Thksgvg. weekend report

Friday.

Go, Barack! What a thrill to hear about your peace prize. Your enemies on the right will instantly, in their hate-filled way, work hard to turn this grand honour into something dishonourable. I know how vile the level of discourse is down there thanks to Jon Stewart - though these days I can hardly bear to watch even him, because of what he shows going on. Almost beyond bearing, that sentient human beings can be that mean-spirited and crass. Mr. Obama should walk right out of that big white house and never came back. But he's not that kind of guy.

It's Thanksgiving weekend in Canada, cold and rainy but it doesn't matter because we're all going to be inside eating. My mother and her sister Do arrived from Ottawa today; the kids came over and the five of us ate stew. I wish the ladies lived closer so my kids had more contact with their elders. My mother reminisced about when she and my dad came came to visit us 25 years ago after Sam's birth, and Anna came running down the street to tell about her new baby brother. Do recited a poem that won her a prize - a fountain pen when such things were novelties - when she was seven years old, eighty-two years ago.

The kids showed us photos on their cell phones and pulled up Facebook pictures on my computer, and we looked at a 3D image of their baby sister, their dad's daughter who isn't due to be born until November 21st, but whose photograph in utero is on the internet.

"She's got my nose," said Anna, and she does.

"Do, our age is showing," said my mother, who can barely comprehend all this technology. Mum was aghast at Sam's new tattoo all down his arm, but when he explained that it was a line in his dead friend's handwriting from a poem by Lord Byron, she was mollified. Both ladies admonished Anna to change her blonde hair back to its natural auburn, which she was intending to do anyway. It was great to relax and leave the nagging, for once, to someone else. All I had to do was cook. It was Mum's 86th birthday yesterday and will be Sam's 25th on Tuesday. Both Libras - cheery and nuts.

I give thanks that my mother, who has had open heart surgery twice and is getting thin and frail, is here to enjoy her grandchildren's sense of humour, and so is her nearly ninety year old sister.

Saturday.

A beautiful day, warm and sunny. I thought warmth had gone for good - for this year, anyway -but not yet.

I don't understand how, while I was wandering around Europe, unable sometimes to find internet access, I still posted regular blogs, whereas here, at home, I am so fraught and exhausted, days go by without a post. I'm aware that you're out there, my reader friends, and I want very much to write more often to you. But perhaps all the mundanity, the ... excuse me while my eyes close for a minute because I'm putting myself to sleep - zzzzzzzzz - okay, up and at 'em - perhaps the pressure of the day to day just drains the juice out of me, and out of you too, I bet. I had not realised before how crazy busy it gets here, how much just getting through the day, scratching things from the To Do list of life, takes out of a girl. It doesn't leave nearly enough time for the fun things like this.

If I can prop my eyes open long enough to finish, I'd like to tell you that things are going well on our multigenerational weekend. Mum and Do actually tottered with us through the chaos of Yonge Street to that tranquil place of repose called the Gap, where Sam bought his birthday jeans and sweaters, and then we all tottered back. On the way, Mum bought a wondrous gift for me - the Beatles boxed set. All the Beatles albums in a neat box, with special DVD's about the making of the music, apparently. My Sergeant Pepper's album vanished years ago as did Let it Be, and my other discs are old and scratched. So here they all are, sounding better than ever. I leaned on the counter during "When I'm 64," one of the best songs ever written, to hear the intonations, the harmony - the "hoo!" Paul hoots at the very end. That music is like food for me, a banquet of brilliant words and melody and my own past.

Tonight we were all here for dinner - Mum and Do, Anna with the four-year old she babysits on Saturdays, Sam and his girlfriend Chanel, and I. Mum had offered to pay for take-out so Sam ordered Swiss Chalet. I didn't care what we ate as long as there was food on the table that I didn't have to cook. The nicest part of the evening, though, was afterwards - Sam put on Revolver and we all cleaned up and then made stuffing for tomorrow morning - the 23 pound turkey has to go in early if we want to eat before midnight - while singing and dancing along to the best band in the world. Everyone went home happy. And I tried to write something, if not riveting, then at least coherent for you, though I'm ready to fall over.

