Let’s go back to August 2020. Like most of you, I had some time on my hands. Unlike many, though, my time was solitary. Caught up in my own head, and my own very recent memories of caregiving for my husband, Jack, and his subsequent medically assisted death, I decided to jot down a quick table of contents for a book I might one day write. Three months later, I raised my head again to realize my table of contents had turned into the beginning of a manuscript, totalling about 60,000 words. The thing is, I knew next to nothing about writing, not having studied English since high school, and never having taken a creative writing course. I certainly knew nothing about writing memoir. I discovered Alison Wearing’s course, Memoir Writing Ink, and ploughed through it in early 2021. 

Imagine you’re 23 years into a marriage and you’ve never laid eyes on your husband’s siblings or children. Or that you’re 25 years into a new country and have never been back. Or you’ve never really been on a vacation, because, well, the cows need milking twice a day. This was my mother’s circumstance when we took our first family trip to the UK in 1974, 50 years ago. 

My mother immigrated to Canada in 1949 at the age of 21, joining her parents and brothers who had arrived earlier that same year. On their crossing (remember - boats, not planes) they’d befriended a young wannabe farmhand from London (the real one), traveling solo. They felt a connection, being farmers themselves who were relocating to find less expensive land and less grim post-war conditions. After Mom arrived, it was just a matter of time before they introduced her to this Londoner, and then not long after that when she married him. Despite having vowed to herself she wouldn’t marry a farmer, knowing farm-life is not easy, she nonetheless was drawn to Dad because of their shared experience as young immigrants in a country that, while still having strong ties to the mothership, was nonetheless full of foreign customs. 

I decided in January that 2024 is the year to bring my writing up a notch. Part of better writing is more reading, we’re told, so I set a modest target of finishing two books a month. You know from a previous blog, my TBR pile was due for a winnowing, so this performance goal ticked two boxes. And what a great group of books I had on deck! I kicked the year off by finishing American, Barbara Kingsolver’s, Pulitzer winning novel, Demon Copperhead. Full disclosure-  I started reading it in December 2023, but it’s a long one so I think it’s fair to include it in the 2024 accomplishments. Twenty years ago, I’d been on a little Kingsolver blitz, tearing through Poisonwood Bible and The Prodigal Summer but then I went off her. Not sure why because her plots are as engaging as her language is readable. This latest one was on the reading list for a literary lecture series I subscribed to this winter at Yorkville’s Heliconian Club.* The Heliconian crowd pick great books, among them, Demon Copperhead. The character, Demon Copperhead, is a modern day David Copperfield. Instead of struggling to survive in the Dickensian London of late the 19th century, Kingsolver has set this in the Appalachia of the oxycontin era. Demon is a sympathetic character who falls for the allure of painkillers after a football injury. While the parallels to Dickens original novel were largely lost on me - it’s been decades since I soldiered through it - I loved Demon and I loved this book. It’s so accessible proving the point that good writing doesn’t mean you have to target just the literary crowd. Gives me some comfort since, well, obviously I’m not a writers’ writer. 

Just saw my first D series licence plate. Couldn’t help but think back to the last conversation I had with my father before he died 17+ years ago. Memory is a funny thing.

I’ve always had a memory for licence plates. The series of green Fords my parents drove in the early 70s each wore FDK 999, below the Ontario slogan du jour, “keep it beautiful.” In those days, the plates stayed with the owner, not the car. While it didn’t yet apply to my life, I bet it made staying hotels easier. No yelling “hey, do you remember my plate number?” across lobbies to whomever you’re with. The letter/number combo was etched in your memory alongside your seven digit phone number and your locker combination. Sometime mid-70s, they changed the policy - plates went with cars. On the 1975 amber Ford Maverick, our plate was HUA 537. 

The 2015 introduction of the express train between Union Station and Pearson was a game changer for people travelling in and out of Toronto. Commuting to and from downtown by cab, private car, or airport bus had always been difficult to predict time-wise although could be reliably counted on to take longer than expected. I remember Toronto City Council lamenting the lack of a rail link when I worked for the Clerk back in the 90s. And that was long before traffic actually got bad.

Toronto has been situated on the Law and Order map with February’s launch of Law and Order Toronto: Criminal Intent. Full disclosure - I haven’t seen this show. With the proliferation of streaming services, I don’t have the money or the time to keep up with them all. If it’s not on Netflix, I’m not seeing it. But no Torontonian will have missed the ads or will have been immune to the pride of having at last been recognized by this 30+ year Law and Order phenomenon. Nor can we help being chuffed at having a show filmed here for an American audience where the CN tower has not been judiciously kept out of the frame, for indeed, we are often the filming location for dramas set in New York or Chicago.

Involvement - it was literally at the top of the list of my personal values 30 years ago and it’s still there now.

The pre-amalgamated City of Toronto of the 1990s was a terrific first employer. I arrived armed with a graduate degree, a sense of humour, and the enthusiasm from 23 years of living. And nothing else. It was luck and maybe that sense of humour that emerged in the interview that got me a job as a management trainee funded by the Ontario Municipal Management Training Program. It was a time when jobs were very scarce.* The door of City Hall locked behind me with a hiring freeze that lasted several years making me the youngest person in most meetings. With little competition and mentors like Barb Caplan (I blogged about her here), I got opportunities others might not have. It was also a time when the civic service recognized that to achieve excellence in service delivery, it had to invest in its human resources. That’s how I ended up the baby among a couple of dozen City managers at a three day residential retreat outside Orillia, exploring how to manage to best serve the City of Toronto. It was a formative experience, without which I would not have been promoted so quickly as a manager. It is astounding now to consider that any government could justify such an expenditure. But they should. Management is a skill that needs to be nurtured like any other.

I grew up on a farm. On farms, house pets are the exception. To be honest, I didn’t know anyone who actually had an animal living inside. Some had dogs - and we did at times - but they always lived outdoors or sometimes in the barn. No-one had cats other than barn cats whose job was to keep the rodent population down. 'Too much work,' was my mother’s response to my attempts to sway her. She already vac’ed the house daily to rid it of straw and dust, and worked very hard ensuring manure remained outside. I can’t blame her for wanting to avoid pet hair, scoot marks from a dog’s bottom, and the grains of litter that migrate through every cat owner’s house. 

That’s what I thought. And some of you are likely thinking it too. If you buy an electric car, you’re going to be constantly fretting over running out of power without a charging station handy. This is real: the range on electric vehicles (EVs) varies widely - 200-400 kms on a charge. Some are designed to go further than others but your range is also affected by factors like speeding, heavy acceleration, and heating or cooling the interior.