I am upset about the post office. I want my mail. I want the letter carrier to deliver my mail to the door, as they have always done.
Canada
Post’s workers walked off the job on Sept. 25. I don’t blame them. On that day
the Government of Canada announced that they want the post office to cease door-to-door
mail delivery, shut some post offices and lay off some workers. What did the
government think would happen if they announced that kind of radical change to
the post office?
Did anyone
think to talk to the people who work for Canada Post?
Who is to
blame for this mess? I blame the government of Canada.
The post
office is a business, okay, but it is also a government service, and has been since
before Confederation. The government has a simple equation: they deliver the
mail, and they charge people postage to deliver it.
What went wrong?
My explanations come from my friendly longtime letter carrier, Mike, and from
my neighbour across the street, Henry, who has worked his whole live at a
Mississauga sorting plant for Canada Post.
Why are audiobooks all of a sudden such a big thing? Zak Annette at Doubleday Canada, the director of my audiobook for Maple Syrup, summed it up simply: it’s about technology, he noted. When Zak, who hails from the United Kingdom, started working in audiobooks, they were on cassette. Then, they migrated to CDs. Now, through apps like Libby, I can download an audiobook using my library card of the Toronto Public Library, and plug my phone into my headset or, more often, my car, for long road trips. Like many people I’ve become a huge fan; most recently I listened to Whoopie Goldberg read John Grisham’s recent novel, Camino Ghosts. That was a lot of fun.
Doubleday Canada will release my book Maple Syrup on Oct. 21, and Penguin Random House Audiobooks wants the audiobook to come out on the same day. They asked me to read my book. My family was surprised. “We were thinking maybe Liam Neeson or Morgan Freeman,” they said. But, turns out, the publisher wanted me. I hear that, in the case of non-fiction, more often than not it’s the author that reads their own book.
It turned out to be a fun challenge. The studio is close to my house: it’s at the base of the CN Tower in downtown Toronto; a nice morning ride on my bicycle. The second day the director, Zak, asked me when I arrived at Penguin Random House Canada, “Did you ride in this morning? I think I passed you on the Wellington Street bike lane. I saw you and I said, ‘I’d better get to the studio before the guest.’ ”
Zak is a pro. He’s worked on 1,000 audiobooks. What a nice guy to work with. The producer of the audiobook is Jaclyn Gruenberger, also top drawer. The process can be painstaking; Zak sits outside in the control room and his voice comes to me in the sound booth through headphones. I read, “Maple syrup lives in me as a proxy for happiness, stability and community,” but I’d moved my arm slightly, and Zak’s voice came in: “Once more for clothing.” There are also problems with a rumbling stomach, which the microphone picks up; the studio keeps a stash of granola bars for this eventuality.
It’s
Canada Day; a pretty warm one, and I am in my back yard with my Smith-Corona
Classic 12, a gift from Mimi for my birthday a few years ago. This is a manual
typewriter which you could call portable, in the sense that it comes in a
carrying case, but it must weigh ten kilos, so it’s not a typewriter that you’d
want to bring anywhere. I laugh to think about it, but a years ago—the year I
turned 30, to be precise—I travelled with my mom to Indonesia. By this point I
owned a laptop, my first, which was a Toshiba. But this was before the
Internet, and I still tended to write mainly on paper, that is, using a
typewriter. My mom flew from Montreal to LA and I flew from New York, where I
lived, to LA, where we met and rented a compact car to drive down to La Jolla,
to vist her elder sister, my aunt Elsa, en route to crossing the Pacific Ocean.
I decided, for reasons that now feel a bit obscure, that I needed a manual typewriter to bring with me to Indonesia, so that I could write while I was there. In a free newspaper in San Diego, in the classified ads, I found a used manual typewriter for sale. I drove over in the little blue hatchback car to buy it off a Ukrainian woman, as I recall. In my memory it was not a particularly light typewriter; nonetheless I lugged it onto the plane and then all over Bali and Java. I was glad to have it, and I did do quite a bit of typing while I was there, while sitting in the shade with a cold drink. Who did I think I was, W. Somerset Maugham? I must have later lugged it back to New York, but I certainly don’t have it now. I have no idea what happened to the thing.
