Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 54

I heart Nova Scotia

Today is the yahrzeit, the anniversary of the death of my beloved uncle Edgar Kaplan. Always missed.

More old people stuff: just talked to my bank manager Dave, an old friend, about the necessity of turning my RRSP into a RIF. B/c old. Also, put the skin tag stuff on. It's like wart remover. Hope it works.

Oh, the indignities of 71. But, as they say, far, far better than the alternative.

What joy this fine morning, a picture of the 2 boys in their home for this month, setting off to find shells. They came running back, their mother wrote me, because they saw a shark. Lots of sharks in the Northumberland Straight! When I found out exactly where they are, my heart constricted; by chance Anna has rented a cabin very near Toney River, where my parents rented a cabin for us every summer when I was very young. The name is mythic to me. It's as if my daughter has been drawn home. Is love of Nova Scotia genetic? Perhaps. 

Labour Day and Canadian tennis stars

Labour Day - brisk no nonsense weather, warm with an undertone of warning = perfect. Friends and family are on the road. Anna spent Saturday packing while the boys and Holly came here to play. I rode to the Eaton Centre to get 9-year old Eli a warm jacket; he's so tall, I bought size 11-12, which only just fits. Ben is interested in money. "How much money do you have, Glamma?" he asked. "Enough to live on, Ben," I said. "You mean, like, $400?" he gasped. It reminded me of when 4-year old Eli told me he was going to marry a girl in his class and I asked him how old he thought he'd be. He considered. "8," he replied.

If only we could hang onto that sweet vagueness about numbers, the world would be a better place.

Anna left extremely early Sunday morning with the boys loaded up in the back and made it by 4 p.m to New Brunswick, to a motel with a pool. For dinner, she found an Indigenous-owned restaurant that served lobster rolls and poutine, and today she made it to Nova Scotia. So we know Anna is in heaven.

My friends Kevin and Donna arrived from Nova Scotia in the midst of all this to spend the weekend; they'd driven the other way to visit one of their sons and his family in Toronto. Kevin's mother became one of my mother's dearest friends in the fifties, so Kevin and I have known each other for decades, though we lost touch for some time as he lives in rural Nova Scotia. We did a lot of talking all weekend. And eating. And drinking. Last night we watched the US Open tennis, the amazing young Canuck Felix Auger Aliassime in a titanic battle with an American. Our boy won, and so did another even younger Canadian girl. Woo hoo! My mother and her sister Do loved tennis and were glued to the set during Wimbledon and every other series. Federer forever.

K and D left this afternoon, and I went to the drugstore for old people stuff - anti-aging serum and skin tag remover. The L'Oréal serum promises that instantly "skin feels more plump, supple, and looks smoother," and in 1 week, "Youthful, bouncy feel returns, skin is visibly refreshed, looks well-rested and glowing with moisture." Stay tuned, my friends. Soon I'll be as youthful and bouncy as Eli and Ben. 

On another front, this from an American magazine to which I'd sent an essay: Thanks for sending us 'Secret.' We're sorry to say this submission isn't right for us. This isn't a reflection on your writing. The selection process is highly subjective, something of a mystery even to us. There's no telling what we'll fall in love with, what we'll let get away.

Writing is hard work, and writers merit some acknowledgment. This note doesn't speak to that need. Please know, however, that we've read your work and appreciate your interest in the magazine.

We wish you the best in placing your writing elsewhere.

Isn't that sweet - "let get away"? Where shall I send it next? 

Here, two iterations of a photo taken on Friday, Beth with one of her great loves - which do you prefer?

Picture a Scientist

I keep saying things like, "He'll back back in September," and people reply, "It IS September." How did it get to be September? I have no idea. But it certainly feels like fall already - the minute the month changed, the weather cooled. It's going to be 8 degrees tonight!

Busy. Today, hours with Rose Napoli, my new social media assistant, taking photographs of yours truly, trying to get a good shot, and then a little film of me talking about the book. Not sure what for, but we'll see.

A bouquet of books.

