long-gone young men, who every week would travel with me to a different land and a different time, who accepted me (and my character) for what we were; who were – in that context – like minded-souls. Our common mission was just a role-playing game, a mess of theatre and dice and story-time. But it was more than that. They weren’t just a bunch of guys playing a game. They were my fellow adventurers. They were my party. And right now, I miss them very, very much.

Writing this before I lose my nerve

I have only written about this one time before, back in Creative Writing classes at night school, maybe thirty years ago. I still remember the opening line of that free-fall “stream” writing exercise: I say I was sixteen when it happened. But I was seventeen. Pretend it makes a difference.

I remember reading that essay to the rest of the group (we were in a cafe, learning to “write anywhere and say anything”). I remember thinking it wasn’t going to bother me to write about it, because it wasn’t that big a deal, and it didn’t define me, and I survived it just fine, and I was fine, right? Absolutely fine. But I did end up crying when I read it, and everybody purring their sympathy and understanding. I remember they were all women and that they’d all had something like that happen to them at some point. Some “worse”, some “not as bad.” I read the piece; had a little sniffle; didn’t have to hand it in; moved on.

Until now.

I have told many people that I was raped when I was a teenager at a party. I have an overshare personality, and I have even put it in Facebook comments or Twitter threads, recently during the “metoo” movement, when particularly obtuse people (yes, of all genders) have talked about how “this whole #metoo thing has gone too far”, or how people (generally, women) should just get over it, or whatever. Not going to re-examine what they said and what I said in response. Because the fact is that I did get over it, right? Went on to become a successful model, writer, wife, mother, lawyer, blah blah, no problem here. Was a blackout weekend binge drunk for a few years (only at parties, interestingly…gee, wonder what THAT was about), and still have a tendency to binge-eat and I still fly into rages if I’m not being listened to (and to get people to listen, I do the cringe-smile-nod-repeat-soft-voice shtick until I finally I just say OH FUCK THIS and yell). No problem here. Nope.

The thing is: when this man Kavanaugh had some woman from his past come forward and say, hey, you! You’re the fucker who choked/tried to rape me, I wasn’t surprised at all. Nor was I surprised when a bunch of other women had the guts to step up as well. Because, well, yeah, me fucking too. Me fucking pretty well fucking ALL OF US. Pretty much. I read that essay to a table full of women thirty years ago and they all said, yeah, ME TOO. Long before anybody ever heard of a hashtag.

I know I’m gibbering here and I’m not even going to edit this before I post it. I’m in France right now and my husband and I are trying to have a good time. We are indeed having a good time: I’m doing that privileged old white cis-woman thing of having a dream retirement trip through France. I’m not – generally – afraid of dark streets and I’m not afraid of men in bars and I don’t drink AT ALL. Ever. But Kavanaugh and his crew – all those hideous old turtle-faced GOP mother fuckers who talk about how SORRY they are that this AWFUL THING is happening to HIM – have crept into my little perfect medieval hotel in Provence and made me realize something big.

I TALK TO MYSELF ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED IN THEIR VOICE. To this day, I tell myself the following: it was your fault. You were drunk. You should have said no. You should have pushed him off and said no. Your fault. You were drunk. What did you expect? It’s not his fault. He was just a kid. He didn’t know any better. I AM NEARLY SIXTY YEARS OLD AND FEMINIST AS FUCK AND I STILL BLAME MYSELF.

I don’t remember the actual incident except as follows: I remember being very very anxious at the party. I wasn’t invited. My popular girlfriend had brought me. I didn’t know anybody. I was wearing a flowered long full skirt and a green halter top that I was too fat to look good in, but I thought I looked good so I wore it. Nobody was friendly except one guy, the host, who was my friend’s friend. He wasn’t the guy who raped me. It was somebody else. I don’t know who. I started drinking because that’s what you did at parties. I remember putting a huge amount of vodka in a beer stein and adding Tang. I remember the sight and the taste of it. I remember chugging it. I had no idea about drinking and of course got really sick/drunk. The party was in someone’s attic in east Toronto. My friend was somewhere else. I don’t know. There was a dark room with a sloping ceiling. I remember it. I remember there being a bed or a couch or something. I remember I was wearing pantyhose because my legs were fat so I got a big-girl thigh rash and I used to wear pantyhose to prevent it or something. It made sense at the time. I remember being in the bed, not how I got there. I remember a guy coming into the bed-thing. I remember asking “who are you” – I can still hear my own voice saying “who are you?” I remember he said his name but fuck I CANNOT REMEMBER THE NAME. Doesn’t matter. It wasn’t Brett, haha. Anyway. Next I remember the pantyhose being off. I remember tugging at the pantyhose. I remember specifically tugging at the hose to get them off. I never liked wearing pantyhose, other girls didn’t have to do that, but I also remember being so drunk that I thought the guy was my boyfriend, Paul, or something. I had had sex with Paul. I was really drunk. I remember tugging at the pantyhose. I don’t remember anything else until waking up and I was alone in the room and there was a door with light in it and a bunch of boys were standing there, maybe three? And they were all laughing. And my friend was there, and I remember her saying, “What did she do?” and a boy saying, “hahahahahaha, EVERYTHING,” and she burst into tears, disappeared, fled down the hall. I could sit up by then. I remember sitting up. Putting on my hose. They were filthy. I knew what had happened. I knew what I HAD DONE. What I HAD DONE. It was my fault. They all laughed. My friend said later, on the way home, to comfort me and herself (because she was FUCKING MAD, at me? I don’t know. No. At them, I’m sure), “You couldn’t have done it. Nobody can get their pantyhose on that quickly.” I remember her saying that. I get the feeling we were on the bus. But I remember distinctly those things. The laughter, the light in the door, the pantyhose on my toes, the stranger telling me his name, me not saying “no,” me passing out and coming to and passing out again, the inch of orange juice in the beer stein of vodka. Fuck, I’m lucky I didn’t end up in the hospital, drinking that much fucking vodka. Or maybe not so lucky.

So the voice was back this morning, telling me my fault, telling me “WHAT DID YOU DO?”, and telling me it wasn’t his fault, because I thought he was someone else? Because I…I don’t know.

I say it didn’t bother me. That I moved on. Yeah, right. I was 31 before I quit drinking, and I still hate myself in so many ways (I already hated myself when I went to that party, and what happened there was just icing on the cake). People say “oh you’re so fucking amazing and talented and look at all the things you do.”

WHAT DID YOU DO, DIANE? WHAT DID YOU DO?

So. All you fucking bastards on the GOP, and fucking Brett Fucking Kavanaugh, I watched you guys last night from a medieval hotel in beautiful Provence, and I see you lying you fuckers. And what happened at that “party” did not define me and it was NOT the last time sexual-assault shit happened to me. I was sexually assaulted while I was out jogging, but I tried to chase the fucker down, but he was faster than me and he got away. Fucker. I did report that one and the cop said, “oh, I wish you’d caught him, we can’t find him but MAN I wish you’d caught him.” Thank you officer, really, I mean it, that helped. And the guy behind me in the revolving door at the Chapters who stuck his finger in me. And the tit grabs and the rubbings and the fucking MEN. No, not you guys…you guys would never do that. YOU GUYS. YOU FUCKERS ON THE FUCKING GOP. YOU FUCKING FUCKING BASTARDS.

I say I was sixteen when it happened. But I was seventeen. Pretend it makes a difference.

What, get political? Me?

Everyone knows that it is pointless to get into a political debate on Facebook. Like “don’t read the comments,” the phrase “don’t argue politics on Facebook” is a contemporary universal truth. Reading the comments will make you physically ill. Arguing politics on Facebook will waste a perfectly good afternoon that you could have spent gardening. Besides, you don’t ever get anyone to ever change their perspective. A rabid right-winger who doesn’t think there is such a thing as microaggression and thinks that the “MeToo Culture has gone too far” is not going to end up marching with you on International Women’s Day. You can phrase things as calmly and politely as humanly possible, and back everything up with cites and sources, and still end up realizing you’re arguing with a troll.

But recently I did end up getting involved in a FB argument with someone who sounded like a right-wing troll, but actually turned out to be the best platonic friend of one of my close, feminist, educated, professional, women friends. It started when I pitched a brief Facebook fit of pique (on my wall, just to friends) over a recent interview given by Trump’s Canadian alter ego, a bizarre quasi-thug of a man named Doug Ford. In that interview, Doug had complained about how hard it is to “debate women” – specifically, the two women against whom he is running for a significant Canadian political office. Why? Because you have to be so careful what you say with them. Now hold on – stay calm – we haven’t gone back in time to 1953. It’s just Doug Ford talking. There’s no time vortex. We are actually hearing this in 2018.

Sadly, I have to try to explain Doug Ford, in order to give this incredibly long blog post

any context for non-Ontarians. Doug Ford lurched into infamy some years ago during the reign of his sorrowful mess of a brother, Rob Ford, as the mayor of Toronto. Doug was also a city councillor (he had the third-worst attendance record in council history), and then he ran for mayor himself, and lost. Recently, though, he has managed through the Machiavellian manipulation of the party-nomination system by a well-organized squad of evangelical Christians (and, possibly, through a stolen toll-road client list, but that’s just an allegation) to earn the party nomination for the provincial Conservative party, in the upcoming June election for premier. Normally, Ford wouldn’t have a chance, one would think: surely one would remember the Ford years at City Hall, and one would remember what a disaster (and global embarrassment) they were. One would remember Ford’s arrogance, ignorance, and that time he handed out twenties to poor people at a housing project as part of a campaign push. One would look south to where a man of similar wealth, temperament, and bullshit content is currently driving his country off a cliff. One would not want this in one’s province, in Canada. One would think.

