Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 111

back to the garden

A day of extreme vileness - freezing rain, sleet, pouring onto the snow already heaped about the city streets. The TTC more than useless. Kevin was called in once more to snowplow duty, leaving Ed working alone for the day. It was very quiet here for once. Ed covered the new floors upstairs with paper and cardboard and began mudding the walls. There is a lot of mudding to do. I'm learning so much.

Truly, this has been one of the strangest winters of my long, strange trip of a life. Even as I go through the trauma of the reno, the fraught anxiety about money and the myriad decisions and arguments with various partners in the project, I am getting more work done than I have in ages. Normally, I am blithely unencumbered with lots of time to work, and yet manage to fritter time away. But now, with chaos on all sides, I sit here and write. Or revise, which is the secret - I can't start new writing, that would be too challenging. But I've pulled up old essays and realized there's a ton of work nearly done. Two essays have been worked on and sent out, and one put aside for now to ripen. The other day, I realized it was time to write about my uncle Edgar Kaplan, who for years was one of the most famous bridge players in the world. I started opening my old Documents files - and discovered I'd already written a more than 10,000 word essay about him. And it wasn't half bad. IMHO.

Yesterday, Kevin and Ed were working elsewhere, there were no electricians or floor guys, just an hour-long meeting with JM. I still was feeling low. So I spent the entire day sitting here working on my uncle, hardly moved except to eat, with a bit of TV - a fave, Doc Martin, at 8. At 11, I had to force myself to stop fiddling and go to bed. I am madly in love with this piece, as happens when you're in the middle and it's coming together. The beginning and the end are hard. The middle, so hopeful, is fun. I am enjoying every minute, can't wait to introduce you to my fascinating and marvellous uncle. It helps that I'm not teaching much this term.

In the midst of my pleasure, there is sadness in the lives of my friends. My dear Carole, leader of the Wednesday class at the Y, lost her husband Brian on Friday night. He was considerably older than she and had for a few years been suffering from increasing memory loss, but his death was unexpected. There's a memorial event for him next Tuesday at the Y, in the same room where we celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary not long ago.

And yet - the definition of a trouper - there she was to teach her RunFit class at noon today. She looked tired and battered, but she was there, and so were many of us, to support and hug her.

And a friend in Vancouver, Cathy McKeehan, an arts administrator and producer, suffered a brain aneurysm while visiting her son recently in Spain. My friend Chris was deeply wounded by her loss; when he lived in Vancouver, he and Cathy often had coffee and gossiped.

"We are fragile. We are older." Sung to the tune of "We are stardust, we are golden, and we've got to get ourselves, back to the garden," by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. Who ain't no spring chickens either.

Please take care, friends. It's slippery out there, in more ways than one.

recovery and Mr. delicious Darcy

I know you are all breathless with anticipation, one mesmerizing question dangling in the air: "How are your floors?!"

To which I reply, "Fine. Just fine. We have survived the Great Floor Upheaval of 2019, and the floors are a soft, pretty, brown, Canadian hardwood."
After all that. Ye gods, what a drama queen I am! Embarrassing. Well, in small bits, it looked dull. But all put together, it's soft and interesting.

As am I.

LOL.

Yesterday morning, much going on in the old homestead. The tireless electricians were back to finish various jobs and the floor guys were hammering and banging upstairs, so the cacophony was extraordinary - Cantonese on the ground floor and Hungarian on the second. One thing this reno has reminded me, though I did know it already: the value of good men who are good at their jobs. The electrician Weili Wu and his team could not have been better through a difficult, lengthy, complex process. If you need an electrician in Toronto, do not hesitate to get in touch with him, I could not recommend him more highly.
weili_wu@hotmail.com

And the floor guys also: Zoltan and his men were fast, skilful, a pleasure to deal with. At the end, he told me, Bad news, we don't have quite enough wood. We thought he'd have to buy some more and come back. But in the end, he had just enough to finish in one day, used every scrap. A beautiful job. Highly recommended also. Zoltan Zsibok.
info@zsibifloor.ca

In the middle of all that, yesterday morning, while I was still suffering about the floor, I got an email from my downstairs tenant, who had told me, to my great relief, that he wanted to stay till next summer; he's decided to move out in April instead. The joys of landlady-dom. I won't complain; it's what keeps me solvent here.

