The Already and the Not Yet

I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. We don't actually own the flat yet. We have had an offer accepted, and a genial bank has given us a mortgage, and there is a "Sorry, Sold" sign on one of the river-facing windows. Our solicitor is working with the seller's solicitor for an earlier move-in date. The seller lives out of town, so this shouldn't be a problem.

All the same, I have been sitting on the stairs to our new flat. It is on the second floor (i.e. on the first floor by European counting) of a two-storey row house built in 1930. It is accessible by a wide concrete staircase, which leads up to a west-facing front door. There are five windows facing west over the gardens (two in the kitchen, one in the bathroom, one over the front door, and one in the front bedroom) and three, I think, facing the river across the street (two in the sitting-room and one I the back bedroom). For some reason, the flat has been demarcated on the west side by a coat of reddish-ochre paint. B.A. likes this and says it is authentic.

This morning's was my third visit to the flat since we bought put in an offer for it. My purpose was to see where in the garden the sun falls in the morning. Yesterday I dropped by to see where the sun fell in the afternoon. The raised beds at the back of the garden, under the apple tree, seem to be always in shade.

Yes, we have (or will have) an apple tree, and the Lady Downstairs told us on our first visit that it gives good eating apples. The Lady Downstairs has a wider strip of garden than we do, but no fruit trees. The departed tenant of our flat used to give her apples, she hinted, and we promised that if our bid was successful, we would keep the apples coming.

The apple tree clinched the deal for me (does anyone ever say 'clinched 'anymore?), to be honest. My first surprise was that the two bedroom flat came with a private garden at all. For over a year, off and on, I have been looking at affordable flats in Edinburgh and environs, and it never dawned on me that one might conceivable come with a private garden. A shared concrete chessboard with laundry lines stretched across it, yes. A sad strip of grass covered in cigarette butts, certainly. But a private garden, no.

For the first time since my Mediaeval Herbal Phase, I have been reading gardening books.

Meanwhile, we are still living in one big room (with ensuite) in the New Town, loaned to us by a generous friend for a peppercorn rent, which goes to her proper tenants, who suddenly found themselves with both housemates and an income-stream. It is a beautifully proportioned room, an excellent shelter after an evening of admiring the architecture of the New Town.

However, the wi-fi connection is weak, which means I go to the Historical House to work, and we are shy of intruding upon the proper tenants in the kitchen, which means either cold food or the microwave. Then there is the problem of two married people who cannot politely get away from each other. B.A. sleeps lightly and late, so in the morning I make a chair out of two pillows on the other side of the closed floor-length drapes and there read five pages of Książe Kaspian.

If we were newlyweds in our twenties this would be sooooooo romantic. Sadly, we aren't.

So while sitting on the steps to our new flat, whose keys we do not yet have, I think about how nice it will be to go indoors and have a kitchen and sitting-room again. The irony, of course, is that the New Town is arguably the best place in all Edinburgh to live, and we will be much older and richer before we even have the opportunity to do so again. I think sadly of the violent assault that befell a young man on our new street, but then there was an actual murder in the New Town a year and a half ago, so You Never Know.

We have a new flat---and we don't have a new flat. It's like the Already and the Not Yet I was told about in theology school. Since the Incarnation, the Kingdom of God is already here. But on the other hand, it's not fully yet here. Since Christ's self-sacrifice, we get to go to heaven. But on the other hand, we haven't got to heaven yet.

So sitting on the steps to the new flat, looking at the garden, is a bit like contemplating the heaven we have been offered but can't get into yet--and might not get into, if we slip up egregiously. Still, we are pretty hopeful we will not slip up that egregiously, and that we will get the keys to both places.

The other thing about looking at the garden is that it reminds me of my childhood garden (or "backyard" as Canadians usually call the land behind a house). This is a little bit sad, for when I sat on the swings in my childhood garden, I wished with all my might to be grown-up and somewhere else---perhaps romantic Britain! And now I am grown-up and in romantic Britain, and I think about the old backyard, and my thirty-something mother climbing up the cellar steps with a basket of wet laundry to hang out.

Oh, aye. How young we all were once--and presumably will be again one day!

Willowdale 4: The Castle of the Kingdom

Our little white house was unusual in that the top storey had been a separate dwelling for the adult child of the previous owner. It was impossible to tell this from the outside. To understand, you would have to climb the staircase, which was tucked away in the centre of the house, to a small landing and open the left-hand door.

Upstairs

The door opened onto a suite of rooms in an L shape. The first room was my bedroom. The second room, at the corner of the house, had a sink in it. That was  Tertia's room. There was a short corridor lined with closets leading to a third room, which was Nulli's room. Eventually it became the boys' room. The short corridor (with was no more than six feet long) gave at least a nod to the concept of privacy. There was no privacy between Tertia and me although I felt I had some privilege since my room had the door. I could leave it open; I could shut it. Power! 

The right-hand door on the landing led to a small self-enclosed room with a window facing west. When we first moved into the house, Nulli and I still speaking with accents we picked up in England, that room was our mother's sitting-room. Later it became a nursery, and then for the last few months it became my teenage bedroom. This was more firstborn privilege, I imagine, since it would have been more fair for Nulli and Quadrophonic to have a room each. Infant Quinta was moved into my old room. 

Dear me. I feel like St. Augustine recounting his childhood sins. 

Landing

The landing itself had charms, for it had a window that looked onto the leafy avenue, and eventually my dollhouse sat in front of this window. The dollhouse had a "stained glass" window, and when the sun shone from the south, coloured lights reflected on the dark stairwell's walls. The landing also had a dark wood and glass bookcase full of books, including the Easter-egg coloured covers of my mother's Georgette Heyer collection. 

Lair of the Glue Monster

Our parents had a bedroom on the ground floor at the front of the house. I didn't like it. First, it was on the wrong floor, in my estimation. Second, there were bushes or trees in front the window, blocking the sunlight and the view. It had a door to the front hall and a door to the bathroom, which struck me as almost as good as a hidden door. 

We were vaguely forbidden to go into my parents' bedroom, but we sometimes cautiously did, especially if one parent or the other was in there and the door to the hall was open. For example, my mother could be coaxed into playing a game in which she lay on top of the bed and stuffed her children under it while making horrible gobbling noises. This game was called "The Glue Monster."

This room was where we officially welcomed the new addition to our number, the newborn, fresh from the hospital, lying flat on the bed and possessing astonishingly tiny fingernails. 

Living Room and TV Room

Across the dark front hall from our parents' room, past the mirrored door to the steep basement staircase, was the principal sitting-room. It had a picture window looking out onto the street, a long "mantlepiece" over a fireplace, and built-in bookshelves. It had a couch, armchairs, a carpet and standing lamps. It was quite obviously a room for reading in. At Christmas-time it had a tree in one corner or the other. 

Beside this room there was a pine-wood lined chamber which contained a small television, a love seat, and an upright piano. There was a window in this room, and on fine spring days, the sound of Nulli's music drifted through our window through Mrs Brown's window next door. She greatly enjoyed that, and I enjoyed waking up on Saturday mornings to the sound of Nulli's playing, too. In hot July, an air conditioner blocked up either that window or my bedroom window, which I did not enjoy, as it made my room too cold. 

The one bathroom was across a small linoleum hall from the "TV room", as we called it, the TV being more important than the piano. The staircase to the top storey was on the left and the route to the kitchen was on the right. The dining-room to the left of that. Before the kitchen was a short flight of stairs to the side-door, ending in a cat litter tray (for some years), a boot closet and a forest of coats imperfectly hanging on hooks.  

