What Got Left Behind
May 31, 2015
And in the beginning, there were no roads. That’s why he was in a boat when he saw the horses walking on water. Beaver Lake in the Kawartha Highlands flows, then dribbles, into Lake Catchacoma. In 1954, Pearson’s Landing was on the west shore of Catchacoma and that’s where we left our car. To get to our cottage at the eastern end of Beaver Lake, you had use a boat – in our case a tiny white wooden dory with a three-and-a-half horsepower motor. Going full blast it took us at least three quarters of an hour to get there.
An e-mail Report I sent to some friends—obviously written before my mother died.
April 16, 2015
How’s your mother? Mine’s 93. Her days of photographing a mushroom fairy ring in our back yard are long gone. But my mother is compos mentis or as she’d say in her rural Ontario vernacular, she has all her marbles.
My mother’s been in bed six weeks in and out of pain (back), still on the gin.
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Notes from my recent trip to London
April 5, 2015
Victoria & Albert Museum
Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty exhibition. Fucking amazing. Read the link to the more lady-like Guardian revue.But keep in mind the exhibition is spectacle enhanced by science, lighting, weird bits of birds and sea shells and movie music like Handel’s Sarabande (Suite No 4 in D Minor, HWV 437), which was the theme for Stanley Kubrick’s movie Barry Lyndon. link
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Don’t make me angry
March 8, 2015
Hello someone there in Metro. As you already know today is International Women’s Day. I saw your sign when I went grocery shopping this morning.
You completely miss the point. I don’t want flowers. I want a raise. I want more women in Parliament. I want more women in positions of power.
I notice you only have one woman on your Management Team of 14 (Vice President, Human Resources). You should have at least six more women on that team. Of the 14 people on your Board of Directors, you only have five women directors. You should have at least two more directors.
Your use of International Women’s Day to sell flowers is offensive. It’s not a greeting card holiday.
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Ferguson: Act 2
March 6, 2015
The United States Justice Department released information concerning their investigation into what has been happening in Ferguson, Missouri. At last.
So for all you people who were, or are, sceptical when I talk about the racism I saw while working in African American churches…I told you so. Lift your heads up out of the sand. And don’t dismiss what Canada still does to our aboriginal people.
And who were those white guys wearing police vests and helmets with their dirty well-worn old jeans and sneakers pointing their guns at the black woman on the ground. Have a look at the photo on page A3 of the Globe and Mail, Thursday 5, March, 2015.
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Hidden Savannah, Georgia
March 3, 2015
A couple of years ago, I travelled to the American south working on a documentary series about African American Churches. I especially looked forward to our five churches in Savannah, Georgia.
The city sounds just great in their brochures. But Savannah has a pretend surface. It’s one big historic landmark, with about 1100 designated buildings protected from demolition. I think they used a colour chart to co-ordinate the paint on all the old houses. And sure, those amazing squares are rimmed with hedges of blowsy flowering azaleas and hanging moss. “Very pretty…very pretty,” said the visitor.
But don’t be taken in, look closer. The building used for auctions of human beings in the 1800s borders one of these grassy squares. Right beside that square, sits The First African Baptist Church. It pulls the back story together. First African owns the nondescript auction building that isn’t on my tourist map. The church is and it’s exploited, knowingly, by the pastor.
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Montgomery, Selma, & Gee’s Bend
February 10, 2015
I wanted to write this before February 1, the beginning of Black History month. I didn’t make it. And I still haven’t seen the movie Selma. This is what I experienced in that part of Alabama in 2008. It made a mark.
Woman: “What were they like?”
Me: “I was the they.”
WELCOME TO ALABAMA
I went to the American south as a naïve white woman, thick as a brick. I knew about the marches, the murders, Rosa Parks and I’d heard the words “Bus Boycott” and “Freedom Riders.” But I had no depth of knowledge, just a bit of well-meaning politically correct empathy — until we arrived at Hutchinson Missionary Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.
Hutchinson church was bombed in 1956. The church’s pastor is Rev. G.W.C. Richardson. In his teenage years, the Klan had beaten, stabbed and pushed him, unconscious, into a river to drown. The Klan left him for dead but his belt loop caught on a tree branch and Rev. Richardson survived.
Fifty-two years later, in January 2008, I was in Montgomery working on a TV documentary about Hutchinson church. Just a few years before, a teenage boy had been stabbed and killed on the front steps of the church. The victim was black, the thugs white. The Canadians in our crew where shocked. No, they were scared.
The seniors we’d come to interview were known as the Forgotten Foot Soldiers of the Movement and Voices of the Boycott. The Bus Boycott has ended, The Struggle hasn’t.
When Gwen Patton was nine-years-old, she made her first move against racism. She spent summers with her grandparents in Montgomery, Alabama. One day Gwen was in the local drug store, had just paid three cents for a cup of water, and sat herself down at the counter. The clerk called her a “pickaninny” and ordered her to get up. Gwen looked at the clerk, poured her water on the counter, and left… slowly. “That was my first conscious protest,” Gwen told a local reporter.
Heritage Donation for the Common Folk
January 7, 2015
“When she (chef & author Julia Child) moved to a retirement complex a few years ago, her Cambridge, Mass., kitchen went to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington where it’s now on display, complete with kitty-cat fridge magnets.”
John Allemang, Globe & Mail
Clever Julia. No need to sort, sigh, pitch or pack. I’m giving our house to the Royal Ontario Museum. They can move the whole house, fridge magnets and all, or run it as a satellite exhibit: The House On Shaw Street — under the auspices of the Royal Ontario Museum. (Painting: Peter Maher, 2003)
This generous donation includes a three-story brick house constructed in 1896 by a builder who couldn’t think ahead to leave space for window mouldings. Mantelpieces are from the Home Depot of the late 1800s. The house sways a bit in a high wind or if a bus goes by – but buses only pass when they’re diverted from Ossington, and the road work there is sure to finish soon.
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A TRUE STORY WITH A FAIRY TALE ENDING… THAT’S ALSO TRUE… & IT HAPPENED ONE RECENT CHRISTMAS
December 18, 2014
Lucy came to us through a friend of a friend. We needed someone to care for Maeve, our newborn baby, and Lucy needed work. She had cared for her mother who had recently died of cancer. Lucy was in her early 50s, her English was sparse, our Portuguese non-existent. I bought us an English/Portuguese dictionary, […]
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November 1 — the Day of the Dead. Family Humour seems appropriate here.
November 28, 2014
As I sit here in my office, The Family Morgue, my sister Debby’s ashes come to mind. Probably because they’re sitting 10 feet away in an early Canadiana jam cupboard that was once hers. Now her ashes are about to be joined by my father Eric’s. It’s times like right now when you need an uplifting story.
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