Toronto -- Round Two

Here I am now – culturally-infused, foot-sore, and exploration-happy – in my latest Urban Infusion Month. Hooray! I’m back in Toronto – three years to the day – but this time for two months. So far, I’ve done Manhattan, London, Toronto, and the Covid-aborted Philadelphia; but Toronto was my favorite of them all.

 I’ve been thinking about what these trips do for me.

• Yes, they’re a chance to get Spring earlier than it comes to Alaska (although Toronto has had snow and winds that suck the warmth right out of me).
  
  
• And yes, I feed my live-theater lust – I’ve already been to five plays here with two more in the next few days.
  
  
• And yes, I get to be car-less while happily gorging on transit.
  
  
• I get to escape meal-planning; grazing on ethnic street food or fruit returns hours to my days!

These are four really big reasons.
 
My only difficulty can be social isolation. There was that rough time in London because British people don’t talk to people they don’t know, but Toronto was special because Torontonians talk to everyone!
 
But this is a Covid-changed world. Even Torontonians don’t talk to everyone anywhere. Everywhere – including on transit – we’re six feet apart, wearing masks, and not making friends. But on the other hand, the rest of the world isn’t very far away: with Zoom, I still meet with my Alaska book club, Bricolage art challenge group, and my siblings. Some days I don’t even feel like I’m gone.

What I’ve learned so far is what my months really do for me. They confuse me. They stump me. They fill my days with riddles and glitches, happy accidents and utter confusion. When I get on a bus I’ve never been on before, I have that squirrelly nervous feeling: What if I miss my stop and end up God knows where? I sit on the edge of my seat.

I seek out this feeling; it’s why I’m here. It’s the Quest for New-ness, the thrill and mystery of non-stale, non-stagnant (without my fear of heights). I do my produce shopping in Chinatown, where everything is way cheaper. Lately, the big crop is strawberries. Two big baskets of strawberries for $2 each (and that’s Canadian dollars!). But over there, on the next table – same vendor – they’re $1 each. How can that be? Why?

Because $1 strawberries go bad twice as fast as $2 strawberries.

I try to be helpful at grocery stores, bringing carts in from the lot to the store. But yesterday, when I saw a woman loading her car, I offered to bring her cart back in, and she looked askance at me. Why? Well, when I returned the cart, there was a little plastic thing hanging, and when I attached it, a dollar – a loonie – popped out! Uh, oh! I bet that woman is telling her family about the panhandler taking her cart money!

My day is filled with things that need figuring out: Why does the remote work easily to turn things on but has a terrible time turning things off? How do people easily deal with their milk in floppy, plastic bags? Does the Sweet’n Low paper go in the Blue Bin, the Green Bin, or garbage?
 
Oh, I have bigger questions: Why did Matthew Wong’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario appeal to me so much? Was it because they were all blue, that they spoke of isolation, that they had simple lines, that Wong was self-taught, that he was bipolar and killed himself at 35? Was it the work itself or the artist’s pain in creating it? Is that why Van Gogh moves me?

In the play, “Gloria,” when Gloria shoots everyone in her workplace except Dean, Kendra misses it all because she’s out getting coffee and Nan is hiding under her desk. All three write a book from his/her perspective and argue about who has the right to “the story.” Who owns any story?
 
Big questions and little ones. When I wake up in the morning, I have to remember the new place where I store the cereal, which drawer has my underwear. Is it easier to go up Spadina and walk west or Bathurst and walk east?
 
Nothing is routine, and the strange interrupts the ordinary at a moment’s notice. Every day, at any moment, I can get a jolt of difference, newness, confusion – even panic. And wonder, too. I like living like this.

 

The Perils of Updating

It was time for the 6-year-old MacBook to die. It was still living in El Capitan, back in 2015. In the Mac world (where they give their operating systems cute names), I was years behind. Eons and mountains and deserts behind.

Websites were starting to remind me I was out of date, if not forbidding me entrance. Some browsers didn’t even want to know me anymore.