Sunday, Anna came with the boys. The high point was playing Snakes and Ladders not just with Eli, who loves the game, but with Ben, who has no understanding of throwing the dice and moving that number of spaces. He wanted to go right down to there and up to there and over here - so in the end, they abandoned all the rules and scampered about the board. Ben won. Small for his age, he is fiercely opinionated and has no hesitation about making his wants and opinions known. His tall brother is funny and clever and a bit sly, especially about torturing his mother. And it won't surprise you to know that they are the finest, handsomest young men in the entire world. I'm sure if you meet them, you'll think the same.

Speaking of fine, handsome men, Sunday night, a huge pleasure: PBS is replaying BBC's renowned "Pride and Prejudice" one hour at a time, and that night was the best hour of all: the wet white shirt scene which has become so famous, there was a sculpture put up somewhere in England of Colin Firth wearing his wet white shirt. It's simply one of the best scenes ever shot - Elizabeth Bennett visiting Pemberley, hearing to her shock what a good, kind man Darcy is and seeing the magnificence of his estate, realizing what she has turned down, and he, a proper, proud aristocrat suffering for love, plunging into his lake, then arriving home dishevelled, hair tousled and damp, his puffy white shirt sticking to his manly chest - INCREDIBLY HANDSOME - and they meet face to face, to their confusion and dismay.
He is inarticulate, rushes in to change, and then out again properly dressed to escort her and her relatives about. We sense his enormous care and love for her, his longing, her changing feelings about him. Will we ever see a better Darcy than Colin Firth? Unimaginable. He is strong, vulnerable, intelligent, besotted - perfect. A dreamboat. Would Jane Austen have been pleased? Maybe she'd have had a crush on him too.
Cinderella, still not feeling well, was at home in her rags, lying on the sofa under a blanket in the plaster dust and rubble, relishing every heavenly moment. Delicious.

apologies - and student success story

Please forgive my obsessive whiny posts about brown floors. Am not taking them down so you can see how a mind can torture itself, how decisions can drive a person crazy. How a renovation can reduce a nice, ordinary woman to a snivelling idiot. Sharing it all with you helps preserve my sanity, but I'm not sure what it's doing to yours.

Anna and family coming over today for fish and chips. The reality of small boys. Thank God.

Watched "Three Identical Strangers" last night. What a fascinating, tragic story. Scientific enquiry, gone too far.

Good news today - a student from last year, a marvellous young doctor, recently appeared on CBC's White Coat, Black Art. So articulate and thoughtful.

https://www.facebook.com/whitecoatcbc/posts/2165601940169538?comment_id=2165713173491748

Another student from the class wrote me this note on FB. Thank you Venetia.
Venetia Butler With your thoughtful encouragement. 
I think four people from our Ryerson Life Stories class have been published thanks to you Beth Kaplan!

absolutely final floor finale

I couldn't sleep last night for worrying, spent the day fretting, putting down pieces of the hardwood flooring, looking, walking around them. I thought, it's nice wood but perhaps it's just not right for ME. It's matte, absorbs light. It's a funny muddy brown. But pretty. I think it's lovely, my daughter wrote, which eased my heart for a few moments.

Then my old friend Ron, a businessman who has bought and sold a bunch of houses, came to see. Absolutely not, he said. The ground floor is pale wood, and flow is vital, continuity; the second floor should be the same. You should return it and get the light wood. I agreed. I am a light wood person. How did I not know that? I knew that but thought I'd try something new and different.

I thought of the poor floor guys who'd hauled in twenty - twenty! - heavy boxes of this brown wood, and of the delay and complications in changing my mind. And then I talked to JM about what I'd like to do.

