Full moon wishes

Tonight is a December full moon, also known as a Drift Clearing Moon [Oh, how I wish there were some drifts to clear!], Frost Exploding Trees Moon, Moon of the Popping Trees, Hoar Frost Moon, Snow Moon, Winter Maker Moon, and Long Night Moon. Here’s a poem by Hafiz to honour today’s moon, and to wish you all a year of sublime moons--but minimal mooning*--in 2021.

* In the sense of  "behave or move in a listless and aimless manner” (which I seem to do far too much of, and far too little of the other type of mooning).

 

Admit Something

Everyone you see, you say to them,
Love me.
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us
To connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying,
With that sweet moon language,
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to Hear.

Delight

A handwritten letter from a fellow blogger arrived in my mailbox today. I have subcontracted the execution of five cartwheels of delight to another fellow blogger by the name of Indigo Bunting (as far as I know, she is the only one amongst us who still occasionally falls heels over head).  

Regret

Although my mother subjugated the skein of anarchy into a rotund, submissive sphere--which reminds me, did I ever mention that an ancestor on her side of the family was an aide-de-camp of William the Conquerer?--I am still making little headway with birthing the knitted dragon. Its advanced gestational age is now a source of great shame. 

And so when I came across this three-line poem at the start of a chapter in Lydia Davis’s Essays One: 

i shouldn’t have started these red wool mittens.

they’re done now,

but my life is over.

i made only a few word changes to sum up my despair:

i shouldn’t have started this purple dragon.

it will never be done, 

before my life is over. 

My job

In 1999 I graduated with an MSc in Community Health and Epidemiology (I was a late bloomer, career-wise). Somewhere around let’s say 2009, although I actually have no idea when it was, someone introduced me as an epidemiologist. After the meeting I said to the person, “Can I call myself that?” I had never done so because that had never been, and still isn’t, my job title, unlike some positions at provincial health units and Health Canada where the job descriptions were, and still are, very different from mine. 

“Of course you can,” she replied. You have a graduate degree in epidemiology and so it’s appropriate. After that, whilst still refraining from explicitly declaring I AM AN EPIDEMIOLOGIST, I would at meetings and conferences introduce myself as “an epidemiologist by training.” 

I think my wishy washiness in this area was justified. With the pandemic most people have finally heard of epidemiology and there’s no longer a need to explain that it has nothing to do with skin diseases or insects. But as another friend who was in the same graduate program as me said the other day, “Should we be calling ourselves epidemiologists? After listening to actual epidemiologists being interviewed about the pandemic, it seems like we really shouldn’t.” 

I agree. In our two-year program—which most of us took three years to complete, as we had a number of late bloomers who liked to stop and smell the roses instead of focusing exclusively on methods to control for confounding—we spent at most two or three classes learning about infectious disease epidemiology. Before the pandemic, like probably most of the civilized world, ACTUAL EPIDEMIOLOGISTS aside, I had never heard of R0 or bending the curve. An acquaintance said she would be interested in hearing my opinion on the origins of the virus. I told her I didn’t have one. I know next to nothing about viruses except that they’re extremely unpopular, whereas humans are BFF with plenty of bacteria and fungi.

You may be thinking at this point that I got my degree through an ad in the back of a magazine or some dubious online source. I assure you that is not the case. 

Most of our classes focused on research methods—like how to control for confounding, which remains a somewhat confusing topic for me to this day—and statistics, which also remains a somewhat confusing topic for me to this day. (Sidebar: I am not being modest or silly here. It seems like these things should be cut and dried, but I assure you that is not the case.) And although we may have learned how to conduct and analyze data from a case-control study to examine whether excess avocado consumption is associated with an increased risk of heart disease (which I really, really hope it isn’t, otherwise I will likely have a cardiac event any day now), I cannot tell you anything about heart disease—this also comes as a surprise to some people. If I was a cardiologist who studied epidemiology I probably could, but I am not a cardiologist. And now it appears that I am not really an epidemiologist either. It’s probably good that I’m working mostly from home these days—by minimizing my work-related encounters, perhaps I will not confound anybody’s expectations about what someone with a degree in epidemiology, but who is not AN ACTUAL EPIDEMIOLOGIST, does. And after five years have passed I will have reached the age when I can retire, at which point I plan to focus exclusively on over-consuming avocados and the other good things in life, public health messaging about “everything in moderation (except tobacco)” be damned.  

