For the Sunday Edition

Hello Michael,
I was listening to the iPod version of your story about the plastic bag in the tree outside your house, and your observations about the need for people to cut back on their use of plastic bags. For several years my wife and I have used cloth bags when we shop for groceries. In fact, I can’t recall the last time groceries or other shopping purchases were brought home in a plastic bag, and as we have no dog, there is no need for us to have plastic bags on hand for scooping purposes although I will confess to using them for cleaning out the cat litter used by our two cats. All things being equal, we really ought to be a household pretty much devoid of plastic bags. And yet. On the inside of the pantry door we have one of those tube-shaped containers sold by IKEA designed to store plastic bags, and that tube is always crammed full to over-flowing. Every time I take a bag out to clean the cat litter, or on rare occasions to dispose of wet garbage, I expect to see the level of bags in the tube drop. But it doesn’t. Like the storied magic purse that produces an unlimited amount of coins, this tube apparently generates its own endless supply of plastic bags, mocking our attempts at eliminating the wicked things from our lives. Perhaps – as with the question of where do all the vanished socks go when they disappear from the clothes dryer - the answer to the question of where do plastic bags go when they are blow down the street or out of people’s trees is that they mysteriously wind up in tubes such as ours all over the country to continue their malignant presence in our consumer driven world. I would love to get rid of the tube, but I confess I’m a little afraid of it now. If I didn’t have the tube, where else in my house would all those plastic bags show up?Please help. The cats are doing the best they can, but it’s not enough.
Otte Rosenkrantz
London, Ontario

The Muffin Man and Canadian Road Rage

[The soundtrack for this blog, BTW, is "Good Day" by Luce.]

I take some pride in my driving record. It’s not perfect by any stretch, but I have – touch wood – so far managed to avoid serious accidents and ruinous speeding tickets. But it’s also true that there are times when I could perhaps be a little more attentive to my driving than I am. This was brought home to me a few days ago when I encountered what felt like a quintessential case of Canadian road rage on my way to work.
After an early morning fill-up at a gas station I had to pull back into two-lane traffic close to an intersection. An Urban Assault Vehicle (SUV) had stopped to let my little Saturn in, and I nosed into traffic, unable to see very much because of the looming vehicle blocking my view. As I eased into the left turn lane, thinking I was free and clear, I heard the squeal of tires. I glanced up in the rear-view, and saw a rusted out old Chev slide up behind me. In the split second that can seem an eternity before an accident I thought for sure he was going to hit me, and braced myself for the impact. But it didn’t come. Fortunately the young man in the black toque at the wheel had hit the brakes just in time.
Much relieved, I waved to him to show my gratitude and by way of an apology, but he wasn’t having it. He was seriously pissed, and while I watched in amazement he rolled down his window and lobbed… a muffin… at me. Having apparently just come from the Tim Horton’s up the street he had, in his moment of road rage, reached for the first thing he could use to vent his frustration at me, and that thing was a Tim’s frosted something-or-other. I know it was frosted because of the streak it left on my back window.
When I told the story to an American friend later in the day he doubled up in laughter and pointed out how very Canadian the experience had been: road rage Canadian style, with a breakfast muffin as the weapon of retaliation. “Had that happened in Los Angeles or Texas, you might be having bullet holes in your car plugged, instead of cleaning whipped cream off your windshield.”
All I can say is that I’m just happy it wasn’t a “fruit explosion”.

To tell the truth.

In rebuttal to Paul Berton’s editorial. “This Paper is not a Promotions Vehicle.” Saturday, February 9th, 2008.


