Category Archives: travel

Septuagenarians in the Wilderness: part 1

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In this part of the True North (strong and free), we say that we are going to the cottage -we never say my cottage or our cottage – as if there were only one and half the population of Toronto ended up there. Well, actually, it felt as if it had last weekend.

And we always say cottage, not camp as my Quebec relatives used to.

We leave Toronto and head north on Highway 400 toward Muskoka, a pleasant trip at 11 a.m. with the aforesaid half of the city’s population and every service centre en route closed for renovation. One has progressed to a well graded site of sandy soil, surrounded by a high wire fence. Factor in my age and you have a tense situation about 90 minutes into the trip. Ninety minutes on the road and I have gone about half as far as I should have, but what the heck, the sky is a beautiful blue with an occasional puffy cumulus or a long thin diaphanous strip of cirrus cloud and the iPod shuffle is mixing things up in an entertaining way: the Rolling Stones, Dylan, Adele, Eric Clapton, Glenn Gould, the Stones again, Bach’s violin concerto, the Stones again. What the!

I battle a woman who is driving half on the paved shoulder and talking on her cell phone. Every time I manage to get out into the middle lane to pass, she speeds up. We are moving  at 60 Kph, half the usual speed, all three clogged lanes. She has left a gap that would fit 2 eighteen wheelers and she is weaving back and forth from the lane to the shoulder. Hey, what’s happening to my sunny-mood-in-spite-of slow traffic. Then mercifully and magically she is no longer there, I have made my way past the only sizeable town and wheeled off to a Tim Horten’s. LIke the cottage, Tim’s is a national treasure. You can use the washroom and buy a beverage, although Tim’s is more famous for its doughnuts.

Good thing I stopped because the land is no longer fertile farm land, but the ancient granite of the Canadian shield, great rock faces that the highway slices through and little lakes. There are no exits at all for many miles and certainly no friendly doughnut shops. But there is almost no traffic and what there is, is moving a good 25 kph over the speed limit. Three and a quarter hours after I left home, I make the left turn that takes me into the railway town, which has re-made itself into a summer destination.

I Dream of Etherica: life changing dream #2

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People who say that life is short are generally not old. Although I have not yet achieved old old age, that apparently starts at  85, I sometimes feel like Virginia Woolfe’s Orlando who started out as one of Queen Elizabeth’s courtiers and ended up as a Victorian mother. I seem to have had that many lives since I was born, although they have all been uni-sex.

One of my lives was esoteric. I meditated twice a day and joined in group meditation at the full and new moon. Every day, I visualized three lighted triangles in partnership with two others (per triangle) in far reaching places -Texas, England, France, South Africa, Australia- to bring light and peace into the world. I read the works of Alice Bailey, submitted essays to the Arcane School and attended conferences in New York City at the full moon in Taurus . We were concerned about world events and considered them in the light of the truth that Alice Bailey had channeled from the being we called the Tibetan.

Now it is true as time went on that I wondered why I never got published in the school’s monthly magazine, whereas my friend, who could afford to donate much more than I, often did. Clearly, I was a poor judge of my own worth. And as I observed the thin, harried, quarrelsome people running the conferences, I wondered if that was what enlightenment looked like.

This was the me that arrived in Los Angeles one August morning about 20 years ago. In the rose-patterened journal, # 23, in my backpack, I had just been making notes: “Tension of heart energy expressed in terms of giving to others- expenditure of spiritual energy can overcome fatigue…”

But not in this case.

My brother, Rob, was supposed to be there to meet me. I hadn’t seen him for seven years. He was flying in from his home in Paris. My daughter met me instead and told me he had been delayed. I was disappointed, I was hot and I was exhausted.

“Take a nap,” Julia said and her husband seconded the motion.

I had my 5 year-old grandson’s room while he was with his father. I lay down on his little futon. I listened. Good. The Buddhist woman next door, who assaulted our ears with her loud, angry chanting, was silent. I breathed deeply and fell asleep.