Personal prejudice proven wrong (or was it?)

I was going to write about how, after viewing the photo of Jia Tolentino on the jacket of Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion, I assumed that the book’s essays would be banal, based on the following illogical belief: If beautiful, then not intelligent (and the more exotic-looking, the more unintelligent).

But I decided not to, as I worry that this personal prejudice casts me in an unflattering light. This might lead others with a similar prejudice and a belief in its equally illogical corollary—i.e., If not beautiful, then intelligent—to assume that I am the latter, and I can make no such claim.

Instead, I am going to write about my prejudice regarding dogs and cats: that cats are smarter. (And generally more beautiful. My personal prejudices about humans are obviously not generalizable to animals.) But the other day this prejudice was shattered when Guyot, a formerly intelligent Siamese cat, couldn’t figure out that to get out of the rain, which was causing him evident distress. All he had to do was jump down from the arm of the deck chair and cover a distance of approximately 1 foot/0.3 metres to get under the awning. Instead, he mewled plaintively until I came to the rescue by picking him up, transferring him through the air approximately 1 foot/0.3 metres, and setting him down under the awning. 

Someone is sure to note the absence of logic connecting this anecdote to the shattering of my personal prejudice regarding cats and dogs. There was no head-to-head comparison with a dog, so who knows whether a border collie, on the other arm of the chair, might not have behaved even more stupidly, in whatever way, shape or form that might have taken? Logic doesn’t enter into this post in any way, shape or form, however—oh, wait a minute, some just time-travelled in from 1979—but I suspect that if a border collie had been present, it would have herded Guyot to the dry safety of the awning. 

My only consolation is that I read somewhere that Siamese are the dogs of the cat world. It is possible, therefore, that the shattered pieces may glue themselves together in the presence of real cats, after which my once-again intact personal prejudice can climb back up on its high horse, that most majestic of creatures (after cats, and possibly border collies). 

My short and sweet surname

One thing I do like about myself, for which I can claim absolutely no credit, is my surname. It’s short and unique. If I Google it in an attempt to find a non-relative with the same last name as mine, or better yet, a heretofore unknown relative who is looking for some nice, heretofore unknown female relation to bequeath their sizeable island estate to, I often end up on the webpage of some company’s Chief Operating Officer. 

But having a unique surname can also cause confusion. For example:

• On a school trip to one of Montreal’s newspapers, each of us received a typesetting block with our name on it. This allowed us to imprint our monikers on our possessions (books, homework assignments, etc.) as well as on random pages in library books, any of our siblings’ stampable possessions—which led to many family feuds—and the “To” line of our parents’ cheques (which led to yet more family feuds). Unfortunately, my block read “Helen Cod,” and that is not my surname. I threw it in the Atlantic in the hopes that a Gadus morhua would swallow it and cause a fabulist uprising in the fishing community. 

• When I’m asked to spell my surname, people generally wait after I say the last letter, expecting more to follow. I have to tell them that those three letters are it so that we can get on with things. 

• My surname elicits questions about my ancestry. Back in the late 1970s when I was applying to different universities, I wasn’t even asked: one institution assumed I was from China or Korea and in their reply stated that they welcomed applicants from that part of the world. My great-grandfather on my father’s side was Irish, although I have never met anyone from Ireland who knows of any other Emerald Isle residents with my surname. I can’t remember exactly where he (my great grandfather) was born, but his family, who owned a distillery, exiled him to the colonies (aka Canada) because he drank too much. When I told a former coworker, who is also one of our fellow bloggers, about this, she asked how much one has to drink in Ireland for it to be considered “too much.” My great grandfather probably could have told us that but he disappeared shortly after arriving in Canada, never to be seen or heard from again.

Despite my opening sentence, I wasn’t always enamoured of my surname. Because of it I was often called a certain type of bird when I was a kid. However, there was someone who was worse off in the merciless teasing-inducing surname department: my classmate, George Moron. 

Birds

I never had much use for birds. 

For one thing, ornithophiles seem to hate cats. I love cats. And so my loyalties lay firmly with Sylvester, not Tweetie. (And like every other kid on the planet, I fervently hoped that Wile E Coyote would eventually devour the Roadrunner.) For another thing, I grew up in suburbia, where only the John Smiths of the avian world—sparrows, robins, jays—settled into neat little nests and laid 2.1 eggs.