Surprise! Because we bought remaindered wood, there's no returning it. I did not know that. Surprise! So either I live with it, or I throw away $2000.

All righty then.

It's fine. Yes, there will be no flow between the ground floor and the second floor. So what? Who needs flow? It's not ugly, it's just not light. It's possible I will get used to it and even grow to like it. And if I don't - one word - rugs.

What stress. What pounding of the heart for such a First World Problem. And yet, this floor is something I'm going to live with possibly for the rest of my life. So let's hope it works out.

Again, friends have come to my aid, offering advice long distance, though unfortunately, in the end, it didn't help. Chris wrote, you're the most opinionated person I know, how can you not have an opinion about your own floors? But this reno, as I've written before, has brought out all my insecurities. In this instance I had no idea what to do and floundered, and made possibly the wrong choice. Possibly the right one. I guess I'll find out when I move back upstairs and live with it.

Carole, a blog friend in England whom I've never met, wrote that she is going through exactly the same thing with her reno - that after the floor guys had hauled in all the boxes through the snow, she realized she hated what she'd chosen and wanted to send it back. She had bought retail and so had the luxury of changing her mind. But her floor guy was unhappy, and mine, Zoltan, will be thrilled, Monday morning, to get to work.

Onward. There are many more important things to think about. Nuclear proliferation is starting again. I'll try to get my mind off the floor.

floor finale

Dear friends, many of you have kindly written with your recommendations for my flooring choice, for which I thank you. You were all overwhelmingly for the light shade, not the dark. I have to tell you - TOO LATE. I chose the darker for a few reasons, the first of which is that it's made from Canadian trees, and though I don't approve necessarily of cutting down Canadian trees, at least my planks created a few Canadian jobs. But I also thought it's a warm colour which would be good in bedrooms, and that it would not show the dirt as much as the light one. The light one was very shiny and I thought more conventional. So I chose the dark.

And now that the many boxes of the wood have arrived and I've had a chance to look at more than one small piece, I will share this with you: you were probably right and I PROBABLY MADE A @#$#@ MISTAKE.

No no, I'm sure it'll look fine. And if it does not, I'll get rugs. At the moment, it looks like dull mud-brown laminate to me.

The house was particularly insane today, with Kevin and Ed working around four Hungarian floor finishers, who arrived first with vast slabs of plywood to lay the subfloor, and then many boxes of the wood. They have a nail gun thingie that they use to nail down everything. There was a huge amount of noise and much loud consultation, not in Cantonese today, but in Hungarian. In the middle of it all Grace arrived to give me another seminar in social media, but I was just not up for it, just not up for much at all. Under the weather, I think they call it. I am under really a lot of weather.

Though my dear Chris just called to say - Buck up, your floors will be fine. No one has ever come to your house, he pointed out, and said, Ugh, look at these ugly dark floors, let's leave. You're making yourself sick with stress, he said, and I think he may be right.

I have spent two months wearing more or less the same clothes - some kind of turtleneck and warm wooly apres-ski pants from MEC, of which I have 3 pairs. Most days I don't even bother putting on a bra. TMI? It's such chaos, I can't be bothered to find other clothes and it's cold, and who cares anyway? A certain nihilism enters the scene, and even red wine doesn't help. What the hell is going on?

Winter, renovation, being 68. What's it all about, Alfie?

As I type, I'm looking at the diamond ring Auntie Do gave me - an engagement ring that she never wore. It's so pretty, such flash and fire, red, blue, pink, green, all contained in that little stone. With it I wear my mother's wedding ring, and on the other hand, a Victorian ring with tiny sapphires that belonged to my great-grandmother's best friend Hattie Cumberpatch, in Northampton, and a green tourmaline ring made by Cousin Lola, an artist and jeweller in New York. I am carrying the love of my family on my fingers. And now I feel much better.

learning something new

I am testing to see if I can post longer sections of writing and give you the choice to open or not. This is from a new essay on my dad and the FBI.

