Slump

Yeah, I was in one. A pileup. You know what I'm talking about.

A feeling of being overwhelmed.

A planned road trip for Daughter and Grandgirl and self to see her graduate from U of T grad school, a huge achievement, wearing me down, even the very thought of it.

Too many medications switches (JFC this blood pressure thing is a nightmare, effecting my kidneys, my outlook, my sanity) to even count. And I won't go on with that, medi-bores are just that and I bore myself.

Uncertainty.

Others' expectations.

I dreaded the talk with D & G.

But I bit the bullet, appropriately, on Mother's Day. I kept thinking I was making too much of my physical challenges, but boy, believe me, some days are absolute shyte and they are utterly unpredictable. And being away from my bubble, this perfect little apartment with doctors on call and friends around, intimidated me with the what-ifs. Plus moving attention away from my darling girl with sick old granny lurking somewhere in her apartment surrounded by pills and drenched in fear. I know, I exaggerate, but you get the drift of the way I was feeling. When I have bad days I practise massive avoidance of people and things and events. It's easy. But not on the road or Somewhere Else.

So I threw on the Big Girl Knickers and at the end of our lovely brunch yesterday told D I could not make the trip and talked of my fears and pain and medical crap. And all I got back was love and concern and D saying when G gets here we will do a small trip around the island and just hang out for a lovely two days, stress free. And that made me cry.

And then I told G on the phone late that night and she was absolutely fine too, more concerned about me than herself and her Big Achievement and Grandma being there.

And I felt loved and valued. And behold, arose out of my slump today and was reborn again.

Safe and secure and looking ahead again rather than behind me, mourning legs and abilities and well behaved blood and driving forever and barreling around Toronto like I used to.

Deslumped, we might say.

Catapult

"Swimming in the sea of me". Now where did I hear that phrase. Sometimes it's inevitable though, pain climbs up the backside and throws its hands around my eyes, blocking out the light, the love and yes, hope.

And then I get catapulted into the lives of others. And that happened yesterday with the floods in Toronto and worry about Daughter and Grandgirl and their well-being which expanded into a discussion about climate change and Daughter's activism which involves death threats. Yes. And no more can I say about that without imperilling her. She is very brave, is Daughter. So she was on the one landline in her house that worked, in a corner of her dining room plugged into the old fashioned jack on the wall with all the power out in the city, the vast immobilized city. Note to others: always make sure you have a real honest to goodness landline somewhere in your home. And yes, like her, a windup radio or one with batteries.

So my sadness about my particular roadblock rolled off me and afterwards, I was able to package it up and file it under "unsolvable mysteries of life" and move on. I slept last night, all night, for the first time in maybe weeks. And yes, I feel good today, not dragging the old butterama around, muttering darkly to the dog about misunderstandings and casual cruelties and raw rejection by loved ones.

And a new friend called and asked me about East Coast Trailing. We found each other! I had always wanted to hike with a companion on the East Coast Trail. Another item on the bucket list. It's not something one does alone as parts of it are dangerous and visions of lying helpless, broken-legged, at the bottom of a cliff for a couple of weeks stopped my solitary explorations right in their tracks. I may be foolhardy but I can be surprisingly mature when it comes to personal risk-taking - much to my own astonishment.

Another catapult. Bring them on.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 6 of 6

See Part 1 Here
See Part 2 Here
See Part 3 Here
See Part 4 Here
See Part 5 Here

I read him Irish poems in the Irish language. He told me Jewish ones in Yiddish from memory. We would slowly translate the words to each other. And sometimes back again, verbally fondling those that had a commonality between the Gaeilge (Irish language) and the Yiddish.

On our very last afternoon together I read him Lady Gregory's marvellous translation of Donal Og.

Donal Og
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you;
the snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh.
It is you are the lonely bird through the woods;
and that you may be without a mate until you find me.

You promised me, and you said a lie to me,
that you would be before me where the sheep are flocked;
I gave a whistle and three hundred cries to you,
and I found nothing there but a bleating lamb.

You promised me a thing that was hard for you,
a ship of gold under a silver mast;
twelve towns with a market in all of them,
and a fine white court by the side of the sea.

