butterfly dream

...the grass is riz, wonder where my pictures is. Well, wonder no longer, picspam lovers, because the other day Shoemom and I discovered Edwards Gardens, a beautiful civic parkland nestled up in North York. One of those old estates turned public gardens, which just parenthetically I think is a terrific way to maintain your legacy. Not only do you get to be thought of as public-spirited, but also as having really good taste.

Anyway, thanks to dear old Rupert Ed., Torontonians have an absolutely amazing amount of stroll-ready nature, right there below the Ford dealership. Between all the Olde Englishe tidiness and the scampering fauna is created the (slightly unsettling) feeling you've stumbled onto open auditions for the latest Disney feature. Ducks on the pond, squirrels racing through the branches, chipmunks scurrying over rocks, robins and cardinals singing from the eaves and - would you believe - a plump little muskrat trotting busily down the path. I love muskrats; I've never seen anything that looks so much like a stuffed animal of itself.

So between this walk and a couple others, I was inspired to create a little Welcome Spring catalogue: 
( Pretty pictures under the cut... )

Haven't been to the Metro Reference Library in ages, so decided to swing by tonight. As an aside, I really can't see why I don't do same more often. 'Food for thought' is a concept that I take seriously, and the Metro Ref is the equivalent of a black-tie banquet; all that lovely knowledge spread forth to be sampled, savoured or flat-out snarfed up, just as the mood strikes.

However, this post isn't about my contented daze - it covers the line that snapped me out of it. In re: Michael Landon and Little House on the Prairie, a TVGuide tome claimed that, roughly, 'He showed millions of viewers what a happy loving family could be..."

Ah...huh. I do not wish to pile it on the man any higher than the six feet already manifest, but come ON, now. As I think even the most sentimental of us can admit, this is feting a guy whose concept of loving family happiness mostly involved exploring the ways it deepens wounds and heightens suffering. On this show, if you love someone, welcome to a nigh-endless parade of drug addiction, blindness, alcoholism, abuse, rape, miscarriage, abandonment, menopause, the death of a child/wife/parent/dog, crop failures, devastating fires, loathsome plagues...you get the idea. It was family togetherness as primal scream therapy, is what it was. And it usually wasn't even that subtle ("Say it! My brother is going to die! Say it! MY-BROTHER-IS-GOING-TO-DIE!")

This started me thinking about TV families generally, and why, the more they insisted on this kind of realism ('gripping drama' was the phrase usually used) the less I, scion of a highly *ahem* realistic family, could actually relate.

It could be that the Shoe clan just wasn't that interesting even in dysfunction, a distinct possibility. Then again...it could be that, overall, real families in crisis generally aren't particularly exciting - speaking from the objective dramatic POV, at any rate. It's been my experience that people in RL tend to paper over their broken bits as much as possible - and by natural extension, their families' - simply because when you're in this kind of a situation your ultimate goal, your consuming desire, is to just be normal. Or anyway as close to it as you can possibly get, in public if nothing else.
Mind, there's always the chance that you'll grow up to develop a fascination with 50's radio comedians partly because they seem so blissfully average. But on the whole, not so much with the Huge Honking Traumatic Deal it all seemed to be on your Little Houses and Family-s and even The Waltons there for awhile. I mean, of course it often is a huge deal, it's just...well, you know. You deal with it, and part of that is you look for a nice escape on the TV, and instead there's John-Boy angsting over some ruddy traditional rite of Walton manhood or another. Just shoot the damn deer already, Freakish Mole Boy.

This in turn has got me realising a bit wistfully that I'll never really know normal, at least not in terms of family... at least. Is it kind of weird that, seriously, one of my chief interests re: Bob & Ray is playing around with the idea of them as average husbands and fathers? You know, contented patriarchs of their own little clans, wherein dads love their wives, and are kind and wise and understanding to their kids rather than forcing it to be the other way round, and everybody has supper together in the evenings, and it's all very (I'm assuming) sweater-intensive?

Yes, before you rush to the comments box, I know deep down that it was never really like that, for anyone. B&R had eleven kids between them at the height of the Baby Boom, I know damn well it couldn't have been even close to like that for them. Anyway, not after 1964.
Also, I should mention that I feel pretty silly, whining like this over comparatively minor issues. Shoedad wasn't a bad guy; he was just far too damaged himself to ever provide real emotional support to anyone else. As for the things that broke him...well, they're the stuff mainly of understood silence save the occasional loud accusation at the end of a drunken evening. I didn't say that there weren't times when a huge cathartic screaming fit wouldn't be welcome...only that it's unlikely.