I wanted for a long time to write a
book about maple syrup. I even started a couple of times, and I had a folder
kicking around in my office, with some scraps of paper I’d typed with a pretty
broken manual typewriter that had a faded ribbon. I typed those words up one
night in sugaring off season when I came in from the sugar bush. That night, it
gave me comfort as I typed to realize that, while I’ll never be a maple syrup professional,
I am a story teller.
I thought
that the book was a kid’s book. Basically, the story was about wet socks. When
we were kids we wore boots from Canadian Tire to gather sap from the sugar
maple buckets that hung on taps on the sugar maple trees at our family farm
near Papineauville, Quebec. The uninsulated rubber boots really were wrong for
the job. We shoved our jeans into our boots and as we clambered through the
sugar bush the snow filled our boots. Then we lugged the heavy pails of maple sap
through the deep snow and the sap sloshed into the tops of the stupid boots and
mixed with the snow. My socks got really wet and my feet were frickin’ cold.
The soaking,
freezing socks somehow seemed enough to anchor a kid’s book: you suffer, you
get wet, and then you get redemption in the end at the sugar shack next to the
evaporator where you strip off your wet wool socks, warm up your feet by the
roaring fire under the bubbling, foaming sap as it boils, and sip the sap as it
sweetens on the way to becoming syrup.
Anyways I thought about it a lot but I never got my act together. I did look up the topic, and saw that the books on maple syrup were either American, or corny olde-timey books about sugaring off at grandpa’s farm with the horse and sleigh, or both. So I knew there was room for a book, but I did nothing. Then quite as a miracle an editor at Doubleday Canada, Anna MacDiarmid, reached out to me, and asked me to write a book about maple syrup. I’d written a few things about the stuff over the years, in the National Post and the Globe and Mail, and the Narwhal picked up a Globe piece I wrote about how climate change poses a risk to the syrup industry. So I guess my name was out there as someone who cares about maple syrup.
Plus in
the meantime I’d become a registered professional forester, so my bona fides to
write a forest-based book had risen.
Anna MacDiarmid is a Brit; because we as Canadians are so close to maple syrup, we didn’t actually realize that there was a hole in the market, for a history book on maple syrup in Canada. Such a book just did not exist—until now, that is!
The throng, horde, torrent, stream, the pure rush and gush of humanity, coursing like lifeblood through Union Station, cannot help but impress, even surprise, and carries for me a message of hope. I arrived at 8 a.m. in a taxi with my sister and niece, to put them on a train. A bit bleary, I went to search for a coffee. The station wasn’t busy—it was mobbed. The workers, the students, the bureaucrats, and even the downtrodden of our nation’s metropolis are on their feet—in running shoes, leather dress shoes, clogs, loafers, fuzzy boots, thick-soled sneakers, pull on boots, carrying backpacks and briefcases and grocery bags; many with earbuds, all walking with firm resolve from the train station into the maw of 10 matching doors with signs above that say TTC/Front St.
I have a friend whom I met when he contacted me after I reviewed his book in the Globe and Mail. We met at a bar for a drink; we’ve been getting together every few months since then, which was a few years ago, usually for dinner or drinks, either near at a dive called E.L. Ruddy, which is a vegan watering hole down at the end of my block, or sometimes closer to his house, which is east of Yonge Street. My friend heads to Argentina next week and we wanted to see one another before he left. But co-incidentally I’ve decided to do a Dry January. It’s something I’ve done over the last few years; harder than it sounds. I am not a big drinker but I do drink a beer or a glass of wine, or sometimes a bit of rye, a few times a week, and I’m trying to lose weight and I know alcohol is not good for you anyway, so I figure a Dry January is a good idea.