You promised me a thing that is not possible,
that you would give me gloves of the skin of a fish;
that you would give me shoes of the skin of a bird;
and a suit of the dearest silk in Ireland.

When I go by myself to the Well of Loneliness,
I sit down and I go through my trouble;
when I see the world and do not see my boy,
he that has an amber shade in his hair.

It was on that Sunday I gave my love to you;
the Sunday that is last before Easter Sunday
and myself on my knees reading the Passion;
and my two eyes giving love to you for ever.

My mother has said to me not to be talking with you today,
or tomorrow, or on the Sunday;
it was a bad time she took for telling me that;
it was shutting the door after the house was robbed.

My heart is as black as the blackness of the sloe,
or as the black coal that is on the smith's forge;
or as the sole of a shoe left in white halls;
it was you put that darkness over my life.

You have taken the east from me, you have taken the west from me;
you have taken what is before me and what is behind me;
you have taken the moon, you have taken the sun from me;
and my fear is great that you have taken God from me!

In my memory, that poem filled up our entire session and spread out over all the afternoons we had shared. I took my time in reading it. My voice felt strange and thick and lonely to my ears. As if there should have been foghorns in the background. Every line felt heavy in my mouth. I had to wrench it out of myself.

His eyes never left my face. Now and again he took his thick glasses off and swept a finger beneath his eyes without closing them. More times than I could count. Catching the tears before they fell, I like to think.

I hesitated when I stood up to leave him. I felt awkward, ungainly in my last week of pregnancy, awkward in the emotions that threatened to overflow into tears or into awkward, inadequate words that would diminish all we had given each other.

Silence can say far more. Silence can bathe everything in golden amber, preserved forever. Taken out of the mind's secret drawer every now and again and admired afresh from every angle.

I turned and I left, closing the door without looking at him.

I never saw him again.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 5 of 6

See Part 1 Here
See Part 2 Here
See Part 3 Here
See Part 4 Here

Jokes were made in the general office about arranging for my OB/GYN to come to the office as this project of data conversion was so massive – one of the first in Toronto - that they couldn't afford for me to take time off.

My sanctuary was the afternoon time with Mr. Geoffrey and our conversation and by now minimal reading. He talked more of his own childhood in Berlin. About his non-Jewish mother, his orthodox father, his beautiful older sister who had a gift for the piano. His uncles and aunts, his cousins, his grandmother. I understood, without words, they were all dead.

He read to me, or pretended to – I believe most of them were memorized - from some old letters of his mother's sent to her cousin in Toronto, fortunately kept by her and left to him when she died. She wrote of days of happiness in Berlin, days of sunshine and laziness in a farm in France in the summers. Days of privilege. Days of pride in him and his sister, her delight in their doings, her love for her husband, the history professor and writer, her joy in her own watercolours.

“You know,” he said, “I can talk to you like no one else. Your people were persecuted. You Irish know all about persecution. You know of lost tribes and hiding and fear, simply for being in the way of others' ambitions and greed.”

In the way of. I never forgot that. For all countries, all peoples are in the way of a more powerful predator – most recently we have Iraq being in the way of countries acquiring cheap oil.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 4 of 6

See Part One Here
See Part Two Here
See Part Three Here

Another afternoon, he said:

“Jenny, my wife, is re-reading Jane Austen to me every night. You must read or re-read Jane.”

I told him Pride and Prejudice was my favourite followed by Persuasion. We discussed the characters. I remember him saying that Jane Austen did not understand men at all and had them utter very few words in her books, it was all about the women, the clever women.

“I wanted daughters very much,” he said then, “And we lost our only child, a daughter. She was stillborn.”

He left the silence stretching out tautly around us. I felt my unborn child kicking in that long moment. I didn't hesitate for a second. I took his hand and placed it on my abdomen. He didn't say anything but left his hand there like a blessing until I got up and left.

We made each other laugh. He told me stories of his school days, fishing with his father, horse-riding with his sister. I told him old stories out of my grandparents, ghost stories, tales of my folk-singing days, of sailing days in endless sunshine in West Cork, of stage performances in operettas and when he teased me, sang the lyrics quietly to him.