Kitchen and dining-room

Over the dining-room doorway was a deep shelf where our Hallowe'en baskets were stored out of reach. Apart from my door, the sewing-room door, my parent's bedroom door and the door to the scary basement, the house was as open-plan as it could be. I did not approve of this either, and would have been delighted had my parents hung long strings of crystal beads between the "living-room" and the "TV room", to say nothing of between Tertia's pink gingham terrain and my chamber of lime green, tan paint and panda-bear wallpaper. 

The memory of the green-and-yellow kitchen fills me with unease for some reason, despite the image of my grandmother at the round glass-topped table genially smoking cigarettes. I was washing dishes when she was carted off to the hospital with double-pneumonia, and I got down on my knees on the kitchen floor to pray for her life. Perhaps the unease stems from memories of our poor mother's early morning drudgery in stuffing an increasing number of children with hot breakfasts five days a week. 

At their zenith, these breakfasts consisted of hot cereal with brown sugar and milk, bacon or sausages, eggs and toast with jam or peanut butter, plus orange juice.  We would gently roll out the door at 8 AM to walk to the school bus stop. 

My feelings about the  dining-room are much less complicated. Despite my loathing for a dish called "Spanish steak", which I snuck to the cat as much as I could, it was a happy room. The room had windows all around the west and north sides, curtained with blue-and-orange plaid, and old-fashioned mustard pots, pewter tankards and fancy plates paraded along a narrow shelf.  We were the kind of family that had dinner together every night--with Dad at the head of the table to boot--and so the whole family was together in one space once a day. That is also the room of all the birthday parties and birthday present-giving and other memorable and rare occasions like the appearance of foreign dinner guests, usually weird-looking linguists from Scotland or the People's Republic of China. 

In the summer, as I have mentioned before, the scent of mock orange entered in through the screen windows. There was also the rose bush under the west windows. At least one of these did not have a screen in the window which meant that we children could surreptitiously climb in and out of it and hand the baby through it, at need. I don't think we did this very often, but occasionally we acted out plays in which there were tower scenes; the dining-room, naturally, was the tower.  

Philosophical reflection

I did not have friends who came from families as big as mine, which is a pity, for it may have made me less resentful of the lack of walls between bedrooms. I think I was 20 before I realised that children in Ontario's big Catholic families often lived three to a room. My understanding of what was right and proper in the world came from books, and the heroines of books always had their own room. 

At the same time, I assumed that every family in Canada, rich or poor, ate a hot breakfast in the kitchen together and then sat in a dining-room sometime after six to eat a hot supper. I had gathered that we were a rather old-fashioned family, but I didn't realise that this extended to the vanishing tradition of twice-daily family meals, to say nothing of the nightly enthronement of the Paterfamilias at the head of the table. 

As I said, there are only six people now living who can remember any of this. Well, maybe seven, if Quinta wasn't too young when we left for a larger house farther north. I wonder to what extent we were all permanently shaped by this small kingdom. Possibly my parents were just continuing to live as they were brought up--only with more children and more after-school activities. 

The Glue Monster's Daughter

Not having any children myself, I do not often enter into the old spirit of my childhood in Willowdale, except to argue that a dining-room is an absolute necessity to comfortable living. 

That said, I return spiritually to Willowdale days when I visit my beloved friend Lily, her husband and their growing family. They live in a three-storey house on the north side of a tree-lined Toronto street, one reason of many why I feel so at home there.  

In this house, with only a small amount of badgering, I will transform myself from a mere courtesy aunt into a kind of Glue Monster. This involves a great deal of underbite, growling and stuffing shrieking children into small spaces while roaring "YUM YUM YUM! HO HO HO!" 

This proves that I am not totally useless as adults go and was properly brought up.  

Willowdale 3: The Gardens of the Kingdom

The small white house and green strips of land I'm about to describe exist now only in the memories of six living people but, reassuringly, also in the mind of God.

I was almost 15 when my family left, so I had ten years to impress the place upon my memory. Naturally, I did not do this consciously--I was a terrible skimmer-over of descriptions of place in books--and I'm frightened that I've forgotten something or, worse, have started mentally painting another scene over what was our home.

When I dream of home, I am always returned to this house and those gardens. We are Canadians, so  really we called them yards. The front yard rose gently up to the front steps; it was a green hill with a small rock wall supporting a minute garden. A black iron lamppost suspending a  house number sign from its ladder rest sprung from this hill. There was also a tree. It still lives.

The real treasure begins at the side, east-facing, door of the house, which had a green-painted milk-box on its right side, and a fragrant bush or tree of some kind that grew under a sash window--one of the kitchen's three windows. Directly opposite the door was a faded wooden shed, accessible over the eternal jagged gravel by flagstones. Facing the shed, but turning to your right, you would have seen a flagstone step or two taking you down to the grassy backyard. Eventually there was an alternate route beside the shed around a wilderness of bushes, a massive maple tree, and the stone outcropping where our father built a sandbox.

From a child's perspective, the backyard was enormous. It ran from flagstone-walled gardens beside the house, which filled with ferns every spring, to a broken wooden fence separating our land from that of a house on the next street. There were wire fences on either side to divide our yard from those of our single old-lady neighbours (when the westward one moved or died, she was replaced by a weirdly childless couple). Our dad put a swing set between two trees on the west side, and we swung facing east, sweet-peas growing up in the wire fence behind us, a friendly pussy-willow tree to our left, and a stern slim tree with high branches to our right.

I always longed to climb trees, but almost all our trees were unclimbable. We did manage from time to time to scramble into the massive maple, sometimes cheating by dragging a flat bench over the flagstones from its place under the big kitchen window facing north. We only made it as far as the first Y of the trunk; the Ys of the actual branches rose away out of reach.

The next most important tree was on the west side, surrounded by impenetrable bushes featuring dry white balls of tiny flowers. (I may have been told what they were called, but unfortunately I wasn't the kind of child who cared; I considered gardening a form of torture.) In the middle of this circular shrub was a pear tree. Its flowers made me break out in red spots, my only childhood allergy.

Some years our young parents climbed a ladder and harvested the pears of this tree. They erected a baby-fence in the kitchen doorway and boiled up jars and jars of pear jam. We ate so much pear jam, I began to loathe it, although now--of course--I long for a peanut butter and pear jam sandwich on supermarket white bread. (Yes, we were the sort of Canadians who really did buy and eat that sugary bread. For one thing, it was cheap, and my parents ultimately had five children.)

There was a mock-orange under the dining-room windows at the south-west corner of the yard, and it released great waves of perfume in summer.

Strips of flower garden stretched from the dry snowball bushes around the perimeter of the garden, overwhelmed here and there by bushes. There was also a thin and disappointing walnut tree that never gave any walnuts, for complicated sexual reasons my mother tried to explain. Then there was a large vegetable garden near the north-west corner of the yard, which my mother worked at and sometimes forced her children to work at, too, although I complained so much, her usually steely resolve faltered.

There was also a white-painted wooden arbour, with great purple flowers flowing up one side, and purple grapes and iconic green leaves flowing down the other. Finally, behind the arbour there was round raised garden made of flagstones, from which orange tiger lilies grew.

The north end of this yard--territory of the vegetable patch, the arbour and the tiger lilies--had been built up so it was slightly higher than the south end, which meant that in winter we children could amuse ourselves by sliding down the small difference on our sleds. It was a rather a short and sudden drop, however, so it wasn't that amusing, but it was something.

All that is left to describe is the grassy stretch along the west side of the house, which was separated from the forbidden front yard by a high wooden fence. My mother planted a rose bush here, which scrambled up the house's white harling wall. For some reason, the grass in this section was deeper, richer and greener than the grass anywhere else in the small kingdom, and much the pleasantest to our bare summer feet.

We were sent out to play A LOT, and in almost every weather, for which I am only now grateful. Left to my own devices, I would have sat indoors all day between September and April and read books. Going outdoors willingly in spring and summer may have been a concession to my fictional friends who seemed to think outdoors was just wonderful. For some reason only a very expensive therapist might be able to discern, I found the natural world deeply dull--and disappointing because there were no fairies in it.