So I decided to update my system. Maybe travel as far as Big Sur or … Monterey! But then an alert popped up: my Microsoft Office 2011 wouldn’t work anymore if I updated my computer. I’d have to update to Microsoft 365.

Aiiiieeee! All this updating! They’re talking to a person who has had the same hairstyle for thirty years, who doesn’t ever rearrange furniture, who kept her beloved Subaru for 20 years and only heartbreakingly replaced it.

I took the plunge. It helped that my sister’s office was burglarized and she had to replace her computer, so some of the replacement research was done. (Sorry, Allison.) Both of us are now proud owners of MacBook Airs.

I can say “proud” because I’m just now recovering from hysteria. The Geniuses at the Genius Bar at the Apple Store must see me and run for the back rooms. Five visits in four days. And that’s not even counting the at-home computer consultant and the chats and phone calls with Apple Support. I’ve been a one-woman disturbance in the cloud universe.

The Cloud! The misty, obscure, and unknowable Cloud. Because I decided I’d have to backup to The Cloud in case (as happened with poor Allison) my laptop was stolen or destroyed. (Allison was wisely backed up.)

First, we had to empty the brains of my old laptop into the new brain. That was a couple of visits which involved the horrors of where did my neat little highly-organized folders go? Then there was the problem of where did my photos go?

And did I even talk about passwords? I could do an entire sitcom on passwords.

That’s when Nancy the Computer Whiz entered my home. She sat down at my computer and explained how to back up to The Cloud, and she made it happen. She explained how to do the password thing, the photo thing. But poor Nancy had me as a client.

So Nancy had to put up with many hysterical emails. Tim had to put up with hysteria in person. The Geniuses don’t know how close they were to having a crazy woman run amok in the Fifth Avenue Mall.

Because everything had disappeared from my computer. It was all in The Cloud, so what if I didn’t have Internet, did I have NOTHING?!?

I find it amazing – if not reassuring – that when I have a problem and ask Google, as I’m typing it out, Google auto completes my query. It means that other people have the same problem. I type in “document not…” and Google comes up with “not loading on my Mac,” “not updating,” “not in my backup,” etc etc. I type in “photos not…” and I get the catalog of everyone else’s problems with photos.

I type in “how to calm” and it’s amazing how many people need to calm down, calm anxiety, calm a hysterical person, calm a panic attack.

Eight emails and Nancy could not reassure me. “It’s all in The Cloud! It’s gone from my computer! Gone!!” Finally, she told me to disconnect from wifi. I did. My things were still there! They weren’t stuck in The Cloud, they’d just changed locations, rearranged the furniture.

My heart rate is slowing down. I can function again. I’d started out writing about things that merely confuse me before I was distracted by things that traumatize me. Maybe tomorrow I’ll get back to mere confusion.

A Very Good Jar

I made a very interesting discovery – an illuminating discovery – but it came about from a whole other direction, which is often how discoveries come about. It started with this cartoon.

I think it's time to consider the possibility that you might never reuse your old jars.

Which started a typical Third Third conversation about getting rid of things, decluttering, needing things some day, not being able to part with things. You know the drill. Ultimately, the group concluded: No More Jars!

But I replied, “Just yesterday, I used Goo Gone to get the adhesive off a Very Good Jar. I did something creative with the lid.”

Which led to the other question: What constitutes a Very Good Jar? Do you have your own definition of a Very Good Jar? (And, by the way, do you have a definition of a Very Good Box, too?) And if you have a Very Good Jar, do you debate and reconsider and ultimately decide to … keep it?

My Very Good Jar has clear glass, straight sides with no narrowing for the mouth, and a snug but easily rotatable lid that ideally doesn’t have a label on top. It needs to feel sturdy in the hand. This is a nearly perfect jar:

The only problem with this jar is that the label adheres too well. When you soak it and then peel it off, it leaves adhesive behind. It’s a sticky mess. That’s why you need Goo Gone.

Meanwhile, in a totally unrelated foray into my closet (Art Supply Storage), I came across Sophie’s Fun with Beads – Ancient Egypt kit from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Back in third grade, she’d meticulously beaded the “Lotus Bud Garland Necklace for Ipuy or his wife.” The kit was short one color of bead for that project, so I wrote the Museum. Next thing we knew, we were inundated with multiple sets of more and more beads. All of them now reside in Art Supply Storage.