Another day he asked could he touch my hair. He had never seen hair like it, he said and pardon him if he had to put his eyes up close to it, to see it properly, the different colours locked inside it, brown and gold and amber and red and some black, he would swear to the black when I protested there couldn't be. Yes, he insisted, there were a few threads of it in there. Rainbow hair, he said, the girl with the rainbow hair.

People went bald in the camps, he said, from malnutrition. If they didn't shave it off you first and sell it for wigs and mattresses. Women couldn't even get pregnant, he added, their monthlies stopped. Mercifully.

By that time I was getting closer to my delivery date. I don't know what he'd said to his partners and the staff but I continued to work there, converting files to the data management programmes that were then just beginning to loom on the business horizon.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 3 of 6

See Part One Here
See Part Two Here

I can't pinpoint the exact moment it progressed. Progressed to what, you might ask and I can't still answer that. All I know is love is in there somewhere. And intimacy. And compassion. And passion. I remember little snapshots of our conversations. The reading time became shorter and our conversation lengthened into our time together.

“Can I tell you what happened?” he said out of the blue one day, taking off the thick lenses that shrouded his eyes.

I nodded. I sensed in my bones we were going outside of this room to somewhere dark.

He stood and took off his jacket and rolled up his sleeve. And I knew what it was even though I'd never seen one before. The tattoo stood out stark on his arm. I wanted to touch it and then didn't.

“You've heard of the death camps of Auschwitz?”

“No, yes,” I hesitated, “I haven't heard the names of the camps”. I told him we had quite a few Jewish children in my school in Cork, their parents had escaped death camps. We envied the children as they did not have to attend morning or evening prayers, religion classes or mass or retreats or novenas. Some of us had even asked about conversions to Judaism to the derision of the nuns. He laughed at this. A rich laugh of such delight that I joined in.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I was liberated as a young man from that camp.” he rolled down his sleeve and put his jacket back on. “You will understand I can't speak of what I had to do to survive and the loss of ....” and he couldn't finish. He bowed his head.

Another picture:

“You're expecting a child?” he said, again out of nowhere one day. I had kept it hidden. In those days you could be fired if you got pregnant. In those days you had to tell at a job interview if you even intended to have a child. In those days there was no maternity leave or daycare or maternity benefits of any kind.

“Don't worry, “ he added, “even though I'm your boss, I won't tell anyone. Work as long as you want.”

Another afternoon:

“My wife is an invalid in a wheelchair. I grieve for her, she loved the opera and the ballet and midnight jazz and art gallery openings and now that is all gone. Between my nearly blind status and her crippling disease we don't go out anymore. We enjoy the radio together. You must listen to CBC.”

Every time he used “must” to me I would later make a note in my small notebook. He introduced me to CBC and its delights - “Morningside”, “As it Happens” and classical music programmes and radio theatre of all kinds along with the jazz and folk music shows.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 2 of 6

See Part One Here

He appeared an old man to me then - for he was at least fifty years of age. He was always unfailingly polite and grateful and I soon got used to his heavy accent and grew to actually enjoy the richness of it. He learned the English language early in life he told me, for the house he was brought up in was multi-lingual.

After a couple of weeks of afternoon reading, we shifted into discussing the archeological articles I had read. He would ask my opinion and listen very carefully to my sometimes stumbling thoughts, his hands linked across his waistcoat, his head leaning against the back of his chair. I was amazed at the number of suits he had. Husband had only two along with a couple of pairs of casual trousers and one sports coat. In those days, I made all my own clothes. And even Husband's casual wear.

Mr. Geoffrey must have had twenty suits, all immaculately tailored, all with matching waistcoats and pale shirts and beautiful ties. Even his shoes were hand made. And his socks looked to be of the finest silks, the little glimpses I caught of them as he crossed his legs.

I would bring deliveries in to his office of different items for his wardrobes if they coincided with our reading time and noted the labels on the boxes and cloth suit and coat covers. The best tailors in Toronto. I would stroke the hatboxes and covet them. I had no hats and neither did Husband. But I always desired the oddest things and still do. Hatpins, Grandgirl's bookmarks. Stuff I have already too much of or have no use for. Mr. Geoffrey always wore a hat coming and going from the office. A hat that matched his suit and overcoat.

Someone mentioned there was a chauffeur that would drop him off and pick him up every day in a pearl grey Cadillac but I never saw it.

