It’s All About the Middle

The best thing about a Oreo cookie is definitely the middle. I think the same can be said for a sandwich, an action packed vacation, or a romantic interlude with my husband.  When I was  a university student the middle of the night was the optimum time to study for tests and complete research papers. 

I remember when I was a child the middle of the back seat was definitely not the coveted spot. My siblings and I fought NOT to sit there. My parents had to legislate the amount of time each of us needed to spend there in order to prevent major battles.  Speaking of driving, the middle of the road is definitely not the place to be. Remember the Louden Wainwright III song, which contained the lyrics ‘dead skunk in the middle of the road stinkin’ to high heaven?’

The middle of a donut is certainly not the best part. There is nothing there. Sticking up your middle finger in public is hardly polite. As we get older the middle part of our body is rarely looked at with favor, since extra weight seems to gravitate there in the most aggravating way. Few people escape at least some sort of ‘mid-life’ crisis.

I had a teaching colleague with a middle child theory. She thought kids sandwiched in the middle of their families between younger and older siblings had to cope with a special set of circumstances that sometimes impacted them negatively. When a child in my class was having academic or social problems the first question she would ask is……”Are they a middle child?” 

I happen to live in the province smack dab in the middle of Canada and think it is a pretty great place. I find musical notes in the middle range are the easiest for me to sing.  Shakespeare’s A Mid Summer Night’s Dream is one of his funniest and most entertaining plays. Doesn’t the middle man/woman in a business deal make the most profit? 

They say the middle class is disappearing, but I’m happy to consider myself a part of it. I’m glad I have the good fortune not to need social assistance but I’m also glad I’m not a millionaire. That would bring its own share of problems. 

The older I get the more I realize that somewhere in the  middle, between the two extremes,  is often the most open-minded and reasonable place to take a stance on controversial things. My life experiences have moderated many of my black and white ideas and sent me scurrying for middle ground. 

“Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle.”   – Anna Quindlen (Newsweek columnist)

The De Grassi Girls- True Canadian Heroines

They were teenage heroines! One of the things I love about writing this blog is that it connects me with interesting people and stories and helps me learn new things. I published a post about our food tour in Toronto in early October and included a picture of the De Grassi  Street sign.

De Grassi Street became famous because a long running Canadian teen television drama is set in a fictional high school on the street.  I had no idea the street also bears the name of  two heroic teenage women until Anne Cohen who works for an online women’s magazine called We Women e-mailed to ask me if she could use my photo of the De Grassi street sign in a slide show for Women’s History month which is celebrated in October.

It didn’t take me long to find several articles online about Charlotte and Cornelia De Grassi. As young children they moved to York in Upper Canada  with their Italian father Captain Filipo De Grassi and their British mother Charlotte Hearne. In 1837  when Charlotte was 15 and Cornelia 13, William Lyon McKenzie,  a former Toronto mayor and former member of the provincial  Parliament  led a rebellion against the government of Upper Canada.

Captain De Grassi who supported the government rode to Toronto on a moonlight December night when he heard about the uprising McKenzie was organizing. Charlotte and Cornelia who were both excellent riders joined their Dad. The Lieutenant Governor Francis Head said he needed to know how many rebel troops there were before planning his defense. Charlotte and Cornelia said they would spy on the rebels and report back to Head as to their strength in numbers.  Both were wounded as they fled on their ponies when the rebels became suspicious of them.

They were able to report to the Lieutenant Governor that the size of the rebel forces had been greatly exaggerated. Later when the rebels set fire to the Don Bridge Cornelia was the first to notice it and raised the alarm.  The rebellion was short-lived and McKenzie spent the next decade in exile in the United States. 

McKenzie noted a De Grassi female spy in his written account of the rebellion and their father also wrote about it in the family papers. According to the Canadian Status of Women website the newspaper, The New York Albion carried a story about Cornelia and Charlotte.  

Merna Forster also tells their story in her book 100 More Canadian Heroines: Famous and Forgotten Faces.

