February 9, 2010
Alzheimer’s Tale: Several years ago, I found this folded piece of paper in the pocket of my mother’s favourite cardigan. This was just before my dad and I gave away her clothes to the Salvation Army and my last reminder that she didn’t want to forget us. ~ Penny is the family dog.
February 4, 2010
You can never tell by looking at a person why they feel the need to run in the dark at 6:00 am, but pretending to know their story is like a parlour game to me. That guy was told by his doctor he has diabetes and exercise will lower his blood sugar. Her divorce just came through and she’s working through her disillusion. That gal’s obviously anorexic and will probably shut her office door at noon and do 100 sit-ups for lunch.
Walking is my cure for life’s hard knocks, for those times when human nature flashes its twisted or stubborn side at me. Moving helps thin out the sludge of doubt and occasional sadness streaming through my body. When I learned, for example, that it takes more energy to stand still than it does to move — a scientific fact that obviously whistled right over my bowl cut back in grade six — I had my explanation for why I feel more tired when I don’t haul ass than when I do.
Like most people, I suffer from questions (big life questions) that come in sickly waves on bad days and quirky pokes on good ones. There’s no order to these questions, no narrative arc or tidy focus, just a spray of tea leaves in need of a good translator. I attend to these questions on my walks. But when moving doesn’t generate any clarity, I still come back to my apartment ready to face the day with a genuine lightness of being that lasts until about 3:00 pm, by which time every endorphin in my body has been reabsorbed and putting a smile in my voice requires a Golden Globe-winning performance.
Here comes one of the morning regulars. He’s got his dog’s leash looped around his wrist and both hands shoved deep inside his pants pockets. As usual, his eyes are cast down and blinkered by his upturned lapels — not like a prepster, more like a twilight misanthrope. 
As we pass by oneanother on the sidewalk, his dog interrupts a sniffing session, as intense as an addict hoovering up a line of powder, and looks up. I smile my first smile of the day … at a Labrador. I’m pretty sure the exchange registers in his brain because when I look back, the dog turns and does the same before his owner gives the leash a sharp yank sending the pooch’s ears flying across his head.
The Running Room types are already on their fifth kilometer by the time they zoom past me. The mini water bottles ringing their waists are nearly drained at this point, like the half-fired cartridge belts worn by squadrons of Desert Storm troopers. I like to think I’m achieving the same health benefits in twice the time and a quarter of the equipment budget. The troopers, of course, have a corner office with a view waiting for them and overseas markets to check, so speed is crucial. By contrast, across the park, gathered under a large maple tree, a group of Asian senior citizens sway in unison to a Tai Chi routine. When they’re not doing Tai Chi, they’re doing laps around a gravel path circling the park. They’re just as committed as the storm troopers, but more Zen in their methods of keeping body and soul together.
Watching these seniors, I think I’ve pinpointed a cultural difference. In all my years of walking, I’ve rarely, if ever, noticed blue-haired old ladies from Rosedale marching up grassy hills towards the rising sun with as much focus as the Mrs. Lees of the world. The same goes for the sassy and opinionated black women I know, ladies in their seventies with tropical names like Hyacinth. The Baby Boomers, no doubt, will change this. But, for now, the Rosedale dowagers and the Hyacinths of the world are in their kitchens at this hour, plugging in the kettle or frying up dumplings for their snoring husbands.
In parks across Toronto, though, you can always cross paths with ancient, bow-legged Asian women wearing over-sized sun visors (even before the sun has peaked) and arch-dropping dollar store sneakers (“Made in China,” of course). I’ve watched the most intrepid of these ladies break free from the gravel paths in the park and scale the surrounding toboggan hills BACKWARDS in those cheap shoes. Maybe they’re widows, and when the leave the park they’ll go home to watch over their grandkids? Or, maybe they plan to walk down the street to the family store, where they’ll stack pears into perfect pyramids for the remainder of the day?
I read once that during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, China’s entire population would rise before dawn, turn on identical battery-operated transistor radios, and do group calisthenics to a distant M*A*S*H-like announcer calling out the commands, “Three more, two more …” Imagine a billion people simultaneously bending over to touch their toes or jumping up and hitting the ground at the same time. How that didn’t loosen tectonic plates and set off a tsunami across Japan and Indonesia, I don’t know. Maybe it did?
