La Agrodolce Vita

Eric Rohmer was able to capture a kind of enjoyable listliss ennui of a summer day better than anyone else. Still from The Green Ray (1986).

When I think of an ideal summer, I think of trips, but not exciting trips. No camping trips, no road trips, no paddling down white water, no arduous hikes on hot hillsides. No, I think of the little trips to go for a dip in a cool pool on a hot day, or to pick up some fresh berries at a market. My idea of summer is a lazy breakfast on the deck, a swim in an outdoor pool, a nap in front of a fan, or a meandering bike ride under a canopy of trees, the dappled light cascading over me. Since living in Ontario, I’ve found the hum of cicadas on a hot day to be the ambient soundtrack of summer.

As a kid, summers seemed eternal. As a working adult, you realize all too quickly that your summer amounts to about ten weekends and maybe a week away somewhere. It’s so easy for those few days to be wrecked. What are the slayers of summer, the flies in the sun block, encumbrances to the enjoyment? Errands, crappy weather and ill health can all combine to kill a summer.

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Second Wind

It's all relative.

I’ve been thinking about time lately. I should have “more of it” but it doesn’t feel that way. In truth you can’t have more time. Time just is. You can’t make it or reduce it. Time doesn’t care about your to do list. It happens regardless of you. We’re just observers/experiencers/voyageurs. We are in time but can’t change it yet doesn’t Einstein’s Relativity say we can all experience time differently? Or at least our perception of it. Clearly I am not a student of Einsteinian physics but I am thinking about my perception of time.

The Egyptians may have been the first to divide time into twelve. They noticed a year had twelve lunar cycles which led to twelve months, of 30 days each (they knew the year was longer than 360 days but like an eager junior designer were more keen on the integrity of it all). Wanting to divide the day into equal halves, they assigned twelve hours to daylight and twelve hours to night time. To make their system work seasonally they simply made an hour longer in the winter to accommodate longer nights rather than mess with the balance and beauty of twelve. After the French Revolution, when the French created the metric system, they even tried to change time keeping from a duodecimal (base twelve system) to a decimal system (base ten). It failed. There is only so far a salmon can swim against the current before it dies.

Did we conquer time or did time conquer us? I’m with the latter. Though I suppose with electric light we can fool ourselves into extending our waking day into the night. The solstice has just passed meaning the longest day is behind us and the days are already growing shorter. That is an odd phrase: to grow shorter. It is also cruel. It means summer begins by shrinking towards winter. Our days will contract for six months before they expand again. The Egyptians had it wrong but it was a valiant effort to bring simplicity to the complexity of time.

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One of those days

Boy, what a day!

Someone cancelled my very own meeting as if to say, “Don’t take this the wrong way but I’d rather not talk to you today.” The gumption! The gall! The nerve! Well, here’s the truth. It is an absolutely lovely day and I don’t want to talk to them either! It's one of those miraculous springlike days in March. Everyone knows there will be more winter yet to come, but we don't care because the Earth is giving us a little gift to lift our spirits. It's that kind of day.

It’s a melting ice kind of day. It’s a drip, drip, drip of ice off the eavestrough kind of day. It’s a new bird in the tree kind of day. It’s a "wear a light jacket even if you have to go to your basement or attic to find a light jacket" kind of day. It’s a "wear shades to keep the sun out of your eyes" kind of day. It’s a squirrel grooming himself on the fence kind of day. It’s the kind of day when kids can’t help but shriek with laughter kind of day. It’s a shoe day. Not a boot day. Not a heavy coat day. It’s a cap day not a tuque day. It’s a bare hands in the sun day, not a glove day. All of this on a Tuesday?!

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The Weight is over

Hello babies!

On Thursday, February 22, our family had a 9lb, 9oz addition to our numbers when my nephew's wife gave birth to a healthy baby girl. Hardy and hale, we welcomed her into our hearts and minds. It immediately occurred to me that we have some cheese in the fridge I bought for the holidays, which we haven't quite finished yet, and that cheese is older than this kid. Last weekend I baked some cookies that deployed some bananas probably older, and sweeter, than that cheese. 

