Archives for July 2018

Both of my parents were born to Catholic families in a time when birth control was neither reliable nor encouraged. As a consequence, my father was the eldest of eight and my mother was the youngest of ten.

I don’t know how many cousins I have. I think I’m the fifth eldest of nineteen on one side and the thirty-ninth eldest of about forty-six on the other. So I’ve had about sixty-five first cousins, give or take a handful. Of course many, many members of my family have died over the years but if you add up all of my uncles and aunts, my cousins and their spouses and their children, we would number in the hundreds. All from my four grandparents.

Many of my cousins are grandparents themselves now and I’ve met some of their grandchildren. And I did know one of my great-grandmothers. So I’ve had a living connection to six generations of my family, whose birth dates span about 120 years.

I can’t pretend to know all of these people who are my fairly close blood relations. After all, we could fill a couple sections at a hockey game. But of the ones I do know, I’m able to infer a few things.

Most of us grew up identifying as Catholic. Some remain devout, others might call themselves lapsed and others are agnostics or atheists. Most of us grew up in English households but for some of us, French is our mother-tongue. We were uniformly white at one time but judging by Facebook pictures, I don’t think that’s the case anymore.

Some of us are very conservative, some very liberal and most probably don’t give it much thought. I have gay cousins and straight cousins and some who might not identify either way.

I have been to more funerals than I can remember. There have been more divorces than I can count and more cancer than I want to think about. We have our alcoholics and drug addicts and those struggling with depression or many other physical diseases and challenges I may not even be aware of. There have been unspeakable tragedies to go along with the many successes and triumphs. That’s the price you pay for having so much family.

I know I have a few wealthy relatives and some who have done very well but for the most part, most of us have lived comparatively modest lives.

My cousins seem to be generally good and friendly people and while I’m sure there are many I would not necessarily choose as friends, of the ones I know, I haven’t really come across anyone I didn’t like.

I’ve watched cousins argue political or social points of view with each other on social media and they always seem to be respectful with one another even if they hold diametrically opposed viewpoints. I wonder if knowing they are blood relations causes them to be more civil than they might otherwise be with strangers? Even though they are practically strangers themselves. Just because their mothers or fathers once shared a bedroom seventy or eighty years ago.

There have been about one hundred generations in the last two thousand years. For me to have some direct connection to six generations seems like a pretty high percentage. I try to remember this when I find myself frustrated with people who seem to have nothing in common with me, who can infuriate me. People who hold thoughts and perspectives that feel alien or asinine to me. Because I have family members who likely feel the same way about me.

But if I’ve personally known six generations of my own family, (and I can really trace about nine), how distant and separated can anyone else, any stranger, really be from me? After all, I know for a fact that I’ve walked downtown streets and crossed paths with cousins who I didn’t even know.

And so I’ve come to believe that we’re all really kind of cousins. Distant cousins, maybe. It’s just that sometimes we have to climb a little higher on the family tree to find our common branches.

In the many years, decades really, that I worked in restaurants and in a few other transient work environments, I encountered a very broad cross-section of individuals.

I worked with Canadians from each of the ten provinces. I worked with people from every inhabitable continent. I tried to count the countries of origin of my many co-workers and I couldn’t remember them all. There’s a lot of water under the bridge. But it was in the bowels of a restaurant that I learned the difference between Ghana and Guyana. I’m embarrassed that I didn’t know it before but I tried to learn.

Canada, America, Mexico, Guyana, Bolivia, Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Haiti.

England, Ireland, Wales, Italy, Greece, Poland, Montenegro, Serbia, Romania, Latvia, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, Ukraine.

I’ve never been to any of these places.

Japan, China, India, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand.

I’ve lived with Iranians, Iraqis, and a variety of people from Africa. I’ve learned more about geography from dish washers and cab drivers than I did in high school.

In the eighties, when I was in school, I lived in a rooming house and watched some of my roommates watch Three’s Company, trying to decipher English together from its broad comedy, while another Indian roommate, who made curries in his uncle’s restaurant on Baldwin Street in Toronto, asked me to be his wing-man at a Spanish bar because he liked the way the women danced to the Latin music but he needed a translator.

Black, White, Arab, Jew, Muslim, Christian, atheist. East- and South-Asian, North-, South- and Central-American. European and African. I met all of these people, mostly in the kitchens of restaurants, or within the square yardage of an eight table section.