Last night, watched Picture a Scientist, a fascinating doc about the shocking sexism facing women in science. I thought of my dad, who late in life became a feminist. I Googled and this came up: 

WISEST (Women in Scholarship, Engineering, Science & Technology) began in 1982, when Dr. Gordin Kaplan, then University of Alberta Vice-President (Research), noted that of the 150 attendees at a seminar on microprocessors, only one of the participants was a woman. With the help of fellow engineers, educators and academics, Dr. Kaplan formed what is now known as WISEST. And, for more than 35 years, we have continued our commitment to empowering women who are interested or want to seek out opportunities in underrepresented fields, specifically in science, engineering, and technology (STEM).

Bravo Dad! But before that, though he had huge respect for colleagues and friends like Dr. Ursula Franklin, it's possible he was as sexist as all the rest.

Last night, the season finale of The Good Fight. I'm not one for American network series, but this show is provocative and quirky, very enjoyable. I'm reading Leaving is not the hardest thing but may abandon. It's pretty rough going. Many many books on my list.

I'm ready for the long weekend, in that I rode to the LCBO yesterday and bought five bottles of rosé and a white; lots of red already in stock for the colder weather. Anna is leaving at 4 a.m. Sunday to drive to Nova Scotia in a rented car, the boys loaded up in the backseat with headphones, devices, and snacks. So my grandsons are coming over tomorrow to give their mum time to pack. Funny, friends who've driven here from Nova Scotia are coming to stay in the basement suite for the weekend. So it'll be busy. 

Right now, silence. Just me and my rose.

sparking joy, spreading gloom

I'm reading a New Yorker article by the brilliant, incisive Jane Mayer, about the countless millions in dark money funding Republicans these days, especially their anti-voting initiatives. She points out that in fact, the Trumpers are right; Donald Trump WAS elected president - of white America. The Repubs are determined to suppress voting by minorities, especially black voters, by any means, and they've so far been extremely successful. It's the death of democracy.

And here we have anti-vax lunatics screaming at Trudeau, following him around. Who are these people? What has happened to the human brain, that people violently reject drugs that will save their lives? It's Fox News, other right wing media, and the internet to blame, surely, for the flood of anti-science stupidity, paranoia, and misinformation that's killing informed analysis and has encouraged the viciousness of discourse. 

I'm wondering what world we are living in now, what world our grandchildren will inherit. It's profoundly frightening. Let's not even think, for now, about fires and floods and what they mean.

There was a family crisis late last night, just to let you know that this woman's sunny ways are sometimes tested. But we got through. 

On a brighter note, I spent two solid days moving files around, creating new folders, renaming files to drag into the new folders, opening old stuff to see if it should be stored or transferred to the trash, which makes such a satisfying sound as it sucks in detritus. I feel SO ORGANIZED! However, the work also depressed me, since it showed, again, just how much writing I did for years and years without sending any of it out. In the nineties, I had lots of essays published, and then I stopped, thought if I was working on books, I didn't have time for essays. I started them anyway and left them littered about in bits and pieces in Documents. Now they're in a folder, and the challenge is to do something with them. 

This should take me till the end of my days. 

Loved this cartoon drawn by a Finnish woman, Anna Harmala, a single mother who drew about her experience. (Click to enlarge.)

What she draws here happened to me; the instant my husband and I separated, I was no longer invited to dinner parties. Ever. Not once. I guess I made wives uncomfortable, or just the table arrangement awkward and unbalanced. So I started to invite people often for dinner here, so I'd have an adult to talk to, and my children could hear grownups conversing. Now they're both in the world of hospitality and food, and neither is a vaccine sceptic or a rightwing blowhard. Because they learned to argue and listen and think. 

There's a story there. But I won't write it, at least not yet. I'm too busy excavating files. 

hooray, Queen's Quarterly, and let's dance!

You know I'm generally a cheerful person, in part because I've been lucky in life, so far, and I take nothing for granted. This morning, I was exceptionally, nauseatingly cheerful. (Many sparrows crowded in the public bath on my deck. I should charge.)