Paul Berton’s editorial in last Saturday’s Free Press was very thought-provoking, and answered a question that has been on my mind for a long time: to what degree, if any, is The London Free Press a vehicle to be used by the city and by local businesses and organizations to promote themselves?
The headline to Berton’s column suggests the answer: “This paper is not a promotions vehicle.” And yet in his opening paragraph Berton says: “Is it the job of this newspaper to be a booster for London? Many journalists would say no; I would say yes, but we can only go so far.” Although Berton does go on to qualify his statement, the very fact that he would suggest that it is the newspaper’s responsibility to, in any degree, act as an vehicle of what used to be called “boosterism” is unsettling.
To be sure, the nature of journalism has undergone some significant changes in the last couple of decades, especially since the advent of the Internet and what is being called “citizen journalism.” Print journalism – the oldest medium - like all media outlets, is finding itself having to compete for advertising dollars with not only the more traditional media such as radio and television, but with the Internet, which is increasingly replacing all these forms of media, as consumers of news turn to online sources for everything from breaking news and quick updates, to in-depth backgrounders and analysis.
But one hopes that these changes will not engender a complete departure from the role of journalists as reporters of truth, no matter how unpleasant it may occasionally be for those who buy the advertisements or who are in positions of political power and influence. The Canadian Association of Journalists’ Statement of Principles makes a point of noting, in its preamble, that, among other things, “It is our privilege and duty to seek and report the truth as we understand it… speak for the voiceless and encourage civic debate to build our communities and serve the public interest.” Under the section “The Public Interest” the Principles expand on the latter point by clearly stating that “The right to freedom of expression and of the press must be defended against encroachment from any quarter, public or private, because we serve democracy and the public interest.”
Codes of ethics and statements of principles are lofty and often seem almost impossible to adhere to, but it’s especially important for journalists to maintain their impartiality precisely because they do serve the cause of democracy and the public interest. The CAJ Principles enlarge on this important aspect in the section “Act Independently” by pointing out that a journalist’s responsibility to democracy and the reporting of the truth sometimes “conflicts with the wishes of various public and private interests, including advertisers, governments, news sources, and, on occasion, with our duty and obligation to an employer.” The Principles, however, do not excuse any favourable treatment being given to any group, no matter how influential, and states in clear and unequivocal terms that “We will not give favoured treatment to advertisers and special interests. We must resist their efforts to influence the news.”
If a newspaper does not impartially and fairly report all the news that’s fit to print, regardless of who may withdraw their political support or advertising dollars, then it becomes reduced to being little more than a publisher of advertising flyers, propaganda and deliberately inflammatory and misleading rhetoric, and surely we already have enough of that.

In Search of a Soul Review

In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the New Canadian War Museum. By Raymond Moriyama. Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver/Toronto. 2006.

Canadians have long been in some confusion about how they feel about war. We take a lot of pride in the performance and reputation of our troops in the First and Second World War, and we’re proud of our country’s international reputation as both brokers and keepers of peace. We are all in favour of supporting the UN, and we are also in favour of having our troops go to war-torn parts of the globe to help people restore order, set up schools, purify drinking water and so on.
We’re not, however, as keen on the part where our troops have to kill people or risk being killed themselves, and we are certainly not happy about incidents such as the behaviour of the Canadian Airborne Regiment in Somalia in March of 1993 when Shidane Arone, a 16-year-old Somali youth, was tortured and beaten to death by members of the Regiment which was subsequently disbanded. The current role of Canadian troops in Afghanistan and the casualties they have suffered are also not sitting easily with a lot of Canadians.
And yet we attend memorial services in record numbers, and feel a very deep, national desire to remember and honour the history of our armed forces.
Our national ambivalence about war, and – Somalia notwithstanding - our pride in the history of our armed forces, is reflected in the creation of the new Canadian War Museum that was completed in Ottawa in May, 2005, in time for the sixtieth anniversary of VE Day.
In the introduction to his book, In Search of a Soul: Designing and Realizing the new Canadian War Museum, architect and author Raymond Moriyama reflects on this sense of, if not discomfort, then uncertainty, that Canadians often feel when contemplating Canada at war as he described his feelings about taking on the task of designing and creating the museum:
“I struggled between happiness and frustration. In the process, memories of my first foray into architecture… emerged from the deep crevices of my mind. Seeking solace from the degradation of life in an [Canadian] internment camp, I designed and secretly built a tree house on the side of Little Mountain, an elongated hill next to the Slocan River in the shadow of the Rockies. Remarkably, this spot shares many similarities with the war museum site in Ottawa. However, my tree house was not a museum – it became my sanctuary during wartime.”

