Lunch with Jesse

Last week I thought it would be a special treat for Jesse if I met him for lunch, but when we walked into his storefront workplace to meet him, he didn’t even look up. Like his 3 other colleagues, he was glued to his telephone, while taking notes.

The place looked like a mini call-centre. He was still on the same call when his coworker looked up and asked me how she could help me. But then her phone rang again. This gave me a chance to eavesdrop on my son and to find out just what kind of phone call takes precedence over a mother dropping in for lunch. 

He was consoling a mother over the phone about her unfortunate circumstances and then coaching her about how to navigate the system so that she and her children can move into affordable housing. 

 

“Condominiums from the $500’s to over 2 million”

Another woman in the office was receiving donations for the recent earthquake victims in China.

When we stepped out into the cool air, a disheveled looking elderly man tried to sell us a cheap, broken wristwatch. He said with anger that “my belly aches from hunger”. Another asked Jesse for a cigarette.

 

I once thought that working in the provincial constituency office of an NDP politician might be a slightly glam walk in the park. When the Mike Harris Conservatives ruled Ontario for 8 long years, they dismantled many programs and supports. Many people in the wealthy city that is Toronto are hungry and poor and discouraged….and most of them are children. Now Jesse and others like him sit in musty inner-city offices tossing life preservers to these ‘children of the system.’ The people who Jesse helps cry tears of relief and try to buy him coffee with their last toonie.

 

We eventually went to lunch in a greasy-spoon diner, where we met up with Jesse’s cousins and their new baby. Jesse held the serene little one and said that it calmed him down.

 

 Just as well, because back across the street the phones were still ringing.

Up in the Clouds

When we landed in Toronto  5 days ago, it was raining out. After 2 weeks of California heat and sunshine, it was actually a welcome change to smell the rain in the air when we stepped off the plane. There were no clouds in California, so I’ve also been enjoying the ever-changing cloud formations from our son Jesse’s 11th floor balcony.

After months of absence from our kids, it was pretty amazing to spend one night at Emily’s and Mike’s and to take a 5 hour flight and sleep over the next night at Jesse’s.

I took this video of a short drive on the Gardner Expressway that follows the shoreline of Lake Ontario across the bottom of Toronto. I thought that Emily and Mike would like to see the CN Tower and their former condo too.

Here is a video showing the view off the balcony of Jesse’s apartment here. Isn’t it pretty?

We have been so busy visiting that I haven’t been able to spend time writing….a shame really, because we’ve had some very interesting talks and visits and experiences, the telling of which will have to wait.

 

 

The Toronto Rush

We just finished up a few whirlwind days in Toronto and didn’t get to see all the people who we wanted to see, but hopefully we will be able to make up for it when we return after our visit to our daughter and son-in-law in California.

This trip is all about spending time visting our kids. So for Toronto, first and foremost, it was wonderful seeing our son again. We were so excited about it and about staying with him that we did all his laundry, scrubbed the microwave and the tub, cooked…

 I think I did way more of that TV traditional mother-stuff in the last few days than in the entire last year that we lived together!

A really special treat for me was going to a meeting at work with Jesse to do a bit of consulting about a blog they want to develop. It is wonderful to see one’s ‘child’as a fully formed adult in a great role contributing to the world and treated with consideration and respect by others. We are so lucky and happy to have 2 kids who are such wonderful people and so interesting, but really, who would be more interesting than the people you have watched growing up?

Fluffy took like a duck to water to Jesse’s place, even though she’d never been there before. I think that she is glad to see him (hey, we’re ALL glad), and I truly believe that she recognized the smell of Toronto and felt good about it. It took her months to feel really comfortable in Bear River. I would open the back door for her and she’d sniff tentatively at the air, filled with tidal river smells with huge crows and seagulls soaring around and she’d run back in the house. 20 min later she’d want to try again, and we’d go through the same routine. She didn’t feel comfortable about outside until about 3 weeks ago. This is a cat that was a stray and adopted us years ago and loves the outdoors. Overall, she was a pretty good traveling companion this time.

I had lunch on Bloor Street with my dear friends Dianne and Kathy. I met them 10 years ago when we all worked together at the Bickford Centre, a school for adult newcomers learning English as a second language. We had such a wonderful time there for a couple of years until the management changed and the caring, learner-centered leaders were replaced by an autocratic, bean-counting regime.

