Beth Kaplan's Blog, page 94

heat wave

Such a contrast - Saturday, to a memorial celebration for a fine man, Jack Bingham, a neighbour and friend. His widow Gretchen had organized a lovely event outside with a canopy, stand up tables, tons of great food from Daniel and Daniel, a pianist playing, a book of remembrance. Many local people from around here and old friends of theirs from the States, including an elderly couple who flew in for a day and night. Neighbour Stephen, who's about 75, wrote in the book that when he grew up, he wanted to be like Jack, who was thoughtful, kind, meticulous. A great loss.

And then Sunday, bursting with life - I brought the two little boys over here for the afternoon. We went to one playground and then another; at the second one I delighted them both by playing catch, chasing, growling and snarling, as they scampered screaming over the climbing apparatus. As I puffed and panted, I thought, this is why I go to the Y - so I can be the Big Bad Wolf without fainting. It was fun. They destroyed my house and then I took them home for dinner. On the way back I stopped at John's; he and Sylvie drove me to an apartment building not far away where I'd bought a great chest of drawers for $40 on Craigslist for the downstairs apartment. We disassembled it, loaded it into John's van, delivered it, reassembled it, and I was home in time to watch The Durrells in Corfu. 

Yesterday evening, teaching the big class at Ry - a new person came so it's officially full at 18. Today, a day of record-breaking heat - 31 feeling like 37 - I spent in the garden pruning and pulling up. Got rid of the cuke plants, cut back the enormous coleus, the huge branchy cedars, the overgrown jasmine. Friend Jason came for dinner - a student 12 or more years ago, then in my home group, then a best friend who's the MC for So True. We are joined at the hip. He's a peach.

What am I doing during the days? No idea. FB and Twitter. A bit of work. The NYT, trying to keep up with the madness to the south of us. Trying not to pay attention to our own election. Reading. Editing for So True and students. Email. The various sites that send me stuff, overload. Coffee with Monique. Chats with JM, a bit of TV, a quick trip to the Y. And voila - the day has disappeared.

And then, best of all - bedtime. Right now.

Eat more cucumbers. Sorry about the bad grammar, below. But the point is taken

later that same day ...

There were many thousands marching, paralyzing the downtown core of our fine city. Anna and I have been on many marches together; this was perhaps the tenth? And Eli's third or fourth, and there will be many more, particularly if this election works out the way the Ontario election did. More Trudeau hating today. It's a terrifying thing to see an entire society shift, like this, from tolerance to hatred, just the way it did against Kathleen Wynne.

Once I was at the march, I knew what sign I wish I'd written and brought. It would have said:
AVOID SCHEER MADNESS. VOTE STRATEGICALLY!

It would not have been hilarious the way some of the signs were, and it would not have been popular with Green or NDP voters, but this is what I believe with all my heart: if you're in a swing riding, please please vote for the candidate most likely to beat the Conservatives. Because if not - well, first, the Cons don't even believe in climate change. So that's where you'll be, all you Trudeau haters. The man dressed up as Aladdin and we'll end up with a climate denying far right fundamentalist clown.

Sorry. I do get het up.

Here's my family again, with their much nicer signs:

Meanwhile, this morning in Parkdale ...

I'm setting off soon for Queen's Park to join my young climate activists for Toronto's march. Was awake in the night with nightmares about this election - what can I DO to help ensure the ghastly Scheer remains in the dust?

We survived Harper, we can survive Scheer, but each time, those guys make our country that much worse, just as our province has already been incalculably damaged by Ford. It's heartbreaking. Could I write an oped that would help right wing 905ers see the light? Could I put up a sign that would galvanize non-voting neighbours?

I'll go march with my grandchildren while I try to figure it out.

Adam Gopnick

You'll be happy to know my bike Marilyn now has two beautiful new wheels. The bike repair guy said someone else came in the same day, from the same area, with a vandalized bike. It's tempting to go back and leave a shiny bike as a decoy to try to catch this creep. But life is too short.

My cold is sitting in my lungs and refuses to budge. Infuriating. Ah well.

Monday night's excitement, after the big Ryerson class, the first where they read their stuff - wonderful! - was seeing Macca on Colbert. Yes, I stayed up until midnight, because I am a superfan. He told some of the same old stories he tells at his concerts - Jimi Hendrix playing Sgt. Pepper's two days after the record was released - but I could listen to him forever.

Sigh.