But sadly, he has a very good chance. The Conservative party has substantial provincial support. This is likely mostly because of a burgeoning dissatisfaction with the previous provincial government – a Liberal one, under Premier Kathleen Wynne. The Liberals have several botches on their record, including what are locally known as the “gas plant scandal” and “the Orange scandal,” (neither of which are as exciting as they sound). However, the biggest bugbear is a significant increase during the Liberal reign in our electricity bills. The fact that the hydro bill increases are not entirely the Liberals’ fault, AND that the increases would have happened to the Conservatives too (because the Conservatives ALSO wanted to sell off hydro, and there are a lot of factors behind the increases) is lost on the populace. Ontarians scream about “Wynne’s Hydro Bills” like the Yanks screamed about Hilary’s emails. So the Liberals are pretty much out of the race for Premier. It’s between the Big Blue Machine (the Conservatives) and the NDP.

The NDP is the New Democratic Party. They are lefty. They are dogmatic. (They are also responsible for fighting for and winning many of Canada’s workers’ and human rights – including Canada’s beloved health care system, which Doug Ford’s proposed minister of health would – if she could – dismantle). Unfortunately, the only time the NDP was in power in this province, they may (or may not, depending on who you talk to) have fucked it up.  There is considerable evidence that they were sabotaged by the other two parties in all their platform implementation efforts and that the steps they took to correct the incredible debt they inherited from – you guessed it – the Liberals were sound. They were also the authors of some significantly unpopular policies. But it doesn’t matter. The perception amongst us average folks is much simpler. It’s: “[grunt] NDP Bad, Mongo! [grunt].”

Now, that’s all just by way of background to what is hereby officially THE LONGEST AND MOST SELF-INDULGENT POLITICAL BLOG POST EVER. I suggest that you either turn back now, or – if you really want to proceed – that you have a pee first and then settle down comfortably. Because this will take a while.

So, in the middle of that political climate, I got into the aforesaid FB argument with a guy I don’t even know. Can I claim provocation as a defence? I mean, he read my post, cut-and-pasted into my friend’s page; then he trotted out some very nasty arguments, including complaining about how “the MeToo culture” was infringing men’s freedom of speech, and another lulu about how only the Conservatives care about single mothers’  hydro bills. I mean, I couldn’t possibly let that go.

So I went after this guy: a man whose profile wall is slathered with pictures of him and his other (white male) buddies tooling around the golf course in a cart, smoking cigars (while clearly worrying themselves sick over single mothers’ hydro bills). And he came back at me. And then my friend jumped in. And then Golf Cart Dude said something about Pride, and then even more people jumped in.

Finally, Cigar Chomping Golf Hero wrote a thesis explaining why we were all mistaken, we don’t even know Ford, we are headed towards economic ruin because of all these social services spending all the taxpayers’ money, and how only Doug Ford can save us. I should have walked away. But I didn’t. I wrote…the following.  My friends told me I should share it on FB, but I couldn’t: it was eight freakin’ comment frames long! I mean, isn’t that why I have a BLOG?

So here goes: the reference to the “incoherent rant” is because Golf Guy said my angry and occasionally crude (e.g., I said, “ME fucking TOO!”) post was an incoherent rant. So here goes. (LAST CHANCE TO TURN BACK AND GO DO SOME GARDENING!)

Sir! Allow me another “incoherent rant” (dog whistle for: “woman is angrily using strong language in response to outrageous statements; must denigrate her delivery and/or call her emotional/incoherent/raving; anything but actually listen and attempt to understand.”) This time, I’ll use numbered paragraphs following the quotes from your treatise, to aid you with your navigation of multiple long sentences containing subordinate clauses and parenthetical asides.

1. “First of all, you have never met Doug Ford and your entire opinion of him is based on a caricature

you have made in your head.”

Not that this is relevant: we rarely “meet” politicians. Depending on the setting in which one might meet him (or any other politician), one might form a different personal opinion about the man. If he glad-hands at a meet-and-greet, and we knew nothing about him or his history, we might say, “What a charming fellow,” or we might say, “Goodness, he gives me the creeps.” Both would be subjective assessments and – again – irrelevant as to whether he would be a good choice for public office and all that that involves.

However! Voters “know” Doug Ford because of how he has conducted himself in politics and society in the past. For instance: if he hands out twenty-dollar bills while campaigning for his brother and then claims he doesn’t see why that’s improper but says he will switch to Tim Horton’s cards instead, that would reveal a level of ignorance, of dishonesty, of lack of suitability for office (it being, clearly, vote-buying), that would carry forward in making judgments about him in the future. One would watch for that sort of behaviour (disobeying of campaigning and election process and rules) and see if it occurs again (which it has).

Ford’s response to a question from a reporter respecting the fraudulent use of stolen 407 personal information (still under investigation) was mostly talking points, instead of answering the question, which was: are you going to remove the 29 candidates who have allegedly paid for and used this stolen data to improperly elect those candidates. Instead of responding, he self-aggrandized how he took “immediate action, I always take immediate action” in removing the one candidate allegedly responsible for the theft/misuse (in fact, the candidate resigned, and denies any wrongdoing: he was NOT removed, he says).

Ford is also producing and distributing a series of faked “news reports” which are distributed on the internet as paid-for advertising. They are not identified as advertisements, but are presented as mainstream media news reports. In another incident, Doug Ford also claimed having no knowledge of the hiring of actors to pose as supporters at one of his rallies, and claimed he was “looking into it.” To date, he has not done any such “looking into” that has been reported. To add an even more interesting twist on the paid-supporters? They were paid less than the legal wage.

There are many more examples of unethical and unscrupulous behaviour on the part of Doug Ford, which preclude the necessity of actually meeting the man in person in order to make a judgment on whether he has the basic scruples necessary to look after the public trust. Some of these behaviours reveal a propensity towards thuggishness. For example: there is the incident (which I watched unfold live, but I will provide sources other than my own observation) during the Rob Ford years, when a vote was being taken to reduce Rob Ford’s powers, after unprecedented mayhem and dysfunction at the hands of Rob and his brother had ground the city to a halt. At that vote, Doug Ford and his brother paced menacingly back and forth in front of the gallery of observers in City Hall – some of whom were calling out “shame, shame” – glowering and pointing at them, while their burly “driver” took video of the gallery and paced along with them. Doug Ford got into a shouting match with a constituent, calling the man a “punk,” and accusing the people who were protesting the actions of the Ford mayoralty of being “union supporters” and not “the real people of Toronto.”

It was at that same meeting – which the Fords deliberately turned into a shameful chaos – that Rob Ford bowled over an elderly councillor, leaving her with permanent injuries. Ford did not apologize but instead said that he had to go help his brother Doug. Neither man expressed any shame whatsoever for turning a publicly-funded, legitimate, and necessary process into a global embarrassment.


One can only base one’s assessment of someone – whether one “knows” them – on what the person reveals. Doug Ford has revealed a great deal about himself. Not that it’s relevant, but I grew up in Rexdale, and my mother still lives in Etobicoke. We are all too familiar with the Ford family. Suffice it to say that the well-researched (and unchallenged, legally, by Ford) investigation into Ford’s private business in unlicensed pharmaceuticals has more than a mere air of credibility to those who lived in Etobicoke during the relevant period. It is also telling that having been the subject of such a damning investigation, Ford declined to bring the defamation action he so loudly said he would bring. He said it was because he was a “little guy” who didn’t have enough money to challenge the allegations in court. Yes, he claimed he was too poor to bring a lawsuit for defamation that might – MIGHT – cost maybe fifty grand (yes, I’m pulling that particular number out of the air, based on my experience as a litigator).

I would end, but one more (I keep stumbling across these ethical/improper behaviour/thuggishness issues while sourcing material): in December, 2016, Doug Ford was found to have violated his ethical responsibilities as a Toronto councillor. Here is the original report from the Ethics Commissioner.

It seems one does not need to MEET Doug Ford in order to KNOW Doug Ford. One knows he is a dangerous incompetent with a slippery approach to the truth and very poor ethics. He is a terrible public servant. He is ignorant. He is brutish. He is badly-behaved. These are not secondary observations: reports and rumours. These are what we can see and hear and KNOW of him. That anyone would still support him is baffling, especially anyone with ethics themselves.

2. “There is absolutely no evidence he is any kind of misogynist – you know nothing about him except that he said Kathleen Wynne has a nice smile during a debate (which is clearly false).”

Doug Ford’s repeated (at least twice ) comments about Kathleen Wynne smiling are creepy and manipulative. Telling women to “smile” is just one of those many, many ways to keep them in their place, which is as attractive creatures that are allowed into the sphere of politics (and elsewhere) only if they play by the rules (don’t be unattractive; don’t be angry; make sure you SMILE).

Men do not tell other men that they have nice smiles. Women’s appearance and facial expressions should be totally irrelevant to all political discourse, but sadly, it is a primary source of criticism and always has been. Commenting on the appearance (the dress, the looks, the weight, the facial expressions) of women politicians is commonplace and highly sexist, and even other women buy into it, saying that they would like so-and-so if only she could smile once in a while. Doug Ford knows exactly what he’s doing when he keeps poking at Kathleen Wynne with “nice smile.” It’s a condescending little jab, attempting to unseat her. Fortunately, Wynne is just too smart and classy to “bite.” She just says she doesn’t know what he’s talking about: “I’m not sure what my smile has got to do with making good policy,” she responded. But working women around the world know exactly what he’s doing. And yes, it’s the sort of thing done by “any kind of misogynist.”