These are eensy beensy little ceramic beads, not suitable for my Third Third hands to do anything involving stringing, but I could glue them. Looking around for a glue destination, I spied a Very Good Jar. And since the Very Good Jar does have a label on top, I could cover that up with beads and improve it further. I glued and sprinkled.

Ta-dah! Something from nothing! Jars rescued from mediocrity. I could give jars with beaded lids as gifts. An Even Better Jar!

But that’s not even the illuminating discovery. In the process of admiring the Very Good Jar, of painting it for this blog, I had to look very carefully at the label. Do you see it?

I am a major spelling advocate. I have taught courses on spelling, I have conducted spelling bees, and I am the Pronouncer for the Alaska Literacy Program’s BizBee, the adult spelling bee. I am the Werd Nerd.

And if you’d ever asked me how to spell bouillon (the soup, not the gold bar), I would have ended it with –ion. There is no second I in bouillon! Apparently, the LL in French comes with its own Y sound. Isn’t that amazing! There’s only one I in bouillon, and I never knew that.

What a day: two New Things. I’ll be talking about that I in bouillon for days weeks.

Baby Steps

Baby steps.

Little by little I may reenter society.

The problem when you feel despair – a “dark night of the soul” – is that you can still interact with people, but when you do, you pull out some ebullience, some pep, because otherwise you’re just a black hole. A Debbie Downer. But then you feel like a fake (not to mention that you can get a little manic in the overcompensation and that’s a whole other alarm). And if you want to be authentic in your interactions with friends, then you’re not presenting properly. You’re presenting positive energy, and that’s not what you have. Other people see a person, but you are just a shattered pile of pieces.

So you just stop.

And because there’s Zoom, you can still appear to be interacting and not missing out on book club or theater group, but that’s because the machine protects you. Maybe people are not doing Gallery View and so they don’t see you. You can always Stop Video.

I wear contact lenses. When I was younger, I noticed that when I wore glasses, I felt like no one could see me. A barrier had gone up around my eyes that shielded me. When I wear a mask, the same thing happens. I get to walk around like the Invisible Woman.

And when the adult daughter spent December with us, my world just moved into our living room. When the temperatures hung out well below zero, I didn’t go out.

So this perfect storm of fakery-avoidance and machines and barriers and home and below zero just allowed me to isolate. And isolate. Even now, I’m not sure how to stop it. It makes many things much easier: less planning, less arranging, less energy required.

I do two things: I read a lot, and I do jigsaw puzzles. Jigsaw puzzles are disorder assembled into order. That is all they have to do, and I cannot say enough good things about jigsaw puzzles.

How did all this start? No, my “dark night of the soul” is not about Covid.

2021 traumatized me. No, it traumatized me. No, more accurately, it traumatized me. It started with January 6 and watching our legislators have to run and cower for their lives. And it continued with watching some of those same legislators later deny the severity of what happened, watching an entire Republican Party cower to the megalomania of a demagogue.

Then I watched our Supreme Court decide they could control women’s bodies. More recently, they decided it was discrimination to try and reverse discrimination. In Anchorage, I saw our mayor dismantle homeless shelters, close Covid testing sites, even mess with our library. My library! My most prized institution in the world!

Oh, I’ve organized Zoom calls with my senators, email and phone my legislators repeatedly, prepare testimony, teach English to refugees and immigrants, donate to worthy causes; but our democracy is in danger, and all I am is some ineffectual Paul Revere shouting in the wilderness.

The only communication possible became a rant. Or despair. Both socially unacceptable.

I told Tim I was trapped in this world, that if I were an animal I would try to chew off my arm to escape.

So he took me to Mexico, to daylight and warmth and water and beaches. It has saved my psyche every year, and it did again. I have a dopey, leaky yellow plastic raft that can barely stay afloat. And unlike a boogie board, the limp, leaky raft doesn’t keep you on top of the wave. It lets the wave pummel you, flip you up from down, smash you into the sand. You emerge with a scalp full of sand, a bathing suit full of sand, and a shriek of being alive. I laughed out loud. That sound actually came from me. I heard it.