I was unable to find any visual images of Cornelia or Charlotte online. It is one of the times I wish I had artistic talent because I think this story would make a great picture book for young people. 

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The Famous Five

Agnes McDonald’s Railroad Adventure

Brides of New France- The King’s Daughters

De Ja Vu at the United Nations

We took a tour of the United Nations and almost everything I saw was a connection to another place I’d been or something I had seen before. This sculpture called A Sphere Within A Sphere by Arnaldo Pomodoro was a gift to the United Nations by the country of Italy and sits in the courtyard just before you enter the UN.  I took a photo of a very similar piece by the same artist when I visited the Vatican in Rome. To me the sculptures represent the world cracking apart enough for us to see it’s working interior. I think this gives us hope that it is possible to get the work done that we need to accomplish if we want to repair our fractured world. My husband Dave is chatting with a woman outside the United Nations who wanted people to sign a petition protesting the Chinese government taking over people’s land without giving them compensation for it.

She reminded me of a woman from Hebei province I saw praying to Mao’s picture when I visited Tiananmen Square in Beijing. She said her family land had been confiscated without proper compensation and when her husband went to government officials to protest he was arrested.  A stained glass window by Marc Chagall sits just outside the chapel at the United Nations. It was presented by United Nations staff members and Chagall as a memorial to Dag Hammarskjold, the second Secretary General of the United Nations who died in a plane crash in 1961.  The window contains various symbols of peace and love. The musical notes in the window are a connection to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony a favorite of Mr. Hammarskjold’s.  I took this photo of a Chagall window in Mainz, Germany. It is one of a series of windows in St. Stephen’s church. The windows depict scenes from the Old Testament. Chagall made them after World War II to help Jews and Christians to remember the part of their faith story they share. He hoped this would aid in the reconciliation between Jews and German Christians after the Holocaust.  At the United Nations you can view a presentation about the need to eliminate nuclear weapons from our world. They have these clothes on display from a victim of the bombing of Hiroshima. It is to remind United Nations visitors of the horrible impact of nuclear weapons.  It brought to mind this photo I took in Hiroshima, Japan at the Peace Memorial Museum showing some of the victims immediately after the dropping of the bomb. These are home-made prosthesis made for victims of land mines in Cambodia. The United Nations is part of a world-wide mission to eliminate landmines. According to this United Nations website land mines still kill 15,000-20,000 people a year.  The United Nations display reminded me of my two visits to land mines museums in Cambodia. At one our guide had lost his arm to a land mine.  According to our guide the United Nations has been working on finding a solution to the question of Palestine since the first special session of the General Assembly in 1947. It reminded me of my visit to a Palestinian refugee camp with twenty-four of my students from Hong Kong. Here the guide shows us bullet holes in the wall around a soccer field where school children were playing. My husband Dave is listening to the audio description of a mural at the United Nations that depicts the nuclear accident at Chernobyl.  The mural reminded me of our visit to the Chernobyl Museum in Kiev, Ukraine. I took a picture of this photo collage which shows the faces of children who were victims of the disaster. Out of the 3 million people the Ukrainian government recognises as victims of Chernobyl, 642,000 are children. Our visit to the United Nations prompted me to make connections with many previous experiences we have had. It evoked memories of other places we had visited around the world. Since the organization’s mission is to build positive connections between countries I guess that’s not surprising.   Dave poses on the steps across the street from the United Nations. On the wall behind him is a verse from Isaiah 2:4   “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore. “

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But They’re Not Chinese

“He’ll never forgive J K Rowling!”  A friend told me her son will never forgive the Harry Potter author for allowing her books to be made into films. He loved her stories so much and had created his own visual images of the Harry Potter characters from Rowling’s descriptive words. They were all spoiled when she allowed her novels to be turned into movies. 

It reminded me of the year I read aloud Island of the Blue Dolphins to a class of fifth graders when I was teaching at an international school in Hong Kong.  After I’d finished the book I showed my students the movie.  We were only about ten minutes into the film when one of the boys was waving his hand in the air with a puzzled look on his face.  “What’s the matter?” I asked.  ” The people”, he said.  “They’re not Chinese!”. The whole time I was reading the book he was imagining the characters looked like him- that they were Chinese.  His identification with the characters in the novel was spoiled by the film version. 