I dreamed I was on a plane on the way back to Toronto, but something was wrong. We made an emergency landing in a high desert airfield. I was looking out the window at something like snow that was blowing up into dirty little drifts.

I turned to the man next to me and said, to my surprise, “Do you think we are dead?’

“Yes,” he said.

We were herded into the airport waiting room, the walls of which were alternately plum, fuchsia and orange, each one edged with the colour of the wall next to it. We were at loose ends, milling about in vague expectancy. I was frankly appalled at the sheer tastelessness of what was, by all accounts, heaven.

Above us, an LED sign fired up, telling us that our first class would be at 10 p.m. Great! Just what I longed for! Heaven is an evening class!

It was 10:10 already. All I wanted was a shower and some rest. Resentfully, I followed the crowd up a curving, adobe staircase. (Don’t ask me. The journal says “adobe”.) Resentfully. The others were chattering merrily as if they were on a cruise. I was thinking how summer-camp, how awful. I didn’t fit in here either.

At the top, I heard joyful greetings. Each person was greeting an assigned teacher, whom they instantly recognized because they looked alike. A swarthy Mediterranean man had met his Spanish-looking teacher. A bull of a man with a short neck had met a broad-shouldered teacher who could be his twin. Each pair withdrew to a plum-colored banquette to begin orientation. They were all talking animatedly.

Except me. I was standing all alone. Bereft again.

What karmic debt was this? What failure of positivity? I had clearly not tried hard enough. I wanted to cry. And I was very angry. I wanted to clean myself up. I wanted to lie down. Lay my burden down. Oh damn.

Then someone clattered down the stairs that curved up to the third floor. She was running. She was smiling ear to ear – thin, pale, intense woman dressed in flowing, flapping, filmy prints of plum and fuchsia and orange.

“Hello, hello,” she cried, “So sorry I’m late. I’m Etherica. I’ll be your instructor. You can call me Dea, that is “of God”.

Her draped arms were held out, ready for an embrace. She was beaming, smiling broadly but more than that. Her eyes were wide and bright and intensely focused on my face, as if she were beaming light and love as she bore down on me. LIke one of those TV preachers or self-help gurus.  But she was also tripping on her gown and, unforgivably for me as a teacher, she was late.

My stomach revolted. I thought I would vomit. This was my  angel! This was how I seemed to others! Flighty, incompetent, ungrounded, and showering a blaze of brightness that made them want to wipe it off. She was not genuine. She was not …what…. She was not real. She could not, please God, be what I was meant to be.

GAAA!

I struggled awake, tangled in the wet sheet. I gasped for air in the stifling room. I stood straight up. Oh bad idea. Low blood pressure. I sat back down. Put my head between my knees. I could hear Julia treating a patient in the next room. I was in Los Angeles.  I was still alive. Etherica might be waiting for me, but she’d have to wait a while yet.

When I was able to get to the kitchen and had blurted out the whole sorry story to my son-in-law, he found it vastly amusing. “Sambo’s”, he chortled. “You died and went to a Sambo’s.”

He had to do a footnote for this uninformed Canadian. Sambo’s, he said, was a franchised restaurant that specializes in pancakes. Ah, as in the story of Little Bl….., how non pc.

“You’re really spooked. Don’t want to die?”

“It’s not the dying. That’s bad enough, but is that what I am – desiccated, flakey, ineffective, nervous…”

An unwise question to ask a son-in-law but at that moment the phone rang. He picked it up. I could hear the person at the other end, saying, “This is North West Airlines. Mr Hood’s bags have arrived and will be delivered before five.”

“And Mr Hood?” my son-in-law asked.

“Yes?”

“Mr Hood has arrived as well?”

“Good” said the man and hung up.

Where, I wondered is Rob. How could his bags be here and he not? I cursed Air Canada for showing that movie about Judgement City on my flight down.

My son-in-law took his shaken mother-in-law out, down to the beach apartment to make up a bed for Rob. My urgent need to prevent myself from ending up in Sambo heaven with Etherica had to be put on hold.