In other news: Doug Ford calls a reporter “a little bitch.” Doug Ford fails to replace or challenge candidate who published racist and sexist material, now claiming he was mentally ill, Doug Ford would (if he could, but fortunately we have a Constitution) curtail abortion services and would allow picketing at family-planning clinics, and more.

But probably the most damning misogyny is revealed by what he said in the interview that originated this thread: he is VERY careful about what he says. If he said what he was thinking, what he REALLY thought about women, feminism, women’s issues, the anti-sexual-harassment movement; if he used the language and said the thoughts that are right there in the forefront of his antiquarian empowered SWM brain, he’d be exposed very quickly. His brother, for instance, raised in the same family and under the same circumstances, did not have the same self-control and had a tongue loosened by drug and alcohol. But Doug Ford is canny and cunning. He knows not to say anything hugely sexist. But in this interview, he reveals himself: he reveals that he is hiding what he really thinks. Paraphrasing: “You [men] have to treat women differently; you have to be careful not to piss them off. They’re dangerous. They’ll change things. If there’s too much change, men might not be the bosses anymore. So: be careful. Women have power nowadays. Don’t say what you really think. Be sneaky about it; get those insults in the back door. Hey – tell them they have a nice smile.” Source? The video above.

3. “There are many anecdotal stories about people devastated by Hydro prices; it is not just a few dollars and it is unfortunate that you minimize how much harm high Hydro prices have caused [to single mothers].”

Please cite one source (anecdotal is fine, but give us a source) of the “devastated” single mother you are so concerned about. That’s a very powerful verb: are you talking financially devastated? Bankrupted by the hydro bill at their rent-subsidized apartment (which is rented hydro-included)? Who is telling these stories? Yes, I want names. “My friend Dick, who runs a doughnut shop on Parliament, had his hydro bills increase 22%. It meant he couldn’t install a new fryer.” That sort of thing. Because of all of my “anecdotes” from my circle, myself, are of people who are merely crabby about the higher bills – irritated, put out, but not “devastated.” And – I expect, unlike you – I know actual poor people.

Of course hydro prices are a problem. The privatization of hydro was a huge political risk, and it turned out to be a blunder. But the PCs would have sold it off entirely. Doug Ford’s claim that he will fire the executives is ridiculous; another “big lie.” It’s a private company. He can’t fire anybody at hydro. He MIGHT be able to dismantle the board, but they are all under contract and there would be huge financial repercussions. They would also have to be replaced, and that would also be expensive: because of rich greedy people who run enormous shareholder-operated businesses being unlikely to be party to a “public trust” work ethic, CEOs and so forth cost a fortune. I find it pretty damned disgusting but hey, that’s “business,” and as we have all heard so many times, Doug Ford would run things “like a business.” That he doesn’t know that he can’t fire a BOD without (a) paying a fortune in contractual penalties and (b) replacing them with equally-expensive directors should be food for thought when arguing that electing a “businessman” as an official operating in the overall public trust is a good idea.

Over to the use of the word “devastated”. I did find a reference to the idea of the devastated poor and their hydro bills, but it is oblique. A search of the verb “devastated”, “poverty” and “hydro” reveals this story of how badly a food bank is being hit by the higher bills. The fact that a social charity like a food bank is compromised by high hydro rates is definitely concerning. But voting PC wouldn’t solve the problem of the need for food banks – that in Ontario, food bank use is one of our shames. We have grown to accept food banks as something that poor people use as their Loblaws.
Yes, something has to be done about hydro rates, and no, Doug Ford doesn’t have anything to offer in terms of solving the problem – which would have been as bad or worse had the PCs been in power. We wouldn’t even own the 47% of hydro that we do own – we wouldn’t even have that income (hydro DOES make money – that’s why we sold it – it’s a going concern, and arguably, we should never have sold it, except now we earn money FROM it, so it ain’t that simple. Which a lot of people don’t like/understand – they want it to be simple – just fire Wynne, and Doug will fix it! Oh yeah? HOW?)

4.  “50% of the population is female and you do not speak for all women. Many have priorities different than yours and will vote for Doug Ford. If you want to call them traitors, so be it. That is a common tactic of the left, to demonize those that think differently than them and ascribe evil motives to them. In a recent poll, 35% of women said they would vote Tory – a plurality. So many enlightened women don’t agree with you whatsoever.”

Actually, more than 51% of the world population is female, and depending on where you are located in the province, it might be more than half, and it might be less. Women are certainly over-represented in assisted-living homes (for the elderly), in subsidized housing, and in poorer rental neighbourhoods. And on the contrary, we DO speak for all of them: we are the ones fighting for their housing, their daycare, their reproductive choice, their safety, their education, their civil rights. Many women still vote Conservative despite the “lefty” women continuing to ensure that they have rights, which the lefty women often do without smiling and looking attractive, which confuses many men and women. But nevertheless, we persist. We persist for all women. It’s unfortunate that some women are willing to take everything we fought [against the conservative thinkers] to obtain: birth control, job equity, parental leave, property equalization on separation, the freaking VOTE, changes to rape law (until 1968, a man could legally rape his wife; she had no right to say no), day care, and on and on. We didn’t fight for the vote and then say, well, only women who fought with us – who also marched and sang and were martyred (yes, there were martyrs for female suffrage: Emily Davison and Inez Mulholland) get to vote.
I wouldn’t say that the women who take all these benefits (the equal pay, the right to wear whatever you want, the right to say “no”) and then vote Conservatives are traitors. But hypocrites? I would go that far.  (I would also challenge them to not vote, since it was women involved in social justice and liberal thinking who fought so hard and for so long to earn them that vote, and if they don’t want it, then fine. Don’t use it. If they don’t want rights, fine, don’t take them. Don’t take what you didn’t earn, and then turn your backs on the people who earned it for you. Just a thought.)

I looked up the source for your claim that 35% of women would vote for Doug Ford. Setting aside that that would mean that 65% of us would NOT, it is interesting that you cherry-pick that figure as a positive thing. What the poll reveals is that just as many women would not vote for him, and that educated women (educated PEOPLE, actually) would generally vote for Liberals or NDP. There is a huge gender divide with the Conservatives and it is only because of the Liberals’ botching under McGuinty, and the whole “hydro hydro hydro” wail, that the PCs have any chance at all.

5. “Conservative and neo-liberal economic policies have created great prosperity for everyone, including women.”

Please name an unbiased source: NOT a right-wing thinktank. The saying “conservative times are hard times” is an aphorism sourced in Canadian experience. WHICH neo-liberal economic policies? How do they tie to Ford’s platform? Which women? The rich women who are educated and professional? The single women? What prosperity for which people? I certainly wasn’t seeing that prosperity as I handed out sleeping bags to the homeless last winter.

Sure, there’s lots of prosperity in the hands of the double-income kids with downpayments from the Bank of Mom&Dad buying a million (or two) dollar house, leveraged to the eyeteeth but coasting on that low Bank of Canada rate. “Great prosperity for everyone?” Great prosperity for men in golf carts smoking cigars.
Not so great for the old man on the floor in the church shelter downtown, who lost his apartment to gentrification, and at the age of 67 finds himself homeless and helpless, dragging his suitcases from shelter to shelter. How do your conservative and neo-liberal economic policies help HIM? Tell HIM about your “great posterity for everyone” (remember to take your cigar out of your mouth first).

6. “I find it so funny you think the minimum wage hike helps poor women – the reality is that at the margin, the woman (or man) who would be willing to work for 11-12 dollars per hour can’t get a job. So someone who could have dignity and get into the work force, where they then could advance, is left reliant on social assistance or worse because of the asinine minimum wage raise.”

Insisting that all employers pay a decent living wage has always been a battle. Nobody is “willing” to work for $11 an hour: they are FORCED to do it, because they’re desperate. That’s not a choice. People work two to three minimum-wage jobs. A raise in the wage to a decent level would help somewhat. No, it does not solve the overall problem of underemployment. And your remarks respecting “getting into the work force where they could advance” shows condescension and ignorance of what the job market is like nowadays. The old idea that you entered a work force and worked yourself up is long gone. There are no more “jobs for life.” Employers use contract labour and multiple part-timers, trying to AVOID having to get involved with a dedicated work force, which is expensive (all those benefits!) and risky (what if I want to fire them? they might have rights! they might sue!)

I’m still trying to get how you managed to logic yourself into “the minimum wage raise has caused people to go on social assistance and worse,” but are you saying that people went on welfare because of the minimum wage increase? Say WHAT? Source, please – source!

In trying to source it for you, I did find a Stats Can report that between December 2017 and January 2018, there were 59,000 fewer part-time minimum-wage jobs, and 43,000 more full-time jobs. Although several right-wing sources crowed that the January wage hike was the cause, the Stats Can analyst said that was leaping to conclusions. Also, despite all the fear-mongering, there is evidence that the minimum wage hike brought to Alberta had minimum effect.

7. “Me, and many conservatives, do care about single moms, the poor, and the vulnerable in society. However, as adults, we understand that the government does not have unlimited funds to pay for every last want and need, nor do we appreciate our hard-earned dollars being wasted on government insiders and marijuana store logos.”