But once I started reading a birdwatching blogger’s quarterly reports, it felt like I was transported to a refulgent metropolis where glossy ibises, scarlet tanagers, yellow-belled sapsuckers, ruby-crowned kinglets, blue-headed virios, purple finches, and rose-breasted grosbeaks preen along 5th Avenue; magnolia warblers headline subterranean nightclubs frequented by dark-eyed juncos; buffleheads perform stand-up comedy on street corners; and violence periodically erupts among gangs of killdeers, sharp-shinned hawks, hooded mergansers, great black-backed gulls, and Wilson’s snipes.

And now I want indigo buntings to teach me how to navigate using the stars, gannets to share their secrets for successfully executing a high dive at 80 kilometres an hour, and Amazon parrots to school me in mimicking a Cockney accent. And the next time I need help with facial recognition, assembling Ikea furniture, or finding my keys, I’m going to hire a neighbourhood corvid.

I still love cats, but frankly, they are starting to pale in comparison to birds, and to seem a bit, well, bird-brained. Or maybe that misnomer should be changed to “cat-brained.” 

Sorry Sylvester. 

The Cotswold Way

The Cotswold Way is a walking trail in England. It is 164 kilometres in length. One hundred and sixty-four kilometres of “magical walking, magnificent views, ancient sites, and beautiful villages.” This is a quote from a government website, which is not to be trusted. This link may provide a truer picture of what one is likely to encounter in those so-called beautiful villages.

If you do buy into the government’s propaganda and decide to walk the Cotswold Way, the most strenuous part of the trail, according to one blogger, is deciding where to stop for afternoon tea (i.e., scones with clotted cream. Shag the tea.). And it’s impossible to get lost. Or maybe it has that reputation because the people who got lost were never heard from again and had no friends or relatives to inquire as to their whereabouts, and so they never became a data point in the “people who got lost whilst walking the Cotswold Way” statistic. 

You may be wondering why I’m resorting to tactics like citing or directing you to others’ literary output and making uninformed suppositions about the Cotswold Way instead of describing, in mellifluous terms, my own experiences of walking the trail whilst evading vats, vicars and vile village greens. It’s not because I’m lazy or sheepheaded—like so many denizens of the Cotswolds*—although I don’t deny that I am both of those. It’s because I have never walked the Cotswold Way. 

I was supposed to, in a few weeks, to celebrate my 60th birthday (which actually isn’t until October, but I and my supposed-to-be walking companion bought into the government’s propaganda about spring being the best time to see wildflowers and to avoid a Wicker Man-like fate during the harvest season). 

Need I tell you why this planned celebration is no longer happening? 

I thought not. 

And now I am going to lay down my pen and weep. 

But there is a silver lining around what currently appears to me as a bloody dark cloud: this pandemic may have saved me from being done in, in notably gruesome fashion, by a rosemary and thyme of English villagers. And for that I am sure I will one day be thankful. But that day may be many, many days hence.

*This is not meant to be an insult. There are many sheep who call the Cotswolds home.

Hygge, Helen style

Like Mali, my version of hygge does not involve naked neighbours in any way, shape or form (statement subject to change if a fine-formed man moves into the neighbourhood). I’m sure they feel the same way about me. 

Instead, my hygge involves food and comfortable clothing. In fact, now that I think about it, my way of dressing could best be described as “hygge.” One of my favourite brands is Cut Loose. I have mentioned this before, but I once met a man who wondered why the clothing of women who travel a lot resembles drapes. I suspect he would now consider me one of those women.

And for me, the most hygge-ish food is grilled cheese. Or macaroni and cheese. Or lasagna. Or pizza. So, pretty much any blend of carbohydrates—and if it’s pizza, wood-fired carbs are best—and molten cheese. This is why, despite aspirations to become a vegan, I have never successfully made the transition. Cheeze or Sheese in any way, shape or form just isn’t hygge. 

And now I am going to contradict the statement I made at the beginning of the second paragraph, but I’m not worried about this because worry and hygge make poor bedmates. If hygge means enjoying simple pleasures, then my ultimate hygge is to wake up on Sunday morning with no plans until at least 2:30 p.m. and to sip my coffee, and then another coffee, and read the newspaper—not in digital format, but in real page-turner form—for as long as it pleases me. Which this morning was about two hours. Unwisely, I made plans for 1:30 p.m. today, and so I am rushing to finish this and to get ready to leave the house. Time to don some drapes, a hat to cover my hair, which with each passing day more closely resembles Phyllis Diller’s in the screenshot below, and burst my cozy (“cosy” for Mali) hygge bubble. 