Today's email brought me a welcome surprise: another essay has been accepted, barely a week after I submitted it, a miracle - in August! This essay, about my childhood pen pal who died in 1966 and what her death has meant to me ever since, matters more to me than almost anything I've ever written. I was devastated a few years ago when I submitted it to the CNFC nonfiction competition, and it didn't even make the long list. I know, some competitions are a non-objective question of taste, but still, it hit hard. I hung onto the piece until finally, encouraged by the wonderful Susan Scott who's the editor of my forthcoming piece in TNQ, I submitted it to Queen's Quarterly. The editor James Carson wrote today:

I’m writing to say that we would be happy to accept “Correspondence” for publication in the Queen's Quarterly. It is an engaging and professional work of memoir that hits just the right wavelength for what we look to publish. It also prompted our associate editor to recall the time she met Paul McCartney at a party in London.

It's like someone saying, I see you. I hear you. You exist. 

I wrote back to say, wonderful, and please let your associate editor know I want to hear ALL ABOUT IT, and that I have a memoir she might enjoy. 

Then I Zoomed into the dance party Nicky Guadagni runs every day. I'd sent her a playlist of dance songs, and today she used nearly all of them. So I not only danced on Zoom with her group of friends but to some of my own favourites, while looking out at the garden, which has recovered from the recent drought and looks newly fresh and green because - of course, because I watered like crazy yesterday - it poured overnight. 

So, bliss. Here's the playlist from today if you want to create your own dance party, but I warn you - you'll be winded.

Now, I'm going to cook while listening to Eleanor, and then I'll go back to work. It's thrilling: I've at last discovered how to create folders for Documents on my Mac, and the chaos of my Documents file, thousands of snippets, essay starts, inspiring quotes, and a ton of other things from decades of scribbling online, are starting to be renamed and PUT INTO THE RIGHT FILE. Oh God, it feels good. 
Much to be grateful for today. I hope you have a list too. Let's dance. 

finding a champion

An image to keep you cool - a friend sent this from the Alaska highway. It's chilly here, she said. 

Hours of gardening today - everything is overgrown or falling over or invading something else. It's so dry, I had to drag my filthy garden hose through the house to water the parched plants at the front. The water line at the front exploded one winter years ago and I've not replaced it, not had to, until now. No rain for ages! And yet it poured across town the other day - here a five-minute sprinkle.

Watching six sparrows bathe and drink in the big saucer on the deck rail, such fluttering, splashing, and squawking. They don't mind bathing and then sipping the same water. I am about to join them, take my grubby self up to the shower. But then I will drink rosé.

On Thursday, to my new friend Ron, who's a vigorous 88, and his partner Babs. Ron has kind of adopted me; he believes I'm as good a writer as Alice Munro and M. Atwood, and though I beg, vehemently, to differ, I cannot shake his faith in me. He told me, "You need a champion as a writer." And for a writer as self-deprecating as I, he's right. It is a very good thing to have a champion. Babs is a fellow Beatlemaniac, so after a glass of wine, we put on Sgt. Pepper's and danced. 

Yesterday's pleasure - on the way to a swim and dinner at Lynn's, I took the TTC to Rosedale subway, then walked up Yonge St. to St. Clair, stopping at the Paperie, full of lovely things, and Book City where I bought Lauren Hough's memoir in essays Leaving isn't the hardest thing; trying to keep up with what's current is one of the hardest things. I'm interested in essay collections, since that's what I may aim for - a guaranteed bestseller, as are of course all my books. 

LOL. 

In bookstores I always look longingly at the Ks in the nonfiction section, where this writer as good as Alice and Peggy is not. I once found Finding The Jewish Shakespeare in a Barnes and Noble at Times Square, and several copies of All My Loving in a Book City here. But not recently. 

But what joy to go into shops and shop! And then to float up and down Lynn's grotto-like pool and have dinner on the deck with her partner Nick. I'd brought a fine bottle someone gave me years ago that I'd forgotten about and was sure had gone bad - a 2003 chardonnay, to be drunk by 2008. Lynn and Nick were game to give it a try, and amazingly, it was wonderfully rich and complex! Only 13 years after its best before date. 