Well, that’s a big one. “Of course we care. But we don’t have the money. And we’re the grownups, and you’re the children, and we don’t want to give you your allowance – because of…uh…marijuana store logos!”

I’m a little staggered to even attempt to respond to this without going on another cuss-filled tirade, which I know you have trouble absorbing, because angry-woman-responds-passionately-to-incredibly-stupid-statement seems to shut down your brain. But let’s see:

No, you don’t really care. If you really cared, you’d be doing something for them. And not just joining the Kiwanis club so that the hospital gets a big cheque. Really doing something. In the trenches. Finding out who the poverty workers in the city and country are, and finding out how to help them. You don’t give a flaming crap about impoverished women with their four kids, no daddy, and one of the kids has a drug problem, and another’s autistic, and there are rats under the sink at her subsidized apartment. You wouldn’t lift one finger to help her, and you’d blame her for her circumstance. The typical conservative response would be along the lines of: “What’s she doing having all those kids? Couldn’t she have had an abortion (on her own dime – I’m not paying for it!) And I’m not responsible for her rotten kid’s drug problem. Put him in jail. The youth crime laws are too loose anyway. Autistic? Aren’t they the kids who make so much noise?  Doug says those are bad! Rats in the subsidized housing? She should be glad she has an apartment – lucky to have it when it’s taxpayers who pay for her – we’re not made of money! It’s our taxes paying for this welfare bum!”

You don’t think that’s what you sound like? Yes. That’s exactly what conservatives sound like. “We care, but we don’t. We’re the adults.” Pretty shocking.

8. “Ontario is seriously headed for a debt crisis – ask Greece how the social safety net does during periods of forced austerity. Just like in a household, it is better to be prudent now, than in crisis later.”

The hyperbolic comparison of Greece to Ontario is just not worth commenting on. However: yes, it appears that we have a large debt and that has to be dealt with. That is not dealt with by cutting revenue (10c of the gas and no plan for replacement revenue except “more people will get in their cars and go shopping?”)

It is also not the fault of “social services” that there is ballooning debt. This has always been the go-to of Conservative governments when they cause bad economic times: blame those poor people and their safety net! Yes, there have been a number of bad decisions made by the Liberal government, including possibly selling off hydro, and of course McGuinty appears to have been more than incautious. But this is not the fault of the poor and it is not the fault of social services.

Cutting taxes for the rich (only those earning more than $100K a year will see any material benefit from Ford’s touted tax cut) and for corporations is just that old trickle-down blah-blah that has left the United States a two-tier society with the very poor on one side and the very rich on the other.

It is not imprudent to invest in social services: on the contrary, failure to support education, health care, the environment, affordable public transit, rental housing, accessible justice, and more only causes suffering and polarization and more (expensive) needs. The money still gets spent, except it gets spent on things that the Cons’ supporters want. Turning farmland into swishy shopping malls. Superhighways. Golf courses. Corporate tax cuts. Courting big business development without a thought to job development or security. Sprawl and spend and consume and bejewel. Cons are not careful with money: they just make sure they keep it close and don’t give any of it away (except in measured, optional, tax-deductible, charitable doses).

Your comparison to a “household” is grossly simplistic thinking. But let’s work with it. Try to picture a house built of rocks, wood, grass, brick, planks, on multiple levels and different foundations; some of the rooms have leaky roofs, some have mould, some are opulent and overlook a beautiful vista; others are used for storage, or for heating; some are full of hungry children and others haven’t been lived in for years. What’s more, the house has multiple owners: some of them are absentees, some of them are relegated to the damp basement, some come for a visit and then leave. Others are elderly and can’t get up the stairs; others are sick but are living in the room without heating. Some owners are devout and won’t live with other owners who are not devout. They all have needs and they all live in the same house. Not all of them have the same amount of money to give; some of them are a bigger drain on the household finances. Some of them are generous and are concerned and want to share; others lock the door to their room and only invite in the people they like, where they feed them brandy and complain about the noise the autistic kid is making in the room next door. Everyone is upset, everyone is worried, everyone is needy (even the brandy-sippers; they have needs – more brandy!). So they try to decide on someone to govern the house.

And who will govern that mess? It’s not an easy job. It’s far more complicated than “a household.” It’s not a business and it’s not a household. It’s a province. Or a country. But what is needed is care. Real care. I do not believe for one moment that Doug Ford cares. He might make himself feel good by having a party for little black kids at his luxurious cottage for the last three summers. “I brought 80 kids from the black community up to my cottage, every single year for the last three years. These kids have never been to Muskoka in their lives. These kids have never put their foot in a lake before, they’ve never been on a jet ski before, they’ve never been out fishing up north.” And he thinks the way he’s talking shows that he’s forward-thinking and wonderful and some sort of white saviour.
It’s vomitous. But most Doug Ford voters would think he’s wonderful – including some of the families of the kids who mistake charity for equal rights.

9: “You and your leftist friends consider yourself enlightened, and ascribe evil motives to everyone who thinks differently than you (dinosaurs, for example), you really want to take society into a regressive state where people are judged by superficialities instead of their character, their decency, and their individual actions.”

“Enlightened?” That’s a big word. You mean the Buddhist sense of enlightened? I think you might mean “informed” or “educated.” Or “experienced.” Not enlightened or superior or the like. Just more interested in the downtrodden, the marginalized, the ones who slip through the cracks. We’ve seen things, been places, fought the injustices, helped people up. We’re gay, we’re straight, we’re trans, we’re non-gendered, we’re black, we’re poor, we’re rich. And we’re interested. We want accessible justice. Affordable housing. Wheelchair ramps. Job training. Religious freedom. Homes for the aged. We want to figure out how much it will cost and figure out how to pay for it – all of us. We are the ones who have fought for freedom of speech, fair divorce laws, criminal justice reform, safe washroom facilities for atypically-gendered individuals, the weekend, public vaccination programs, health care, equal pay for equal work. Gay marriage. Reproductive choice. All of it. We fought for it.

A lot of conservatives say and do horrible things and then complain that they are being judged. “You don’t even know Doug Ford,” you started off by saying. And I don’t know you, either. I hear you’re a nice fellow under all this strange, twisted, backward, harmful, money-money-money thinking. I’m sure you are. I’m sure you love your wife and your kids (probably you don’t have a husband, but stranger Cons have happened) and you give to charity at the Golf Club’s annual Christmas drive. You’d probably be the type to ask little black kids to your cottage and then boast about it. No, wait, that’s Doug Ford.

I grew up in Toronto in the 60’s, a time when birth control was illegal, when a man with a black face was stared at as the “other”, when we were so uniformly Christian that Eaton’s drew its curtains over its display windows on Sundays. In those days, I was told by many (not my mother) that I could not be a lawyer because women aren’t lawyers: our choices were mother/housewife, teacher, and nurse. The only “out” gay kid in the school was regularly beaten up. People drove drunk because there was no public education about it. I remember my mother even having to pay for a trip to the doctor (a very faint memory). Men were constrained to be manly; women had to smile. We girls weren’t even allowed to wear trousers to school (not “feminine”). My mother was fired from her job when she got engaged. A pregnant neighbour was “sent away” to have her baby. Disabled people were confined to their homes and by their disabilities – there were few efforts to integrate those with hearing impairments (they were called “dummies”) or with intellectual limitations (“retards”), and navigating the city in a wheelchair was impossible. Our neighbourhood had Canada’s first black MPP – Leonard Braithwaite – and some of us were very proud of that. Others called him “that nigger.”

Identity politics? Not scared of that. Not at all. Not even sure what it means, except if it means that I have respect people’s identities, well, yeah, okay. I’m down with that.

But what’s really scary? Really backward? Doug Ford. He got into the place he is now by the machinations of the Evangelicals, and possibly by voter fraud (see cite re: the 407 breach and the use of the data). That many people believe he is there to help them is very sad. But as a lawyer, I had many clients who had been the victims of fraudsters. They were all so bewildered when they came to me, having had their title compromised, or their bank account stolen, or their investments drained. They couldn’t believe that they had been so fooled.

I don’t even know Doug Ford? Yes I do. I know him all too well.

 

Lost In The Yucatan – Again…

For me and the Spousal Equivalent, it has become a tradition that on our annual visit to the Yucatan, Mexico, we take road trips. It is just as much a tradition that on at least one of these road trips (okay, okay, on nearly all of them) we get next-to-hopelessly lost.

Getting lost is unavoidable in the Yucatan, although we don’t much like it and try not to do it. For the past five years’ of trips to Mexico, John has been an excellent and thoroughly-prepared navigator. He has used his purchased-specially-from-a-geographical-society map of the Yucatan, his printed-up-back-at-home satellite maps, his internet research skills, and his strong resolve that he is going the right way (which, fortunately, he usually is) to make sure we (eventually) get where we want to go. My job has been to drive, and yes, to have the occasional meltdown over the directions. Being sent the wrong way up a narrow one-way street on market day, straight into the path of an oncoming parade of bicycles, tuktuks, street dogs, and gun-toting Federales in gigantic black-and-silver Jeeps, has made me sometimes raise my voice above ladylike levels. There is one town that we regularly pass through (called Xchatu’kunkzchin, or similar), which John calls “the town where you screamed at me.” Which could actually be what Xchatu’kunkzchin means in Mayan.