Here's a test:


I open my mailbox and there it is, a solid brown envelope addressed by hand, with “U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation” in the corner. “Official Business,” it says. “Penalty for Private Use $300.”  A few months before, I’d written to the FBI and asked them to release any files they might have on my father. Though my dad left New York City, his birthplace, for Canada in 1950 at the age of twenty-seven and never lived in the U.S. again, I suspected that American authorities might have maintained an interest in this fiercely outspoken socialist. After his far too early death at sixty-five, I hugely regretted not asking him about his life, career, and activism, not finding out who he was as a young man, during my early childhood. I wanted to learn more about him.

real walls!

Your faithful correspondent was not in good shape today but not actually sick - fighting the good fight. Had to go out to the library and the bank but otherwise, keeping warm and not moving much. Today's treats: THREE library books I'd ordered came in at once, and then the Globe brought by JM, and in the mail, a new New Yorker with spring on the cover and a royalty cheque from my publisher for a big fat $95! How great is that?

JM rented a car, and we were supposed to go to the nether reaches of the city in search of job lots of hardwood; I wasn't well enough to go so he went on his own, and now we're debating the dark versus the light. In the meantime the team of Chinese electricians were still here battling the knob and tube - poor guys, I think they've lost a fortune on this contract which is taking far, far longer than they'd thought. That's my house for you. Kevin and Ed have all the drywall up and are taping. Thrilling.
my bedroom south wall
my bedroom east wall - new walk-in closet illuminated
the spare room

Hard to photograph and looks dull - but the excitement is real rooms with walls! Tomorrow the plywood for the new floors goes in, then mid-next week, finishing starts - trim, doors, light fixtures. We're now figuring out paint colours. Miles to go. Have to say - I don't mind so much the chaos, teams of skilful men marching through making mess and noise. A girl can get used to that.

I'm also wrestling with an essay about my dad's thick file with the FBI; my editor pointed out that it's unfocussed. It's true - I don't really know where it's going or what it's about. Need to stand back and figure that out.

Your smile of the day:
Brutal and bitter out there but very sunny, which helps. We're all in survival mode. A roof and a furnace help. Books to read and friends to write to help. Lying on a beach in the sun would also help, but - another time. For now, decisions - the dark or the light? A major consideration: the light is Chinese, the darker is Canadian, so my nationalist loyalties are in play. What do you think?

surviving the polar vortex

Surreal days. It's the polar vortex out there, freezing, bitter winds, tons of snow, Torontonians huddled together at the streetcar stop trying to survive. You've gotta be tough to be Canadian, as I reminded my young friend Karim, who's from Jordan, today at the Y. He has been in Toronto for a few years but has never encountered cold like this. But - this is Canada, Karim, I said. For better or worse.

In the meantime, I am not feeling well, just generally dragged down and achey, sat in the sauna at the Y and came home. The house is full but not full enough - though Ed is still faithfully putting up drywall, Kevin has vanished once again to his other job, driving a snow plow. JM is upstairs measuring something meticulously, as he often does, and the Chinese electricians are all back because they discovered more old knob and tube wiring which needs to be removed at additional expense - so they are upstairs cutting into the freshly installed drywall. LOL.

Somebody is drilling or sawing with some loud instrument of pain. Between the weather and the renovation, the world is too much with me today. Definitely.

Here's a picture the electrician drew of what he's doing with the wires.
As you can imagine, I understand it perfectly.
But - despite the foot of snow on top of the bird feeder, the sparrows are clustered there. Last night's documentary on two famous American journalists was fascinating. I sent an essay yesterday to my new editor who sent it back today with lots of valuable comments - what a gift that is. I have two books waiting at the library and may venture out to get them, though God knows, there's plenty to read around here. And last night my dear friends Jason and Luis came for dinner and to give paint colour advice; two men with great taste, they brought sample books, and we went around looking at swatches. What do you think about a soft, pale, warm grey for the front hall and stairs? I think we have a winter. I mean winner.