Lynn and I looking at the little red squirrel on the telephone wires.
May we all be so lucky and last long after OUR best before date.

a lesson in Instagram

Received a nice rejection this morning from a magazine I'd sent an essay to: Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we don’t see a place for it at this time. We did, however, enjoy reading your pitch, and we would welcome submissions from you again. 

It's still a no, but the door is open a crack. Believe me, in this business, that's a win. 

Another win: according to the eye doctor yesterday, I do not have glaucoma. My dad and others in the family had it, but so far the eyes are good, for me — a huge relief because reading is my life. Still waiting for CT scan results. Still alive to tell the tale.

My son came to visit yesterday and gave me a lesson in posting on social media, specifically Instagram. I've taken workshops and webinars and read many articles on marketing, struggling to make sense of it, and I learned more in ten minutes from Sam than from all of it. I need to post regularly on IG, and it's not vain and self-serving to do so. Well, no, it IS, but it's what's necessary to get yourself and your work out into the world. So I will try to overcome my reluctance. It feels like boasting. It is boasting. But he gave me ideas on how to make it fun for readers. I've been looking for years for a social media assistant, and there he was, eating, as usual. "Just buy me a steak," he said, "and I'm happy to help." 

This is the pic I posted today: Lennon and McCartney arm-wrestling, with a note about my sixties memoir All My Loving. 

There's something primal here. The intense, mostly friendly competition between these two geniuses is what made their music so brilliant. Luckily George, with his own quiet genius, was content to remain in the background for the first years, and easy-going Ringo was the steady backbeat for them all. 

As was the great Charlie Watts for the Stones, RIP. 

Watched a doc yesterday on the history of elephants: the first, according to fossils thousands of years old, was as big as a rabbit. They posit the trunk grew because the tusks appeared first, and the beast needed a way to get past them to put food to its mouth. Talk about brilliant! Also, that elephants as they ate brush cleared land in Africa, allowing the first primates to move about freely and flourish. So we owe it all to the elephants. I signed a petition against the importation of ivory this morning - does that even still need to be an issue? We are such barbarians. 

https://action.hsi.org/page/86381/action/1?locale=en-US&fbclid=IwAR0beN5reQHTpa28ZX8615zDURLmIgqDASkHGPKGAJ1om3EWMZgewGEG0xU

The Chair

This country is going through an election, and I'll have to stop listening to the news. The sniping and insulting and boasting and absurd promises that can never be kept - they make me sick. I fear calling the election early, with the 4th wave crashing in and the Afghan rescue mission in chaos, is a mistake Trudeau will regret. And if we end up with a Conservative government, that this country will regret.

Okay, let's move on. I just watched The Chair, an excellent six-part Netflix series. Sandra Oh stars as a professor who has made history by becoming the first female and Asian Chair of the English department of a small American university. My father was Chair of Biology at the University of Ottawa, and this, from a Washington Post review of the show, resonated: 

That's what I think Dad found, too. I thought the show was scattered in focus and tone, with slapstick humour, a critique of the naive and destructive excesses of student political correctness and yet also of the sexist, racist hierarchy of the university, and more. But it's also about the good that good teachers do, the actors are terrific, and it's fun. I enjoyed it. 

What was not so much fun was my CT scan yesterday; you have to drink a lot of liquid and wait. When my time came, the doctor said I was getting "the Cadillac machine," as he slid me into a huge round white maw. Results as yet unknown. Tomorrow morning, another eye exam. I do know that as I age, doctor's appointments are going to take more time. The alternative, however, is not so good. 

When my brother was here, his son pointed out that he and I have the same condition, trigger finger, in which one finger remains stuck in a bent position, in exactly the same finger, the ring finger of the right hand. Genetic trigger finger, who knew? Apparently I can get a cortisone shot to alleviate it. Add another doctor's appointment. There's another little lump on my head; they keep appearing, not to mention the brown spots. One day I'm going to write an ode to my tweezers, my most important beauty aide. I spend time each day depilating my poor bristly chin and upper lip and eyebrows. Oh, it's not pretty, this stuff. 