Fortunately, most of the time, we manage to stay pretty cool when we’re lost. We have had to, because it’s a just-you-and-me-kid situation. We can’t really ask for directions, because we don’t speak Spanish, despite making efforts at lessons and Duolingo. We blame our aged memories: it took us two years to memorize the words for “right” and “left” in Spanish, and then to our distress we learned (the hard way) that the words for “right” and “straight ahead” only differ by one vowel. That “hard way” took us off-course by fifty klicks that time, and there was no one to correct us. Until this year. This year, it was just us – and the Google Lady.

After years of Luddite-ism, this year we decided to give Google Maps a try. John was at first a bit reluctant to believe the voice we christened the “Google Lady” could navigate better than he could. I was myself not much more confident, and was pleased to see that John still had his dossier of maps and printouts. Shortly after arriving, on our first road trip, we gave the Google Lady a formal try-out. She scored four stars out of five, and would have done perfectly except for at the last minute telling us to turn left onto a road where there was no actual road. But that happens with the paper maps as well, so we decided she’d done well.

Let me interject here with a bit about Mexican roads in the Yucatan. The word “road” here can mean any number of things. At one end of the spectrum are the new highways – modern polished thoroughfares, bearing well-marked signage and clear lane delineations. At the other end, there are the pitted one-lane limestone tracks – often shown on a map as the only way to reach one’s destination – which start off as barely-driveable and eventually dwindle into little more than a rutted footpath. In between those two road standards there are many, many different roads: everything from beach roads (soft sand tracks occasionally flooded with lake-sized puddles), pueblo roads (lazy semi-paved pathways peppered with sleeping dogs, teetering cyclists, and ambling locals) and run-of-the-mill two-lane highways (which may or may not bear the same identification number as the road shown on your map, and whose potholes keep the many, many Mexican tire stores in business). On top of the roads themselves, there are esoterica such as the lack of signage, the unmarked one-way streets, the topes, the potholes, the dogs, the kids on motorcycles, the potholes, the pickup trucks on verge of collapse (overflowing with commuting labourers who are all standing up in the rear), the old men on bicycles, and the potholes. Add to that occasional surprises like gun-toting random police checks and occasional informal toll collections (where locals at the outskirts of a town string a rope across the road to stop traffic, then shake a tin can at drivers, asking for a donation “por la puebla”). And the city streets? Don’t even go there. Literally. Don’t go there. Stay in the country, where there are fewer things trying to crush your rent-a-car between a dump truck and a city bus.

So we were justifiably concerned that the Google Lady might have trouble navigating all these nuances. Still, we started using her services, on this year’s crop of exploratory “adventures.” She got us to Sisal (where we saw the birds and the spectacular beach), and to Paraiso (where we went horseback riding and rented a donkey cart), and to the Cenotes Santa Barbara (where we swam in not one but three of the amazing subterranean lakes that pepper the Yucatan). Did she get us to those destinations without a hitch? Well, no. She was a little…erratic. Sometimes she lost us. Sometimes she stopped talking to us. Sometimes, she flat-out lied, apparently thinking it was cute to tell us we were in Europe. We were happiest when the little red arrow on the phone screen would proceed confidently along the blue line of whatever road we were alleged to be on. But then she would abandon us, and the heartbreak would begin. “Come back, Google Lady!” we would cry. And then we’d get out the paper map, and struggle our way back into signal range. It was a little nervewracking.

We decided, therefore, that for our next road trip, we would take a straightforward tour along the Convent Route. The Yucatan has a number of “rutas” that are guide-book recommended, for trips through cenote country, or archeological zones, or trips to areas filled with grutas (caves) or bird sanctuaries. The Convent Route looked very simple, promising a fascinating ecclesiastical/historical adventure. We would drive to the starting point – a village with an “ornate” church and an operating henequen plantation in a restored hacienda – and then proceed through seven more towns. Particularly charming-sounding was the village of Telchaquillo, where we would see an “austere” 16th-century church built on a Mayan ruin (those are actually pretty common), and an underground cenote, right in the town square. It sounded great, and easy to do. We figured we could do the whole thing and be back by dinnertime. If we didn’t get lost, that is.

Well, the best-laid plans of mice and men aft gang a-Google, and within forty minutes of leaving Chuburna, the Google Maps lady had stopped being our best friend. John and I stopped conversing pleasantly about the scenery and started swearing at the Google Lady. But she seemed confident, and – foolishly – we trusted her, even in the face of our experience. We knew we should stay on the Pereferico until the Cancun exit. We knew that. But she said, “in 400 meters, take the exit to Y’ulbegitzinlost,” and like idiots, we took it.

An hour later, along roads that clearly hadn’t seen traffic (or a maintenance crew) in decades, we finally arrived at the first stop: the puebla that featured the henequin-plantation-restored-hacienda. You would think that the Google Lady could get us from the outskirts of a town that housed maybe five hundred people, to the gates of an enormous tourist-trap hacienda. But no: it was at the town limits that the Google Lady completely lost her mind. She took us left, right, right, left again, and then told us to drive through a soccer pitch. Did I drive through the soccer pitch? You bet your ass I did. Three little goats grazing near the goalposts watched us pass, no doubt thinking, “Google maps again.”

The henequen plantation/hacienda was far more expensive than we’d anticipated, but we paid it and went anyway. It was a beautiful site and an interesting tour, but it was three hours long, and involved the sort of thing we don’t do in the Yucatan very often: a large group of tourists (Mexicans, Canadians, Yanks, Aussies, Quebecois, and one very cheerful German) being herded along a fixed path while a guide gives a bilingual talk. By the time we got out of there, it was early afternoon. There was no longer any chance of doing the whole route. We decided to head straight to the next town – Telchaquillo – of the austere chapel and the in-town cenote. Then we could go from there on perhaps two more church visits on the route, and still be home for supper. Piece of cake.

So we started off down the road by which we’d come, turning on the phone to summon the Google Lady. The Google Lady, though, had disappeared. She’d been there on the way in, but now – on the selfsame road – she was gone. We put the phone down, and John pulled out his map. We could kinda-sorta see where we might possibly be.

“Which way?” I asked John, when we reached the turnoff for the main road.

“Damned if I know,” he replied. Then, having flipped an imaginary coin, he said, “Turn left.”

We should have turned right. Hell, we should have turned around. The Google Lady had brought us into town via a series of backroads that she might have considered the most direct route. But if we’d gone the other way, we’d have been on the nice clean tidy highway, and got to Telchaquillo in ten minutes. Instead, we arrived there in an hour’s time, having driven miles out of our way. At least it was interesting (as getting lost in the Yucatan usually is): we drove through several villages, two of which were located on ruined haciendas, their derelict smokestacks looming overhead; we saw many traditional Yucatan-style thatched-roof houses and even more brightly-painted cinderblock-and-plaster two-room houses. We passed two large and enticing churches, clearly exactly what we wanted to see, but they were closed. So we kept driving, occasionally checking to see if the Google Lady was back. She would check in long enough to tell us that in her opinion, we should turn left at Marseilles. So we would turn her off again.

We drove, through miles of dry sparse Yucatan landscape, flat and rubble-strewn, largely treeless. We met a cow and took its picture. It ran away through a small garbage dump (those are everywhere in Mexico) and disappeared into the bushes. Then finally, we emerged onto a highway – an actual marked highway – and there overhead was a large and official sign declaring that Telchaquillo was at the next retorno. John and I high-fived each other and celebrated with a slurp of Coca Light. The Google Lady came online and sneered. “Told you so,” she said.

The Google Lady supervised us into the remote village of Telchaquillo, where – inexplicably – there was a strong signal. There was absolutely no way to get lost in that little puebla, but she gave it the old college try, telling us to turn left and right and right and left and stop and back up and do the hokey-pokey. We ignored her. It was a town of a thatchwork of maybe ten calles, and the austere chapel and the town square took only minutes to find. Sadly, the church was closed, and the town looked deserted. The town playing field, beside the shuttered church, housed the tents and trucks of a travelling circus called, incredibly “Circus Norman.” The tiny town square was treed and there was a circular stone wall, obviously the mouth to the cenote. But by that point, it was after 2 p.m., and we needed something to eat. We pulled over at the town’s only enterprise, a tiny tienda that sported a cardboard sign with the word “comidas” hand-printed on it. “Comidas” means meals. Basically, this tiny, grubby, windowless, Mexican corner store was offering meals.

We parked in front of the tienda to consider this. This could be dangerous. One of the rules about Mexico is that you never eat food from roadside stands. But this wasn’t exactly a roadside stand. And besides, we were very hungry. Maybe we would go in and see what they had.

Just then, a face appeared in my driver’s side window: a little old Mayan lady, cheerful and largely toothless, asking me God-knows-what. “Comida?” I asked, and triggered a dance of gesticulating and welcome. Yes, of course, comidas! Get out of the car, she motioned, and come on in. I will feed you.

Okay, so this wasn’t turning out as planned. We were in a mostly-empty village in the height of the afternoon, and the thing we’d come to see was closed. We were about to eat lunch at a the rural Mexican equivalent of the seediest variety store you might ever wish to avoid. But we went in, where I hoped to see a menu behind the counter. No such luck. There was no actual food source visible beyond the rows of ancient bags of potato chips strung from a leaning metal display, and a styrofoam cooler with the word tortillas magic-markered onto its side.