But what really saved me in Mexico was respect. In the restaurant, people would enter with a mask, hang it on the little hook by their table while they ate, and put it back on when they got up. I felt like they cared about the health of their community, about each other. They passed laws to protect themselves and others.

So now I’m back home, and Putin is on the border of Ukraine and I had a dream that nuclear war happened and Sophie cried that she’d thought she’d have her whole life ahead of her and my heart just broke, and this is how my head is working and I just don’t know how to walk around like this in front of other people.

So now you know.

Every now and then, a warm and funny thing happens, and I want to write about it. I imagine the structure it will take – the beginning, the middle, and the end – and it’s a good story. Maybe I will write about it tomorrow.

Lost Voice

Sorry, I seem to have lost my voice. Nothing comes out.

It’s either because I’m empty or maybe I just won’t unleash my storm into the universe. Mostly, my whole self just stopped. It takes A LOT of oomph to un-stop, and all my oomph just goes to putting one foot in front of the other. That’s all.

Not sure how long this will last.

Road Trip: One Amazing Thing

I started writing a post titled “Human beings do amazing things,” and I was telling you all about the amazing things encountered on this trip: art, museum exhibits, architecture, theater, food. But there was just too much. It got boring: This great thing, that great thing, oh and another great thing.

So I’m just going to tell you about one thing. Who knew that the Gettysburg Museum & Visitor Center would float to the top of my list?

I had my qualms about the whole stop in Gettysburg, thinking it might be a chronicle of this general and that battle and those maneuvers. I’m tired of the militarization of American history; our chapters go from war to war: Revolutionary War, War of 1812, Civil War, World War I, etc etc. What if instead our chapters went from invention to invention or economy to economy, peace to peace? What would things look like if most of our monuments were all about peacekeepers, good Samaritans, educators, farmers?

There were 51,000 casualties in three days at Gettysburg. This is no victory celebration site; this is a cemetery. By the end, the Civil War killed more Americans than any other war: 620,000 people.

Gettysburg is a museum of War – of the toll it takes

of the people who die

of the people who have to bury them

of the equipment they have to carry

of the equipment they don’t have

of the heat

of their heavy uniforms

of the photographers and journalists who witness their deaths

of the weight of decisions to make and mistakes that are made

of canteens collected and water not found

of regret and despair

of the whims of chance and who had the higher ground and who they couldn’t see in the dark

of medics and disease and amputations

 

of the women left behind and the families splintered.

of freedom fought for and yet freedom undelivered.

It’s all arranged chronologically, by the three days of the battle. We walk those three days. It’s a brilliantly designed museum. We feel those three days.

Sometimes you learn things by slowly absorbing them, bit by bit. And then, every now and then, you get a direct infusion to the brain. The Gettysburg Museum is a 2 x 4 to the head and heart: War is hell; freedom is worth fighting for; equality is not done.

At the end of the museum, there’s a continuously-running film that ends with the 50-year reunion at Gettysburg. President Wilson invited white veterans of both sides, and a famous handshake between white Union and Confederate soldiers took place. Black soldiers were relegated to setting up tents and cleaning latrines.

All those dead people, and this is where we are.

I read further and the story of the racism of the 1913 centennial is even worse. In 1963, at the 100th anniversary, President Johnson gave his Gettysburg address:

“The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him — we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil — when we reply to the Negro by asking, ‘Patience.’”

That was in 1963, but still equality is not done.

The next day, we did the outdoor tour of Gettysburg. You can hire a guide or you can follow along in your car and listen to Ranger Gwinn describe the sites on your smart phone.

Little light interlude because this is all so heavy:

I was very happy because Ranger Gwinn does a wonderful job at each site, but mostly: I got make-your-own waffles for breakfast! All through this trip, the hotel breakfasts have been reduced to grab-and-go breakfasts because of Covid. I love make-your-own waffles, but I have only been able to stare longingly at the dormant waffle makers. Not in Gettysburg! Waffles for breakfast!