I concluded that I definitely have some socks older than some other members of our clan. I probably have some underwear older than other kids I've met. I'm positive I have some jeans older than kids that play in the schoolyard behind our house. For that matter, I have some sweatshirts older than our current government – that would be a relatively new sweatshirt. This inevitably reminded me that I have a t-shirt older than some of my work colleagues. It's a bit of merch from Sting's "Nothing Like the Sun" tour from 1988. I'm pretty sure I have another t-shirt from a known Toronto-based design firm, Reactor, that's probably from 1990. They still fit! And no holes. They don't make 'em like they used to.

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Not So Fast

How many clothes do you really need? Image by Midjourney.

On another chilly minus-umpteen centigrade February morning I donned a thin, red fleece that is one of my most worn and cherished items of clothing. It cost $19 USD. That was 25 years ago. That means it has cost me about 76¢ per year or put another way, about less than a fifth of a penny per day. It is from "fast fashion empire" H&M. I bought it in New York City before the brand had any presence in Canada.

This isn't the only item I have from retailers like Uniqlo, Old Navy etc. Many of them over a decade old. Mind you, I have on a occasion purchased some items from shops that are either long gone, or should be. A summery short-sleeved cotton shirt from "Jean Machine" comes to mind. As I recall, it was dirt cheap, I wore it about a half dozen times and on one sunny day, the back of the shirt went from dark gray to a bleached out pale colour. Additionally, the fabric had become closer to dust than fibre. The cloth was even too weak to be used as a rag. It had to be tossed. I have never been back to a Jean Machine location, and am now even wondering if such a place actually existed. Is it a machine that made jeans or one made from denim? So yes, I have bought super cheap clothing that couldn't withstand a single washing, but most items I have purchased, outlasted my interest rather than their usefulness.

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Riparian Diversions

Now I lay me down in green pastures, but preferably the ones near rivers. Image by Midjourney.

Humans are terrestrial creatures, but inexplicably are drawn to water. Maybe it's not that inexplicable. We do need water to live. Aren't we mostly made up of the stuff? I often attribute it to my island upbringing for my fascination with water, but it isn't necessarily true. So many days I've started a bike ride with no intentions to go anywhere but still find myself drawn out to the Leslie Spit, a purpose-made headland created from demolition rubbish. Out on the point of broken concrete and brick, you can feel like you're out in Lake Ontario. Standing out looking over the water is one of my only ways to see the horizon in Toronto.

Being near or out on the water is the best way to forget about the city but it's not always about leaving things behind as much as finding new things. Probably the most surprising part of Toronto is the amount of nature you can encounter thanks to the Ravines. You have to go pretty far to completely leave the built world behind. So many Saturdays I would ride 50-60 KM away from my house and still never leave the city, never leaving its sights, sounds or smells behind. One summer we went kayaking on the Humber River. You can ride your bike or just take the subway to a parking lot where a company rents kayaks and canoes. At the launch point you can paddle beneath the bridge that carries the east-west subway leaving you in the curious position of being on a lazy river looking up at a subterranean rail line. Once, while floating past the shoreline, I thought I spotted eggs nestled in the grass but on closer inspection they were really just faded golf balls. I guess I wanted them to be eggs, even if it made no sense. That paddle was full of surprising encounters. Gliding in and out of inlets thick with water lilies and tall marshy grasses, we met swans, ducks, spied fish below, spotted hawks floating above and saw egrets walking in the shallow water or perched in a willow. Those sleepy, slender white birds, lazing about on an equally slim branch seemed like an image from a Japanese wood block print. The image is still in my mind. Later in the year, we returned to the Humber to watch the salmon run and their attempts to jump the weirs in the river.

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Not Good in a (Fake) Crisis

City of Toronto Archives. Snow storm, King Street West at John Street. Photographer: Alexandra Studio 1961

Toronto has been absolutely sacked by two or three large snowfalls. 10cm of snow here or there never hurt anyone, but follow that with 20cm or more, followed by 15cm, another 20cm of snow and you will quickly bring a city like Toronto to its knees. Which, if I'm being honest, is fine with me. The first of these onslaughts had the noticeable effect of quietude. The heavy snow was like a weighted blanket that calmed the city and dampened the sound of traffic. Yet it wasn't a sweet silence but more of an eery one. Similarly, the snowpack filtered light through the skylights of the house and gave a sort of igloo effect as if the snow had actually piled up three stories high, blocking us inside. It was on days like this in my youth, that my father would essentially sound the alarm and command his sons to man a shovel and get digging. I always wondered what the rush was? When I would ask about the sense of urgency, his answer lacked what I would refer to as logic. "What if there's an emergency? We'll need to be able to get out of the driveway." he would say as if it made perfect sense. I still wondered what my father was imagining. If there was a medical emergency, how would being able to get to the end of the driveway suddenly clear many kilometres of highway to the nearest hospital? Those first few metres would be a dream of clear asphalt, but unfortunately, the following 10-15 kilometres would be passable only by snowmobile or dog team.