But weren’t we in Mexico to have adventures? Hadn’t that hacienda tour been an over-priced tourist-trap antiseptic anti-adventure? Hadn’t we said, when we left it, that the hacienda had been about as far from an authentic Mexican experience as we’d ever had? Didn’t we just love authentic Yucatan experiences? And who were we to turn down an authentic Yucatan meal, just because of the high risk of food poisoning?

While the woman disappeared into the back, I tried to figure out what we could order. But there was no menu – no indication at all of what was offered as the alleged comidas. The “restaurant” comprised a stone counter that bisected the tiny store, and a single rickety tin table, its tabletop Coca-cola logo covered in crawling flies. Our hostess then emerged from the back of the restaurant, and I got a better look at her. She was maybe seventy, and dressed in the traditional rural Yucatan embroidered pinafore over a white lace-trimmed skirt. She spoke a combination of Spanish and Mayan, and the three of us fell into trying to communicate, a process that – for some reason – we all found hysterically funny. Whenever we achieved understanding, we would all cheer like someone had scored a goal in a really important game. When talks collapsed, we all assumed expressions of true sorrow. It was more fun than we’d had all day.

I managed to explain that we were very hungry, that we would like a comida, and that we had been lost for hours. “Perdidos,” said John, and I echoed it. “Perdidos por horas!” She grinned and agreed that it was very sad to be lost. At least, that’s what we hope she said. She might have been commenting on how stupid we were. Didn’t we have Google Maps?

We had come for comidas, so she set about preparing whatever that might be. But first, she said, she must make things clean! As we and a local dog watched, she sprayed the table with blue liquid from a spray-bottle, and wiped it down thoroughly. Then she brought us two Coca Lites and made us sit down. From behind the counter, she produced a Tupperware of what appeared to be meat: clearly-not-refrigerated, cooked, meat. Pork, she told us. “Pork?” I asked John. John nodded. “Okay, pork,” he said. So we told her, “Si, gracias,” and the meal began.

She was so proud of this meat. She popped it in the microwave, and served it to us on the two paper plates, without cutlery, and with a pile of cold tortillas. She watched us as we ate, with our fingers. I tasted a piece and yes, it was actually good. It might have been roiling in toxins, but it was at least tasty. John and I rolled the meat up in the tortillas while our chef brought another dish – a communal plate of some sort of tortilla-and-refried beans pie – and tried to get us to eat what I think was a jalapeno pepper. I asked her what it was; she tried to explain. I told her that in English, it was a pepper. She made multiple, giggling, merry attempts to say pepper. I don’t think explosive fricatives are part of the Mayan tongue, because making a hard p sound was next-to-impossible for her. But she was nothing if not game. She stood beside our table, watching us eat, and blowing hard blasts of air through her lips. Pah! Pah! Pah-par! The very word made her double over laughing.

We explained we were from Canada. She told us that in Mayan, the word for shoes is canada. She might have been messing with us. I haven’t looked it up because it was too adorable, to have her pointing at our shoes and saying, “Canada! Canada!”

We had a blast with this lady. She had no upper teeth and only half-a-dozen lower teeth, My phone was dead – Google Maps sucks juice as well as other things – and so we were without our translate function, not that it can translate from English into Mayan-Yucatan Spanish. Still, soon, we were all killing ourselves laughing. Every now and then we all successfully communicated something, such as when she did the inevitable older-woman thing and asked whether I had children. I knew how to answer this common question: I told her I had two sons , and that they were twins. I augmented the description by holding up two fingers and saying dos ninos, and then making a rounded pregnancy-like gesture over my midsection. At which point, our hostess roared, squatted a little, and mimicked giving birth. John actually applauded that performance.

Even backwaters have cellphones, and when her cell went off and she stepped away to answer it, I could hear her talking about us (I caught the word tourista). But we were talking about her, or at least, about her food. Yes, that pork – which, thank heavens, she had microwaved to a temperature I hoped would kill the botulism – was delicious, as was the strange tortilla-and-refried beans cake. As we ate, cautiously, with our fingers, we discussed how suicidal we were being. John assured me his doctor had given him enough food-poisoning antibiotic for two people. “We’re going to die horribly,” I said, eating another fingerfull of whatever-it-was. If it was death, at least it was tasty.

Our hostess returned with a bowl of brown liquid that we think might have been soup. Maybe it was the local dish – mole – but nevertheless, we declined politely. This lead to a discussion of the word “enough,” which she tried gamely to pronounce. It turns out that the f fricative is even more amusing than the p, if you are a Yucatan grandma.

“Enough,” I said.

“Ah-nuh!” she replied.

“Eee-nufffff,” I repeated. “EEE-nuFFFFF!”

“EEE-nuFFFF!” she cried, blowing a massive amount of air over her lower lips, past the remainders of her teeth. “EEE-nuFFFFFFF!”

A small crowd of young boys who had gathered (along with two dogs) were delighted, but too shy to try saying enough themselves. She demonstrated the word to the boys, who were her nietos, and then went back again to the rear of the store, returning with three breathtaking pieces of Yucatan women’s smocks, with hand-done cross-stitch embroidery all over the yoke and hem. I remember trying to do cross-stitch from Girl Guides, and I can tell you, it’s not easy. This was breathtaking work. She pulled me to my feet, and slid the tunic over my clothes (shorts and tee), a procedure that had us both doubled over laughing, because I was twice her height, although not much more roly-poly. We self-declared as gordas and hugged each other and John took pictures of me in the smocks. But then, when I asked, she said they were three thousand pesos. I couldn’t begin to afford that, and she was not interested in bargaining. Without showing any feelings of insult she took the garments away.

At last, I indicated to John that we should get back on the road. I wanted to at least see the little village cenote, being as we had seen exactly zero churches on our church tour. But asking for the bill turned out to be a further comedy routine. While the half-a-dozen boys looked on, the grandmother added up the cost of two small paper plates of pork and half-a-dozen tortillas – and two Coca Lites – and a bag of some kind of fruit that she insisted we take – to be 240 pesos (about twenty bucks). Twenty bucks is a lot of money in the Yucatan, but we were okay with it. Besides, we didn’t have enough language to argue, and the process of drawing the bill was chaotic, involving her struggling to add up a few penned items on a napkin, while the kids crowded in to watch John take out his wallet.

John removed a 500-peso note, just as our hostess observed the Canadian bills in the wallet, and pointed to them with delight. John commented on them, saying they were money from Canada. She found this intriguing, and asked to see one of the bills. There followed a farce wherein I took a five-dollar bill out of John’s wallet, and gave it to her, and she wanted to keep it as a souvenir (communicated by gestures), and I demurred (because it was five bucks and didn’t we have a loonie somewhere instead?), and she cradled the five dollar bill to her embroidered yoke, and John gave her the 500 pesos, and she gave the five dollars back, and the 500 pesos vanished.

She stood there expectantly, despite having been just given twice what we owed. At least, we thought we’d given it to her. We weren’t sure we’d had anymore…she was standing there so innocently and expectantly, while the kids tried to see the rest of John’s money. Grandma wasn’t offering any change, and she didn’t have pockets, so where did that 500-peso note go? Surely, she couldn’t have just taken it.

So we ended up giving her another 240 pesos, because we were confused, and there were so many children, and several dogs, and Canadian money. After that, she decided to pat John’s knee, then recoiled in mock horror at how hairy it was. “Lobo!” she shrieked, before quieting down enough to write the number “150” on the napkin and hold it out to us with a look of expectancy.

“No mas!” I said. She gestured to the squad of well-fed and happy children and pretended to cry from the pain of looking at her poor starving grandchildren. I put my hands on my hips and gave her the universal look of don’t-push-it-sister. She cracked up again, threw her arms around me, and then pulled my face down to kiss me on the cheek.

So we left her, followed by the dogs, and ambled the twenty meters to the town’s cenote. A man with a cranial deformity let us in the stone wall’s iron gates for ten pesos, and we descended into the earth, down the stone steps, to a tiny clear pool some fifty feet down. The hole in the earth’s crust above us showed the blue of the sky and the crisp bright green of the trees, and we could hear birds above the echoing voices of the kids who were playing in the water. It was as close to magic as one could ever imagine.

When we got back in the car, we discovered I’d left it unlocked. Everything inside was still there. We asked the Google Lady to take us home. And, to our surprise, she did. She took us straight out to Highway 184, one of those polished thoroughfares. And yes, we were home by dinner. And no, we did not get lost.

Now we are sitting quietly at our perfectly-named casita rental (Casa Preciosa, in Chuburna) as the night settles in, and the dogs in our beach village bark into the darkness. Somebody somewhere is burning palm leaves. Crazily, a rooster is crowing, having confused dawn and dusk. The Google Lady has gone to bed, plotting her next acts of mayhem.

And somewhere, miles away, in a little village with an austere church, and a circus called Norman, and an underground swimming pool, a little old lady is still laughing.

Spare me the snake oil, please

Very, very cranky blog follows. On a topic on which I usually keep my mouth shut.

I just had a smart, informed, loving friend post an anti-vaccination video on Facebook, which popped up on my wall, where I could not unsee it. I normally ignore these things. But this one upset me. It related a story of a family who went to another country – one that is rife with communicable diseases – without vaccinating their children, because they believe in “natural remedies” (yes, so do all the people in that disease-riddled country). Luckily, the children returned safe. Which is being touted as evidence in support of the anti-vaxx nonsense spouted in the video. By someone of whom I now cannot help but think less.