As Nulli and I grew older, we became interested in history, especially in warfare, and so one of our favourite outdoor games was to recreate the dogfights of World War One flying aces. The skies of France were much more interesting to me than the glorious flowering kingdom around us. The southern swing was my Fokker triplane, and the northern swing was Nulli's Sopwith Camel, and our little sister Tertia was a blonde French maiden whom I invariably kidnapped so that Null would come swinging to her rescue.

Now, ironically and inevitably, this childhood game is of much more interest to me than the actual fatal battle between our esteemed countryman and the great German knight, which the Australians now claim to have won. Australians certainly watched the battle; our colourful re-enactments (the Red Baron probably left the French maids alone) may have been overseen by our young mother, either through the small window over the kitchen sink, or through the large glass plate beside the lace-covered kitchen table.

Our mum spent her thirties tending to that small white harling house, those sprawling gardens, and her growing family; she was younger than I am now when she and my father boxed everything up and left it. It now seems to me incredible that a one-income Catholic couple with two, then three, then four, then five children could own (actually own) a detached two-storey house with gardens in northern Toronto. When people talk about progress, that is something to think about.

Meanwhile, the house has vanished and the gardens gutted. A ridiculously huge and modern house stands in its place, well back from where it was, with only the tree remaining of the front yard. It contains a double garage and wide driveway stretches to the sidewalk. It ate up most of the back yard,     felling some of the trees and all of the bushes. All the gardens, all flagstones, and the arbour are gone.

There is a sales video of the monstrosity on youtube, dated 2011, accompanied by jewellery-ad music by Vivaldi. The introduction to the new house involves apparently exciting photographs of North York city centre, which is a rather vigorous walk away and, now, the site of a massacre.

Willowdale 2

Benedict Ambrose and I have been at early morning mass. On the way back to our Old Town refuge, we climbed the paths leading from Edinburgh's Princes Street Garden to the Castle Esplanade. The green slopes are covered with deep-yellow daffodils and butter-tinted narcissi. From halfway up onwards, we could see the hills of Fife clear over the glittering Firth of Forth.

I mention all this for the sake of my childhood self, who is somewhere back in the 1970s or 80s, propelling herself back and forth on the backyard swing set, staring at the blue sky to the east, and wishing with all her bored might that she was somewhere else, like England, Scotland, or Ireland.

What a shock to the poor child if she knew that her over-40 self would be thinking just as hard about her quiet tree-lined neighbourhood, and reminiscing about Zinia's (the nearest candy store), the hamburger joint where Nulli and I discovered soft-serve ice-cream cones, and our metal roller skates.

Crash-crash-crash-crash-crash!

For some reason, when this morning I was thinking about Willowdale, I heard a noise before I saw anything. It was the metal clashing of clamp-on roller skates against concrete sidewalk. There were four roller skates: two for me, and two for my brother Nulli.

At the time, Nuli was a bright little boy with a mushroom-cap of straight platinum blond hair. I, slightly taller, was a living embodiment of  Little Orphan Annie--albeit with proper eyes. (The cartoon Orphan Annie gave me the creeps.) We had been given these metal roller skates for Christmas, and when the weather was nice enough, we clamped them onto our running shoes and went rolling away up and down the sidewalks, annoying grown-ups with the racket.

At the time our street had sturdy, unassuming two-story houses, rambling bungalows, old trees, flowering bushes and a broad paved avenue that led to a locally important intersection at Yonge Street. Kids therefore had to take special care crossing the road; ours wasn't the kind of street you could play road-hockey on.

Therefore, Nulli and I were pretty much confined to the sidewalks, which was annoying for two reasons: first, because of the cracks between the slabs of pavement making up the sidewalk, and second because of our pebble driveway.

These were not round pebbles, but jagged pebble-sized bits of gravel which hurt our bare feet every summer until our soles hardened in late-July. These little rocks didn't stay confined to the driveway beside the house and front garden but instead rolled down onto the sidewalk and under the tree on Mrs Brown's front yard just to the east, and I found one just last month, as the tree is still there.

Because we disliked the jolting of the cracks and being tripped by gravel, Nulli and I skated away eastwards in search of a nice flat place, which was, of course, the smooth concrete walkway around Yonge Street's Sketchley Cleaners. There we found five or ten minutes of flat, smooth, rollerskating heaven. Then an officious grown-up appeared and chased us away.

Sadly, it would be almost forty years before Jordan Peterson would write "Do not bother children when they are skateboarding."  I am sure he would say the same about rollerskating.

We would have roller-skated on the relatively crack-free road, were playing in the street not an offence punishable by a spanking. Other such capital crimes included playing in the front yard unsupervised, "door games" and "stair games".  As we got older, however, we roamed beyond our street to other Willowdale streets---usually south of us, and rarely across the great traffic chasm that was Yonge Street.

However, there was one pearl of great price that did sometimes tempt us to cross this Amazon, and it was the hamburger-sausage-gyro joint kitty-corner from Sketchley Cleaners. I want to say it was run by a Greek family, but I do not remember for sure. It was a short distance, by grown-up reckoning, from the enormous print plant where our late grandfather had worked. Anyway, this hamburger joint sold soft-serve ice-cream covered in a chocolate coating that hardened shortly after it was poured over the white swirly pile of frozen sweetness.

To children whose normal tipple was a 15 cent popsicle, and to a girl whose big luxury was a 35 cent cherry-flavoured Lola, this hardened chocolate over soft ice-cream was nothing short of a MIRACLE of MODERN LIVING.

Like so much else of our childhood, that hamburger joint has disappeared. Now the miracle of modern life is that the candy shop where we got our popsicles and Lolas still exists. When we were kids, it was run by a couple named "Zinia" or "Zinnia" or, most probably, "Zenia." Now it is run by a nodding East Asian lady, who smiled politely when I told her I used to come there as a child. It is one of a row of mid-century shops that stretch from Johnston to Poyntz Avenue.

Poyntz, allegedly, is where the St. George Day killer stopped his rampage. I stare at the buildings in the background of images of him being arrested, and I can't quite believe them. I look at the Arabic (or Persian) letters and the glass-and-metal building and think "Poyntz? Really? That's Poyntz?"

Willowdale

I grew up in a pleasant neighbourhood of modest homes, deep back yards, old trees, small shops, supermarkets in outdoor malls, a municipal library and swimming pool, a old-fashioned cruciform Catholic Church just around the corner from the Catholic school, an old cinema, a hardware store dating from pioneer days on the north-west corner of the southernmost major intersection.

My mother grew up in that neighbourhood, too.

Our neighbourhood disappeared decades ago, or rather, was covered over with a new neighbourhood-- monster houses, row houses, giant condos, business towers, massive indoor malls, modern churches, a proliferation of Korean and Persian shop signs. The main street--Yonge Street--became a real concrete canyon.

As the development started when I was 13 or so, I guess I shouldn't say I grew up in the old neighbourhood. The new neighbourhood grew up with me: I worked in the  new North York Centre mall and I studied in the North York Central Library.  I've long been ambivalent about the changes, however. The last time I was home, I went for a walk with a new resident, a former professor of mine, showing him where my childhood home used to be, where the school-bus picked us up, and where the ravine starts. I pointed out where my grandfather's workplace--a massive printing press--used to be.

When I'm back in Willowdale, I like to pick out the few shops, buildings and trees that have managed to survive. The candy store, for example. And even here in Scotland I can recall great swathes of vanished streetscape.

This was not the first transformation of Willowdale, of course. After the Toronto Rebellion of 1837, British soldiers burned down the farmhouses owned by rebels on either side of Yonge. Until yesterday, that was the biggest local tragedy, and as it happened so long ago, it no longer seemed tragic.