Back in Toronto, a few of the old women in the cheap running shoes are donning surgical masks. Are they still worried about SARS? Or have they shifted their fears to H1N1? 
Maybe their memories of all those belching smoke stacks in the Far East have them playing it safe. After all, trade winds have carried choking coal dust from Chongqing, China’s “Smog City,” with its 30 million masked inhabitants, all the way to North America in as little as two days.
I wonder what David Suzuki, Al Gore and Barack Obama must think of this as I tackle the hill myself. How impotent Obama must have felt when he walked (some say stormed) in uninvited into that closed-door meeting between China and India at the Copenhagen Conference on climate change last December. His charm was powerless to their carbon emissions. But what do you do when two rising superpowers feel entitled to their own industrial revolution? After all, we had ours by burning every fossil fuel imaginable.
I suppose it was only a matter of time before our hope and Obama’s spectacular potential came face to face with the stubborn and entitled side of human nature.
I turn around and head home. I’ve got much smaller challenges waiting for me at my desk.
February 2, 2010
I got a lot of moving feedback the first time I wrote about my mother, Catherine, here in The Long Goodbye, published four years ago on this blog. After she died in December 2012, I expanded on the story of our relationship and turned it into a magazine piece for Glow Magazine. You can read that version here. I dedicate my work to my brothers, Peter and Richard.
My mother knew her entire adult life what was coming. But confirmation arrived the day she shuffled into the kitchen, swung open a few cupboard doors, then turned to me and asked, “Where are the singing noodles?” From that day forward, I stopped leaning on mum and started extending a protective hand. Before long, pots began appearing in the oven, car keys in the fridge, and sticky notes with basic English words started multiplying across every surface of the house — all quirks of the onset of Alzheimer’s.
Nothing erases human nature like Alzheimer’s. The imprint of the disease is the same in everyone who gets it. They all disappear down the same path, exhibiting more or less the same set of behaviors. Most go from nervous fusspots crying “No, no, no” (the last word in their drained vocabulary) to silent bodies with gawping mouths and fixed stares. Mum’s mum gave her a preview of what was in store before she died of the disease thirty-five years ago. That’s why I prefer to think about what made my mother unique before age flicked a switch inside her body and unleashed this great leveler.
For someone born before the Crash of ’29 my mother had a remarkably liberal view of a woman’s place in the world. By the time I came along she was already in her early 40s and so excited to have a girl, after two boys, that she later told me she regularly whispered in my infant ears, “Ah, someone who’ll understand.” Right from the start, she knew we’d be confidantes and that we’d have each other’s backs until the end.
One thing that set my mother apart was that, once I was out of the house, she never ever tapped on her watch and asked, Where are my grandchildren? To me or my brothers. Her own struggles to conceive sensitized her to this loaded topic. But it was more than that. She had this rare ability to honour the life of the individual. That meant that other people’s unconventional choices never sent her into a tailspin. Not like some women in the neighbourhood.
In her day, of course, women attached themselves to men like the stateless to life boats, their fortunes rising and sinking with their rescuers. All too often, you married the man you wanted to be: aspiring novelists teamed up with practicing writers (becoming their first readers, typists, editors, and, sometimes, their ghost writers) while nurses said “I do” to doctors, and vowed to always pass the scalpel but never perform with it. Mum, on the other hand, believed in developing a person’s potential, not thwarting it. So when I grew up and decided that filling a blank page constituted a large chunk of my identity, she was right there with me. She didn’t go out of her way tutor me about love, and I think that was deliberate. At that point I had no interest in living an integrated life. What were guys to books? When we did talk men, she just smiled, looked me in the eye and said, “You”ll have to figure that one out on your own.” Confounding, but true.
All the while she kept feeding and watering my individuality, so that every time I came home to visit my parents at Christmas or Spring Break, there was a new book at the end of my bed touching on one of my many interests: painting, history, culture, biography. Those books have moved with me to every house I’ve lived in since university. There’s the doorstopper, Paintings in the Musée d’Orsay, the elegant Complete Guide to Chinese Brush Painting Techniques and Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea, an ode to the many forces that shape a woman’s life.