Please, people, if you want to share about anti-vaccinations, or “bananas cure cancer and Big Pharma’s hiding it!”, or any of that stuff, there’s a new setting option where you can share with everyone BUT your friends who know better than this stuff.  Like me. You can’t imagine how much respect I lose for you when you share this stuff. I don’t want to unfriend you. Everyone is entitled to their own clutchings at false hope. They’re entitled to believe their own brand of illogical health nonsense spouted by snake-oil-salesmen on sites that are the equivalent of the fraudsters that used to go from town to town selling bottles of “miracle cures” to the gullible public. (At least, of course, until they got run out of town on a rail, and also got largely put out of business by, oh, legitimate/tested/proven sources of medicine).

Oh, crap, now I’ve got going. Darn. I really did want to just ignore this. But I can’t. You want anecdotes? I’ve got ’em – in addition to actual bona fide studies (but for now, let’s just use anecdotes). My first cousins and my friends who predated the Salk vaccine, and contracted polio, versus my cousins and friends who post-date it and…wow, there are none in the latter group. My mother who nearly died from the measles, and her friends who DID die, versus dying parents now (very rare, but becoming more common in districts where people believe in land-of-woo remedies and don’t vaccinate). The death records in my genealogical searches – “death by whooping cough” “typhoid” “diphtheria” – versus the causes of death nowadays (when is the last time your friend lost her baby to scarlet fever – or smallpox?) The number of rabid dogs on the streets of India, where they do not vaccinate, versus the number of rabid dogs we have here (even though dogs get bitten by rabid wild animals every year in North America, fortunately, they’re vaccinated – it’s the first thing the health authorities ask when there’s a dog bite incident:  “was it vaccinated?”)

All these anti-vaxx sites are SELLING something. Look who creates them and funds them, and you’ll dig down to someone who’s got some snake oil remedy for sale. Talk about the greed of the mythical “Big Pharma” – as if pharmaceutical companies wouldn’t make a good deal of money from the patenting and sale of remedies (from any source) that actually work and which won’t kill the patient.  As if they don’t investigate and test “alternative medicine” – of course they do! They don’t sell them because they almost always DON’T WORK. If something DOES work, then yippee! the researcher/developer gets to patent and sell it. They OWN it.

But it’s not just about the money involved in successful development of medicines. Not only is there big bucks in that, but do you REALLY think that people who run pharmaceutical companies – the scientists – the executives – the doctors – are part of some “conspiracy” to hide working medicine? That they go home at night and chortle over all the people they hurt that day, hiding medicines? Why would they do that? Like, THINK about it. There’s no money in hiding “it”. There’s no benefit to them personally – if there is a cure or a preventative for something, then they are humans, they have families too, they would benefit from it. If “alternatives” work – alternatives, like, oh, willow bark – then eventually they become mainstream (viz. aspirin).

Being careful about what you put in your system and using “home remedies” on your sunburn is one thing. Believing everything that gets shilled on the internet because you think there’s “something strange” about vaccines or that “scientists are hiding the cure for x or y or z” is just foolishness. And NO I’m not going to get into a discussion of this with all the people who are going to shriek indignantly and post more echo-chamber pseudo-science to pitch me their conspiracy theories. I’ve heard all this crap before, and I’m always shocked when I see intelligent people buying into it and spreading it. There’s a lot of us who are just smiling, nodding, and rolling our eyes when our conspiracy-theory friends post another “EATING BAT POO WILL CLEANSE YOUR LIVER!” article, and praying we don’t see the day when smallpox comes back.

Buy all the banana oil you want, but don’t think for a moment that you’re helping humanity or participating in something that’s not 100% crap. Please, when you’re about to “share” about your miracle cure or your conspiracy theory, take an extra second and make your audience “friends, except Diane.” Because when I see stuff like this come up, it DOES make me sick.

And there’s an easy cure for that: keep it to yourself. Thanks.

Happy Accident

It was one of those accidents that is over in a flash. One moment everything is fine, and then – poof! – everything is not. You’re flat on your back, or you’re through the windshield, or you’re lying in a ditch. Cars crash, buildings collapse, ice gives way, horses buck. Accidents happen – very, very fast.

Three days ago, I had one of those accidents. I was riding – going hell-bent-for-leather down a forest path – when my horse broke into a fast gallop. He kind of bolted, actually. Bad horse. But I wasn’t scared or anything. I asked him to slow down – reined him firmly but gently, sat down in the saddle, said “ho”, all the quiet calming stuff you do to signal a horse to take it easy – and he said no. He said no by throwing his ass and back in the air and flicking me off like I was a fly.

One moment: everything was fine. Next moment: everything was not.

I’ve been told many times by many doctors that I should not be riding. I have been diagnosed with severe osteoporosis, and words like “fragile” and “brittle” have been applied regularly to me by various bone specialists, for the last decade or more. My current specialist tells me that I have “extreme risk of fracture” in my back, hips, and wrists. About five years ago, she took a back x-ray to establish a baseline, and discovered that I had three compression fractures in my spine. She freaked. “Were you in a car accident?” she said, before putting me on a ferociously aggressive bone-building parathyroid replacement, that I had to inject daily (and which cost about two grand a month). She also took a bone scan, to determine the age of the breaks (compression fractures can happen to anyone, and very often painlessly). The bone scan revealed that the fractures were very old. But that made no difference to her assessment. As far as my bones are concerned, I’m pretty much made of glass.

Of course I was supposed to give up riding. Riding is a risky sport. Horses are not machines, and even the gentlest and most well-trained creature will do crazy out-of-the-blue without-warning stuff. Even the stuff they do with warning can land you on your ass, your head, your neck, your back. Get a group of lifetime riders together, and they’ll talk about the pins in their hips, the breaks in their legs, the cracks in their ribs. They’ve been thrown, squashed, bitten, and kicked. Part of being crazy about horses is…well, being crazy.

I’m lucky. I haven’t – or, rather, hadn’t – had a real accident in decades. Actually, compared to this one, I’ve never had a serious accident at all. I fell off my last horse about seven or eight years ago when he shied from a dead standstill, having been suddenly terrified by something completely harmless and stationary (I think it was a fern). I landed uninjured. Before that, I guess it was the time I went over my horse’s head when we jumped a little cross-bar jump, and the time before that it was when my fat little Appy tripped and did a complete somersault (fortunately throwing me clear of her tumbling body). I fell off a lot when I was a teenager, too, and doing crazy-ass risky things. But in terms of horseback crack-ups, I’ve been lucky: very, very lucky. I’ve simply never had one: no pins, no breaks, no concussions. Lucky.

So maybe I had forgotten just how dangerous riding can be. I’d recently had to give up my beloved part-board horse of nearly ten years, when his owner moved, and had found a new place to ride. I’d only ridden there four times, on a good-tempered fellow who is part of a herd the barn’s owner rents out to part-boarders and day-riders. The trails are excellent – broad and sandy – and the horses seemed lovely. I thought I’d found a pretty good spot.

But last Thursday when I went up there to ride (with my friend Monika), we were both given horses we’d never ridden before. We also were told we had to ride in the group with the owner, ostensibly to be safe. The leader of the ride was a big strapping young man I’ll call Ahmed, who rides a gigantic Thoroughbred/warmblood cross named Commander. I’d been out with Ahmed once before, and had spent most of the ride at the canter, because Ahmed loves speed. I think he was a Bedouin in an earlier life – he and his horse are all go-go-go.

Now, to my embarrassment, I was actually happy when I saw that Ahmed was leading. Like a lot of riders, I love to canter. The horse I was riding – who was a stranger to me – had a lovely canter. Once we got started, I discovered he was responsive and responsible, and had a nice, easy-to-sit canter. I thought, what a nice animal. Whenever we slowed down to walk for a while, I told Monika how much I liked the horse: how obedient he was, how smooth his transitions were, and other horsie things. Then Ahmed would take off again and so would the rest of us, off through the forest at a good clip, like we were all invincible.

What was I thinking?

I can tell you that, easily. I was thinking how happy I was. I was thinking how wonderful it felt. I was thinking about how much I love to ride. I was thinking all these good things. And then, in an instant, I was on the ground, swearing and yelling and in pain, thinking this is really BAD.

It was bad, but it could have been so much worse. I didn’t know it yet, but I had a broken shoulder blade, as well as various crushed/bruised/torn rib-and-arm-and-shoulder tissues. Monika was beside me in seconds, and with her help I got to my feet. She made a sling out of my light jacket. She made sure I didn’t pass out when I stood up. And fortunately, I could walk. Other than the upper left quadrant of my body, everything worked. There were no cuts, and my helmet had protected my head. We walked a mile back to the barn, with Monika leading the horses, and the barn owner riding alongside giving me heck for my poor riding skills (my reins were too loose, she said), which had caused the accident. She also told me about how Ahmed had had a wreck the year before, when Commander had thrown him, and how he’d spent two weeks in the hospital and now was held together with pins. But I didn’t really care about her scolding or about Ahmed’s horse-accident story. Me and my blown-glass, low-density bones were (mostly) in one piece. I was alive. I wasn’t a quadriplegic. So yeah, I was grateful.

Grateful is what I’m still feeling, a few days post-accident. It’s Thanksgiving Sunday, and boy am I thankful. Since that horse gave me a lesson in humility (and safety), I’ve been astounded and humbled by the rising-up of helpers and friends and family. Starting with Monika, who walked me back to the barn, drove me to the hospital, carried my bags, pep-talked me when I was giving in to the pain, it’s been an ongoing shower of people and things to be grateful for. Then the nurse in triage, who was so understanding. My husband, who showed up and sat beside the stretcher while I lay there in a neck brace with my shoulder and arm and ribcage feeling worse by the second (shock wearing off, I guess). The doctors and nurses; the painkillers; the x-ray machine. The texts from my kids. All of that.