Yesterday a man from nearby Thornhill  Richmond Hill got in a rental van and, from Finch Avenue to Poyntz Avenue, mowed down everyone in his path. At least ten people are dead.

One of my schoolmates was within earshot and seems traumatised, poor woman.

I saw the news online as I did a last check of Alfie Evans stories and went a little crazy as I tried to get in touch with my family. At last I got my dad on Skype, and while we were talking, my Toronto brother phoned him, so that was Quadrophonic accounted for, too. Try sister Tertia posted that she and her son Pirate were safe north of Steeles Avenue.  Mum was at her volunteer job north-east of Finch and Yonge; Dad said he'd look for a phone number.

Dad was quick to suggest that this wasn't a terrorist attack but the actions of a madman. The police have released the man's identity, and when he was a teenager he was a high school student in Thornhill. I am disgruntled with people on Facebook who see photos and footage of the Persian signs and assume that Willowdale is "a Muslim neighbourhood" and that the perpetrator was Muslim.

Sheppard-and-Yonge when I was a kid

I imagine it is possible to have an Armenian surname and also be Muslim, but as yet nobody knows why this man did what he did. Having been a Willowdale kid, I think it's too soon to ask that question.  I'm still wondering who died and if I knew any of them.

Does anyone ever imagine this could happen in their own quiet childhood town?

Sheppard-and-Yonge when my mum was a kid.

The Joy of a Truly Free Press

"Listen," I said. "I come from a small country, too, a country with a big neighbour,  and so I understand. And yes, Poland got squashed several times by its big neighbours. But you mustn't care so much about what other nations think about you. You should concentrate on your achievements."

This advice did not seem to console my interlocutor one jot. Living in the UK, she bears the brunt of other people's misconceptions about Poland and the Poles. The misconceptions come mainly from the media, and I am not talking just the Daily Mail here. I am talking about the oh-so-correct Guardian and all the rest of the British establishment media. The woman who told me that Polish must come in handy for speaking to workmen at the Historical House does not read the Daily Mail.

Reflecting on what the western mainstream media has published about Poland, the woman sitting beside me seemed to be on the point of tears. Therefore, I was once again glad that last November I was able to publish this.  If I never again write anything of any importance, at least I wrote that.

One of the problems with contemporary journalism is that most newspapers can no longer afford to keep offices in several foreign countries. That is one explanation for the scandalous and appalling fake news about Poland that was foisted on the British, the Canadians and, especially, the Americans about the 2017 Polish Independence Parade in Warsaw.

There are other explanations, of course, and I remember when I first lost my touching faith in mainstream media: it was while watching a Toronto TV station's coverage of a pro-life demonstration. I had been there, and I knew that something City-TV said about it was not true.

I also flinched at the unmistakable contempt in newscaster Mark Dailey's universally beloved voice. The fake news I don't recall, but the contempt left a permanent scar. By the age of 18, I knew that lots of Torontonians despised pro-lifers, but it hadn't occurred to me that Toronto's big-voiced sweetheart did, too. I thought the press would be like, you know, neutral.

Goodness knows why I thought that after years of reading Doris Anderson in the Toronto Star. Anderson was a famous feminist, but that did disturb me until I came up with a bang against her sneering prediction that Pope John Paul II's play would bomb on Broadway but be a hit in church basements. Somehow I remember that and not all her abortion apologetics, probably because the slam was just so bizarrely petty.

I recall asking my mother about it and my mother saying something about Anderson being from out West (where anti-Catholicism presumably festered). But the objections of the lady columnists of the Toronto Star also included the saint's Polish birth. (I forget which one it was, exactly, attributed John Paul's alleged dislike of women (!) to being Polish. It probably was Anderson, but it might have been Michelle Landsberg.)  "Polish jokes" had recently been banned from the schoolyard,  and I was surprised to see such an obvious ethnic slur in the Star. 

As a matter of fact I had very little interest in Poland, but things I heard about it in childhood did linger. For example, I still cannot shake the impression, formed in 1977, that Poles (all Poles) are desperately poor. The beautifully paved road from the John Paul II airport to Krakow was, therefore, quite a shock.

I'm not sure if there's a moral in that, other than that one needs to be intelligent and be cognisant of historical changes in the countries one visits or one risks sounding stupid or even offensive.

My real point in writing this post is to celebrate the existence of a truly free press--which in English-speaking countries may mean the online press--that interrupts the unjust or merely craven narratives of the mainstream press.

I don't mean to abjure all the MSM. As long as The New York Times continues to publish Ross Douthat I will have some respect for The New York Times. But I am highly suspicious of any British, Canadian or American MSM narrative about Central and Eastern Europe right now.

Meanwhile, I am deeply contemptuous of how the British mainstream press swallows the abortion industry's lies about the British pro-life movement. (It really astonishes me how an obvious INDUSTRY has the British press in thrall, but I don't discount the role of blackmail. In Canada, abortionist Henry Morgantaler  blackmailed Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau.) That, however,  is a topic for another time.

Update: The Spectator is good value, though. See this article from January, for example. It looks okay to me.

A Snowy Bridge

Last night my mother and I returned from a car trip to my brother's village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec. It was a 7.5 hour journey, with at least two unnerving moments: the setting sun getting in my mother's eyes as she drove through Ontario and, before that, crossing a very high and snowy bridge over the St. Lawrence River.

It was snowing, and I thought about Scotland how the Central Belt (from Glasgow to Edinburgh) ground to a halt last week because of blizzards. It's easy to laugh at the British for their inability to cope with snow, but without snow tires or any kind of snow safety training, it's hard to see how they could. Meanwhile, Mum and I had proper tires, but as soon as we started driving up the bridge (literally up), I began to pray. The crossing lasted one quick decade of the rosary. 

This would be difficult for people from reformed traditions to understand, but since Benedict Ambrose's dramatic recovery, I've concluded our family patroness must be the Immaculate Heart of Mary. The Immaculate Heart of Mary was most definitely in my thoughts as we crossed that bridge, as was Benedict Ambrose. I realised that, having prayed for him at Mass that morning, it was more than likely that he had prayed for me at Mass that morning. This was a very comforting thought. 

This year my trip home has been unusual in that I've been working from 9-5 almost every weekday--although occasionally I take lunch out instead of just working through lunchtime with a bowl of food on the desk. It has made it more difficult to see everyone I want to see, as often as I want to see them. But at the same time, I'm grateful that I have a job I can do anywhere there is an internet connection. 

The sacrifice is time to really reflect on how everyone is and what has changed over the past year.  The children are all taller, of course. My seven-year-old niece now says she hates pink and wants to wear black all the time. She has drawn a skull-and-crossbones which now adorn her bedroom door. I asked her if she was a Goth, and she didn't know what a Goth was, so that's not it. My nine-year-old nephew is less noisily rebellious. The candy store in my brother's village has shut down. The bookshop, thank heavens, survives. 

Meditation on Other People's Children

Okay, so only very devoted readers are reading at this point, so hello! I'm in Toronto, where I have been since a week after the EVENT that made B.A. and I historical-homeless.  I was not driven here by the misfortune--I bought my airline tickets on January 1, in fact--it is just my annual visit to my family and friends.

And I am pretty darned tired because I am also working 9-5 (or, yesterday, 7-3) at my great-grandfather's desk and my friends all live in different parts of Toronto, which means a lot of travel for me. And I hate "empty" time on busses and subway trains, so that also means a lot of Polish study. And one of my best friends has four small children, three of them boys under 9, so visits to her usually include chasing the boys around and around the ground floor of their house roaring like a dragon.

That is quite fun, actually, if ultimately tiring.