Tuesday's thrill, a little more intellectual - being Lynn Bevan's guest at the 17th Lafontaine-Baldwin Lecture, this one by Adam Gopnick. I didn't know these two politicians, one Upper Canadian and one Lower, worked together in the 1840's to help create Canadian democracy. Gopnick was learned and eloquent, as ever, about the threats to democratic institutions right now. I came away with a renewed sense of the importance of community, activism at the local level. He said:
Liberal democracy celebrates both inclusion and individuality, and both of those are under siege as they have not been since the thirties.
Rule of law, open elections, universities where free speech is valued – these things are fragile. Those who have not lived through social chaos take them for granted.
We need to guarantee the permanent principle of pluralism. We do that by building community – social capital – the commonplace civilization. By acts of sympathetic imagination. Compassion.
Got it. Will do my best. Will be at the climate march tomorrow with Anna and the boys. As I walked to the Gopnick event, I ran into a climate protest, students closing down Bloor Street at rush hour. We'd better get used to this.

curses on you, wheel thief!

Parked my bike near Sherbourne right on Carlton Street and went to lunch today with two theatre world friends, Allan Stratton and Norman Browning. Norman is an actor with whom I worked quite a bit, including a cross-Canada tour of Cruel Tears, and Allan a successful writer in whose first play Norman and I also toured. We had a great catch up with much much gossip and many theatre stories, as you can imagine.

I walked out of the restaurant on this lovely afternoon to find this:
My beautiful Marilyn, decimated, without both her wheels and some of the gears that went with them. These were not quick release wheels; someone had to have tools and work quite hard to get them off, in broad daylight, on a busy street corner.

Allan kindly carried her frame and we walked to Cycle Solutions on Parliament, where I bought her. For a mere $300 I'll have my bike again.

@#$#@$@%@#$%#$%$#^#$^#$%^$%&$%^&%^&^%*%^*%^*^%*%^&*&%^*%^&$^#$#$.

Okay. First world problems.

forward and back

It's hot - hot hot hot, and it feels especially blessed because we know it won't last. Heavenly. Nobody, not one single person, is complaining about the heat.

Yesterday I "unfriended" someone I knew many years ago but have connected with recently only on FB, who says he's from the left but has been ranting so viciously about Trudeau that I couldn't bear it any more. By chance, we were supposed to meet on Tuesday with another old friend from years ago; my FB unfriend rang my number by mistake, instead of our mutual friend's, intending to cancel our date because he was so insulted I'd unfriended him. I explained I simply cannot take FB's relentlessness any more, the barrage of opinions and abuse, so I started with him. We are meeting after all.

Ah, navigating the modern world, so complex. "To unfriend" - a new verb.

But on other hand, I've invented "to family." I familied yesterday. My son and I were supposed to go to a movie, but when we met at the Varsity, he took one look at me and said, "Mum, you're sick. The movie theatre will be freezing. Let's just go to your place and I'll make you a nice dinner. "

Music!

We ended up at our favourite restaurant on Parliament Street for dinner at dusk on their roof deck; I had a glass of Prosecco to celebrate being there with a very fine man. He has had a hard time  since the ghastly event of last month, but has the support of many friends who love him, a workplace he enjoys tremendously, and, now, a great blessing, a professional who specializes in trauma, who has explained to him how his brain is operating right now. All this has led to a calmer and happier man. We talked and laughed and ate and came back here to watch the Emmys, where usually he has seen everything and I have seen nothing. This time, Fleabag won big, and I had actually watched 3 episodes and he -  none. It was a first. Because I am so very cool.

Here's a few pictures on this glorious day, as I rest in preparation for a big class tonight  - got to get these lungs through it -
I looked down after working in the garden and a magnificent tiny beetle was clinging to my pants. I took him out and found a leaf. He's bronze, with spots, just beautiful. I took it as a good sign that a beetle liked me.
Is there anything in nature more showoffy than roses? The peacock of flowers.
I've been delving into old photos. This is my dad with Dr. Benjamin Spock in the late sixties or early seventies, both working for peace and against the Vietnam War.
And this is Dad after he signed up for the U.S. Army, in 1944 at the age of 22. This is the young man my mother met.

Today I was reading letters by my British grandfather, Mum's father, who was born in 1890. How lucky, to know these generations. To be part of a long line, stretching back, stretching forward.