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Kathy and Dianne taught ESL and were both so conscientious and innovative in their teaching styles.

I managed the library with wonderful student volunteers and I tried to create an atmosphere where learners would feel welcome and validated. I bought books for the library that represented the many countries those learners were from. I allowed people to bring coffee in and organized seating areas that tried to induce a living-room feeling. The library was routinely packed with 150 students at lunchtime and teachers would bring their learners to the library during class time. We had Internet access which was vital for 20-somethings to communicate with their families back home. There was a waiting list to volunteer in the library.

One day a week I organized a ‘paint up a storm’ watercolour class in the middle of the library after school. It was open to anyone and everyone and attracted both students and teachers. Kathy and Dianne were regulars and even after the wonderful, positive bubble burst for us there and we no longer worked together, we still got together for years to paint together. You know how one thing leads to another…the art sessions in my studio at the Oakdene this past winter were a continuation of the many painting get-togethers with my Toronto friends.

So, it was fitting that I would meet Dianne at Midoco, an art supply store in Toronto.

They both have promised to come and visit us in Bear River in the fall.

 After lunch, I went to a little appliance store on Bloor and bought a food processor that was made in Hungary. We had looked unsuccessfully in several stores in Digby for one that wasn’t made in China (after watching Manufactured Landscapes) so I was glad to find one that wasn’t in a big-box store. Then I headed across city on the subway in rush hour with my art supplies in my backpack and carrying this humungous box with the machine that will help us make our soups, hummus, pesto, anti-pasto, sauces and meringues next harvest time!

 I met up with Larry and we visited our friends Paul (metalsmith) and Louise (quilter). It was great to see all the flowers coming up in their backyard garden oasis and to listen to the stories about the incredible amount of snow that fell in Toronto this past winter. It becomes a nightmare downtown when there is only street parking available and nowhere to dump the snow.

Here are some shots of the beautiful textile work that Louise does.

  She is getting ready to show her work at the popular and busy Cabbagetown festival in September. If you are in Toronto at the beginning of September, check it out. It’s one of the top craft shows in Toronto. Ontario even.  We urged them to come and visit us in Bear River and they said that that might do that in the fall.

I am writing to you from 40,000 feet above Colorado, on our way to Los Angeles.  Over Nebraska, we saw lots of huge circle shapes in the fields below and I can’t wait to land and to look at Google Earth and try to figure out what I was looking at. Does anyone know? The mountains below are amazingly varied in colour and shapes.

By the time we finished talking to various people, over 7 of them have said that they are visiting us in the fall. It will be interesting if they all show up together.

Arriving in Ontario

Our first Ontario stop was to Hastings Ontario where our former Toronto neighbour is managing a B and B. Ursula was one of the original Urban Guerrillas and for the last couple of years we frequently plotted our Toronto Exodus together. Ursula was the president of the Toronto Astrological Society and despite my taurean skepticism (compared with Larry’s openness) we applied all of Ursula’s advise as to when to sell our house, and moving dates to Bear River. Her advise has always served us well.

We talked a lot about the state of the world and when I looked at her bookcase, the titles seemed to sum up much of our conversations.

  

She served us up a yummy French toast ….from locally baked bread, local dairy farmer’s whipped cream, and frozen, local berries. Our Fluffy was treated like royalty and the 20 hours we were there flew by and, regretfully,  it was time to go. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, outside, the Trent River raged with some excess water that has accumulated from all the tons of snow that fell this past winter.

We drove along some of the back roads of Northumberland County as far as we could in order to postpone dealing with the rush-hour super-highway traffic. That part of Ontario has lots of gently rolling hills and many large farms. The fields were already bright green and it was fairly warm outside. The landscape is very manicured and tame compared with Nova Scotia. I’m guessing this is due to the richness of the earth In Ontario, the large sizes of the farms and the intensity of the farming. When large equipment is used to work the land, it’s much more efficient to have a ‘blank canvas’ to work with and so even the tree stands we passed looked fairly young.

Eventually we had to jump on the highway and it was a bit of a shock to see so much traffic. Everytime we passed an apartment building, I thought about the fact that all of Bear River could fit into one! In spite of the hwy, I felt pretty excited to be approaching this familiar place that holds our son and so many friends 

Then….we finally got to our exit and pulled up to the building where our son lives. What a thrill to arrive at his door!