On Sunday I was at these boys' baby sister's baptism, and there were something like 20 adults, many of whom I knew, and 45 children, most of whom I didn't, they having been born since I married and moved to Scotland. Afterwards the church's basement hall was knee-deep in the anklebiters. When I went home, and I was one of those who stayed to tidy up, there were still 15 children under 12 running or toddling around after each other.

From a Catholic and civilisational point of view, I was highly edified. Most of the parents were in their mid-thirties, and I thought St. John Paul II must be very proud of the generation named after him, for here they were with three, four and five children. I just wished they didn't all look so tired.  The baby's mother looked especially tired because her toddler had kept her up from midnight until five. I do not know how you can live like that without accidentally putting the laundry in a high chair and the baby in the washing machine.

During last night's visit,  I did the math and calculated that in three years and three months, her eldest son will be legally old enough to babysit. I myself will pay him the going rate so that his mother and I can go shopping. She, however, will probably be mourning over how fast her children are growing up, even though her sons are spending their extreme youth falling out of windows, bouncing each other's heads off the arm of the new sofa, getting stitches, and dropping the baby's sterling silver christening mug on the hardwood floor.

Just so you understand the heroism of my friend and her husband, none of their boys are allowed electronic devices or television at home. They are like little boys from the 1970s. When I first turned up, they showed me their hockey cards, and we had an intelligent conversation about Gordie Howe, Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky and other hockey greats who retired before they were even born. Thus the no-screen policy has led to very active, imaginative, clever little boys with an interest in history but also maximum exhaustion for their parents.

I really like those boys, I must admit, but at the same time I am delighted that the baby is a girl.

Meanwhile, I have also been visiting friends without children or with grown-up children, including pals and mentors in the Catholic journalism world. They don't look as tired as my thirty-something friends, but they do look older than I remember, which makes me gloomily wonder how much older I look, and when I will die. It is not fun when someone you vaguely remember to be only 12 years older than yourself admits that they are retiring in the next few years.

Interestingly, I feel the weight of my years least when I am around the under-nine set, which is just more evidence to my theory that the very young give almost as much to their elders psychologically as their elders give to them materially. I wish I had known as a child or teenager how much adults really enjoy the company of a bright young thing, as long as the BYT isn't silly, sulky or tiresome. My Canadian grandmother did say a few times that her "grandchildren keep [me] young", which at the time I took for kindness or affection. Now I understand that that was, psychologically speaking, true.

Benedict Ambrose report: B.A. is still very well but won't come out to Canada despite my pleas because he wants to keep his eyes on his job and on the Historical House.

Another Argument for Catholic Homeschooling

This is not an edifying story, but I find it both funny and important. It's funny and important for the same reasons.

After being found guilty of misconduct for putting her legs behind her head in front of her students, [the ex-teacher] stands in a coffee shop the next day and lifts her floral skirt. 

“It was a yoga exercise,” Brown says, revealing to a reporter that she has aqua yoga tights under her skirt, just like the day she proved how flexible she is to her students. “You stretch until you’re aligned. That’s what I showed them. I’m not ashamed.”

Brown, a fit 65-year-old, was recorded by a student when she laid down on the floor and swung her legs upward until they were behind her head. The video, along with the statements of more than 10 students and one educational assistant were the primary evidence used against her during an Ontario College of Teachers tribunal hearing on Tuesday. Some said her actions made them feel embarrassed.

“Why would the children be embarrassed,” Brown asks, noting she performed the exercise during lunch hour. “They have sex in the hallway and they smoke.”

 It's funny because we do not expect teachers, let alone Catholic religion teachers, to illustrate how flexible they are by doing feet-behind-head yoga moves, or talk glibly about their mothers' sex-lives, or make jaw-dropping claims about the students' sexual behaviour.  Something tells me Humanae Vitae  and the thought of Saint John Paul II weren't pondered too deeply in this woman's classes. 

But it's important because it is dangerous to assume that  teachers are thoughtful, prudent, moral, respectful people just because they are have been hired to teach at Catholic schools, especially government-funded Catholic schools. Teachers at publicly funded Catholic schools in Toronto are very well paid. If I had had any financial sense when I went to university... But, on the other hand, if you're not called to it, and you do it just for the money, teaching high school can be miserable. 

This woman claims to have taught at a number of Toronto Catholic high schools since 1987--when I was in high school, my dears--including my own high school. I don't recognize her, so I don't think she was there (if she ever really was there) in my day.  However, I can remember one other teacher giving a very good impression of being bat-guano insane. Others, of course, were great and their more quirky pronouncements--"Mankind is doomed, girls. We're doomed. Have a good afternoon"--didn't do me any harm. 

Now that I teach teenagers instead of adults, I worry about being overly lighthearted and saying the wrong things or The Wrong Thing that will stick in a student's head for years after I have forgotten it. (I worry about this regarding my niece and nephews, too.) The teacher in this story doesn't seem so bothered. 

Happily, I am not given to outrageous remarks about (A) Adult Stuff or (B) my students' ethnic backgrounds. I imagine Filipina-Canadian girls who attend or have attended one of this woman's schools (and their parents) must be feeling pretty shaken by this woman's dismissal of them all. It is hands-down worse than anything I ever heard anyone in Toronto--student, teacher, boss--say about pasty "mangiacakes "like me, and I am still mad that 30 years ago Mrs Such-and-Such said that Anglo-Saxons won't do construction jobs because we don't like to get callouses on our hands. I was too stunned to raise my hand and volunteer that my mother's (White, Anglo-Saxon and even Protestant) cousins worked summers in Toronto's construction industry until their inability to speak Italian became a problem. 

(Let it go, Dorothy. Let it gooooooo. Daj spokój. Non fa niente. ) 

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of the story is that this ex-teacher was hauled up before a tribunal only in 2015. Okay, it could be that she was an exemplary teacher from 1987 until then. But if not, what were her colleagues doing to protect their students from this woman's insanely imprudent and immoral remarks?  

For the sake of fairness, I should also observe that this teacher was the victim of quite a serious fraud at the hands of a friend in 2014, so it very well may be that she snapped afterwards. That said, I really do think it important that all parents who entrust their children to a system check that system regularly. 

Spiritual Power of the Catholic Family

I had a great weekend: I saw my two best friends and every member of my Canadian family except one. Hopefully I see again before I go.

On Saturday I left Nulli, Ma Belle Soeur, Peanut and Popcorn in Quebec and travelled by train back to Toronto, where I found my Mum and Dad.

On Sunday I walked through the beautiful snowfall to my first sister's place--given a lift part of the way by a friendly bus-driver with an empty bus--and went with her, my nephew Pirate and Pirate's friend Joseph downtown for brunch with my dearest Tricia. After traditional Canadian brunch, Trish left to provide music to  a Finnish Lutheran baptismal service and the rest of us drove  to Holy Family Parish, home of the Toronto Sunday Missa Cantata. 

I warned the boys that this was Traditional Mass and that communion was received on the tongue while kneeling and hinted strongly that confession was available all through Mass, but I forgot to remind them that it was in Latin. Fortunately, I commandeered a second row so that they would have a good view of the action in the sanctuary. Although the snow reduced the usual numbers, there were positively flocks of altar servers and Oratorians. There was a priest, deacon and sub-deacon in rich purple as it was Septuagesima. From the distracted gaze of the littlest altar servers, I correctly divined that Pirate was wriggling a little, but however he felt, I was delighted to be at Trad Mass with my sister and nephew. Usually when I am at home my family stubbornly adheres to the local parish, weep weep. 

Afterwards my sister dropped me off near my friend Lily's house, where I had a cup of tea and a chat before taking the metro (as it is never called here) to the iconic Dooney's (now at Ossington and Bloor) to have lunch with the poet Clara Blackwood. 

