Happy Canada Day weekend

I'm looking forward to a quiet weekend in the nearly empty city. 

Here's some adorableness for your viewing pleasure. Nearly six weeks old! Too bad he doesn't have more personality. 

Went to the market this morning and couldn't resist dropping into the Sally Ann on the way back. The fruits of my labours - actual fruits, veggies, eggs, a new translation of "Don Quixote" and a little red leather purse from France. My kind of shopping.

Happy Canada Day to you all! 

Enjoy this version of O Canada using Molson Canadian beer products.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBI68Il4Zsc

Also - I just read Leah McLaren's "Globe" column about a new book called "Single: Arguments for the uncoupled," which shows just how couple-centric our culture is. Hooray for the power of one! This morning, getting ready to go to the market, I thought about calling my dear friend and neighbour who also loves to go to the market, to see if she wanted to come too. But then I thought, that'd mean being with her, talking, sharing. Why? I love going to the market alone, doing what I have to do, and going home. Bicycling home, alone. I am a profoundly single person and very happy that way. Glad there's a book about us weirdos.

a cottage swim, and Nora E. redux

I went to a friend's cottage today, had a very refreshing swim in the little lake, wandered in the woods, and then we had lunch by the water. And the great thing was - I got there by subway.

In fact, my friend lives downtown in Forest Hill, at St. Clair and Spadina. This is her unique and beautiful garden oasis. Hard to believe you're in the heart of the city. Now I'm looking at my own turf and thinking, could I squeeze a little lake in there somewhere?

Excitement this morning - up at 6.30, I opened my email to find a note from an editor at the London Evening Standard. Could I write 100-200 words on Nora Ephron for a special page they were preparing about her? I Googled to check - he was real, must have happened upon that brief mention in yesterday's post. Stopping only to make a necessary cup of coffee, I got to work immediately and sent it off half an hour later. Only after banging it out did I stop to calculate. He needed the copy by 10 a.m. London time. 7 a.m. Toronto time is noon London time. So much for my brief moment in the London Evening Standard.

Here's what I wrote, a quick riff on what I'd already written in the blog:

Only Nora Ephron could turn our universal irritation about the aging process – the growing list of things we can no longer be, do or remember - into not one best-selling book, but two. Reading her latest acerbic pieces, and listening to her rant with comedic fury in interviews, I wondered if she was truly that angry about something as inevitable as getting old, or if her snit about aging was a highly successful schtick she was using to keep us entertained. Her mother urged her to view everything in life as potential comic material, and she did.

Though Ephron wrote with bitter and fluid wit about many important things, it’s her rueful take on aging, the fuss about bad hair and drooping neck, that’s being quoted in obituaries. And yet, despite her public complaints about wattles and wrinkles, Nora Ephron remained strikingly beautiful. A woman who got enormous comic mileage out of the pains of aging was herself ageless, until the end.

There's a great outpouring about her, as there should be. I myself can't add much, because I was not the huge fan that many women writers are. Absolutely, I admired her courage and phenomenal energy and had many great laughs, thanks to her wit. I admired how she got the perfect revenge on a bad husband, skewering him in both a book and a film. Apparently she was generous and kind. But I disliked what I thought was the shallow, sloppy sentimentality of "Love, Loss and What I Wore," and I really thought she should shut up about her neck. She said the good thing about dying was that you don't have to wash your hair any more. And I thought, Nora, get a wig. Get a buzz cut. Let it go. What a lot of time you must have wasted in salons. 

Though God knows, she produced more in a week than I have in a lifetime, so I should shut up too. And I will. The best line is a tweet from Denis Leary: "Nora Ephron died. Christopher Hitchens is about to find out just how bleeping funny women really are." 

my first pepper

Had to pick it this small to save it from squirrels. Had it for lunch in an omelette.
And that is not an inflated belly button sticking out at my waist, it's the tie to my gardening pants, thank you very much.

Nora Ephron and getting old

Tonight is the last Ryerson class of the spring term, so tomorrow, except for my one day garden workshop and various editing jobs, that's it for paid employment until September. So I'll have lots of time and absolutely no money - the ironies of the freelance life. As I wrote a few days ago, a writer is always at work, though the actual making of money is in a separate and mostly distant realm. No wonder my business-type friends cannot comprehend how we survive. And neither, sometimes, can I. And yet here I am, a freelance pauper in the most beautiful garden in Toronto. If not the world.

Speaking of writers - what a shock to hear about Nora Ephron, that witty writer dead at 71. It's a shame that the two obits I've read so far have chosen to quote from her latest material, about aging, rather than the sharp, funny, bitter stuff she wrote earlier. I wished she'd stop going on about the wattles on her neck and how much time it took to get her hair done - First World problems, as my daughter would say, particularly New York problems. Her musings obviously struck a chord because those rueful books were bestsellers, but I hoped she'd move on. Instead, of all the many wonderfully clever things she wrote, those words about old necks and bad hair are what people will remember her by. Not fair.

I guess, though, it was groundbreaking for a wealthy female artist to write so honestly about the pains of aging. This morning it was hard, as it has now become, to get the rings onto my swelling fingers. There's a new hideous mole on my upper chest that's worryingly dark - should I call the doctor? My ankle and knees have more or less healed after my fall, but they creak, they ache, they mutter ominously.

No! I will not go on about getting old. It's Wednesday, Carol's class, I'll run around the gym with my friends. My hair, to which I pay as little attention as possible, is emerging from the pale brown mist as a stern and steely grey, and my neck is pretty damn fine. It's true that in those pictures Anna took of me holding baby Eli, below, all I could see, at first, were the deep wrinkles on my cheeks and, yes, the shrivelly state of my neck. C'est la vie. Time to go into the garden and smell the roses - literally - and pick some lettuce and a tomato - yesterday, harvested my first very small pepper! - then off to the Y to puff and pant and celebrate being 61. And the proud grandmother of a baby boy who is now not only smiling but smiling EARLY, as his proud mother points out.

Peace to you, Nora. You were a brave and beautiful woman, and an inspiration as a strong, successful writer. Your acerbic honesty will be missed.

Eli and Glamma: the conversation begins