How long ago did we lose the art of making our dreams solid?

I am finally getting around to reading Words Without Borders, a collection of 28 works of literature never before published in English. My younger nephew gave it to me a couple of years ago at Christmas.

One of the works is from “Experiment with India” by Giorgio Manganelli. In it the narrator poses this question: How long ago did we lose the art of making our dreams solid?  

This question intrigued me, but it presupposes that one has a dream. And unlike Martin Luther King Jr, I do not. I have long had dreams of having a dream, but only through alchemy could such gossamer precursors be transformed into solid matter. And so, like the ducks in the park* that paddle through shallows created by heavy rains, I am able to entertain only fleeting notions before they seep into sodden graves.*

*The park in question—officially McBurney Park, but known to locals as Skeleton Park—used to be a cemetery. 

Comic interlude

I think it’s time to officially declare that I am having too much “me” time. I recently discovered that I can take funny photos of myself using Photo Booth and spent the last 30 minutes entertaining myself in this way. (Does this count as “being productive”?)

Here is my alien(ating) doppelgänger.

Field of joy

Write about a mysterious or fantastical place in your memory. Like a visit somewhere as a child that, once you were an adult, seems far away and perhaps remembered slightly askew from reality. Or a structure or natural location that enchanted your imagination even as an adult.

I very much liked the idea of this week’s topic, but the execution was a struggle. I encouraged my memory to roam. It chose to take a nap instead. And when I let my imagination run wild, it ambled aimlessly. Then it joined my memory and the cats on the day bed and soon I heard the sounds of satisfied snoring.

When my memory awoke, it stretched and tossed me a bone: on our way to Trousers Lake during the summers when I was more interested in rowboats than boys, my family and my best friend’s family would stop at the mudflats to play hide and seek. The remembered topography seems like one conjured by my paleomammalian brain: picture an enormous, winding chasm, the walls on either side so high that a Tyrannosaurus rex roaming at the base would resemble an ant to anyone standing at the chasm’s edge. 

Before I had time to digest any of the other memory-bones scattered nearby, my reptilian brain scuttled over and devoured them. Satiated, it circled several times, nose and tip of tail greeting one another after weeks of physical distancing, then settled into a deep and dreamless sleep. 

Finally, my neomammalian brain, after hearing the Prime Minister of New Zealand declaring the Easter Bunny an essential worker, gently nudged me towards a fantastic childhood memory. The topography was anything but fantastical, however. In fact, so banal was it that I can barely remember any distinguishing features. It was merely another field somewhere on the outskirts of another Toronto suburb. What made the place so special was the human activity it hosted: an annual Easter egg hunt with my cousins. A memory cloud—one of those shape-shifting formations that might cause one child to shout, “Hey, Godzilla’s chasing Dad!” while another might exclaim, “Look, it’s Count Chocula!” and yet another might start weeping because the cloud reminds them of their beloved dog Toby who died the year before—passed over my three brains and I saw my cousins and I running amok, scattering rocks and dirt and branches in our wakes and whooping with delight whenever we discovered a foil-wrapped chocolate treat. And surreptitiously unwrapping one or two, or five or six, and devouring them despite, or maybe because of the directive issued by the parent politburo about holding off on sampling anything until we got back to our cousins’ house, where everyone’s findings were to be redistributed to ensure an equal share for all. We were too young and greedy for such chocolate-coated socialism.

Banality doesn’t only harbour evil—there are also great delights to be found, if one only searchers for them. (And now that I’m older and left-leaning, I would urge everyone to share those delights with others.)

My year of backpacking (1985)

Nineteen eighty-five was my year of backpacking with two friends through Southeast Asia. That past, of foreign countries, has itself become a foreign country: I did things differently there. All three of us did, and so we remember things differently. This leads to some interesting discussions and debates on the very rare occasions when the three of us get together to talk about that time in our lives. Here are some of my memory snippets.