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Malingerance

Remember me when I'm almost gone.

I naively thought the archaic term "malingering" meant that a sickness, a malady or something malignant was lingering. It does not mean that. In fact, it means something different altogether. It's basically a term meaning faking an illness or feigning sickness as much worse than it is to get out of some obligation, usually work. I haven't done that sort of thing since I was about eight years old. I recall complaining my stomach hurt, which I thought, "How would you know if I was fibbing?" In those days, your mother might call the local physician who would just pop by (Dr. Natashan? I think? I remember his daughter was in my class and was quite pretty. I knew the doctor had left town when she didn't show up to school). I hid under the covers, which made me quite hot and after when he saw me, I remember hearing him say to my mother, "He seems fine but he's a bit hot, probably nothing serious." Then mom made me eat two bananas to "glue my insides together" (a common way she would refer to stomach troubles), and told me to stay in bed, which went down in history as the biggest waste of a day off school that I ever experienced.

From then on, the fear of getting caught "faking sickness" seemed like too big of a risk. Our mother wasn't much of a poker player and would always call your bluff or entirely ignore you. If you skinned your knee, "psh, that's nothing." followed by some ancient and incredibly burning antiseptic, Mercurochrome (no longer in use due to alleged toxicity). If you twisted an arm or knee, my mother would ask if you could move your fingers or toes, and when you did the reply was, "Nothing broken. If it's a sprain, it'll heal well enough." It got to the point where you pretty much had to have a bone sticking out of a limb to get noticed. Even then I imagine my mother saying, "Oh stop making such a fuss, stick it back in and get a band-aid."
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In Between (Christmas) Time

Kodachrome Christmas is the best Christmas.

I feel a bit adrift lately. We just went to a Christmas concert on a cold, damp Wednesday night, which was nice, but a bit odd. I was already feeling the carnage of Christmas before it arrived. The carnage I refer to isn't the pressure of gift-getting, or of meal prep, or of baking, or of having company over, or even the last-minute rush of work. It's a carnage of my own perception of time. I’m feeling timelessness. As in, I have no idea what time or day or year it is. We saw a live show on a Wednesday? So it feels like Thursday or Friday, but it’s not. It’s cold, damp, and grey like November, but it’s actually December; that is, until suddenly it's -16°C and it feels like January. Lately, we’ve been watching old episodes of The Great British Baking Show, which were shot during the pandemic. Having a second Trump presidency only makes this time dislodgement worse. Is it still 2019? 2017? 2030? I can’t affix words to this feeling of time drift other than it feels like I’m a viewer of my own life in slow motion. At times I’m busy, punctual, ticking off boxes, checked in, tuned in. While other times, it feels like 2 hours passed in minutes, or I forgot to put out the bins because Wednesday is tomorrow. Isn’t it? I see Christmas decorations out and about and have to remind myself it is, in fact, Christmas.

In physics, the elasticity of time is called time dilation. Yet, I'm not feeling what Einstein predicted; I'm perceiving time in a very jumbled way. I don't want to raise any alarms about my cognition either. I'm not forgetting what I had for breakfast, but simply by the early evening, breakfast has felt like it happened a week ago. I would liken this to that feeling you get if you've ever been in an accident and it seems to happen so very, very slowly, or like some moment in sports when you felt like you were moving normally, but for some reason, everyone else was just standing around and you walked in on net and scored. Then you think to yourself, "That was weird." Later, you wonder why you couldn't just do that all the time. For the last few days, this feeling has been even worse. I've had a cold. Not a bad one, but one that has drained my batteries and forced me to try and sleep it off, which has only messed with my sense of days drifting slowly by in a flash.

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