And now ... over I fall.

an early giving of thanks

Grocery shopping as life lesson - welcome to Cabbagetown. The first time I ventured into the Parliament Street No Frills, in 1986 on our arrival here, I thought it must be like a shop in downtown Beirut - chaotic, bombed-out, abandoned. It has since become more upscale, but not much. Today, with my basket of French cheese, fresh raspberries, garlic, pork chops and endive, I stood in line behind a First Nations man and his silent, hooded female companion, who were buying one box of Kraft Dinner and a small carton of milk. I stood there for quite some time, because they were paying in carefully doled-out pennies and nickles, plus eleven cents for two plastic bags - "one for the garbage," he explained to her.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, it is always good to be reminded, once again, of just how much we have to be thankful for. There's a woman in my Tuesday Ryerson class who fled Iran with her husband and two boys during the revolution. They gave their life savings to a man who promised to ferry them immediately to Canada, and ended up living for 27 months in a village in Turkey, wondering if their money would last or if they'd starve, and if they'd ever reach the promised land. In yesterday's essay, she wrote about gazing through the window of their tiny room, imagining that she was looking out at Canada, walking for the first time in snow, seeing her footsteps imprinted behind her. Finally, she and her family made it here.

"Did Canada live up to your expectations?" someone asked.

"Oh yes, yes," she replied. "I love this country. This is a beautiful country."

With thanks to Canada, which for once, since the advent of the piano-playing grinch Stephen Harper, did the right thing toward its refugees and let this family stay. Even if it has not helped to provide more than Kraft dinner for my friend at No Frills.

I have ordered a twenty plus pound turkey from St. Jamestown Steak and Chops on Parliament Street, where we've been buying turkeys, and much else, since 1986. My mother and Aunt Do are coming for Thanksgiving from Ottawa, my kids from across town, various friends of mine and theirs. They'll all take away a little packet of leftovers. How I look forward to this gathering, the first since my mind-altering journey abroad - family and friends gathered around our table to eat a fine Canadian meal with a bit of No Frills French cheese afterwards. It doesn't, as I am wont to say, get better than this. Lucky, grateful, blessed.

P.S. Speaking of lucky, grateful and blessed, I bade farewell yesterday to my dear friend Bruce, and now am bereft. Hurricane Bruce, as he has been named, forced me to completely excavate and rearrange my office, so now it's a decluttered sparkling new workplace. We spent a glorious evening listening to his favourite selections from Bach's B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion. He bought me new RAM and installed it, and crossed off a long list of technical things to do with the computer, the TV and the DVD player. This is a man who enjoys reading electronics manuals. Can you imagine? So he reads them and fixes things up and leaves little notes with a simple explanation for my moron mind on how things work.

He says when he retires from his job as Musical Director for the Art's Club in Vancouver, he is thinking of travelling around, staying with friends in exchange for technical expertise. Book your time with Hurricane Bruce now.

Nuit Blanche

Bruce and I made a foray into Nuit Blanche last night. Whoever had this idea (did it start in Paris?) is a visionary - the entire city turned over for a night into a giant artfest. Bruce had the best line; whenever we saw something that looked vaguely interesting, "Is that art?" he'd say. "Have we found some art?"

We started right here in Cabbagetown, where there were various happenings on Parliament Street between Carlton and Winchester, closed for the evening. There was bicycle art, kids and adults running their bike wheels through a trough of colour and then riding, weaving as much as possible, over a huge sheet of paper. "That's how I think modern art is actually made," snorted Bruce, and we speculated that they'd sell the resulting canvases of tire-track squiggles for thousands.

Gina from up the street had created a sound-and-slide show on the wall of the liquor store; we sat in the parking lot watching as powerful images of the First World War - a bombed-out Frenchwoman sitting on a park bench with her cow on a leash - clicked by with a reading of letters from the time. Our local representative George Smitherman, whether he's running for mayor or not, had turned his riding office into party central, with a cross-section of my diverse neighbours - Sri Lankans, Jamaicans, middle-class WASPs, homeless men and women - eating pizza and cake and looking at murals and paintings created by neighbourhood schoolchildren and First Nations people. So far, we thought as we headed off towards downtown, so good for Nuit Blanche.