Bill Morneau comes to call

How often does this happen? My doorbell rang and there was Canada's Finance Minister wanting to talk to me. And we stood talking for 15 minutes - he perhaps relieved at a sympathetic reception - though I told him not to shake my hand because of my cold. We discussed Blackfacegate and SNC - agreeing that the PM has made foolish choices in his past and that the bright, capable women he chose for cabinet were inexperienced at politics and did not know how to play the game. "They hated to compromise," he said. "I have to compromise all the time. I never get exactly what I want."

I liked him tremendously, found him honest, direct, and personable. I told him as a former actor that Trudeau needs voice lessons to sound less breathy and indecisive, and he said they've tried. He told me about sitting down with Trump in Washington - that he's a master salesman who decides what he wants to pitch and goes for it and it alone. And it works. I was wearing my worst slumpy clothes, sweaty and probably smelly, but we had a great talk.

Now there's a red Liberal sign in my front yard. Pragmatic politics with some heart is, I think, the best we can do right now, in this age of right-wing lunatics and frenzied online hatred. And looking at the rest of the world, pragmatic politics with a heart is not bad at all.

the life of a writer and the Exodus

This is I think a first - it's Word on the Street, and I'm at home, will not be trekking around listening to writers and trying to claw my way through the crowds in the hot sun to look at books. I'm thrilled the event is such a success - but not for me today, with my cold, and also - with a kind of sadness about my profession. An article in the NYT: Since 2009, when eBooks and book piracy became a phenomenon, income for authors has declined 42 percent, according to a 2018 Authors Guild income survey, with the median income from writing now so low — just $6,080 a year — that poverty level looks like the mountaintop. By contrast, a 2017 Nielsen survey found that people who admitted to having read a pirated book in the previous six months tend to be middle class, educated, female as well as male, between the ages of 30 and 44 — and with an income of $60,000 to 90,000 a year. 

I have to say that $6000 US a year from writing sounds mighty good to me; almost all my money, as you know, comes from teaching, editing, and landladying. Mind you, I've been anything but singleminded in my pursuit of an income from writing. A former student of mine has a book being launched at WOTS today; she HAS been ferociously focussed, I've watched her progress upwards, and there's no question she will make a success of this business. But I know few as fiercely singleminded. And certainly not me.

Anyway, I'm still recuperating and coughing and snuffling, though better. Seeing a movie with my son tonight, have not seen him for weeks and am anxious to connect, so will rest today to be in the best possible shape, not to mention well enough to teach tmw night.

The work on my parents' letters proceeds slowly. They were both vivid, fluid writers, so I'm able to piece together details of parts of their lives I knew little about - my mother after the war, for example, working in northern Germany with the IRO - the International Refugee Organization - with refugees from the camps and other Displaced Persons, trying to find them permanent homes. 95% want to go to the States, she tells my dad who's in New York, but can't get visas so end up in France, Australia, Canada, even South America. She was on site when the Exodus, the ship packed with Holocaust survivors trying to land in Palestine and turned away by the British, was forced to land in Hamburg. My mother, among the many trying to help those on board find refuge. It was a terrible mistake to force them back to Germany, she knows, and the British are hated; she has to hide her nationality. Almost all, she says, will continue to fight to get to what they consider their homeland. It's so very complicated, she sighs. If she only knew.

But now, I know so very much more than I did. It's a thrilling exploration, even if sometimes, what they write about their children, about their young daughter and son, hurts. I can take it. I'm a writer, though I don't earn even $6000 US a year at my job. My job is to try to figure things out and write about what I find. The pay is abysmal, but - it's not just a job, it's my life.

The Band's Visit

Months ago, I was thrilled to see that the musical The Band's Visit, which I'd tried to see in NYC but was sold out, was coming to Toronto. I bought a ticket for this Saturday's matinee. On Thursday afternoon I had a runny nose and by that night a full-blown cold. Friday, self-pity and coughing, filling an entire waste paper basket with Kleenex, tossing all night long. Today I was sure I'd be too sick to go to the show.

But - it's hot out! It's like a gift, the sun, the whole city out soaking up every moment. My upstairs tenant Robin went to Cherry Beach to sunbathe and swim. I sat out baking the germs in the sun, took an Advil and lots of throat lozenges and hopped on my bike. Luckily my ticket was on the aisle at the very back, so as I coughed discreetly and sipped my water I didn't bother anyone.