I’ve learned prejudice like anyone else. I still have prejudices. Middle Eastern and East Asian musical scales make my ears bleed. I hate overly patriarchal societies. I make judgments that are not born of experience all the time. But I try to fight it.

Sometimes I wonder what it’s like for people who might have worked most of their lives in government offices or on construction sites or in law firms where everyone comes from a similar background. Where their differences might be about cheering for the Leafs or the Canadiens. Being Catholic or Protestant. Being French or English. Voting Liberal or Conservative. Pretty much like my parents in the fifties and sixties.

I’ve only really known a handful of First Nations people. A childhood friend. An occasional drinking pal thirty years ago. Someone I once lived with. And so of the hundreds of friends I’ve known, of the thousands of people I’ve encountered, every single one of us came from a family of immigrants. If it was a hundred and fifty years ago, like my family, or a hundred and fifty days ago, the stories are mostly the same. The details may differ but that’s only a function of time and place.

Three dishwashers.

H was a professional baseball pitcher in the Milwaukee Brewers organization. He came from the Dominican Republic. But he hurt his arm and his career was over and somehow he ended up in Ottawa. One of his contemporaries was Robinson Cano, a future Hall of Famer. H called Robbie his cousin. When I knew H, he worked sixteen hours a day, six days a week. He’ll be going home soon, ready to retire before he’s forty. And in the fifty-nine minutes out of every sixty I knew him, he had a smile on his face and was always an easy laugh. I liked talking baseball with him, though our conversations were sometimes short because of the language barrier. And I liked impressing him that I knew so many players from his home town. His pride was visible.

M was from Haiti. He lost a dozen or more family members in the big earthquake. How do you recover from that? How do you give a guy a bus-bin of dirty dishes to clean on the day when he finds out he lost an entire generation of his family? Without feeling something? And he still showed up for his minimum wage job. And he still was able to be gracious. And humble. I’ve watched the news differently and have viewed charitable donations differently because of him.

I can’t remember the name of the third dishwasher. It was over twenty-five years ago and I only worked with him for a month or so. I was in my twenties and he was probably about fifty. He was from somewhere in South America and spoke English well. I don’t remember which country he came from but he told me he was an excommunicated Catholic priest who had been imprisoned as a political prisoner. I don’t know if any of that was true but I believed him. He was a very slow dishwasher. But I always enjoyed bringing dishes to him because he was a philosopher and always had something profound to say about the most mundane of things. “The cleaning of a plate means nothing without the realization that you have the will to cleanse and make the world a little more Godly.” I don’t know what happened to him.

I always tried to ask my new friends and acquaintances about their homes and experiences. They always spoke with pride, sometimes with sadness, and usually with gratitude. And nearly every one of them seemed to land in Canada in the winter, with no coat and bad footwear. And even twenty years after arriving, they never got used to the Canadian winter. I told them that Canadians who were born here feel the same way.

I’ve worked with hundreds of immigrants. They laugh in the same way. They get hungry and tired and are happy and funny in the same way. They fall in love and get angry or frustrated in the same way. As far as I remember, there were only two differences. They worked harder and some of them liked music that wasn’t to my taste.

And I should stop using the word “they”. It should be “we”. It should be “us”.

And that’s something to embrace. It’s something to celebrate.

 

In the last few years of political tumult, I’ve been drawn to historical commentary and political philosophies of yesteryear. What has been a revelation is how little of it is new. All the cliches have become cliches for a reason. Nuance needs to be considered, as always, but the lines we’ve all heard for most of our lives really do map out all we need to know about what is happening today.

A few of them are here.

Follow the money – All the President’s Men

The love of money is the root of all evil – Timothy 6:10

Absolute power corrupts absolutely – Lord Acton

No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public – H.L. Menken

There’s a sucker born every minute – P.T. Barnum

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning – Warren Buffet

There comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right – M.L.K.

It goes on and on. From the Ancient Greeks to the biblical texts, from the industrialists of the nineteenth century to the activists of the 1960s. In literature and in song, in comedy and in film. There’s little that can be said or written today that hasn’t been said or written before.

All the old tricks still work because we, as people, do not learn. Or if we’re forced to learn because our families and towns and nations have been devastated by catastrophic war or recession or depression, we willingly forget those lessons within a few generations because we want to believe the lies. Because the lies promise an easier path to prosperity than does the truth.

Why else would poor people applaud tax cuts that make the rich richer and the poor poorer?

Why would poor people proudly die in foreign lands fighting other poor people so that their masters may profit?

Why would people who profess to be righteous and moral, gladly suffer and then die for the most immoral of human behaviors?