We got off the subway at Dundas along with thousands of others; I've never seen the downtown core so jammed. Famed American Jeff Koon's gigantesque silver bunny balloon with carrot we found floating near the ceiling in the Eaton's Centre - amusing, but what did it MEAN? "I like the geese more," said Bruce about the work of Canadian artist Michael Snow, a flock of Canada geese flying above the capitalist fray of the mall, and so did I.

And at City Hall we watched the "4 letter word machine" by D. Therrien, an American artist, which had F A T E in very bright lights suspended above the crowd. We waited for the giant letters to change - weren't they supposed to be changing rapidly? And when eventually they did - anti-climactically, to F A E - everyone cheered and clapped.

One of the best things about the night was the easy friendliness of the good-natured crowd, strangers chatting with strangers. As we got into the elevator to see an installation at City Hall, a man getting off said, "You'll find it scintillating. Scintillating." He laughed, and his wife smacked him on the shoulder. We thanked him and indeed it was, as he'd implied, less than scintillating, though an interesting idea - someone had filmed a corner very near here, in Regent's Park, for an entire day, rotating around and around, and the day was being shown in fast motion by a projector revolving around the chambers of City Hall. It was fun to see my neighbourhood wheeling by, but more fun to see where the portentous room where the decisions affecting our city are made.

Though the afternoon had included a violent thunderstorm, the evening was dry but cold, so we began to meander home up Bay Street. We were going to see the installation inside Trinity Church but there was a long line-up, and the same for the blindfolded wrestling match in the Greyhound bus terminal, though that looked like a lot of fun. Films were being projected on various building walls, including the Canadian Tire store, which was open. Helpfully, many stores had remained open, so you could consume some goods along with your art.

The city had sponsored events far and wide, including a midway in the financial district and a huge Monopoly game with real money. If you were organised - apparently you could track the night with various electronic devices, far too high-tech for us - you could see most of the night's offerings before they closed down at 7 a.m. Bruce and I ended our night back in the 'hood at Riverdale Park, where someone had set up a twinkling enclave filled with kissbotts - little robots made of popsicle sticks with big lipsticked lips - and a tunnel where a strange creature with fiery eyes lurked, and then we saw a cube covered with projected films down Riverdale hill.

As we were making our way there, I could see large fuzzy shapes inside the fence at Riverdale Farm. Though it looked like Dusty the donkey and the Clydesdale horses, I found it very strange - they are always inside the stable at night, and now they were against the fence in the cow pen rather than their own for some reason, and utterly motionless, like ... like statues, I realised. "It's art!" I cried. "Someone has created furry sculptures of the animals, and they're so realistic no one has noticed."

However, when we got close, we saw that the sculptures were in fact Dusty the donkey and his two Clydesdale friends Dolly and Rooster, who were in the cow pen at night, for some reason, and remarkably still. But very real. Still, they looked like art to me.

so it's cold, whaddya want, it's October!

It's freezing! What makes the bone-chilling damp worse is that I Skyped with friend Lynn in Montpellier yesterday; it's 30 degrees in the south of France, she said, she's wearing little tops and going to the beach. Ah well - this is the price we pay for living in this fine country. As I've always said, if the Canadian climate were better, we'd be overrun. Only the brave survive here, even in early October.

Bruce and I had an impassioned discussion about the New Yorker today, as he was installing my new external hard drive which is named MacSwell, and I was still going through files and throwing out 35-year old bits of paper. I told him I'm so swamped by the New Yorker that I'm considering letting my subscription lapse. I adore this magazine, but there it is, once a week, shouting, "Read me, read me!" while seventeen back issues, eight other magazines, three newspapers, twenty-two backed up internet sites and twelve books also shout.

"What is wrong with our lives that we don't have time to read the New Yorker?" cried Bruce.

Time time time. Where does it go? Wednesday was Carol's class at the Y; a week had gone since the last class, but it seemed like a day at most. Time is the greatest luxury, it seems, at this stage of life.