Mum expressed a lot of things before Alzheimer’s pulled her under. Because she knew she was about to lose everything the declarations just poured out. “I want you to be happy,” she said, still not serving up a prescription for how I should get there. “I love that guy,” she’d smile, pointing to my dad while he was pushing a grocery cart down the produce aisle or, more likely, watching the Golf Channel. She must have said “I love you” to him more times in her last year (of speech) than in the final two decades of their sixty plus year marriage. Most times, he was too busy staring at the TV, wincing at a missed putt, to hear. But he knew, and we knew because she was telling the whole room, the entire store … no, the entire world. I’m glad I witnessed this as an adult. The romantic in me is forever believing in love’s power to cut through chaos, disappointment and change as it did with my parents. He had her back, and she his.
A few months before we handed mum over to the care of a team of nurses (she was beyond consulting on this), she called me and left a message on my answering machine. Something in me said, This is the last time she’s going to know how to pick up the phone and dial my number. That hunch proved true. I played her message over and over that week, then popped a blank tape in my ghetto blaster and pushed “record” so I’d have her voice with me forever.
It’s been seven years since she left that message and I haven’t listened to the tape since. I can’t. In that moment in time, she put aside her doubt and fear for herself and with a shaky, lilting voice let me know, “I miss you, Alison, and I just wanted to let you know I think about you every day and hope that everything’s going well in Toronto. I love you. Bye.” From the commotion, I could tell she missed placing the receiver in the carriage on the first try. That vulnerability makes my knees buckle every time I think about it.
January 30, 2010
An article published earlier this month in the New Scientist is claiming that a high-information diet is bad for your health. “No one ever tells you how dangerous this stuff can be,” says the author, “they just go on pumping it out, hour after hour, day after day [and we’re all] consuming it without a clue about the possible consequences.” Whoever said that surfing the net is like drinking from a fire hose nailed this moment in time.
This is only my second blog post and I see no reason to avoid telling you that the internet is making me sick. It’s giving me the vapours — and I mean that in the Victorian sense of feeling overwhelmed and dizzy as opposed to the steamier definition laid out in the Urban Dictionary. I never remember feeling this tired during the heyday of newspapers and magazines, even with skyscrapers of unread magazines piling up around me (which I’m slowly replacing with apps).
But eye strain, headaches, rounded shoulders and feeling burnt out weren’t the focus of the New Scientist piece. That’s the article I wished they had published. Instead, the author talked about the dangers and releasing too much information too soon, and, specifically, how we rushed to publish the genome in 2005. By putting this information online, some people are worried that we’re making it easier to recreate pandemics, like the 1918 influenza that killed my Uncle Albert before his second birthday. These same people say that pacing the release of sensitive information will protect our health.
I like the idea of pacing and not because I’m afraid of bio-terrorism, but because I need structure. I need back a life that includes the internet (my life circa 2001), not one that IS the internet. I call that protecting my mental health.
I’m addicted to information. But my behavioral ticks, like constantly hitting the refresh button on my email, are probably your behavioral ticks too. I haven’t reached the point where I’m taking my iPhone into the washroom, I’m too busy in there reading back issues of Toronto Life. But now researchers are saying that the compulsion to check our inbox and read everything you can get your hands on is evolutionary. As the author in the New Scientist piece explains it, new information has always brought us evolutionary advantages; it led to inventions like the spiked club, the longbow, gun powder and the printing press, to name a few. Our flying fingers and darting eyes are just human nature’s way of trying to get an edge of the competition (and out-clubbing them)
Still, the printing press never cranked out sentences this fast. And that’s what makes this technological revolution different, and so much more tiring. Now more than ever, says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, we need “to develop a more reflective and qualified view about the value of knowledge.”
I guess that starts one blog and one website at a time.
January 29, 2010
There’s a reason why Shakespeare feels completely fresh the further we move away from his time, and why the spine is cracked on almost every page of a book by Alice Munro and Philip Roth, at least in my collection. I don’t see that sort of wear and tear on the covers of my Erich Segals or John Grishams, but I still like to read them for the empty calories they dish up. I pass those books on or leave them on airplanes, but I hold on to Alice and Philip —perhaps a little too tightly.