Hong Kong

• The rickety fire trap we stayed in—something (but not Fawlty) Towers. Instead of using garbage cans, detritus got thrown out the window into a central “courtyard.” Presumably someone eventually hauled it away, as it hadn’t yet reached the level of the 14th floor. Lots of backpackers stayed at something (but not Fawlty) Towers, including a stereotypically statuesque, blond Danish woman who walked around most of the time wearing mostly nothing. 
• The stifling heat and humidity. The Danish woman was the only one who looked cool and collected.

China (I suspect traveling in China now is very different than what we experienced in 1985)

• “Mayo.” That’s the phonetic spelling of an oft-uttered word by seemingly everyone in the tourism industry in China at that time. It means “We don’t have,”, as in “No, we don’t have a room,” or “No, we don’t have any food,” or “No, we don’t have any running water,” or “No, we don’t have to help you,” etc. etc. It seemed like the country was actively trying to discourage tourism. We seldom had the opportunity to talk with a “regular” Chinese citizen, as in, someone who didn’t work in the discourage-tourism industry. I do remember one man we met, an English teacher. He was lovely. We invited him to dinner at our hotel, but “regular” Chinese people were barred from entering.
• Every backpacker carrying a copy of Lonely Planet’s China Off the Beaten Path.
• T telling J and me that we were pronouncing “Guangzhou” and “Yangshuo” incorrectly, even though we were saying it exactly like her. (T speaks Mandarin and Cantonese, and so was the ideal travelling companion for China—there were no English signs there at time, and hardly anyone spoke English.)
• Another stereotypically statuesque, blond Danish woman crying in a train station. She had been there for two days, trying to buy a train ticket. But because nobody spoke English and there was no English signage, she hadn’t been able to. For her, T was a Norse god.
• The dreamy memory-of-mountains landscape of the impossible-to-pronounce-correctly Yangshuo.
• The pile of dead rats at a market in the equally-impossible-to-pronounce-correctly Guangzhou. We initially thought they were being sold as food. It turned out they were actually a form on advertising by the vendor, who was selling rat poison.
• Strange looking animals in cages in front of restaurants. You know how people at seafood restaurants used to point to the lobster in the aquarium that they want to consume? (And do they still do this?) I later learned that the strange looking animals were pangolins.
• THE WORST TRAIN RIDE I HAVE EVER BEEN ON. I don’t even want to get started, because this post is already too wordy. Suffice it to say that once we had boarded we were stuck on THE WORST TRAIN RIDE EVER for 35 hours because all the stations between where we had boarded and where we were to disembark were closed to foreigners.
• After weeks of awful food, finding a cooking school in Chengdu that served a delicious egg and spinach dish (or maybe it was eggs and tomatoes). 
• THE WORST TOILETS EVER. In some places, the facilities consisted of a long line of holes one squatted over. That in itself wasn’t the issue. Rather, it was the fact that there were no barriers/privacy screens at all between the holes. And no toilet paper.
• Paying more for everything than T, who got the “overseas Chinese” price.

Tibet

• Stunning landscape (good).
• Stunning culture (good).
• Stunning smell of burning yak butter at all the temples (bad—is has a stunningly rancid odour).
• Feeling breathless. Not just because of the stunning landscape, culture, and overpowering smell of yak butter, but also because of the high altitude: Lhasa is situated at 11,975 feet (3650 metres) above sea level. 
• How much the Tibetans and the Chinese hated one other.
• Witnessing a sky burial. I am ashamed now when I think of how we tourists gawked at what should have been a private ceremony for grieving family and friends. Nobody took photos though. Before the proceedings got under way, the person performing the ceremony mimed someone taking a photo, and then made a gesture of drawing the knife he was holding across his throat.
• A stereotypically statuesque, blond Swedish couple who looked like they had been flown in for a Vogue shoot. They were actually backpacking like the rest of us.
• Hiring a driver to illegally chauffeur eight of us to the China-Nepal border. At the time, the only legally sanctioned mode of travel from Tibet to Nepal was by plane. But pretty much every backpacker did the same thing we did. The driver barely slept, and drove like a complete maniac. I lost count of the number of dogs he hit. One of the passengers lost it at some point and started screaming and hitting him. What should have been a four day trip was completed in two days.