Someone has created a four cornered box to show our life choices, with, at each corner, Work, Family, Health, Friends. If you want "success," it posits, you can have three of the four, but not all of them. If you want "real success" - fame, I guess, or wealth - you need to give up two of the four. And I know that I have put my family and friends first and spend time at the Y at the expense of my work, whereas others have kept family and work at the expense of health and friends. Is this a particularly Toronto/big city pattern? In small towns, are the choices as stark?

And what about Angelina and Brad, or Stephen Lewis and Michele Landsberg, who seem to have all four? Is this because they are cyborgs? No, come to think about it, we don't really know about their health ...

All I know is that I feel myself running, running on the spot with my lists clutched in my hand, as if I'm on a conveyor belt moving in the opposite direction. This is crazy. Stop and breathe, girl. Bruce is having a nap right now. That sounds like a good idea.

Tonight some television, for once. A new Law and Order at 8, and later, the Flashpoint episode which may feature my kitchen. TV is the greatest time-waster of all, but sometimes it's a luxurious necessity, and a new Law and Order, especially when it's cold and dark outside, is definitely one of those times.

Greetings, my forty readers

You're out there, readers, you're really out there! To paraphrase Sally Fields.

Bruce, my own personal organiser and techno-geek, is visiting from Vancouver, and the other day he set up Google Analytics on my website. We waited 24 hours, then clicked on it and wow, I found out that about 40 people a day are actually reading what I write here. Terrifying. Mostly from Canada, but also from the Netherlands, Switzerland, England, France, the U.S. and one unnamed country. Gazanfer in Turkey, maybe? Anita in Finland? Hello! Welcome! Come on in, grab a coffee, let's chat.

Milk? Sugar? Hmmm. What should we talk about? Suddenly I feel shy. Writing into a void was fine. Writing to 40 expectant readers is different. No, no it isn't, get over it, on we go. Though I'd love to know who you are and what you're doing right now. How's things in Switzerland these days?

Right now I'm in my office surrounded by files and papers, but in a good way. As he always does, Brucie has forced me to get organised, and this time we tackled my office. Unlike my friend Mr. Choy, who works in a rabbit warren stacked ceiling-high with papers, books, collectibles and souvenirs, I work better in relative emptiness, hence the joy of the serene Paris apartment which contained almost nothing. Here, through the years, my hoarding nature has led me to open countless files - Books to Read, Articles of Interest, Great Writing to Keep, Nice Postcards to Look At Again in 40 Years, etc. I'm drowning in files and papers to file and things to read, including two bulging files entitled Papers to File and Things to Read.

Bruce and I reduced the mountain into recognisable piles and then moved most of them to another room, where I don't have to look at them. "But, " I protested, "I should sort them out first, read them or whatever."

"You're never going to do it," said Bruce, "so let's just put the stuff where it won't make you feel guilty."

And you know, he's right. It's in another room, stacked neatly in labelled boxes, and perhaps one day, who knows, after my prefrontal lobotomy when I need something mindless to do, I'll sort it all. Until then, I don't have to look at it and can get on with my work. Though Bruce left yesterday for Stratford and I unearthed more paper which is now spread on every surface, waiting for a decision. When Bruce gets back today, I'll let him bundle it up and move it on out. Hooray for Bruce! I'm cooking him a pork roast and sweet potatoes, right now, as a reward.

It's cold out there. The weather switched so fast, it was bewildering - one minute hot sun and t-shirts, the next blistering wind and freezing rain and hauling the heavy jackets up from the basement. That's Canada. I love Canada. I have never loved Canada more than now, right after my long stay in Europe. Brucie has just reappeared from Stratford with a box of Rheo Thompson chocolates for me, wonderful man. "Let's have one right now," he said.

"No," I replied. "In France you have chocolate after a meal, with coffee."

"I hate France!" said Bruce, but of course he doesn't mean it. We both love France but are happy to live in Canada where you can eat chocolate at any time of the day or night.

Except, even if you've put in a Herculean effort in the office, when you're visiting me.