Munro and Roth both grab me with their honest take on human nature. Their pointed descriptions of characters’ motivations and actions prickle my skin to the point where I’ve often wondered, did someone install video surveillance in my apartment, then e-mail the files to these authors? Is there a hanging folder with my name on it in their drawers?
Despite this imagined attention, I don’t treat these writers very well in return. I defile their pages with an elaborate system of marks, which might explain why I can’t count a book dealer amongst my circle of friends. In my defense: I spare first editions of the classics by not even hunting for them since I know I’ll devalue any book that ends up meaning something to me (that sounds slightly disturbing when I read it back to myself). Dots in the margins highlight the passages of magical thinking I wish I’d come up with. These dots range from a soft grey to a hard black pressed with such force it creates a dip or a pimple that goes on for several pages depending on which direction you move through the book. Pages with corners folded down indicate ideas I know I’ll refer to again: top corner down for insightful observations about human dynamics, bottom corner up for the sections that reflect my life and choices back at me with an uncanny accuracy. I don’t like other people looking at my copies of The Moons of Jupiter or The Dying Animal for this very reason.
My compulsion to get involved with what I’m reading makes Munro and Roth exhausting authors. Whoever said reading was a sedentary exercise must have been dozing with a book across their face by a less accomplished observer of human nature. With Munro and Roth, I often have to put their books down to deal with the rush of energy their ideas generate. Recognition makes me jump to my feet, walk into other rooms for no good reason, or run to the bathroom mirror to examine my face. At some point, I come back for more universal truths from the people in the fictional kitchens, studies and bedrooms they describe. I have a friend who says he regularly stops to do push-ups when he’s reading Roth. That’s probably why a lot of people take the easy route and read Grisham instead. He entertains, but he never rattles your teacups (or tones your biceps)
Of course, Shakespeare’s grasp on human nature is legendary, but I’m not even going to pretend to have mastered his wordplay when Munro and Roth are so straightforward. Kenneth Branaugh’s screen adaptations of the Bard’s stories were a huge help to me. They always inspired me to go back to the text, especially to the characters Emma Thomson articulated with such sparkling naturalism. But now that “Ken and Em” are over I guess I’ll only ever understand Much Ado About Nothing and Henry V. Their chemistry in these two flicks was spellbinding! By contrast, I find Stratford productions of Shakespeare too exaggerated and formal, the actors’ posture and voices are too ramrod straight. I don’t come away feeling like I understand people any better. I just feel tense.
“Society Pages” is my attempt to understand people better. Clearly I’m fascinated by insightful fiction, but I’m also drawn to the growing field of evolutionary psychology (in particular, Steven Pinker’s work on human nature) and TV shows, like Mad Men, that showcase our innate tendencies before legislation stepped in to correct them (or bury them).
I’m convinced that part of the reason we stampede to Mad Men is because the bottom-pinching sexism it depicts is alive and well today. Laws since 1960 may have evolved to include women, but in private (and in bars) human nature has this way of bypassing progress. That’s why when Betty Draper (January Jones) says, in between sharp exhales of her cigarette, “As far as I’m concerned, as long as men look at me that way, I’m earning my keep,” we still know exactly what she means. The same goes for the quip Roger Sterling (John Slattery) makes moments after hearing Sterling Cooper has lost the Dr. Scholl’s account. “With every closed door there’s an open dress,” he says through a scotch-fueled wince. Does his reaction feel any less true because it’s 2010 and not 1960?
Notions about women as objects still share the stage with more recently updated truths that acknowledge the full range of their strengths as individuals. Beauty is one of those strengths, but it also happens to be the one that gets most attention and abuse from both sexes. The laws that protect a woman’s humanity will always struggle to keep pace with our less enlightened assumptions about them. That’s because we’ll never totally get rid of those assumptions. The same goes for racism. Despite all we know about human potential and all the energy we’ve put into erasing discrimination, it exists because posturing and status seeking at the expense of others is, you guessed it, a persistent part of human nature. The inequities we’ve written into religion don’t help matters.
But, hey, there’s good news too! I believe just as strongly that human nature can be wildly generous, optimistic and empathetic. And I’ll be writing about that in this blog, and backing it up with more than just my own hunches but the latest research from the experts.
I know how I feel, and now I want to know how YOU feel. So post a comment and let’s see where these topics take us.
It’s gonna get interesting!