Why would self-professed Christians support a leadership who behaves contrary to every teaching of Jesus Christ himself?

I don’t know why in every case. It’s complicated and beyond my understanding. But it seems clear that George Orwell was right. War is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength.

It’s not really that those things are true. But it is easier than any of us might ever have believed to make them seem true.

It boggles my mind.

But it’s happening. Again.

The truth still exists and will always exist. Just like hieroglyphics carved in the deepest part of a North African cave. They may be lost for a time. Maybe a long time. They may be lost forever and so we might never know them. But that doesn’t negate their existence.

Perhaps that truth will be rediscovered. It shows its head periodically but somehow it never escapes the darkness of the deepest of caves for very long. But it’s still there. Waiting for the light.

This past Sunday, my wife and I were looking for something different to do that didn’t involve too much time in the sun but would get us out of the house and into some fresh air. We ended up driving about fifteen minutes from our home, to the south end of the city, where there was a groomed walking trail through a woodland area. We probably walked about five kilometres for over a little more than an hour. We only saw one jogger and one other couple. Besides that, we were mostly left to ourselves with the trees and the birds and the mosquitoes. We looked at sunshine and shade and listened to the wind blowing through the leaves.

At one point, my wife remarked that we were having a very Canadian experience. We’d just been talking about Gordon Lightfoot’s current hairstyle. Walking in the woods in 2018 and talking about Gordon Lightfoot’s hair. Wow, eh!

We kidded about the possibility of getting lost or breaking an ankle in the forest and how we’d hoped we could properly communicate to Lassie that we were in need of rescue. But then, of course, we realized the error of our ways because the Littlest Hobo, the iconic and heroic tramp/dog of 1980’s Canadian television, would likely be the one to guide us to safety. Or at the very least, he’d find someone who could. Communicating our exact location in a well-enunciated bark or two.

And our speech pattern actually started to change. Our inner hoser/valley accents became stronger and with each birch tree or pile of pine cones that we pointed out to each other, we began to sound more and more like Bob and Doug MacKenzie. On purpose. Because it was fun and funny.

I had a dental cleaning today. As my hygeneist and I were catching up about the world, as is our habit, I readied myself for a little pain. There were two TVs in the small room, tuned into the CTV national news network. It played on a half-hour loop and in the forty-five minutes I was there, I saw the top stories twice. Kids in a cave and then kids in a cave.

This story reminds me of another time. A time of Lassie and the Littlest Hobo. A story that really only has one side. No one wants to see kids die and everyone is cheering for a happy ending. Left/right, Canadian/American/European/Asian… everyone likes a good rescue story. It’s like cheering for the child who fell down the well. That used to happen a lot. It’s like cheering for a mountain or an island or an airline rescue. No one cheers against that.

But it’s a dozen kids. A dozen kids just died in Africa in the time it took me to type this last paragraph because they lack clean water or mosquito nets. Or because their mothers were denied birth control. A dozen kids were just scarred for life in internment camps in the land of the free in the last half an hour. A dozen kids on the Gaza strip just suffered more anguish this afternoon than most of us will know in a lifetime. Children in Flint, Michigan and Puerto Rico are suffering due to a lack of clean drinking water, because their skin is too dark or they speak the wrong language. Innocents, all of them.

I’m pulling for these kids lost in a cave. Their lives are no less important than any other life in the world. But no more important either.

When my appointment was over, I signed my name three times and left my wallet in my pocket because I’m lucky enough to have insurance. I then waited for my bus across the street from Parliament Hill. It was a hot and sunny day. There were hundreds of people milling about on the lawn. They took pictures of the buildings and the statues and the Eternal Flame. Children and grandmothers and students. People of every colour and a dozen languages. And there wasn’t a gun or soldier in sight.

I stood right beside Terry Fox’s memorial statue. I wanted to sit because I was hot and tired and am feeling every one of my accumulating years these days and the best spot to sit would have been upon the base of Mister Fox’s statue, but I didn’t dare do that. Although I’m sure he wouldn’t have minded. More than anyone, he knew the need for rest, for respite. But if he could endure what he did, I could surely stand in the sun for another ten minutes until my bus arrived.

So in the space of twenty-four hours, I walked through a forest not knowing where I was going, not because I was escaping horrors or running to freedom, but because a leisurely walk in the woods was good for my soul.

I had an aspect of my health attended to simply by picking up the phone and making an appointment. I left the dental office richer, not poorer, than I had been when I entered it.