When we arrived back home on Washington Way, a van labelled  AirServ stood in front of the house and a delivery man with his phone to his ear was pounding on the door, yelling, “Pick it up. Pick it up. I know you’re in there. Well finally… I’ve got your bags here. Where am I? Right at your door. Your single storey brown house..” He turned to look at us as we came up the walk and Julia threw open the door.

“I think you have our bags there,” my son-in-law said pleasantly.

In the evening, the front room changed from a consulting room back into a living room and we were there watching television when I suddenly got to my feet and opened the door. Rob was getting out of a car across the street.

“Hi there, Sis,” he yelled. “I lost somebody. I’ll be right back”.

Back in the car. he made a U-turn and vanished up Abbot Kinney. We stood shivering in the cool desert air until he came roaring back followed by another car. He stood in the middle of the street speaking rapid French at the people in it. We must meet his friends, hear the story of the lost bags, of being questioned in Amsterdam as suspected terrorists because they were bagless and much, much more.

He had blown back into my life, this force of nature, he who had been stabbed on a train platform in Bombay, spent a week in jail in Turkey and as a camera man had had compartments that no one could ever find.

While Julia and her husband were working we walked on the beach and Rob talked, “And so I said to him, ‘Monsieur Godard, films are not made with trucks. Films are made with people – directors and actors.’ quel triumph…”

We drove north up the Pacific Coast Highway to Big Sur, where there was no room at the inn but he conned the hostess into letting us have a table. I had been a vegetarian for ten years but I ordered chicken.

“I remember you, Sis,” he said. You used to laugh. You could laugh at anything. You had a root canal that went wrong. You were in agony for weeks and you had people splitting their sides. You’re the one who taught me how to laugh.” He put down his fork. “What happened to you?”

Probably only Rob could have said that to me. Even so, a list of what had happened unfurled  in my mind and I started to cry.

“It’s okay to cry,” he said, taking my hand, “but, when you get around to it, it’s better to laugh.”

And so it was that what Etherica started, Rob finished, and I gave it all up. I gave up esoteric study and triangles of light and group meditation and terrible earnestness. I gave up flowing prints. I gave up a whole bunch of friends who didn’t laugh either. I ate meat.

That night after he had registered us at the Carmel Motor Lodge, he came out and said, “I told her you were my sister. I think she believed me,” and he fell over the steering wheel in gales of laughter.

Dress Code

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“What should I wear,” he asked. It was a hot day. We planned to take the dog for a hike through the woods before dinner and Blake preferred shorts, the shorter the better.

Many years ago, he had cut off a pair of jeans, rather, it must be said, too short and had worn them for many years to every family gathering from Mother’s Day to Thanksgiving, thereby, scandalizing his mother-in-law.

“Bring a pair of long pants,” I suggested. La Veranda Osteria took reservations so perhaps it was somewhat formal.

I was loathe to say that. For the most part no one tells us what to wear anymore. Mostly but not entirely.

A  week earlier, he had asked a few of us to the Sail Past at his yacht club. “The invitation calls for dress whites and navy blazers,” he added, “but people ignore that.” I had planned to wear white and navy anyway, seeing it as an occasion to play dressup.

Wearing white pants on the deck of a sail boat is a challenging affair at the best of times, what with winding wet sheets around winches, but that Saturday turned out to be rainy: you step into the sailboat by stepping onto the seat cushion with your muddy shoes. At the skippers’ meeting, the decision was made to cancel the sail because the lake was too choppy for dozens of boats to sail in close quarters past the commodore’s boat to salute him.  All the more time to hang out, waiting for the reception, dinner and dance, and so we found ourselves in the bar. Strictly speaking, it was not the bar, but the dining room and “strict” is what I am speaking about.

The air conditioner was running full tilt despite the cool weather, pouring cold air down onto the top of my head and my neck. I can’t abide that. I reached over, picked up my hither-to-unnecessary straw hat and put it on my head. It had barely settled my hair when the waiter appeared at my elbow and whispered something unintelligible. I needed translation. She was telling me to remove my hat.