Nepal

• Wonderful restaurants in Kathmandu, often run by Europeans who went to Nepal in the 1960s and 1970s and never left. I still remember the  apple strudel that was served in a cafe run by a German couple.
• The ancient temples. 
• The Himalayas.  
• Entering Chitwan National Park illegally with an illegal guide. We had to wade across a river, and I refused to roll my pant legs up because my legs hadn’t been waxed for several months. The illegal guide screaming at me, because the wet pant legs would alert the park rangers that we had entered the park illegally and there was a substantial fine for those who were caught (we weren’t).
• Climbing a tree to avoid being trampled by a mother and baby rhino in Chitwan National Park. The rhinos at the base of the tree, catching our scent. Me snapping photo after photo, with dreams of seeing them to National Geographic. Me discovering afterwards that I hadn’t loaded the film properly, and didn’t get any photos of the rhinos.
• A dog pulling itself along the side of a busy road with its front legs. Its hind ones were paralyzed, or broken. People on bikes swerving over to kick it. I doubt I will ever go to Asia again—the mind-boggling indifference to animal suffering overshadows my memories of the ancient temples, the Himalayas, and the rhinos.

Burma (since renamed Myanmar)

• Paying for our taxi from the airport into town with apples we had saved from the flight.
• Paying for most everything with some consumer good that the Burmese couldn’t buy because the country imported virtually nothing at that time. The items of choice were Johnny Walker (I can’t remember whether Red Label or Black Label was preferred, but one of them was), jeans, and lipstick. Travellers were required to exchange dollars to buy at least $25 worth of local currency. It was really, really difficult to spend even that paltry amount in seven days (the maximum time travellers were allowed to spend in the country), because nobody wanted to be paid in the local currency.
• Going back in time to what felt like 1950s/1960s America, mainly because of the vintage vehicles. 
• The mind-boggling temples of Pagan (since renamed Bagan). Mind-boggling in number, beauty and solemnity. 
• Delicious strawberry milkshakes in Rangoon (since renamed Yangon).

Thailand

• Staying at some hellhole in Bangkok, with the three of us having to sleep in a double bed because nothing else was available in our price range. Waking up one night screaming in a corner of the room because a rat had run across me. 
• Encountering some very scary people on a trek through Northern Thailand, which was a big centre of the Asian drug trade. 
• The two psychotic Americans on the trek, who spent most of their time looking for cobras. They wanted to kill one. They both carried large knives for this purpose. 
• The gorgeous beaches of Koh Samui. 
• Gorgeous raw silk.
• The frequent sight of older Caucasian men accompanied by very young looking Thai women. Some of them may even have been Thai girls.

Malaysia

• The warning sign at the border that Malaysia enforces the death penalty for anyone caught with drugs. At the time, several westerners were on death row there because of this.

Singapore

• The order and tidiness after the general chaos of the other countries we had visited.
• Afternoon tea at Raffles Hotel.
• Getting my legs waxed.

Indonesia

• In the middle of what someone referred to as “bum fuck nowhere,” Boney M’s Rasputin blasting all day long from the ferry that crossed the lake. 
• The orangutangs at the orangutang sanctuary. One of us keeping watch for crocodiles while the other two bathed in the river by the sanctuary (I guess wherever we were staying didn’t have a shower). 
• Eating THE BEST Nasi Goreng from a little roadside stand, served in a banana leaf. 
• Jakarta: very scary. The bus driver yelling at us to get off and run, because we were about to be robbed. 
• The beauty of Bali: the place, the people, the culture, the food. Except for Denpasar, the capital, where we were almost robbed. As it turns out, three women yelling can be a powerful deterrent to would-be thieves.

We flew from Indonesia to Northern Australia at the end of 1985. Australia, and New Zealand, are another post for another time. 

This is much longer than I intended: as I started writing, more and more memories surfaced.  And I know much of what I have written sounds negative, but these are only snippets and don’t represent the sum of what I suspect will have been the adventure of my lifetime. 

Please join me at 7:30 p.m. on [date TBD] for tapas at Tango Nuevo

I also had a difficult time choosing a restaurant. I love Sima Sushi, where I always order the same items: shiitake mushroom “pizza,” yam tempura, and avocado rolls. I also love Chez Piggy. The menu there changes frequently, but if I were to go there this week—which I cannot, because all the bars and restaurants are closed—I would order one of their delicious vegetarian entrees and try to remember to save room for one of their exquisite desserts, which I never manage to do because the chewy sourdough bread is too tempting. But I finally settled on Tango Nuevo, because they serve tapas--and what can top tapas for truly sharing a meal? I’ve reserved a table at 7:30 p.m. for the first night all international borders have reopened. The reservation is for eight people, and EVERYONE is expected to attend (Kim, Indigo, Bridgett, Mali, Maureen, Dona, and Susan, that includes you). You can peruse the restaurant’s menu here, so you’ll have plenty of time to choose one or two sharing plates.^a,b,c This will hopefully avoid any dithering during the ordering phase and allow us to quickly transition to the eat, drink and be merry phase. Looking forward to seeing you all!