Recently a former teaching colleague and I were trying to think of some first-rate children’s books that we used to read to our students that have never been turned in to movies. It was hard. We came up with Castle in the Attic by Elizabeth Winthrop,  The Remarkable Journey of Prince Jen by Lloyd Alexander and The Shakespeare Stealer by Gary Blackwood.  I also don’t think the Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth George or Number the Stars by Lois Lowry have been made into movies although I’ve heard rumors they are under development as films. 

Can you think of any great novels for kids that have no movie version?  I think we need more of them. If  you liked this post you might also like………

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New York Reminds Me of Hong Kong

It has been about a year and a half since we moved back to North America from Hong Kong.  On our visit to New York City, I realized there were many things about New York that reminded me of Hong Kong.

Hiking in Sai Kung County Park in Hong Kong

Although the typical image of Hong Kong is a place of skyscrapers and traffic the city has lots of green space. There are plenty of parks and beautiful wilderness places to hike.

Riding bike in Central Park

New York has preserved some lovely green spaces as well. We spent several hours biking through Central Park. Right in the middle of this huge metropolitan city is a park that covers 843 acres and is 2.5 miles long. In both Hong Kong and New York people seem to pay little attention to street lights. They just cross the street in droves whenever they think they can get safely across. Our guide on one of our New York walking tours told us that jay walking is just an accepted part of life in New York City. It is in Hong Kong too. 

There were times in Hong Kong when I would look around in a train car and realize that I was the only Caucasian there. That happened to me a couple of times in New York too. 

 

In Hong Kong you see men in parks playing mahjong. In New York they are playing chess.

In Hong Kong ferry boats are still used daily for transportation. There are plenty of ferry boats to ride in New York too. 

In Hong Kong when you are in a restaurant or coffee shop or shopping mall you can hear people speaking all kinds of languages- Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Tagalog, and English. It is the same way in New York. We were sitting in a Starbucks just off-Broadway and I heard Spanish, French, English, Korean and a language I couldn’t identify being spoken by people sitting around me. There is lots of construction going on in both Hong Kong and New York. In New York, they use steel scaffolding.

 

 

In Hong Kong the scaffolding is made of bamboo. Rent is very expensive in both Hong Kong and New York. I found statistics for May 2012 that said an average two bedroom apartment in Hong Kong was renting for $2,800 a month and a two bedroom apartment in Manhatten was renting for $3,400 a month. 

In both New York and Hong Kong cars aren’t as popular as in many other cities.  In Chicago for example 89% of people have access to a personally owned vehicle while only 50% of people in New York own a car and only 56 out of every 1000 people in Hong Kong own a car.  The public transportation system is very heavily used in both Hong Kong and New York. 

In New York you board the trains after swiping your MetroCard. 

 

In Hong Kong you use an Octopus card. As I was walking down the streets of Time Square in the evening, the crush of the crowd reminded me of trying to make my way down the streets in the Mong Kok area of Hong Kong, the most densely populated place on earth. 

There are lots of street sweepers in both cities although they dress a little differently.

Here is a Hong Kong street sweeper

and her New York counterpart.

In Hong Kong restaurants offer every kind of food imaginable just like they do in New York. 

Both Hong Kong and New York have iconic statues.

In Hong Kong there is the Big Buddha.In New York it is the Statue of Liberty.

 

Although I don’t know if I will ever get to visit Hong Kong again, being in New York City brought back some fond memories and comparisons with the city we called home for six years. 

Signs- Signs Everywhere in New York

Meg Ryan, playing the role of Sally Albright, fakes sexual fulfillment in a most convincing way at one of the tables in Katz’ Deli in New York. It is a classic scene in the movie When Harry Met Sally. That scene has put Katz’ on the map. There is a sign in the restaurant marking the table where the scene was filmed. 