She was telling ME to remove my hat. But I am female. I have a licence – just a minute, it’s here somewhere. I got it when I was born into this western society. Not only am I allowed to wear a hat anywhere I want, there are still places where it is mandatory. Aren’t there? I spent the first half of my life, travelling with a kerchief (a square scarf which is folded into a triangle- oh, just picture Queen Elizabeth with her dogs on a wet day) in case I wanted to visit a church or cathedral. And now  I’m being told not to. Apparently, I had walked right by that sign that said so.

I took it off. I didn’t want to make a scene, pull out my six shooter, so incompatible with the genteel chapeau.

I could just imagine that oh-so-politically-correct discussion where it was deemed unfair to tell men to remove their hats in the dining room if women were wearing theirs. The rule was a great leveller. I had been levelled!

What if I were Muslim, I wondered. I fantasized coming in wearing a headscarf. Then let them try to tell me what to wear!

 Wait a minute, wasn’t that more or less what France had just done and Quebec was threatening to do?
Who gets told what to wear these days? Hapless bridesmaids are probably still suffering in ugly dresses and bearing their expense. My Californian grandson unwrapped a red toque with genuine gratitude; his science teacher had just seized his last one. Catholic girls have to remember to roll their skirt bands back down before they go back to class. But from the looks of red carpet fashion and the girls in the club district, dress codes have gone the way of boned corsets and farthingales.
At the age of 22, weighing all of 120 lbs. I set off to teach my first high school class encased in a girdle. No rule book mandated this, but a well-bred young woman knew she shouldn’t jiggle. On extremely hot days, pre-air conditioned schools, I was mortified to have to slough it off in favour of garter belt and stockings.
Those were the days, my friends, we thought they’d never end!
Boys were not yet suspended for wearing baseball hats. They knew better than to try. It was several years before they were suspended for wearing shorts. I remember one who demonstrated the resolve of Thomas More, defying Henry VIII. It was reasonable in his opinion to wear short pants in the June heat. As soon as his suspension was over, he came back to school – in shorts. I passed him coming down the up staircase.
Blake recalls arriving at that school’s first ever staff meeting in a pink shirt and forever sealing his reputation as a renegade by so doing.
In the depth of sub zero winter, my small daughter set off for school wearing pants under her wool skirt, permitted to do so only if she removed them in the cloakroom. We saw that women were beginning to wear what we called slacks to work on television, but always with a jacket. Eventually, word came down from on high, that female teachers would be permitted to wear “pant suits” so long as the jackets were of a modest length. (Code for over the bum, babes)
By then someone had invented panty hose. You didn’t need all that rig and tackle to hold up stockings after all.  There was a new and dangerous freedom in the air.  GIrls as well as boys wore jeans. GIrls started wearing short shorts. Bras became optional. My favourite anecdote on that score concerns the vice principal who, in his role as inspector, evaluated a fellow teacher and wrote in his report that she was wearing false nipples. She, of course, was not, but she had a good idea what he had been inspecting.
In the larger world, the smelly wool jacket loaned out to men who arrived at, say, Honest Ed’s Steakhouse, improperly attired, got retired from duty. Blake stopped sending five dress shirts to the laundry every week. We relaxed and let it all hang out, even at the prom, well, especially at the prom. There even came a time, when some of us vowed never again to encase ourselves in pantyhose like a nyloned sausage. And even that was doable.
Dinner at La Veranda Osteria was excellent, really fresh greens in the salad, mouthwatering lobster stuffed pasta and  Blake remarked he was glad he had changed into his pants. It was that sort of place. And I wore my hat throughout.

Jack Reacher -Wandering Taoist

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In my last post “How I developed ‘Low Tastes’ in Reading, I mentioned that I was hooked on Lee Child’s Jack Reacher thrillers, to my dismay. Then, wouldn’t you know it, I found a justification: Jack Reacher is a wandering taoist.