Several hundred people gathered on the south lawn of Queen’s Park in front of the Ontario legislature on Saturday, Nov. 23, 2024, at 2 p.m. I went there with my son Frits, and our friend Francis met us there. We stood by the pedestel of a bronze statue of a guy named Whitney and we listened to about ten speeches. It felt really good. The government of Doug Ford, the Progressive Conservative premier of Ontario, announced the other day that they want to rip out many kilometres of bike lanes in Toronto, including bike lanes on Yonge Street, University Avenue and Bloor Street. A lot of people are righteously pissed off about it. I’ve lived in Toronto for 30 years this fall. Before I moved here I lived in New York. Before that I lived in Montreal. In Montreal I rode a white Raleigh mountain bike to my job at The Gazette (weather permitting). At that time, more than 30 years ago, Montreal had safe, physically separated bike lanes. I used to ride down Berri Street from my home in the Plateau to my job at the newspaper. There was also a decent bike lane on de Maisonneuve Blvd at the time, and pretty good bike lanes too down at the Old Port and going out along the Lachine Canal. I rode my bike all the time. Once an off-duty police officer hit me on Laurier Street and left with nothing more than an apology; generally, though, I felt safe.
This afternoon before supper I practiced my tennis game, banging a pale green Wilson us open ball into the brick wall that spreads across from our house. As I banged the ball, the evening sun poured onto me from between the bars of the gate, painted Cadbury-purple, that bars entry to the west part of the factory. We bought this house in 2007, so we’ve lived across from the wall for 17 years. I grew up on a farm; we had a lot of cool stuff like hills to sled down and apple trees to climb, a river to swim in and fields in which to cross-country ski, and what seemed like a limitless supply of fresh vegetables, but we did not have any brick walls.
Is a brick
wall an asset? I am not sure I would phrase it that way, but the red brick wall
– four stories high, as long as a city block, and about a century old — and
the Cadbury chocolate factory it encloses, are, if not friends, at least
aspects of existence.
We have a love-hate, mostly hate, relationship with the factory; on Sunday morning they backed up a tanker truck to the wall and hooked up a hose to a proboscis that juts from the factory, and at intervals this truck emitted a whooshing sound that sounded like the air brakes on a freight train.
I am just back from a couple of weeks in British Columbia. It occurred to me that for me B.C. is the Old Country; where I am from; the crucible of old traditions that have stayed with me in my wanderings.
My parents met on a ship from the Netherlands and settled in B.C. in 1958. I was born in New Westminster. My parents split in 1964 and we went our separate ways; not sure exactly what led to the breakup, but is was a bit scorched earth I guess in the sense that neither of my parents, nor us three eldest kids, ever lived in Vancouver much after that. That said, both my parents went on to have kids with other partners. Now I have three siblings in B.C.: a brother in Surrey south of Vancouver, a sister on Vancouver Island and a sister further north on the mainland in the South Cariboo region.
On a
recent Saturday morning I boarded the 506 Carlton streetcar of the Toronto
Transit Commission, heading west. I tapped my Presto card to pay my $3.30 fare.
I like to sit at the back, but it was occupied by a sleeping man, who had
stretched out over five seats. I walked further ahead, and saw two other
sleeping forms, one beside a cart filled with their possessions; the other
sleeping on a bench with several bags tucked under the bench. I walked further
forward; just behind the driver sat a fourth sleeping figure, next to a
shopping cart.
I am quite
sure that none of these riders paid a fare.
The TTC is
in trouble. The commission notes that ridership in 2023 dropped to 70 per cent
of levels in 2019, before the pandemic – even as Toronto has continued to grow.
Fewer people ride transit because more people work from home. But that’s only
part of the reason. The roads are as clogged with cars as ever, or more so; if
more people work from home, whence all these extra cars? Part of it, I suspect,
is that people choose cars over the TTC, because our transit system is becoming
a refuge for homeless people, and riders feel less welcome. I feel less
welcome.