This ‘in memory’ plaque was on a park bench right beside Strawberry Fields the art piece dedicated to John Lennon in Central Park. The plaque in memory of Britt Marie Katayama  begins with the words Imagine you at Peace . It alludes to Lennon’s peace anthem Imagine.

The David Letterman Show was in a filming hiatus during our time in New York but we went past the theatre which is its home and my husband Dave posed for a photo.

Most of the fire trucks I saw in Manhattan had one of these ‘in memory’ signs. They featured the names of firefighters who died during the 9/11 rescue operations.

In the Trinity Church cemetery I took a photo of the grave of John Grum 39, and his nine month old daughter Rachel, who both died in 1759. John died in August and his child in November. The words of a hymn written by Isaac Watt in 1709 are engraved on the bottom of the tomb.
Hark! from the tombs a doleful sound;
My ears, attend the cry;
Ye living men, come view the ground
Where you must shortly lie.

 

Names of the firefighters on Engine 154 who died doing rescue work at the Twin Towers during 9/11. Their names are engraved in the steel railing around the memorial pools at the Ground Zero site.
This is the table where the Canadian delegation sits in the United Nations assembly. 

This street light banner for Rutgers Presbyterian Church makes the congregation sound pretty inviting. Serious about peace and justice- Playful about worship-Joyful about faith.

The New York subway system has an initiative called Poetry in Motion.  They post a different poem every month on their trains.  In October during our visit to the city they were featuring an untitled poem by Jeffry Yang.  It read…..

west of rest is sleep
east, dream
where waters meet
north, emptiness,
south, wakefulness,
and out, rising up
to the stars, peace.

A reminder of Canada on Wall Street- The Toronto Dominion Bank

King Kong poster in the Empire State Building. In the 1933 movie King Kong the giant ape who is the main character, climbs to the top of the Empire State Building and falls to his death after being attacked by airplanes.

One of the art pieces in a display at the United Nations that catalogues the 30 articles in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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In New York We…….

It’s All Part of the Job!

“You’re writing serves the forces of evil.”  

“ I was alarmed by your article. Someday you will have to account for your behavior.”

” I take exception to the slanted and erronous tone of your column.”

“I was shocked you would dare to take the stand you have.” 

Those are just a few of the comments I received in letters sent to me when I was writing for the Winnipeg Free Press many years ago. I have a whole box of correspondence from people who read my column. Some of it was positive, but plenty was not.

I thought about those critical letters this week when I was re-reading some of Colleen Simard’s articles in the Free Press. She is one of my favourite columnists. There are some people who are very critical of what she writes however, and every week she is sure to receive some negative comments about her column along with a bevy of positive ones.

When I wrote for the paper people could not give online comments  and so the response wasn’t as immediate or as frequent and no one else got to read the comments except for me, although when the feedback letters were sent to the editor they were sometimes published. 

Columnists now have their work judged and critiqued almost immediately and for all to see. That must be tough. I know it took me some time to grow a thick enough to skin to accept the criticism. It seemed I remembered the negative responses to my writing much more readily than the affirming ones.  

When I taught high school journalism I told my students they had to be prepared to have people disagree with them and to be critical of their writing.  We published the school paper as a part of our class work and so their pieces would often be subject to public scrutiny and critique. Some of my teenage writers were quite hurt when someone took exception to what they had written. I assured them that if people vehemently disagreed with them it was actually a credit to their writing because they had taken a strong articulate stand for their position.

I hope Colleen knows that too. I probably need to add my voice to those who give her affirming feedback. 

Sound Bites in New York City

                                            Occupy Movement straggler Trinity Church

• What the f__________ are you tourists doing here?

– homeless person who says he is part of the Occupy Movement outside Trinity Church at the end of Wall Street

•  Speak softly. Be considerate. Keep your feet off the seat. 

– electronic reminders on the train from New Jersey to New York

Ground Zero Memorial Pool

•  My husband was crying when we visited the Ground Zero Memorial site.