But the alternative is not so good.

What I think of as one of my best essays has never found a home, so I sent it to an editor I know for feedback. She replied, I adore the essay and have read it over and over, trying to decode the hesitation on the receiving end when you've sent it out. The vitality is what I love about your writing.

So, grateful for the support, I just sent it out again. A woman who has registered for the U of T class in October just wrote: True to Life is on its way, as is All My Loving. Loose Woman I've finished a few moments ago with tears of love for the exuberant woman that you are.

So nice! I guess this exuberant, hairy old bag will just keep going.

"a gentle joy"

I think the word for the air is 'soupy'. I have been running the AC for the first time this summer, for survival. Time to go out to water and pick some chard for dinner. But first, listening to Macca on Spotify and checking in with you. 

Some lovely things happening. My brother came to visit with his 14-year-old son Jake. The last time he was here two years ago, he'd just returned from Israel, of which he is an ardent supporter; in his view Israel, like my parents, can do no wrong. As you can imagine, one person in particular at the table objected vehemently to this view; there was a violent argument, and we have not seen him, or spoken much, since. There's a long history of us not getting along, so I just let it be. 

But he came and we all had dinner and a really great visit. Apparently he apologized to Anna for provoking the argument. He took her boys swimming in the pool at his hotel and they adored Jake, who's a sweetheart. I have very few relatives left in the world, only one sibling and one nephew. It's a source of great pleasure that peace was made. 

He expressed interest so I send him a few excerpts of the letters I've been transcribing between our parents after their separation in the mid-fifties, which to my mind explain why he and I have never been able to be friends. What I found in the letters made me weep. They both adored my chubby blonde brother, who was, indeed, adorable, but for some reason they both denigrated me. It's there in the letters, including, as I quoted a few months ago, my dad writing to Mum, "I'd almost forgotten what a bitch Beth can be, but your letter reminded me." I was seven. I hope my brother sees why I hated him, that we really didn't have a chance. We have not been able to fix it in all these years. But maybe we can now. 

Last night, the Word Sisters, an impressive group of women in publishing, came for a potluck dinner on the deck. One is a writers' agent with one of the best agencies in the country, another is a publicist with one of the best publishing houses. I want to shout, "LET ME IN!" We disagreed about the term "vanity publishing" which they still use and which I say is dead as a term; now we say "indie publishing." There's no vanity in our struggle to get our words out into the world.

Occasionally I wonder if this blog is worth the time and focus it takes to keep it going, and then, out of the blue, comes a boost, a gift. Someone wrote this on the blog. Thank you, Ellen! I needed that.

Less than a week ago a few of your blog readers (fans) and I were discussing how much we enjoy your blog for the beauty of the words and thoughts, the spirit of kindness that always radiates, the optimism and the gentle, reasonable, and positive approach to life. Even when you discuss more serious personal matters (e.g., your recent health challenges, your friend Patsy, your worries for the well-being of those you love), you do so with warmth, honesty and courage, and from that we all learn and grow. I follow, and am grateful for, your suggestions on books that you recommend, for the music you discuss, and for the films/documentaries/tv shows that you discuss. For all world issues I rely on mainstream news, but am interested in other's opinions when discussed. Your blog is a gentle joy and I thank you for that.

Cabbagetown apartment to rent

Friends, my basement flat will soon be available again. A friend moving from Vancouver has taken it for a month, but it's empty as of Nov. 1 or even possibly mid-October. Please forward to anyone you think might be interested. Many thanks.

FURNISHED APARTMENT TO RENT 

Spacious one-bedroom basement apartment in Cabbagetown, steps from streetcar and Parliament St. yet startlingly tranquil. Private entrance through a beautiful garden, high-ceilinged living-room with dining space and kitchen, dressing-room, bathroom with huge shower, washer/dryer, bedroom. Fully furnished. 

$1700 a month, including utilities and high-speed wifi. Someone quiet and reliable with references, please; prefer longterm but short-term also possible, two month minimum. 

Kaplan2721@rogers.com.