Instead, I revel in the fact that I'm a ferociously independent woman who's learned strength in ways many people never will. And...I daydream, sometimes.

Toronto, my beloved city, is 175 today - and here are 175 reasons, courtesy the hometown Star, why that's a Very Good Thing.

Which also seems like a very decent segue into a progress report on the Great Shoe Migration of '09: The moving part is still on. Really, we swear.

However. As it turns out, thinking seriously about leaving a place, and leaving the people, are two distinctly different things. Witness congregations are static within a given area, rather like a Catholic parish; once you move out of the [preaching] 'territory', that's it, whole new congregation. Sure, there's nothing saying you can't keep up with your friends anyway, but...well, you know how that works. "We'll have to get together real soon!" "Oh, I know, I've been so busy!" *trots happily away, never to be seen again*

So basically for the last couple weeks it's been talk excitedly about moving, go to meeting, feel crushed at thought of parting, talk a little less excitedly, go to meeting...lather, rinse, repeat. The lack of excitement was getting to elephant-in-the-room levels - and if you'll recall, these are very small rooms - before we finally both broke down last night and admitted that taking everything into the balance, we weren't ready to give up what we have just yet. She would rather take more frequent days right out in the country over a compromise position somewhere in suburbia, and frankly I don't fancy complicating my commute the way I'd have to anyway.

On the other hand, the lack of space is still a major issue. I do honestly long for a bedroom, with a bed, which isn't separated from the kitchen only by a low counter that the cats keep knocking things off all night. For that matter, Shoemom wants a living room that she doesn't have to worry about explaining away all my tchotchkes every time she has adults over - much less the nephews. Some of them are glass.

Thus, new plan. Friends in a nice-but-affordable old building nearby mentioned the other week that there was a two-bedroom coming up there. Shoemom loves the friends' apartment, is ecstatic about the tree-intensive location (it backs out on to the huge historic Mount Pleasant Cemetery - very quiet neighbors!) and just generally 'has the same connexion I felt when I saw this [current] place for the first time'. And we've been here five years. Kitchen's a lot smaller in this new place, but not-futon sleeping place....mmmm. Also, walk-in closet. I feel so shallow, but it's true.

So we're all set to initiate paperwork. Friends are good buddies with the super, so things are looking...gahhh, don't want to get too excited about this in case it doesn't happen...let's leave it at that, shall we? Will report developments as they come in....

....eeeeeeeeeee i hope i hope i hope...

Sat up with a cranky computer Friday night and most of Saturday (barring an unpleasantly cold and dingy foray into preaching service). Pages won't load, downloads crawl along then corrupt. 'Course, I only discover that last bit after I uninstall current antivirus program, because I thought it had been disabled by a killer virus.

Got a sick nervous headache.

Dragged self - in a medicated stupor - to a friend's card party anyway, after friend made wistful noises about uneven tables when I called to cancel.

Resumed computer ministrations immediately on getting home, wound up awake at 2:30 AM trying for the literal fourteenth time to get fresh antivirus to download.

Finally fell asleep to docudrama about the Boston Strangler, had horrible nightmares.

Sunday morning, woke up early, antivirus suddenly downloads like a dream. Just happy enough that I don't have worse problems to avoid punching holes in monitor with shards of juice glass.

Promptly get into huge fight with Shoesis over the usual random failure to respect. In the middle of it all, Shoemom suddenly bursts into tears, on startled questioning confesses she's in a mood anyway because she's sick and tired of city life. We apply usual therapy - ie., take off for Niagara. One thing leads to another, and we're discussing moving as far out to the country as a transit commute will extend.

Arrive home all excited, hop on Net...discover that despite being literally just down the highway from each other, the area we want to move to and the area I work in aren't connected by transit.

Oh, well. At least Shoesis eventually apologised. Eventually.

Musings on Teh Inauguration coming soon, I promise.

But I just remembered, I did do something mildly interesting this past weekend: went to the ROM (Royal Ontario Museum) for the first time post-reno. A jewelry-designer friend wanted to see the diamond exhibit, and her membership includes a guest, and I am just generally very good at being the type of person benevolent friends take to the museum.

So...the reno. To be specific, the Michael Lee-Chin Crystal; or to be even more specific, 'that huge ugly blister that's now stuck to that gorgeous old building', as friend's husband put it. Can't really disagree. While the concept is clearly supposed to be 'organic growth fused to city setting', the net result is more like 'explosion at the storm window factory somebody tried to contain with random weatherstripping'. 