Tertia and Pirate rejoined us for dinner, as did my youngest sister Quinta, and I was somewhat startled by the sound of six people thundering out Grace Before Meals. I was almost tempted to chime in "And God bless our lord the king" at the end. One can only imagine the noise and force of a large Catholic family praying the Rosary! 

This evening I am going to Tertia and Pirate's karate class. Gradually my family is becoming as enamored of karate as it is of languages. I wonder if B.A. would like karate. Apparently it is a great sport for those who hate sports. 

Hipsterville, Dojo, Party & Premiere Moisson

Nulli told me of a wonderful town near him that had an artisanal chocolate shop, an artisanal bakery and a hipster café. I was very excited, so when given the choice between going to see La La Land and visiting Hipsterville--as I called it--I picked Hipsterville. 

I didn't stop to consider whether urbanites with tattoo sleeves and beards would REALLY set up shop in a country town in South-eastern Quebec. But I knew there was something wrong when my brother parked and led me to the café. The markings on the windows bragged of having juices and sandwiches and other not-very-hipster-café stuff. Worst of all, there was not a beard in sight. 

"I'm sorry, D," said Nulli, crestfallen. 

The coffee was all-you-can-drink, as it is in no hipster café in the universe, and one cup was all I could drink because .... Still, it was a nice place to look at, and obviously both anglos and francos were welcome. (There are some mighty sketchy and tribal joints in the Eastern Townships.) The town is prospering because of the ski hills and the tourists. 

"Who runs the artisanal chocolate shop?" I asked suspiciously.

"South Americans," said Nulli.

"Are they young? Do they have beards?"

Nulli didn't think they were young or had beards, and the artisanal bakery had closed, so that was it for Hipsterville--except for the amazing craft brewery. The presence of the brewery suggests that there are hipsters in town, but heaven only knows where they get their coffee. 

We were home before the school bus arrived; this is THE deadline of my work-from-home brother's life. 

This morning we dropped Popcorn off at a friend's house and took Peanut to a dojo at a nearby village. Both Nulli and Peanut were already in their white gi--karate outfits, which in Quebec French are called kimono, for some mysterious reason. The high school in which the dojo resides has 1,000 francophone students and 500 anglophone students, and they are not allowed to eat together. 

Apparently this high school used to be fully bilingual, but the provincial government put a stop to that, divided the students by mother tongue, and cut funding to the English section. If that sounds like apartheid, welcome to Quebec! Fortunately, most of the people in my brother's village do not share the prejudices of the provincial government. But the grinding poverty and hopelessness of the unilingual English-speaking minority in the Eastern Townships are just awful. The drug of choice is heroin.  

The woes of the poorest descendants of local United Empire Loyalists were not on display at the high school, and there is no lack of funding for the dojo, which has a beautifully sprung wooden floor. I watched with great interest as my brother and nephew about 30 other people did their warm-ups and kata routines and fought each other. The fighting struck me as a lot more dangerous than English-style boxing, for it was bare-knuckle. Interestingly, the students all wore shin-guards and pads on their feet, but not hand-wraps or padded gloves. 

After the session, we went to Montréal. Popcorn had chosen to attend a village classmate's party; the rest of us celebrated the birthday of Nulli's friends' four-year-old daughter. This was a bilingual party, most adults and children slipping easily between English and French. As such a cheerful and unselfconscious mixing of les anglos and the francos is of relatively recent date, I have to admit that there has been a vast improvement in one area of Canadian life--or, to be more accurate, Montréal life--since the 1960s. 

My train was late. Cheered by the sight of the queue still waiting in front of the "Toronto" sign, I found the Gare Central's Premiere Moisson ("first harvest") bakery and bought two croissants for the train. One of them is a chocolatine, so I will have to add that to my Sugar List, along with the chocolate cupcake I ate at the party. Sigh.

A Trip to Vermont

Just so you know, I am officially off sugar. No more sugar. By any reckoning, Christmas is over, and since I arrived in Canada I have already consumed the following essentials:

Black Midnight birthday cake made by my mother
Striped shortbread triangles made by my mother
Real Canadian maple syrup on pancakes made by my mother
A Tim Horton's old-fashioned doughnut
A chocolate chip cookie made by my niece and me
One scoop of Vermont's famous Ben & Jerry's ice-cream--in Vermont!

Yesterday my brother and I went to visit Red Mezzo in Vermont. Long-time readers with excellent memories may remember that Red Mezzo is my red-haired opera singer friend who lived in Montreal. Like most of my long-term readers, she has ceased to be Single. She got married to her handsome crush object (who adored Rita Hayworth) and now lives on a dairy farm an hour's drive from my brother. She and her husband now have two beautiful children toddling merrily around their old farmhouse.

After coffee and zucchini bread, Red Mezzo, her daughter and I went upstairs to clean up the daughter's room and play with her toys. I could not resist the Fisher-Price clock, for I used to have one exactly like it, and discovered for the first time that its tune is "Grandfather's Clock" (1876) by Henry Clay Worth. Then I played with the wooden doll with the 100 (literally) magnetic outfits. Finally I seized  the children's version of Anna Karenina which was all about AK's clothes and not at all about trains.

Highly suspicious, I searched the lovely illustrations for a hidden train, but it isn't there. It is a completely unironic child's version of Anna Karenina with direct quotes about AK's clothes. There is an illustration of Vronsky in his lovely white uniform, but no mention of or reference to Karenin. Little girls who love this book--and I reveled in the pretty dresses- are in for a terrible shock when they grow up and read (or see) the whole thing. I still haven't read it, but the Keira Knightley film left me with jitters.

Then we all sat down to lunch which was followed up by Ben & Jerry's ice cream, which may have milk from the very cows in the very barn in it. I had one little scoop because (despite all the treats mentioned above) I am on a low-sugar diet. Red Mezzo's husband felt badly that he was giving me sugar, but I assured him that I considered B&J ice cream the vin de pays of Vermont.

Maybe a good low-sugar diet rule is that one can only eat Ben & Jerry's when one is actually in Vermont.

We returned to my brother's village in Quebec after lunch, so as to greet the returning schoolchildren. After supper, my brother took me along to karate, and I was highly impressed when the sensei asked him to take the children aside and refresh their memories on some kata (or whatever they are). My niece--an orange-belt--was the smallest child there and the most impudent. (Nulli to Popcorn: "I 'm not daddy, I'm sempai !")

I was charmed when Popcorn pulled her two girlfriends there--one much taller and somewhat older than myself--over to my bench to introduce us. This display of good manners was so staggering in a six year old that I can only assume there was an element of "show-and-tell" to it all. (The girls smiled shyly and seemed delighted to be pulled hither and thither by the tiny human tugboat.)  Then I was terribly impressed when my brother taught the children--a mix of francophones, anglophones and hispanophones--in English, French, and whatever necessary Japanese.

But it was -17 C when we got back out to car. Brrrrr! How happy I was to return to my brother's hearth with a book.

Karate in the Village

On Monday I took the train to Montréal. My brother Nulli was waiting, and we went off to get a  late take-out lunch at Schwartz's (me) and Co Co Rico (Nulli). In years past I have had the famous black cherry soda to go with the smoked meat sandwich and fries, but at 46 g of sugar--forget about it. Sadly, the sandwich and fries were not the same without it.

We drove to Nulli's village in the Eastern Townships of Quebec (Estrie, en français). Village and countryside, thickly populated by tress, were knee-deep in snow. The lake was frozen solid and also covered with snow. Fantastically beautiful--and one reason why I travel to Canada in February!

My brother and his family live in a sprawling 1950s bungalow with a finished basement and an enormous conservatory added in the early 21st century. It has a stone floor, a pine wall and ceiling, ceiling high glass windows, a gas fireplace, my brother's grand piano, some green potted plants, comfy armchairs and sofa.  Never mind the grandest rooms in the Historical House: this is my favourite room in the world.