^a Please keep in mind that one of us does not eat anything with a face :) Also, while I’m not sure whether shellfish have a face, I don’t eat them either. Nor am I overly fond of celery, although I know it definitely doesn’t have a face. But it does have a heart.

^b I’ve got dibs on the donghae poutine and the avocado tartare.

^c Be sure to save room for the Spanish churros for dessert.

Advance eulogy for my mother, who turned 89 on March 5

I recently read Beverley McLachlin’s autobiography. She was the first woman to serve as Chief Justice of Canada. In the book she talked about how her mother didn’t get to live the life she wanted because, to paraphrase Trudeau, it wasn’t 2015. 

My mother also didn’t get to live the life she wanted: to be a forest ranger. I’m sad she didn’t have the chance to live her dream—even if it might have turned into a nightmare, if the stories about mosquitoes exsanguinating a moose calf in 20 minutes are to be believed.

Although my mother’s sphere of influence may not have been as large as a Chief Justice’s, I hope she knows how many two-legged and four-legged lives she enriched. And even a three-legged one, after her cat Sydney got caught in a trap and had to have his leg amputated. How many Chief Justices can say they helped the three-legged denizens of this world? If the dozens of cats and dogs and one rabbit that my mother housed could have verbalized their feelings, I’m sure they would have said something similar to a friend’s response when I suggested we meet for lunch: Helen, are you bringing your mom I hope? I'm looking forward to seeing you of course but your mom is a really big draw. I love your mom.

Human relationships are often sprawling and complicated and it’s difficult to do justice to them without penning a sprawling and complicated novel. So I will have to make do with an anecdote that illustrates one quality I really appreciate about my mother: her stalwartness. This rather ugly-sounding word is the best one I could find that melds the wonderful and possibly under-appreciated traits of dependability, strength, and calmness. 

The incident in question took place on a road trip from Kingston to Thunder Bay in 2012. I was arranging our accommodation and asked my mother, who was 81 at the time, if she would be willing to camp the first night. My mother agreed, which I imagine not many 81 year olds would have, even if they happened to be Chief Justices. 

We arrived just before dusk. At the entrance to the campground there was a sign warning of bear activity in the area. I have a morbid fear of bears, but since it was getting dark, the campground was about 50 kilometers off the main highway, and there were no towns nearby, we had little choice but to continue with Plan A. 

It was dark by the time we had set up our tents and eaten dinner. I was getting ready to wash the dishes when my mother suggested we put them in the trunk of the car and deal with them in the morning. “If you think that’s OK,” I said. I was tired and eager to crawl into my sleeping bag.

At some point in the night I was wakened by loud noises. I unzipped the tent and peered out. One of the car doors was wide open and the noise was coming from inside the vehicle. Lots of noise. I screamed at my mother, “I told you we should have washed the dishes!” and scrambled out of the tent, yelling at my mother to get out of hers. “There’s a bear in the car!” I shouted by way of explanation. 

“What?” my mother said. “How did it get in there?” 

The noises from the car grew louder, together with my worry that the bear would soon have consumed all the food and might start looking for dessert in the surrounding area. I shouted at my mother again to get out of the tent. I remember reading about a bear that had dragged a couple out of their tent in Algonquin Park, and I thought we might have a better chance of surviving if we weren’t encased in a nylon coffin. 

“Keep your voice down, you’ll wake the neighbours,” my mother said. (This is another one of her good qualities: she is exceedingly considerate of others.)

“I want them to wake up!” I screamed hysterically. I wondered what was taking my mother so long. Was she combing her hair?

Finally, she emerged. She came over and stood by me and asked again, “How did it get into the car?” 

“I don’t know I don’t know what should we do what should we do?” I said, wringing my hands. My mother shone her flashlight—I had not thought to bring one—into the car. A raccoon, holding a cracker between its front paws, peered out at us. 

My mother and I looked at one other. Then we laughed. “How did it open the door?” she said. 