It's a gorgeous piece of work - haunting, slow, quiet, the antithesis of what you think a Broadway musical will be. I'd loved the movie and I loved this theatrical adaptation, would gladly see it again. The music is wonderful, the setting, the actors, who are also all musicians - and the story, not about Israeli and Egyptian tensions, as you think it will be - this story of an Egyptian orchestra stranded by mistake in a small Israeli town - but about how difficult it is to be alive, how much we all want to be loved and heard, the deep wound at the core of us all. Profoundly moving, the best kind of theatrical experience, that sits forever inside your soul. Deep deep respect and gratitude to all involved. Ten Tony awards rightly given.

Thank God for something beautiful, because these past days have been devastating. Even people I consider friends have turned into self-righteous judges; Trudeau is attacked viciously from both right and left. He should have known better! He's a hypocrite! Etc. Etc.

Look, we know he's a lightweight. We know he likes the limelight, selfies, maybe he's vain, a show-off. But can we please remember he has done lots of good things? Can we look at who is waiting to replace him if we all throw up our hands because he's a flawed human being? The very soul of my country is being tried right now, being weighed in the balance, and the other side, the bad side, has a huge amount of far right money pouring in from the States and Alberta to make sure our decision goes their way. The relentless pile on from media and social media is beyond appalling, JWR all over again. Hyenas. Vultures.

What decent human being would want to be a politician in the world now, with every event of a life, past and present, under a microscope, with every pundit presenting an opinion about everything? I think of FDR with his crippled legs and his longterm affair, protected by the media. Despite his brilliance and powerful social conscience, I'm sure he'd take one look at the disgusting scrum of the current political climate and choose to do something else with his life.

So I'm heartsick but not too physically sick. A one day bug, I hope. This weather is due to continue all week. They're warning of a long hard winter, but right now, we're living under a blessed sky. May the hearts and minds of my fellow citizens also see the light.

The Band's Visit - and I will proudly defend Trudeau to the end

Months ago, I was thrilled to see that the musical The Band's Visit, which I'd tried to see in NYC but was sold out, was coming to Toronto. I bought a ticket for this Saturday's matinee. On Thursday afternoon I had a runny nose and by that night a full-blown cold. Friday, self-pity and coughing, filling an entire waste paper basket with Kleenex, tossing all night long. Today I was sure I'd be too sick to go to the show.

But - it's hot out! It's like a gift, the sun, the whole city out soaking up every moment. My upstairs tenant Robin went to Cherry Beach to sunbathe and swim. I sat out baking the germs in the sun, took an Advil and lots of throat lozenges and hopped on my bike. Luckily my ticket was on the aisle at the very back, so as I coughed discreetly and sipped my water I didn't bother anyone.

It's a gorgeous piece of work - haunting, slow, quiet, the antithesis of what you think a Broadway musical will be. I'd loved the movie and I loved this theatrical adaptation, would gladly see it again. The music is wonderful, the setting, the actors, who are also all musicians - and the story, not about Israeli and Egyptian tensions, as you think it will be - this story of an Egyptian orchestra stranded by mistake in a small Israeli town - but about how difficult it is to be alive, how much we all want to be loved and heard, the deep wound at the core of us all. Profoundly moving, the best kind of theatrical experience, that sits forever inside your soul. Deep deep respect and gratitude to all involved. Ten Tony awards rightly given.

Thank God for something beautiful, because these past days have been devastating. Even people I consider friends have turned into self-righteous judges; Trudeau is attacked viciously from both right and left. He should have known better! He's a hypocrite! Etc. Etc.

Look, we know he's a lightweight. We know he likes the limelight, selfies, maybe he's vain, a show-off. But can we please remember he has done lots of good things? Can we look at who is waiting to replace him if we all throw up our hands because he's a flawed human being? The very soul of my country is being tried right now, being weighed in the balance, and the other side, the bad side, has a huge amount of far right money pouring in from the States and Alberta to make sure our decision goes their way. The relentless pile on from media and social media is beyond appalling, JWR all over again. Hyenas. Vultures.

What decent human being would want to be a politician in the world now, with every event of a life, past and present, under a microscope, with every pundit presenting an opinion about everything? I think of FDR with his crippled legs and his longterm affair, protected by the media. Despite his brilliance and powerful social conscience, I'm sure he'd take one look at the disgusting scrum of the current political climate and choose to do something else with his life.

So I'm heartsick but not too physically sick. A one day bug, I hope. This weather is due to continue all week. They're warning of a long hard winter, but right now, we're living under a blessed sky. May the hearts and minds of my fellow citizens also see the light.