As I ponder on the luxury of his clothes today the phrase “sartorial splendour” comes to mind.

That he had in true abundance.

Mr. Geoffrey – a Love Story. Part 1 of 6

I've never written of this or spoken of it before to anyone. Mr. Geoffrey came to my mind early one morning last week as I lay in bed free-thinking. In that way when one's mind can dance and spin around itself, trailing black and white pictures with the explosion of odd sunbursts to make it more interesting.

I can still see him clearly, his leonine head pooled in the light from the strong lamp on his desk, his manicured hands, his eyes magnified far too much behind the thick lenses of his spectacles.

I had the thought of a one-woman play on this story. Next I had the thought that perhaps it was much
too fragile for that? So I'm greatly interested in feedback. I will never forget this man and the unspoken intimacy that lay in the air between us. We never talked of it as if that would have somehow demeaned or cheapened it. All these years later, I still feel warm and safe and, well, loved, when thinking of him. And extraordinarily weepy.

Part 1.

Some things seem quite odd in today's world. Setting: 1969 - downtown Toronto: afternoon in a wooden-desked office. I had the only calculator. A large cumbersome machine which had carbon paper interspersed with the double tape on it so a copy of my 'tots' could be clipped to a general ledger page. Ah, general ledgers, huge tomes with numbered pages. They held the entire financial transactions of a company. Erasures were not allowed. One had to stroke through an error and re-enter it. In pen. Errors were frowned upon. I would need a key, kept in the office safe, to separate the covers and add a new page to avoid fraud and falsifying.

In the summer a light breeze would slide through the windows on the fourth floor and cool us. Open windows in an office building! I would take the sales ledger from the sales clerk around two o'clock in the afternoon and begin to transcribe the totals into the general ledger. Ditto with the purchase journal. All huge books. Important books with columns of blue and red. Where brackets were not allowed but dr(debit) or cr(credit) inserted after each entry. I was 25 years old and considered myself terribly important as I was the first female accountant hired by the firm.

At around three o'clock I'd be awaiting the accounts receivable ledger (where the receipts of the day would be entered against the amounts owing) when I would go to the kitchen and get two cups of coffee and then into the office of Mr. Geoffrey. Mr. Geoffrey was one of the partners of the firm, a man whose main distinguishing feature were his bottle-bottom glasses. A man impeccably dressed with a heavy Germanic accent. There were embroidered logos of his initials on his french cuffs and on his handkerchiefs. I had never seen the delicacy of this before – on pearl grey silk or finest linen shirts there was discreet matching silk embroidery - GBF all intertwined. So delicate I could barely detect it. My mother was a fine embroiderer and knew her fabrics. I remember writing to her about Mr. Geoffrey's shirts and handkerchiefs as I knew she would probably have never seen such work either.

Even in the middle of the day with the sun pouring through the windows, a bright brass desk lamp would illuminate his desk. Beside it was the largest magnifying glass I'd ever seen.

By the afternoon, his eyes would be tired and he had made an arrangement with his partners that I would read to him: the early edition evening newspaper, any archeological articles from the National Geographic or essays from the Atlantic. He told me he'd chosen me as he didn't like the Canadian accent (whatever that was!) and he thought I spoke so well. I would sit beside him and he would have the reading material all ready in his preferred reading order.

And I would begin.

Signage

Odd signs around Toronto.

On the back of a Hummer:



Who do unreal men love?

Condominiums are cluttering the downtown skies in various stages of undress being babysat by mighty cranes. One sign read:




And I will damn well marry Charlie next Saturday.

Mixed Feelings

My power animal {totem} is the owl given to me by a shaman many, many moons ago and supplemented by many little owls who have come to live with me over the years.

The price tag of moving away from nearest and dearest is quite high. I am reminded of this when I am with family and old friends in my present little sojourn in Toronto.

There are times when I can't even say goodbye, it sticks in my throat so much. There are certain friends that when I walk into their homes after a length of time it feels like we sat down yesterday. That is the way it was with a friend today. We just pick up where we left off. I have a few friends like that, how lucky am I? My friend in Dublin is the same. We just pick up the thread of the last email or phonecall and carry on across the kitchen table. The language of the heart. No barriers, no doors. Our lives to each other is as an open book.