And I got to the liquor store and bought four bottles of red; there's food in the fridge, the furnace works, Kevin just came back, and I have four bottles of wine and an essay to work on. Not to mention Netflix and tonight "Notes from the Inside", a documentary about a musician who takes his grand piano into a mental hospital. No complaints. I'm set.

despite the storm, your inspiration for today

Major snowstorm today - blowing snow, high winds, bitter cold. I was complaining to Ed, a man of few words who was putting up drywall upstairs. "This is Canada," he replied. Nothing more need be said. But how glad I am - usually I teach Monday nights so would be gearing up to plow through to Ryerson. But not tonight, I'm gearing up to pour a glass of wine and practice the piano, which has been sadly neglected for weeks. Months.

But truly, a little snow doesn't bother Canadians. One year I was teaching Tuesday nights at Ryerson and there was a snowstorm worse than this. When I got there, I expected to find almost no one, and instead, the class was almost full, including a woman who drove in from Kleinburg. Hardy souls.

Tonight's treat - a documentary about hard-bitten New York reporters Jimmy Breslin and Pete Hamill on HBO. Maybe another episode of Harriet's drama on Netflix. Soup. Looking out at the snow and not having to be in it. A roof and a furnace.

Here's a big treat for you: a hilarious piece about memoir from the New Yorker.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/dear-publisher 

And a joke my friend Lani sent.
And finally, something Harriet sent from Australia. She is shooting a series that also features Eileen Kramer, an actress and a dancer who just wrote and illustrated a book. Oh yes - she's 104.
And if that's not inspiring, I don't know what is. Onward indeed!

Black Earth Rising - and snow

A perfect winter day - bright sun, fresh snow. Went for a walk to the Necropolis, to commune with Toronto's dead and with my own - a few years ago, I scattered most of the ashes of my parents there, though took a bit of Dad to Paris and of Mum to London. Today, I took the rest of my uncle Edgar, most of whose ashes I scattered in Central Park just after his death, to the Necropolis and scattered him near my parents. I told them all how much I love and honour them and that we are fine but the world is insane right now. It was very beautiful there.


This couple Alexander and Jane lost four of their children in infancy and two before the age of thirty. So much to be grateful for, my friends, healthy children and grandchildren more than anything.

Last night, watched the first episode of the British drama Black Earth Rising on Netflix - starring my magnificent friend Dame Harriet Walter as a Louise Arbour-type international prosecutor, with a daughter she adopted after the genocide in Rwanda. A complex drama about war crimes and ethnic identity, beautifully acted of course. I wrote to Harriet to congratulate her; she's in hot Australia filming a six-part series. The interesting life of a very talented woman.

Before that, I finally got to my friend Wendy's book club, Bourbon and Books, to discuss Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders, a book I loved, in a chic downtown restaurant. A fascinating discussion - Wendy is a professor of philosophy so brought in Hegel and Kierkegaard, about whom I know almost nothing. We had delicious French fries to keep us going, some of us drinking martinis and some cappucinos. A wonderful time.

And before THAT, a minor trauma  - another fierce argument with my friend and project manager cum designer Jean-Marc. My worries about this reno bring out the worst in me; I think of myself as a nice person, so the person he blew up at, whom he accused of being petty and nasty, is someone I'd prefer not to acknowledge. My friend Chris helped me gain perspective, and I wrote JM later to apologize; the cost of this reno freaks me out, money pouring out, my line of credit swelling, plus the timeline, the constant decisions. And my dear friend, frankly, can be annoyingly insistent in pushing his ideas and, I feel, glossing over my concerns. So we battle. I understand why renovation pushes couples to consider divorce, if not murder.

But we have made up; he is a kind, open human being, and our friendship matters more than anything, more than the money or our disagreements about how to get through this experience. We'll get there. And let's hope Mean and Nasty Beth never has to appear again. Onward.