It was reading # 156 in Deng Ming-Dao’s 365 Tao:Daily Meditations* the one for June 5th that clued me in to what I should have realized before.  (* Available at Amazon.com)

Inseparable: The trunk is hollow,/But the branches live./The void is fundamental,/But the ten thousand things are diverse./ Therefore wanderers free themselves of cares/And follow Tao in great delight.

In the ensuing explanation, Deng tells us that we can know all of Tao’s manifestation by travelling through the world. All experience is the experience of Tao. Those who follow it, divest themselves of ego and ambition and follow its flow throughout the land, moving from place to place as they sense the direction of its vital flow. “These wanderers have glimpsed the void that is in them and in all things. They delight in life but never see more than the void.”

As a volunteer, I once took a phone call from a very serious young man who wanted me to tell him what Taoism was. I replied civilly, I hope, that to answer would take longer than the average phone call and, besides, it was beyond me. Short answer -Tao is the stuff of life, the energy that animates it. Taoists believe in the supremacy of nature and the necessity of living by its laws, in particular the cycles of change. They understand that whatever is full and rich will decline in time and whatever is empty and poor will rise in turn. Taoists don’t talk about God in spite of reverence. Should they search for God, they would look, not in a book, but within.

I would say they are practical and work things out as they go along rather than adhering to doctrine. This story illustrates that: a Buddhist, a Confucian and A Taoist were meditating when mosquitoes began buzzing around their ears. The Buddhist let a mosquito bite him without protest. The Confucian slapped and killed his mosquito. The Taoist waved his mosquito away. When that didn’t work, he moved to another room. When the mosquito followed him there, he killed it. Taoists  prefer not to interfere unnecessarily but act instinctively when necessary.

It seems to me that many people are Taoists at heart, although they never identify as such. Joseph Campbell, for example, warned against being co-opted by the system. Systems prevent us from personal assessment and self-determination. They also enable us to succeed in our careers, attain wealth and social standing. Opting out has rather the reverse effect.

The fictional Jack Reacher attained the rank of major as U.S. military police officer. Then in 1997, he left that system over a moral disagreement, just short of being deployed to outer Thule or its equivalent. His pension is paid into a D.C. bank and accessed on the road. He doesn’t own a car, drives badly and flies only when he can’t take a bus or hitchhike, across the Atlantic, for example. He travels the United States according to whim, once deciding to follow a diagonal line from the north east to San Diego. He carries no baggage, except that folding toothbrush, I mentioned last time. When his clothes need washing, he buys new, cheap, sturdy shirts, pants etc. and throws the old ones away. he reckons that when you factor in the cost of a washing machine, dryer and the dwelling to contain them, not to mention the soap, he still comes out ahead. Nevertheless, he is a clean person, showering thoroughly in the cheap motels he chooses, although when he still wore his Class A’s complete with Purple Heart and Silver Star, he was not above cadging first class digs at the army’s expense.

Wherever he goes- Mississippi, Kansas, Colorado, he finds trouble or it finds him. Often all he does is step down from his ride, when the locals take agin him and try to run him out of town. Usually it is a very small town with its own ingrained and deeply corrupt system. But at 6’5″ and 250 lbs. and with some serious brawling smarts, the system’s minions don’t have much success throwing him out. Pretty soon, he has identified the nature of the corruption and its victims. He believes as he was taught that the best fight is no fight at all, but when a fight is necessary, he strikes first and dirty. In The Affair, he chides the rednecks who take him on for bringing only 6 men and takes them down readily. And they aren’t even the real enemy, just wrong-headed and misinformed.

I gave up watching boxing when I was 20 and now it just makes me think ‘concussion’, but Lee Child’s fight descriptions are choreography on paper. I would love to know how he knows all this stuff. Does he practise it the way I practise tai chi?