What a fine, Canadian irony it is that a child of a wartime internment camp of Japanese Canadians should eventually create what is both museum and monument to Canada at war.
All Canadians would do well to visit this remarkable structure, and to reflect on its meaning. The building emerges eastward from the ground, with textured concrete that makes it look both like a bunker, and like the prow of a battleship clad in copper to match the rooftops of other public buildings in the area. The small windows on the bow spell out lest we forget in both English and French using Morse code. The copper used on the interior of the building is from the roof of the Library of Parliament which was refurbished in 2004.
As he remembers the journey from the government’s decision to replace the old museum on Sussex Drive in Ottawa and the invitation sent out to architects to submit a proposal, to the completion of the project in 2003, Moriyama takes the reader on a detailed and often emotional journey of this important and lasting project. The book is gratifyingly filled with colour photographs that enhance the detailed and fascinating account of every meticulous step in the building of the museum.
Included in these colour plates are images of some of the exhibits, and images of landscape features and war images that supplied much of the inspiration for the highly unusual design of the museum. Some of the innumerable challenges faced by Moriyama and his large team is summed up in his observation that
“This vitally important content [the exhibits] requires safe storage, strict environmental controls and protection from vandalism and flooding. At the same time, the museum that houses it must be able to display this content in an accessible, appropriate, enjoyable and educational manner. The heavy artefacts – artillery, vehicles, airplanes and a fifty-four tonne Centurion tank – require not only a substantial volume of space, but also special floor loading and ceiling supports. The design of appropriate displays that respected the unique and precious qualities of every artefact, from paintings and medals to love letters and uniforms, was one of the most challenging tasks.”

The result of Moriyama’s experiences, genius, and clear understanding of the importance of his work are carefully detailed in this insightful and fascinating book of the creation of the Canadian War Museum. Most of all, of course, the building itself stands as a monument to not only Moriyama’s vision, but to his country’s struggle to come to terms with its own military place in the world.

OK, so I buried the lead in this one – sue me.

It’s Saturday, and I am once again hurtling down the bicycle path on my rollerblades, cruising along by the river in my usual near suicidal out-of-control fashion, arms flailing, people leaping out of my way iPod ear buds firmly screwed into my ears, pumping out the kind of motivational music I tend to think of as road trip music – ZZ Top, CCR, Rolling Stones, BB King, that sort of thing.
I spent the morning at yard sales looking for more useless junk to clutter up the garage, when I saw a cd, and not just any cd. No, this was Family Style by the Vaughan Brothers from 1990. The minute I get home, and before I headed out on my rollerblades I loaded it up on my iPod. The album includes the song Tick Tock, one of my absolute favourites.
So as I swing onto the path, past the soccer games and the long line of parked minivans, I have Tick Tock blaring in my head… remember?

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

Still sends a shiver up my spine.

“One night while sleeping in my bed I had a beautiful dreamThat all the people of the world got together on the same wavelength,and began helping one anotherNow in this dream, universal love was the theme of the dayPeace and understanding and it happened this way.”

Well, we didn’t do so well with that, we Babyboomers, did we? We had great ideas about bringing peace and understanding to the people of the world and of helping others. But other things got in the way, didn’t they? The paradigm changed, as so many of us loved to say… What became important was not so much peace in the world as gated neighbourhoods, lots of technology, and SUV’s to ferry the kids to the mall. We got derailed, and things have gone from bad to worse.

“The sick, the hungry, had smiles on their faces,the tired and the homeless had family all aroundThe streets and the cities were all beautiful places,and the walls came tumblin' down.”

Well, not so much – what we did was put up a lot of walls, physical and otherwise, rather than tearing them down – and don’t throw the Berlin Wall at me – that was just good economics.

And the environment? We were going to do something about that too… All those environmental movements and the organic food co-ops and the local produce farmers’ markets were all started in the 1960, for the love of monkeys! These movements are more than 40 years old!! And we still insist on having fresh fruit in our grocery stores in January, and damn the environmental costs of shipping it half way around the world so it can get to our tables in a perfectly ripe, spotless condition.

“I had a vision of blue skies from sea to shining sea,all the trees in the forest stood strong and tall againEverything was clean and pretty and safe for you and me,the worst of enemies became the best of friends.”

It’s embarrassing, isn’t it? And we’re all patting ourselves on our backs for changing light bulbs and “recycling” plastic shopping back by using them to pick up our dog’s poop… future generations will be so grateful.

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

But, as I ricochet under the overpass and narrowly miss a couple of bicyclists and a tree, I wonder if there is any chance our kids will do better. Although we failed miserably in our own promises and pious proclamations, perhaps we did at least plant a seed with our kids that the time has come to do better. It’s too late to stop the coming damage, but if our kids will do even half of what we said we were going to do, there may be some hope still for a better world for their children.

“People of the world all had it together,had it together for the boys and the girlsChildren of the world look forward to a future.”