Nulli and his kids are mad about karate. This morning I was treated to a demonstration of karate moves in the conservatory. Then my brother led me through yesterday's calisthenics workout again. He is disturbed by my Edinburgh tales of altercations on the Rough Bus, the Not Supposed to Be Rough Bus, the Rough Beach and the Polski Sklep and thinks I should learn karate, too. I have pondered this, but the quickest fixes would be (A) putting the old-lady berets in storage (B) taking the bus as infrequently as possible.

We went to the main street yesterday for lunch, and I was impressed at how neighbourly everyone was. (Of course, it is a small town.) I even met the sensei. Interestingly most people can switch from French to English (or from English to French) without too much awkwardness. Conversations between francophones and anglophones are cheerfully bilingual.

Today is a "frozen rain" day (snow is not a problem for anyone out here), so Peanut and Popcorn are home from school. This afternoon I shall teach them the Greek alphabet and then help them make cookies. At the moment they are suspiciously quiet, but apparently they really are just playing nicely.

Dancing Snowflakes

I am just so in love with my native city right now. Yesterday I took the bus early downtown, took another bus and had brunch with my friend Trish in one of the many College-and-Bathurst area brunch spots. As we munched I watched snow swirl around outside. It was so incredibly relaxing. The brunch place was done up to look like a Canadian holiday cottage--vintage hockey posters on the walls, vintage signs--bilingual even. There was a basket of racquets in the loo--I mean, the washroom.

I've been travelling around the city for three days to meet siblings and friends, and it hasn't been the least bit stressful. On Friday after Mass I went to the Catholic Register offices, took a pal there to lunch, and then went to west Queen West to visit Trish in her amazing flat/backyard theatre. I was home in time for dinner, and my youngest sister dropped by to help eat it. 

On Saturday, I visited my other sister's new condo, I did a little toy shopping, I met my youngest brother for lunch on the Danforth, and I zipped across town to see my pal Lily and her little ones. I was home in time for dinner again. 

After Sunday morning brunch with Trish, she drove me to Holy Family on King Street West for the Missa Cantata. After Mass, I greeted friends from high school days and met their ninth child, an adorable infant. I also met a long-time blog reader, and we were on the same bus to Roncesvalles where, for once, I didn't buy Polish stuff: just more toys. I popped by Lily's, but the family is down with the 'flu, so I went home and finished writing an Ancient Greek test for my charges back in Scotland.  My youngest brother came for Sunday supper, and afterwards my dear old prom date dropped by for a cup of tea and a chat. 

The backdrop to all this has been the cold--a refreshing, dry cold--and the beautiful snow. Whenever I see the fat white flakes solemnly descending in utter silence, I am in awe. Then, when the wind whips them up into a swirling dance, my heart fills with joy. I had forgotten just how beautiful snowfall is.

Peacock Feathers by Temple Bailey

My parents are avid library patrons, which is why their house is not crammed top to bottom with books. Some of the books that do linger on the shelves were owned by my grandparents, and one of them is Peacock Feathers by Temple Bailey (1924). This was one of my favourite books when I was a teenager. It was good to read it again with the eyes of a forty-something.

The story is about a parson's son from western New York state who is led by his adventurous uncle to believe that he will inherit wide estates in Colorado one day. Although he adores his kindly, idealistic and self-sacrificing father, Jerry pines to be more like his uncle. As a teenager, Jerry travels with Uncle Jerry to Washington D.C., where the latter seeks to put together a lucrative deal. When they are eating in the Senators' restaurant, the boy sees a beautiful auburn-haired girl dining with her grandfather. The grandfather, says Uncle Jerry, is a famous senator and the girl is his niece, Mimi Lebrun.

Jerry has fallen instantly in love with the girl, and when his uncle sends him to Yale University, he befriends a young man there who turns out to be Mimi's cousin. Thus Jerry gets swept along into Mimi's High Society orbit, where his simple background puts him at a considerable disadvantage.

Strangely, this is the only book by Temple Bailey I have read. Why I never thought to look her up in a library card catalogue in those far-off days of my youth, I know not. She reminds me of Lucy Maud Montgomery, only there is a beautiful spareness to her writing. With LMM, I find my eye skipping over passages of descriptions; this is never true for Peacock Feathers. Although she too loves landscapes, Bailey gets the greater impact in the fewer words.

I also love the book for its scenes of pre-war America, which is also conjured up for my by E.B. White. It's a reminder that people thought they were on the cutting edge of modernity in 1912. In Peacock Feathers, Christian Jerry rarely mentions Almighty God to his glittering set because they simply wouldn't understand what he was talking about. Having grown up in Canada, I sometimes get the impression that the world before 1968, or 1939 at earliest, doesn't matter to the zeitgeist. It's gone completely down the memory hole; we have entertaining "historical novels" instead.

True, a white American novelist born in 1869 might have a blinkered, limited view of American society. In Peacock Feathers, the only African Americans are female servants and the only American Indians are farmhands and itinerant sellers of blankets. Jerry finds the Italian immigrants who come to farm New York incredibly exotic. However, if your ancestors include pre-war white Americans, stories drawn from their experiences will surely move you.


Immigrant experience is here, of course. Mimi Lebrun and her high society set are from St. Louis, and identify strongly with the French experience in the USA. Their ancestresses came from France with their ballgowns packed up in boxes, and they danced with Lafayette. Their pride, though, rests in their ancestors having been founders of the American republic, founders of cities. They are most definitely "American first" because, although they did not arrive with the Mayflower, they sprang from "first Americans [of the Republic]."

Today this is a decidedly unfashionable point of view, no doubt because the descendants of "first Americans" are vastly outnumbered by the descendants of New Americans who, unsurprisingly, feel disgruntled and marginalized by being left out. This may be why the sins of the "first Americans" are presented to our view today much more often than their virtues. Stuart Little seemed vastly untroubled by inherited guilt, and it wasn't just because he was--incredibly bizarrely--a mouse.

In the Natal Oikos

Here I am in Canada, safe under my father's roof. How very traditional. If I'm not under my husband's roof, I'm usually under my father's in Toronto or my brother's in Quebec.

Anyway, I am on holiday from Church news, so you will not find any big Church news here, solely local details. I went to my parents' parish church for First Friday Mass (and the Feast of St. Blaise) and was very moved by the old stained glass windows, rescued when the old church was knocked down and replaced. I have loved those windows all my life. The current parish priest is a lovely man, too. There were 40 or so people at the 8:30 AM, and that also was moving.

The natal oikia (house, oikos is a household) is not in the least historical, but it is big and bright and sunlit, with big white tiles in the massive kitchen and the lovely wooden floors that have been replacing the wall-to-wall carpets over the past two decades. The sentimental wallpaper in the bedroom of my youth has been replaced by chic green paint, and the newly wooden floor is a delight.

Lots of sunlight, lots of coffee and a delicious cake. My mother is my superior in the baking of cakes, and I don't care who knows it. She blames British flour for my cakes' deficiencies.

It is very cold outside, but it's a dry cold. It's a beautiful, crisp Ontario cold.

The Quebec Mosque Massacre

The French word for shame is "honte", and that is what I have been feeling since I learned that the police have only one suspect for the shooting in the Ste-Foy mosque and his surname is Bissonnette.

I try to avoid publishing the names of suspected assassins, as my mother told me that fame is one of their motives, but in this case I feel I have to spell it out because it is one of the most Canadian names there is--if you believe that the longer your family has lived in British North America, the more "Canadian" its name is. Needless to say, this is a controversial point of view. It is not, however, self-aggrandizing in my case, since my Scottish migrant ancestors landed in Canada no earlier than 1900---late enough that I could "go back" to Scotland and feel at home.