I awaited a bus while looking upon a lawn that offered a fair representation of how lucky I am to have been born where I was born. A place my immigrant ancestors escaped to.

I looked up to Terry Fox. A man who died young, who affected the world beyond his wildest imagination and in a way he would never know.

And I was lucky enough to joke with my wife. Dumb and innocent laughter. How precious.

Lucky, lucky, lucky.

 

I’ve recently come home from Chicago and there are a few things about that city that have stayed with me, things I can’t escape. It’s been five days since I’ve returned and I still hear and feel the echos of that town. I haven’t traveled extensively so my experience is limited but when I encounter a place that is historic, that has a personality, that evokes a distinctive feeling, I carry it with me long after planes have landed and hotel room numbers are forgotten.

I’ll never think of city planning as a boring municipal issue again. A hundred or more years ago, the people in charge decided that the shores of Lake Michigan belonged to the citizens. And it became the law of the land. Because they understood that from the dawn of time, people need to be near water. They need the clean air and the blue skies. They need parks and beaches. To put one’s feet in cool water feels as good today as it did ten thousand years ago. So for twenty-six nearly uninterrupted miles, the people of a huge city have access to a Great Lake. It makes a difference.

Design. Everything in Chicago is about design. When the city burned to the ground in 1871, it became a blank canvas and those who were tasked to rebuild it were unencumbered by that which came before. It was the Second City. Some of the best and most influential architects in the world had free reign and the results were immediate. And standards were set. Once beautiful buildings were built, once innovation and creative industrial design became the norm, it became unacceptable to aspire to anything less. And for a century, that has been the standard. Just as you won’t survive as a mediocre blues player or as a bad steakhouse in Chicago, there isn’t room for unimaginative architecture.

There are two people from Chicago who I’ll remember for a long time. They are both old black men. They are both musicians. And they are both blind.

My wife and I went to the legendary Green Mill Jazz Club on the north side. It’s been open for a century and became notorious in the twenties and thirties as an Al Capone hangout. His preferred booth is still there, the one that has a view of the front door and the back exit. It’s close to the bar where there is still a trap door to an escape tunnel. Now the busboys use that tunnel to fetch more liquor or store cases of empty beer bottles.

My wife and I went there on a Sunday night because we were too tired to go on the Friday as we had planned. When we walked in, there were no musicians on the main stage, the stage that I remembered from twenty five years ago. Instead, they were set up behind the bar. A three piece band. Guitar, drums and Hammond B-3 organ. Initially, I was disappointed because I wasn’t going to hear any horns, and jazz guitar has never been my favourite.

Boy, was I ever wrong.

We ended up sitting at the bar, not more than eight feet away from the band. The guitar player was perhaps the best guitar player I’ve ever seen. And I’d never heard of him. And no one I know has ever heard of him.

The organ player, Chris Foreman, was something else. You know the feeling when you have the revelation that you are extremely lucky to be where you are, both physically and in a moment in time? That’s what it was like watching these guys play. Chris sat with us between sets. I don’t know why. Maybe he liked Valerie’s voice or perfume. But he stopped and asked if he could sit with us. We chatted about music and other things. He’s a sixty year old professional musician who has been blind since birth and he is probably among the best players of his instrument in the world. The bandleader said that Chris’s left hand was the best bass player in Chicago. And on a quiet Sunday night in a neighbourhood bar on the north side of a city, far away from the tourists, we experienced some of the best musicianship we’d seen in our whole lives. For five bucks. For the price of a cup of coffee. Like the buildings and the shore, Chicago decided long ago that music was important.

When I wake up in the morning and when I lay down to sleep, I hear one song. It’s four words long. I think the melody has three quarter notes followed by a whole note. It goes like this: Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day…. A block or two from our hotel, on the way to the bridge to cross the Chicago River, in the shadow of the Trump Tower, was an old black man. He stood on the corner, blind, and he had a 7-Eleven cup filled with the coins that he had collected and he shook it in rhythm to his song. Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day…I never spoke to him and I know he never saw me. But he’s stayed with me. I don’t know his name and I can’t possibly know his story. But he’s stayed with me. If I had to guess, I’m fairly certain that I’ve never had a chance encounter with someone, however peripherally, and that person would remember me a week or a month or a year later. Somehow, in some way, I wish that man knew that I remember him. That I think well of him. Someone in another country, in another time zone. I still sing his song.

So long, Chicago.

Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day, Have a Nice Day…