Then, when I got home, the level of help just plain-out exploded. My husband turned out to be a closet Florence Nightingale. My neighbours brought Thanksgiving dinner, dog-walks, soup, entertainment. One friend rode a bus for an hour to come walk my little dog. My sister-in-law showed up with flowers and to tell me that her mother thinks I’m crazy to be riding horses at my age (well, yeah, I am). A woman friend from childhood whom I see maybe once a year drove for miles to bring me a weird inflatable ice-water cooling jacket that fits over your shoulder (it also works on my boob, which feels half-ripped from my chest wall). Another friend from music circle brought a special cooling jacket that treats torn rotator cuffs. I’ve had phone calls, company, food, and advice; my little dog has been walked by multiple people he’s never met (all of whom he barks at ungraciously). I’ve had two full days of serious pain and limited mobility, but this morning – day three – I can say that yes, there’s a little improvement. It’s definitely not as bad as it was yesterday. I am going to get better. Hallelujah!

I’m missing Thanksgiving dinner at my in-laws, but that’s okay. I’m thankful enough. I am thankful to be alive. I am thankful that today, if I’m careful, I can use my left arm from the elbow down, and type. I am thankful to Joe, who just left with the dog for his walk. I am thankful to Monika, who took so much time on Thursday to make me safe and get me home. I am thankful to John, who is waiting on me hand and foot. I am thankful to Andrea and Roy for the contraptions. I am thankful to Terry for the company and the dog treats and dog walks; to Melanie for coming all that way on the TTC to take the dog to the lake and to bring soup and to sit with me and talk theatre. I am thankful to Jason and Alexis and their family for the dog walks, the company, and the shared roast beef dinner. I am thankful to Carmen and those flowers on the mantel. I’m thankful for my sons and sister and Mom. I am thankful for all the good wishes and all the offers of help. More than once I’ve felt myself choking up over all of the generosity of the people around me. Except I can’t actually cry because my ribs are too sore.

I’m even thankful that I was thrown from that horse, and not just because it was a reminder to be more careful. It has brought home to me that my life is full of wonders and joys and gifts that extend beyond a foolhardy gallop through the woods. And for that – and for all the gifts this Thanksgiving – I am very, very grateful.

Paddling up denial…

Source: Paddling up denial…

Paddling up denial…

“Unusual weather we’re having,” the Cowardly Lion says to Dorothy, when snow falls on them on the way to Emerald City. I was thinking of that line in the old film today while swimming – yes, swimming – in our small lake in Highlands East, Ontario, Canada. Swimming in late September in this neck of the woods usually involves either a dare, alcohol, or a desperate need to rinse off after intense labour (often all three). It also helps if the weather has provided one of those lovely spells of autumn warmth known (apologies to the indigenous nations) as “Indian” Summer. Those three- or four-day periods occur after the season has clearly shifted from summer to fall, and Canadians have begun hauling out the autumn clothing and hooting about how amazing the colours are this year. But even then, they don’t usually swim.

Well, this summer – now this fall, the equinox having passed a few days ago – was definitely unusual. Actually, it was wretched. I have never known in my 58-almost-59 years on this planet such a disgusting summer, weather-wise. We Canadians don’t like our summers messed with. Depending which part of the country we live in, we can get anywhere from four weeks to four months of actual summer. The best we can hope for is something that starts in lateish May and extends to maybe – maybe – mid-September. We all expect – indeed, demand – a certain amount of heat, blue skies, green trees, and bitching about the humidity. We feel we are entitled to a clear and defined period of actual summer because, well, we’re Canadian. And Canadians have Canadian winters. Which – as pretty as they might be, and as good for skiiers and players of ice hockey – generally suck.

This past summer broke all the rules, at least in southern Ontario (an area, for global readers, about the size of England). It arrived late, carrying buckets of rain; it parked itself in a cloudy spot and stayed there. I’m fortunate enough to have a cottage – a cabin in the woods by the above-mentioned small lake – and normally the woodstove isn’t needed from maybe first week of June to shortly after Labour Day (first Monday in September). Not this year. At multiple times of all four precious months of our too-short summer, we had a fire burning, to keep warm and ward off the damp. Not once did we experience more than two days in the high 20’s Celsius, and the swimming season – which usually starts by first week of June, with a jump into still-chilly water – didn’t start in earnest until July. It was over (we thought) by late August. Little kids (who are known to be crazy) went in as usual, but we adults wrapped ourselves in multiple layers of towels and sat scowling on the dock, going in once in a while because dammit, it’s summer. We’d dive in, shriek, and get right back out again. Then we’d go sit by the fire.

We tuned anxiously into long-range forecasts, looking for the traditional heat waves which give us an opportunity to complain about how hot it is, instead of what we complain about for the rest of the year, which is how cold it is. Instead, the reports repeatedly offered only rain and more rain, and even lower temperatures. Knowing long-range forecasts were usually about as accurate as reading chicken entrails, we would head up north from the city anyway, tuning into the local station (Moose FM), hoping to hear something better. But it got so we could predict the predictions. “Mostly cloudy with sunny periods, high of 22, low overnight of 10, fifty-percent chance of rain,” was the usual prognostication. But often, it was “Rain all day, high of 18, chance of afternoon thunderstorms.” When one prediction was for a low that night of 4 degrees – close to freezing – we were astounded. This was in July!

The growing season was three weeks behind, and in many areas, the spring water levels never receded. For the first time ever, I saw lakeside cottages on other lakes that had been dammed off by the owners with a protective wall of sandbags. The local businesses – especially the ice-cream parlour – suffered, as people didn’t bother coming “up north” to their cottages, or going camping and hiking in Algonquin. The dirt roads turned to mush, and trees fell as their root balls were compromised by the damp. On Labour Day weekend, the traditional hoot-and-holler send-off-to-summer weekend, it pissed cold rain. No one said, “What a great summer – I can’t believe it’s over already!” Instead, we all muttered: summer? What summer?

So imagine our shock and delight when shortly after Labour Day, when all the kids had gone back to school, and everyone’s summer mindset (and vacations) had ended, that The Heat finally arrived. Most of us had already pulled in our swim rafts, since by late August swimming had become unpleasant (except for those crazy little kids, who emerged from the water blue-lipped and shivering, proclaiming I wanna go back in!) It was another surreal weather pattern that I had never seen in my life in Ontario. Everyone went from bedraggled, damp, and disappointed to celebrating this extraordinary meteorological gift. As I write this, I sit tanned and glowing, having had more than two solid weeks of increasingly hot temperatures. Two weeks ago, we hit the mid-20s and sunny; it increased steadily until yesterday, when it hit 30. Today it is supposed to go to 31, with blazing sunshine and low, pleasant, wind. And swimming? The lake has warmed up again. I spent yesterday evening floating around a glass-calm lake, basking in the warm water and the warmer air, as the sun’s bright fireball slid behind the wall of dense forest that rings the lake. And that was after spending a full day’s canoeing to a sandbar and beach on Grace Lake, where everybody and their sister had showed up with picnics, inflatable toys, and ecstatic children. And all anyone could say was, “Isn’t this incredible? Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Well, no, we haven’t. And we know this is coming to an abrupt end. The Moose advises that this is the last day of this surreal period of otherworldly warmth. Tomorrow, the daytime high is predicted to be 16, with a low at night of 5. By the weekend, it’s raining, 12, and close to freezing at night. Which is what one expects from the weather here, in southeastern Canada.

Yes, it’s been a joyous two weeks: a reprieve after all hope had been abandoned, and we were expecting to have to close up the cabin early this year. But it’s also been somewhat disturbing, this weather misbehaviour. We keep thinking: this is not normal. While we were sitting on white hot sand beside glittering water that rivals the Caribbean’s, the real Caribbean was being crushed by three unprecedentedly-huge hurricanes in a row. While folks in our village general store were buying two-scoop ice creams and marvelling at the unusual weather, the Atlantic hurricane season had wiped out Puerto Rico, Dominica, Barbuda, and many other island countries and territories. When we finally got an internet signal and looked at the news, it was horrifying. The leaders of these flattened countries are saying that rebuilding may well be impossible. They are saying they may have to abandon their countries.

For years we have been hearing about “climate refugees,” and how people will have to flee drowned-out and destroyed areas, in the way they flee wars. Meanwhile, the government of the United States pulls out of the Climate Accord and promises to invest in more coal (perhaps they will also put their money into the cotton gin and rotary-dial telephones). Canada’s record isn’t spotless, either: despite our self-image of being greenies, we have a poor international reputation on environmental protection (not to mention the international embarrassment of the oil sands).

We tell ourselves we know what to expect from the weather. We kid ourselves that everything is all right. Yes, there are terrible hurricanes; yes, it’s been a bad year for that. But here? We’re fine. It was a strange cold summer, yes, but look at this incredible gift: going-on three weeks of steaming hot weather. The trees have dumped their leaves without turning their usual magnificent colours; the ducks are hanging around in the bays instead of flocking together to migrate; the mosquitoes have had another hatching. But really, it’s nothing to worry about. This isn’t climate change – not here, not yet. Everything’s fine. It’s just a little…unusual.

 

A Different Kind of Travel Bug

Source: A Different Kind of Travel Bug