– tourist from France staying at the same bed and breakfast we did

Immigrant Hall on Ellis Island

• “My father had left Sicily two years before us to get a job and find a place for us in America. I was seven years old when he finally had saved enough money for my mother and we children to come to America too. I remember him walking through the door on Ellis Island after our ship arrived and he spotted us from across the room and he was just standing there looking at us. And then he knelt down on the floor and opened his arms wide and all five of us children rushed into his embrace. My father was crying and he said, “I promise that we will never be separated again.”

-paraphrase of a first person account on an audio tour guide track at Ellis Island

• Theatres should have four times as many bathrooms for women as they do for men. 

-woman standing in line with me to use the washroom during the intermission of the Broadway musical Wicked when the announcement is made that there is one minute to curtain time. There were still a dozen women ahead of us in the line. 

•  That apartment building is where Nicole Kidman and Keith Urban live. They have an elevator for their car so they don’t have to get out of their vehicle to go up to their apartment. 

-our New York City tour guide

Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

• I confess to almighty God and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do. 

– from the mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on October 14

• Are people born wicked or do they have wickedness thrust upon them? 

-Galinda in the musical Wicked

Dave gives money to Battery Park gymnast

• You can come a little closer white people. No need to be scared of us. Remember we have a black president now. His name is Obama and he wants change but we want bills. 

– African-American gymnasts in Battery Park collecting money from the crowd after putting on an amazing show

Tenement Museum New York

• In 1898 this tenement building was home to twenty families each with a 325 square foot apartment and on the main floor there was a saloon.  All the tenants and the saloon shared one spigot for drinking and washing water and it was located right beside the four outdoor toilets. The average wage was $10 a week and the infant mortality rate was 30%.

–tour guide at the Tenement Museum

• I left Europe after a failed marriage and entered the United States on a visitor visa. I soon realized if I wanted to stay and become a citizen I would need to get married. A friend set me up with a guy who seemed really nice but we had only been married a couple of days when I realized he was insane. He truly had mental problems and I was scared of him. So I kicked him out and got a divorce as quickly as I could. The second time I chose more wisely, a gay guy who was from Prague. He had American citizenship and needed a place to live while he went to university. It worked out well. We got married. He moved in with me. We were together for a couple of years. I got my citizenship. He got his degree and we got a divorce. Then he went back to Prague to look after his aging parents and he never returned. We have lost touch. I love living here in the United States. I have been able to get a college degree and now I have a steady job and income. You wouldn’t believe how many people I know who got their immigration papers by marrying someone and divorcing them later. Everyone does it!  Just like in the movie Green Card. 

– a woman we met in New York 

• The United Nations was not created to take humanity to heaven but to save it from hell. 

–tour guide at the United Nations quoting former Secretary General Dag Hammarskjol

    What happens to a dream deferred?

      Does it dry up

      like a raisin in the sun?

      Or fester like a sore—

      And then run?

      Does it stink like rotten meat?

      Or crust and sugar over—

      like a syrupy sweet?

      Maybe it just sags

      like a heavy load.

      Or does it explode?

 

– a poem called Harlem by Langston Hughes that kept running through my head when we took a tour of Harlem

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In New York We……….

rode our bikes all around Central Park

paid our respects at Strawberry Fields a memorial to John Lennon

got chills studying the painting of Salome and John the Baptist’s Head by Andrea Solario at the Metropolitan Museum of Art

imagined we were taking part in a session at the UN

took a break in beautiful Bryant Park

stopped to admire the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim

waved to the Statue of Liberty

viewed the city from the top of the Empire State building

ate turkey and pastrami sandwiches and chicken noodle soup at Katz’s

strolled through China Town

took a picture of ourselves on the giant screen in Times Square ( we are on the left of the sign)

let a delectable praline souffle melt in our mouth at Capsouto Fieres

discovered a Canadian icon

pretended we were kids at the Museum of Modern Art admired the athletic prowress of the cheerleaders at Barclay’s Center at a Brooklyn Nets basketball game

In New York we had a very good time. 

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Visit to the MOMA-Are All Artists Troubled?