Inside the crystal sections, the tone-deafness continues. Where you would expect sharpness and light, an enhancement of the museum's intellectual power, there is instead flat white...drywall? As in, they were so anxious to start making money off this thing they decided against finishing off the walls? Sure looks like it, is all I am saying. Occasionally, you can glance through a haphazard shred of storm window down onto: yet another condo build. This does not discourage mental snarks about pretentious Torontonians.

(Weirdly enough, the only place the new interior works is the renovated Hall of Dinosaurs, clearly where all the planning budget went. The ancient skeletons really pop against the white and light).

The diamond exhibit was fairly cool. Albeit I had been expecting more romantic history surrounding famously sordid gems and fewer...er...carbon filaments. A similar exhibit on pearls I'd seen some years ago managed to tie their formation, the rarity of their perfection, into a marvellous tour of power and prestige down through the centuries.

With the diamonds - thank you De Beers, I suppose - they jump straight from 'yup, really hard and clear' to Cartier and Harry Winston and carat-encrusted leopards with emerald eyes, all that sort of thing. The diamond as symbol of conspicuous consumption is a powerful story; but it's also, eventually, something of an imaginative dead end. All told I have added three valuable bits to my store of Life Experiences:

1.) Large, flawless pink diamonds do indeed look like 'a deuced drop of pink bubbly'. I read that phrase in a mystery once and have always been charmed by it. Good to have confirmation.

2.) It is possible to get some truly lovely effects with diamonds - picking out a snakeskin pattern, for example, or enhancing the delicate grace of a swirl or ribbon form. Lush forms are not served quite as well, or rather are served too well. And a life-size diamond-encrusted rose is over-the-top to the point of inducing mild nausea.

3.) In medieval portraits, diamonds  - and gosh weren't there a lot! - were invariably painted black, 'with a flash of white along the edge'. I will now not embarrass myself, should I ever run into an art historian. Here I'd been wondering all this time at the medieval nobility's dedication to onyx when there were all those diamonds available.

OK, you asked for it...What? Well, look, just play along for awhile, could you?

Seriously, the camera has been my constant companion the last couple days, and I have to say the results have been pretty encouraging. I mean, even if I'm not a pro just yet, at least I won't be embarrassing myself in comparison with the pages of...uh...well, Better Homes & Gardens, mostly. Hey, it's not my fault I don't live in the South of France, OK? If Hbc had a branch office I would be all about the sun-drenched vineyards and lush...um, what else do they have out there besides vineyards, anyway? Anybody know? Is it important?

At any rate, in my 'umble experience there's very little to compete with a lazy Saturday-afternoon stroll through Leaside, the Toronto neighborhood just to the east of mine. It's a tiny perfect city oasis of lovingly-restored old brick houses set against soft, almost dreamlike spills of green (clik any pic to enlarge):
 




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The Toronto Transit Commission is on strike. And I am angry.

No, check that - I'm furious. Furious that a bunch of complacently overpaid doofuses can basically throw a tantrum that leaves thousands of their fellow human beings helpless and stranded (and in a not insignificant number of cases, drunk) on downtown streets at Friday midnight.

No, I wasn't one of them; I happen to have a 9-5 weekday job, and no plans that would've taken me into the outskirts. First I heard of a strike I was being shuttled around early-morning service in Shoemom's Kia.

Thing is, though, among TTC riders, I'm in the minority. I know this because the last time there was a major weekday strike I was working shifts at the bookstore. Only a quirk of scheduling meant 28-year-old me wasn't tripping along freakin' Yonge and Dundas at 11pm.

Supposedly, this time 'round the union bosses violated their own promise to give 48-hours' notice of any strike action because they were concerned for the safety of their own in the interval. Uh-huh. If I'm the ticket taker at, say, Runnymede at 9pm Friday night, and I'm hearing this rationale to start kicking people off the trains at midnight (literally - TTC subway and most bus service ordinarily goes offline at 2:30 am, meaning these poor victimised fragments of humanity whom we should all rally behind in a spirit of blue-collar solidarity actually stopped the trains and told people to get off, young, old, handicapped, what-have you, regardless of how rough the neighborhood or how far from their destination)...yeah, the first thing going thru my head as I face that mob is "Ooh, such caring, thoughtful leaders we have!" You betcha.