Jack Reacher can be counted on to right some wrongs before he blows out of town and to  leave behind more wisdom than he found there, that is for those who survive. The guiltiest may meet sudden ‘accidental’ ends, which cause Reacher neither remorse nor even a backward glance. He bids goodbye to his latest woman just as readily.

Now the purists among you may object that he also has sex on a regular basis. I counter, never indiscriminately and always on the basis of respect and affection as well as healthy desire. Besides Taoists are not purists. If they claim to be, that’s your first clue.

Jack Reacher looks into the void. The void looks back. That’s okay with him.

Septuagenarians On the Road: part 1

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We had been on the road together at least once, fifty years ago, lithe, limber and quick. That time we had a five month old baby in tow and we slept in a tent. Now here we were  my ex-husband, Blake, my sister, Georgia and me, septuagenarians on the road again – to the wedding of that baby’s son.

Georgia insists she is not a septuagenarian and will not be until September (at which time she will no doubt celebrate her achievement). Well,okay kid, two septuagenarians and a sexagenarian, does that sound better?

First off, let me say, that we are active old codgers. Every day, Georgia swims, Blake hikes with his dog and I practise tai chi. So physically, we felt we were up to it.

Whether it was wise for the three of us to share a room was another question, but there was little room at the inn, it being graduation day in Amherst, and prices had risen accordingly. Two hundred dollars a night seemed sufficient. Two rooms at that price, a bit steep. I reasoned there would be two queen sized beds and ordered a cot, but I confess when I talked about it to non-participants, I implied there just weren’t two rooms available.

Georgia and I had, fairly recently, driven from Toronto to the Quebec/Vermont border, where we were born and that had gone well. We took turns driving her Corolla. Mostly, I remembered the way although I experienced the usual confusion getting through Montreal.

Blake and I had made many trips when we were married, to the east coast in the summer, to Myrtle Beach on spring break, through the Rockies to Vancouver and for two summers through England, France, Italy and Greece. Blake had always been a fearless driver even on the right- that is to say the wrong- side of the road. Plus he had with an unerring sense of direction.

And I had driven myself from Toronto to Los Angeles, a drive that surely qualified me for this day trip.

We made good time Friday morning, arriving at the Fort Erie border by 11 a.m. and clearing it twenty minutes later. Now we needed to stop for several reasons, some of them typically septuagenarian. Fortunately, the New York State Thruway had a service centre a few miles farther on and we piled out to stretch. It was hard for some of us to stand up when we got out of the car, but we soon shook that off. There was an Arby’s restaurant, but it was still before noon, so why not wait until the next service centre. We were back in the car twenty minutes later, armed with caffeine and rarin’ to go.

The next service centre sported a Mcdonalds. Okay, some of us were food snobs, but also starving, so I gathered my courage and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich. Later when asked how it was, I replied that chicken had not led a happy life.

This pattern repeated itself. We passed centres with Starbucks, for example, but when we needed sustenance, the nearest centre was sure to have only Mcdonalds. What changed was that, at every stop, it took longer for some of us to straighten up when we got out of the car.  We spent the first few seconds more or less doubled over as if we were searching the tarmac for a lost treasure.

It was a beautiful drive, through wooded flat land beside the Erie Canal and then through low hills. Suddenly, two roads diverged. “Go right”, I said, consulting  Google’s convoluted directions. Blake went left. Either I had to be quicker or he did.

That he even consulted me as navigator surprised me. What had happened to Blake the intuitive navigator? That he didn’t react to instruction faster amazed me. What was this lag time about? It hadn’t been there 35 years ago.

The directions the toll guy gave us were more confusing than Google’s but after 15 minutes and Blake repeatedly assuring us that east is east and the I-90 goes east, he proved to be right. Never trust a computer program to know a continuous route if its name changes.

By the time we arrived at Ho Jo’s at 6 p.m., I had decided that I’d rather drive than navigate and if I never sat down again, it would be too soon.

And there in the parking lot was my son whom I hadn’t seen for six months, unloading his baggage. “Legs, don’t fail me now,” I whispered and launched my bent-over body out of the car.