At the Museum of Modern Art in New York

You can take photos of the art work at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City. So I posed with Van Gogh’s Starry Night perhaps one of the most famous paintings in the world. The Dutch master painted it while spending time in a sanatorium after a mental breakdown. Van Gogh died at 37 from a gun shot wound. The two women he wanted to marry rejected him and he had an unsuccessful career as a pastor. He only sold one painting in his life time.  

I toured the MOMA with some of my former students from Hong Kong who are currently studying art in New York. During their art history courses they have learned about the biographies of many of the artists featured at the MOMA. We discussed whether all great artists have personal lives that are troubling and tempestuous. 

Three Ball 50/50 Tank by Jeff by Jeff Koons photographed at the MOMA in New York in 2012

Here’s Three Ball 50/50 Tank created by American Jeff Koons.  Koons, whose work has been auctioned at prices as high as $25 million definitely qualifies for having a personal life fraught with drama. His first child, conceived when he was very young was put up for adoption. His subsequent marriage to, and divorce from, an Italian pornography star resulted in a nasty custody suit for their son which Koons eventually lost. 

This is a self-portrait of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. She had polio and suffered all her life from a variety of injuries sustained in a bus accident. She was married to artist Diego Rivera. Both had numerous extra marital affairs and they were never able to have children.  Gold Marilyn Munroe is the work of American artist Andy Warhol. Due to a disease of the nervous system Andy became a hypochondriac as a child. His father died when Andy was 13. When he was forty, a script writer whose manuscript he had misplaced, shot him. Although his life was saved he suffered from related health problems till his death at age 58. This is just a small portion of a three panel mural of Water Lilies by French impressionist artist Claude Monet. Monet’s mother’s died when he was just 17. Monet and his first wife Camille and their son lived in poverty and he was so despondent about their situation Monet attempted suicide. He suffered from self-doubt about his work which led him to burn his paintings. Camille died from complications of a second pregnancy and after her death Monet became involved with a married woman.Les Demoiselles d’Avigno by Pablo Picasso is another jewel at the MOMA. Picasso and his father argued a lot and Picasso was traumatized by the death of his seven-year old sister from diphtheria. Picasso had two wives and a string of mistresses both before and during his marriages. One of his early mistresses died prematurely when she was only 30 and Picasso was devastated.  I was intrigued by this portrayal of American President Lyndon Baines Johnson, shown as a blockhead holding tiny versions of his wife and daughters in his hand. The piece is by Marisol Escobar, who after the death of her mother when she was just sixteen began to engage in harmful acts of religious penance, walking on her knees till they bled, tying tight ropes around her waist and refusing to speak for long periods of time. This is The Storm by Norwegian artist Edvard Munch, perhaps most famous for his painting The Scream. Munch spent nearly a year being treated in a clinic for what he called ‘a touch of  madness.’ He experienced excessive anxiety and hallucinations made worse by his drinking and brawling. He didn’t want to ever get married so the one woman with whom he had a long-term relationship finally left him for a younger colleague of his. Salvador Dali’s painting The Persistence of Memory was much smaller than I thought it would be. Dali’s mother died when he was just 16, an event that left him devastated. His father disinherited him when Salvador began a relationship with a married Russian woman ten years his senior. He married her and she was able to accept his numerous affairs with younger women.  Dali tried to commit suicide after his wife died.

This is not the blog post I really wanted to write about the MOMA. I saw so much intriguing work there and learned things about that work which I was excited to share with my blog readers. However my comments about Van Gogh’s hard life at the beginning of this post got me off on the wrong foot.  It made me recall my conversation with my students about the troubled circumstances of many artists. This led me to explore the personal lives of the artists at the MOMA whose work I had photographed. I discovered unfortunately that most of them had pretty ‘messed up’ lives. 

I really do think you can be a great artist and not have a hugely dysfunctional personal life but that just wasn’t the case for the artists above. At a later date I’ll try to do an alternate blog post with other paintings I photographed at the MOMA, paintings whose creators were happy functional people. I’m sure there are some!