We went on to Washington, D.C, where white flags at the Washington Monument memorialize American Covid deaths – 700,327 when we were there. As far as the eye could see. We’d passed the Civil War milestone.

No, Gettysburg was not a depressing element of our trip, but it was thoughtful, sobering, and unforgettable.

Road Trip First Stop: Logistics

When I take my urban infusion months, I live in a place. I become a resident, not a tourist. This trip was different (and not just because Tim was with me); it was a sightseeing trip. We stayed in hotels, not apartments. We ate out; we didn’t cook. I didn’t get a library card; Tim never unpacked his suitcase. We didn’t become “regulars” anywhere.

Becoming a resident means some days you just hang out. If the African-American History Museum is closed Mondays and Tuesdays, that’s okay because you’ll still be here on Wednesday; you don’t have to kill yourself to fit it in on Sunday.

We were going to be gone two months. We couldn’t do it. We cut it short. Tim said I could always stay on and do my “month,” but I’m tired. I want to lie in my own bed, sleep and wake on my own schedule. I want to do nothing for as many days as I feel like it, walk around the house in just a T-shirt. I am pooped. This New Yorker cartoon says it all.

 

By the end of this trip, I was traveling bench-to-bench. Time to go home, the bench at the end of the rainbow.

I did learn a few things. That’ll be today’s post. Then I’ll get to the good stuff.

Things I learned schlepping four bags across the country:

1. Never schlep four bags across the country. If you’re going to camp, go on a camping trip and bring a duffel of camping supplies. If you’re going to stay in hotels, bring a bag with clothes and stuff. Do not even think of bringing both at the same time.
   
   
2. If you’re going to schlep four bags, do it once. Don’t rent a car, take a plane, another car, switch to a train, take a taxi, back to a plane, onto an air train. With hotels in between. With staircases, streets, long hallways, and curbs in between.
   

Things I learned staying in hotels:

1. The people who write reviews of hotels online are very crabby people who seem to run into a lot of stained sheets, hair on pillows, worn-out carpet, and nasty check-in staff. I stayed in some of those places, and I liked them just fine (except for one, but I should have known better). Some places were even great. I’m going to give them 10s to offset all the crabby people.
   
   
2. Towels multiply. You start out with two of each towel. You leave them hanging up to use again, but when the room is serviced, there are now three washcloths and four big towels. By the time a week is out, there are zillions of towels. At least they aren’t pillows.
   
   
3. The pillow situation is out of control. Why would any bed require six pillows – plus decorative ones! – and no place to move them so you can actually sleep? I haven’t had to clear out a bed like that since Tim evicted my stuffed animals years ago.
   
   
   
   
   
4. I need to buy new towels. Hotel towels are fluffy and white and they absorb water. While I like the color of my towels at home – and have liked them for many, many years – I’ve learned that towels are not supposed to be threadbare in places. Unless you’re outfitting a hotel for a crabby hotel review.

Things I’ve learned about hot places:

1. The only reason to go to a hot place is to swim and loll around a pool or ocean. Otherwise, hot places are just hot. Hot, hot, hot.
   
   
2. If a hot place comes with beige-colored terrain, it is just a hot, hot, beige place. Avoid in the future.
   

Things I’ve learned about places with mask mandates:

1. Life is good! Things are open, people feel happy and comfortable! People walk around, pause before a doorway, reach into their pockets for their masks, put them on, and enter. Occasionally, they have to show a vaccination card, but that just means something wished-for is finally able to open (whether it’s live theater or a restaurant). It’s no big deal! (Thank you state of New Mexico, District of Columbia, and New York City!)
   
   
2. You cannot imagine how nuts the rest of the country thinks Alaskans are right now. Anti-mask lunatics in Alaska are spreading disease at crisis levels because – wait for this – they think it’s unbearable to put a little mask on. And in the process, they have to trivialize the murders of the Holocaust by comparing that little mask to genocide? Really? Theirs are not protests, they’re tantrums. With consequences for all of us.

But I got to vacation in Adult Land – good stuff next post!