“I know, I mean, I know they have opposable thumbs [Brief aside: This is a myth. Unlike my mother, I have a tendency to spout fake facts] but, I mean, I’ve never heard of a raccoon breaking into a car,” I babbled in nervous relief. 

Only then did I remember that after I had gone to bed but before I had fallen asleep it had started to rain, and so I got up and went to the car to retrieve the tent’s fly. Because I inherited some of my mother’s consideration for others, I left the car door open; my hands were full and I didn’t want to kick the door shut, as I thought that would make a loud noise and wake her. So my plan was to return to the car and shut the door gently after the fly was on the tent. This would have been the perfect plan, except that it took me so long to put the fly on in the near blackout conditions that I forgot to go back and shut the car door. 

I confessed all this to my mother, who could have made me feel small and stupid for being such an idiot, but all she did was laugh again and say goodnight. (This is another quality of hers that I appreciate: she doesn’t belittle people, even when they’re ripe for belittlement.) 

As we started walking back to our tents, something growled in the bushes behind us. It was a big growl. A big, bear-sized growl. We turned and looked at one another, but this time we didn’t laugh. I dashed to the car, which the raccoon had considerately vacated by that point, scuttled in, and slammed the door. My mother walked calmly over to the passenger side, got in, and shut the door in a controlled manner. We stayed there for the rest of the night. In the morning we related the night’s happenings to the campers occupying the site next to ours. They had somehow managed to sleep through all the drama. 

“It was probably a raccoon you heard in those bushes,” they said. “They can sound pretty ferocious.” Maybe, but maybe it was a bear. Or a tiger. Or a lion. The point is that I panicked when I heard the wild beast and my mother did not. 

We resumed our drive to Thunder Bay, exhausted but exhilarated at having survived the ordeal. We laughed frequently that day. This is another quality I love about my mother: she has a good sense of humour that can withstand most anything, including sleep deprivation.

One of my great fears—other than encountering a lion or tiger or bear—is dying in a plane crash. If this were ever to happen, I would like my mother to be in the seat beside me. I know I would be able to depend on her to take my hand and to remain calm and strong, as she did for her sister when she was dying. And even if my mother isn’t physically in that seat beside me, and even if it’s not a plane crash, I hope that I can summon her calm and strong presence when I need it. And maybe share with her a final chuckle about that time the bear that wasn’t a bear broke into the car through an open door. 

My most useful* purchase ever

I suggested this topic because I wanted to tell you about my stupidest purchase ever: a pair of “weight loss” pantaloons. They attached to the vacuum cleaner and formed a waist-to-knee corset when the vacuum was turned on. (My second stupidest purchase ever, which I also ordered during the peak of my teenage body-hating years, was a Mark Eden bust developer. When it arrived, in a plain brown wrapper, my two best friends and I excitedly passed it amongst ourselves, taking turns to pump it vigorously. The device broke that first session, along with our dreams of Brigette Bardot-like bosoms.)

But I thought I would instead perform a public service and tell you about the most useful* purchase I have ever made: a GORE-TEX® face mask. It allows me to amble outside in -30 degree weather without falling prey to the frost-biting gods or feeling the need to hurl expletives at every other member of the wintry pantheon. At the same time it leaves my eyes exposed, which allows me to tender looks of sympathy at any passersby who lack my facial wardrobe smarts.

My GORE-TEX® face mask is not my most treasured possession, but it’s near the top of the list. In the event of some cataclysmic event that would require me to vacate my premises immediately, it would probably be the third thing I would grab, after Sampson-and-Guyot (because they’re sentient beings and would probably hunt me down and kill me if I didn’t save them) and my wallet (because I know how much time and money it requires to replace government-issued ID). 

[Brief aside: I “inherited” Sampson-and-Guyot from my uncle when he died. Some people are convinced I was duped by my cousins, who were surely aware of Sampson-and-Guyot’s habit of sweeping everything on every horizontal surface to the floor, their bulimic tendencies (OK, I don’t really think they’re throwing up on purpose, but sometimes I wonder), and their verbosity. Despite these character traits, I find them wildly endearing. So I may have been duped, but I’m a delighted dupe. I mean, look at them…]

* Applies only to residents of geographic regions that have a winter season, or to those who migrate in the opposite direction to the chickenshit of snowbirds that make their way south at the first cold snap.