Incidentally, here is a list of the most common surnames in present-day Canada, and here is a list of the most common surnames in present-day Quebec. I see that Bissonnette is not on it, which rather trashes my assertion. You will have to take it from a Canadian that the name Bissonnette conjures up images of French-Canadian life. I see before me the "Farine (flour) Five Roses" sign as my train east once again pulls into Montreal's Gare Centrale.

It doesn't matter that I am not myself a French-Canadian. My husband is not a Gaelic-speaking Highlander, but he would feel terrible if Donald came down from the Isle of Skye and shot up the mosque in Inverness. Ste-Foy is very near birthplace of Canada, and so it hurts me both that innocent men were shot there--while praying--and that the guy who did it was from Cap-Rouge.

Yesterday's rumours that the killer was a sectarian Islamic convert--he was wrongly reported to have had a accomplice named Mohamed--have been replaced by rumours that he is a "Christian nationalist". As a Christian and a nationalist (depending on what is meant by that word), I am wondering what it is in Christianity or nationalism that would inspire a 27 year old to walk into a place of worship and shoot men at random. Anyone who wants to take up arms against actual Islamist terrorism has a number of options that do not include shooting innocent people.

The suspect's Facebook page was wide open to the dozens of insults that were posted there as soon as he was named, and that's clearly where journalists got his photo. (Being a journalist, I have chosen as many privacy option on my own Facebook as I can figure out.) Looking for any possible motive for his crime, I scrolled to the the suspect's "Likes", and to my horror,I saw that he had liked G.K.Chesterton's The Flying Inn.

The Flying Inn, published in 1914, imagines an England whose ruling class has taken a shine to Islam, particularly its dislike for alcoholic beverages and its option for polygamy. I'm a little frightened that GKC may have influenced this young man, and I am thinking uneasily about how stirring renditions of Lepanto--a traddie favourite--might inspire a shortsighted youth to take up arms against the paynim in freaking Ste-Foy.

Objects of Happiness 5: Blankie

I have a hideous cold. Not just a little sniffle, but a full-on, back-hurts, head-hurts, nose-stings cold. I may have caught it from going out in the rain to pick up a friend from the railway station. Now I am being a terrible hostess, not baking or washing dishes or cleaning or being entertaining. And naturally my thoughts are turning to Fuzzy Blanket.

Fuzzy Blanket is no more, having been worn to pieces. Originally it was a fluffy tartan rug purchased in Scotland, where for some strange reason we call blankets rugs. It was not really a security blanket--I don't remember needing one--it was more of a pal.

I probably should buy another (and identical) Fuzzy Blanket now that I actually live in Scotland, but let me see.

My natal oikos, as one says in Ancient Greek--which I will be teaching next term--abounds in afghan blankets knitted or crocheted by my mother. One of the memories of my family enduring in my memory is of several them sitting around the living-room clad in afghan-blanket togas. I think they were all engaged in reading, and I would not be surprised if at least two were drinking coffee. I had temporary run away from some less salubrious home, and thus the utter normalcy of my proper family struck me most distinctly.

My mother watches a lot of television, but her inner critic tells her this is wrong unless she is doing something with her hands. It matters not that she is now so hard of hearing that she must watch the screen. She is perfectly capable of reading subtitles and crocheting or embroidering at the same time, and she knows it. As a teenager she knitted pullovers while reading long and dull French and German books for class.Anyway, her projects are various, and over the years they have included a lot of afghan blankets.

As I sit in front of my sitting-room radiator in a green silk kimono, I could really use one of those afghans. I'm marooned in duvet country. You can see why the Scots voted against Brexit. They're not really British; they're French. That's my cold talking.

Basically I need my mother and an afghan. Not sure what my mother could do, however, other than say "There, there" and "Drink lots of fluids", wash the dishes, entertain my husband, and make a lot of cookies. Actually that is quite a lot of usefulness. Checking Air Canada fl----yikes!Checking Expedia.

No. Just impossible. Oh dear. Poor migrant me. Poor poor.

Objects of Happiness 3: Bear

Sitting on my desk and looking utter perplexed is my old friend Edward Sebastian Bear. Bear is over forty now and his expression has changed as, over the decades, pieces of his eyebrows and mouth have fallen off. I can't quite remember what Bear looked like when he arrived one Christmas morning, but perhaps a helpful parent will scan a photo and send it in.

Like many well-off Canadian children of my generation, I had a number of woolly animals and dolls sitting on my bed. There was the anthropomorphic elephant knitted by my mother, a small walrus, a multi-ethnic cloth doll (there was an alternative face on the reverse side of the skirts), a Holly Hobby, a (relative to the other toys) large blue whale and, of course, my favourite, Bear. 

Bear started his career named Bear, then Ted, and then Edward Bear (after Winnie the Pooh), and finally Edward Sebastian Bear after I watched as much of Brideshead Revisited as my parents let me get away with. I got a crush on bottle-blond Anthony Andrews; goodness knows why.

I started getting crushes on boys from an early age so and for such particularly stupid reasons as having long, dark eyelashes or blond hair. These crushes were sometimes of short and sometimes of long duration, but through them all, I had my faithful Ted. Edward Sebastian turned up before I was troubled by crushes on anyone; he is a link to the sunny innocence of infancy. 

Not that I was entirely faithful to the bear. I didn't always take him with me on my travels, in part because he is an inconvenient size and shape to pack. For some reason he got left behind when I got married and moved to Scotland. He whiled away his time with my nephew Pirate, who was rather fond of him, before I retrieved him and carried him across the sea. 

The poor old thing has had to be laundered several times in his existence, thanks to the measles and various bouts of the flu. If he was ever soft, fluffy and golden, he is now rough and sand-coloured. Has he aged worse than me? Yes, he has developed a small hole from which stuffing could fall out, and so far I am fine in that department, thank God. 

His expression is so worrying, I had to think seriously about whether or not he qualifies as an Object of Happiness. But as a reminder of home and of Christmas Morning 197-, he must definitely is.

***

In honour of my Great-Uncle Art, I have to tell the story of Beloved Belindy again. After all, I may be the youngest person alive to remember there ever was an Uncle Art. 

Were he alive today, Uncle Art would probably be 116, and he was plenty old back when he gave me my little toy broom. This broom took the shape of a handle attached to an anthropomorphic black mop. The black mop looked a lot like Beloved Belindy in a truly ancient Raggedy-Ann-and-Andy book I possessed, so that's what I named it at once. 

The black lady-mop was wearing what I many years later discovered was called "a mammy rag",  and my parents were clearly horrified by the racist implications of my sweeping the floor with a black lady wearing a mammy rag. (As young as I was, I remember the atmosphere of deep embarrassment.) Thus, Beloved Belindy was swiftly removed from my possession. 

For decades I thought she must be at the back of some shelf, but in recent years the terrible suspicion has been growing that my parents simply chucked her out. The sad irony is that I was really attached to Beloved Belindy, just as generations of innocent British children must have loved their golly dolls. I hasten to add that I would not give a golly to a contemporary British child, and so I begrudgingly have to admit that my parents were probably right to take away B.B. Come to think of it, my Raggedy-Ann-and-Andy book similarly disappeared. 

Returned from Poland

In case you were wondering, I have spent the last two weeks in Poland.  As the Historical House is a national treasure containing national treasures, I don't like to advertise when B.A. and I, or just I, am away.

I have an overdue article to write, but when I have finished that, I have some amusing (and at least one scary) travel stories and interesting snapshots to share. In the meantime, here is my article in Catholic World Report about the nationalists' parade on Polish Independence Day.

Some time ago I declared that Poland was not somewhere I go to relax but to be challenged and to grow. This still holds true---and how! But for relaxing, I don't think Italy fits the bill. When my plane touched down in Edinburgh, for one shining (and obviously confused) moment, I thought I was in Toronto. As much as Toronto drives me nuts, I don't think I will be truly at rest until I am there again.