Then I remember a picture and story in a recent edition if the Toronto Star. The photograph shows my son in a small crowd at a farmer’s market, one Canada’s first two certified local farmers’ markets dedicated to selling locally grown produce only, and not reselling food from around the world in the guise of being locally grown. Seeing my son there, obviously keen on being part of this vitally important concept gives me some hope that maybe the promise of the future will be better in the hands of his generation than it was in mine.

“Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' awayRemember thatTick tock, tick tock, tick tock people, time's tickin' away”

I land in the grass… safe and only a little bruised… happy that this patch of natural green hasn’t been paved over yet – the pavement really bites.

Postcard From the City

Postcard From the City

There she sits, in the seat across from me on the train to Toronto. She’s of an indeterminate age: anywhere between 35 and 50, I would think – maybe even a little older. She got on the train the station after mine, carrying only a large shoulder bag, and without looking around sat down in the seat opposite me. She looked out the window for a few minutes as the train pulled out of the station, then reached into her purse, pulled out a Styrofoam bowl of some sort of pasta salad for which she, according to the label, had paid $2.50 as some local farmers’ market, and proceeded to eat a little of it with a plastic fork. After a while she replaced the bowl in her purse, zipped closed the bag, arranged herself in the seat, carefully avoiding crowding those around her, put her head back and fell almost instantly into a deep sleep.
She is not a large woman, but she looks strong, compact and solid. Her clothes – a pair of khaki Capri pants, running shoes and a dark green polo shirt – are clean, but worn. Both the pants and shirt show the early signs of fraying a little at the edges. Her arms are crossed over her chest, showing the muscled forearms and hands. The skin on the arms is still firm, but starting to show some wrinkles close to the elbows; there are a few white marks here and there that look like small scars or scratches.
Her hands are clean, but clearly use to hard work: the finger nails are very short and unpainted. She wears no rings. Her knuckles are large, but not red as one might expect from hands that spend a lot of time in water, cleaning or doing dishes. These are more the hands of someone who might work with tools of some kind.
The sleeping body radiates exhaustion. Her head rests on the back of the seat in a position that looks awkward and uncomfortable, yet she sleeps soundly through the various stops, the rolling and jerking of the train, the coming and going of passengers. There are lines on her face, but they are not pronounced yet. Her skin is sallow as of someone who spends a lot of time indoors and who is not getting much sleep. She wears no makeup, yet her hair, brittle and dry though it is, has been dyed a dark auburn, but it is surely only a cover for what is almost certainly grey or greying hair.
In the depth of her sleep, her mouth has fallen open a little, and she breathes regularly and slowly without any fitful moves or sounds. She remains in almost exactly the same position for the nearly two hours she’s on the train.
As we roll into our final destination, she awakens without any of the startled and somewhat self-conscious behaviour so common to people who have fallen asleep in public. She merely sits up, runs her hand over her face, collects her hand bag, and with a look out the window as if double-checking that we have, in fact, arrived, she stands up, joins the line to get off the train, and disappears into the crown on the platform, and into the rest of her life.

Riding the bus

I wonder why it is that people riding the bus try so incredibly hard to as appear mean and solitary creatures. The world is surely a grim and unpleasant enough place without making it worse by appearing to hate those around us.

Today, I was lucky enough to be part of a brief moment on the bus when that shell of petulant, sullen resentment that seems to radiate from most of the passengers was briefly dispelled. There was a young man with very little mobility in a motorized wheelchair who was on the bus, and when it came time for him to get ready to get off, he turned as best he could to me and asked me to put the hood on his jacket up for him to protect him from the rain that was starting to fall outside.

I had my briefcase and umbrella with me, and was reading a book at the time, and didn’t want to leave it all on my seat while I got up to help him, knowing that the lurching of the bus would send it all over the place. So I handed the book to the young lady on one side of me, and the umbrella to the woman on my other side, and went to tie up the guy’s hood.

When I was done and went to sit down again, collecting my book and umbrella, there was a moment when I noticed that several people around me were smiling, some at the guy in the chair, some at me, and others at the people who had been pressed into service to help me. The spell of gloom and irritability was briefly dispelled.

Then the guy in the chair left, the seat, which has been put out of the way to make room for him, was put back, the bus moved on, and as the usual pall of sulky antipathy settled back over the passenger, I reflected with regret that things had returned to normal.

But for a moment there, we had, in fact, all smiled at one another.