I think it helps to cement friendships when you go through the tough times and out the other side over the years. With this friend, we say goodbye to each other before the night is over so I can slip away quietly when the time comes. Or I would cry. Or she would say: "I hate that you moved away, I hate it hate it hate it but I understand why you did it."

The rest of the week is more of the same, tomorrow is a mix of work and meeting an old, formerly estranged friend for dinner. A reconnection that lightens my heart when I think about it.

And the highlight of the week is a date with Grandgirl for dinner and show on Sunday. Just the two of us.

Five Glorious Things

{Picture was taken near my house in Newfoundland before I left}

I'm in the great city of Toronto for some days. Reigniting connections, spending time with family, cruising through the changes in infrastructure since I was last here in September.

My needle was stuck and I was devoid of feed for my blog, whether it was revisiting past writing, fresh writing, any writing. Daughter put me in touch with a new editor, as my last one and I, well, best to say we had far, far different perspectives on how my stories should present themselves.

1. To prepare for the editor, I reviewed some of my short stories and was a little charmed at how the distance from the writing of them made the re-reading of them fresh and interesting. I honestly did not remember how some of them turned out so was deliciously surprised. Does that sound vain? Who cares?

2. I had lunch with a dear old friend yesterday. He is off to Mexico on the weekend, so meeting with each other was a priority. A lingering 3 hour lunch at a wonderful Jewish restaurant which he had never been to where we caught up with life's doings and beings and felt intensely satisfied with how relatively stress free life is today after years and years of angst, problems, death and suffering of cherished ones.

3. I had dinner with another long established friend. This time a 5 hour dinner where we covered the grounds of the persecutions of our ancestors, in my case the Irish Famine Genocide, and in hers the Anabaptists of Switzerland who made their way to Pennsylvania and onward to Ontario. She shared a wedding experience in France where the charming custom is for the bride to enter the church alone and proceed up the aisle talking to relatives and friends on her way. This was followed by a week in Provence for all 350 guests. Her vivid description of her time there had me enthralled.

4. Timewise, I lagged a few minutes after Grandgirl in my returning to Daughter's house last night. But she quickly joined me in my room where we behaved like two schoolgirls with secrets and jokes until the wee hours, not aware we were preventing Daughter from getting to sleep down the hall.

5. Calendar is full both with social and business meetings while I'm here. I am replenishing, topping up the batteries of friendships and family.

I am so very lucky once I stay where my hands are.

Out of Sorts

Did you ever feel like you are standing some distance from yourself, wondering why you don't feel like yourself? No? Well, that's me at the moment.

I don't feel well, I don't feel deathly ill, but somewhere in between. Coughing, difficulty breathing, leg pains, thigh pains. "Off": that's me. The older I get the more the city air (a loose term for oxygen, I know)affects me. I tend to shallow breathe. It might only be me but I feel it is toxic. It reminds me when I was down in Mexico City and my brother told me an environmental engineer with a fresh contract in his hand for a project, had moved his wife and family down there and three days later they all took the first plane out. He'd done some testing. And fled.

Does anyone test the air in Toronto? I know anyone who lands in St. John's to visit me remark about the air immediately they arrive as they suck in huge lungfuls of it.

I was feeling really sick last night and trying to sleep and a party next door breached many decibel levels. I'd forgotten that. Even over and above the traffic and sirens and airplanes overhead, how very noisy next door parties can be. Could be I'm a fully fledged geezer now.

I was going to stay on for another week or so, there were some events I wanted to attend but my mind is made up today. I am heading back out to Newfoundland at the beginning of this week.

I just can't take it anymore.

Changing Times

A dear friend whom I was meeting for dinner tonight (I know endless rounds of delightful dinners out with friends seems like a permanent lifestyle for me at the mo)texted me to say she had severe pains in her abdomen and was taking herself off to the hospital.

Whoa, nelly, what? I text her back. Where are you? What hospital? Silence. I leave messages at her home, on her blackberry, on her office line. Silence. One of my messages I say: Yeah, I've been there with severe abdominal cramps, mine was a ruptured appendix followed by peritonitis.

She finally texts from a Women's College Hospital ambulance, they are taking her directly to Toronto Hospital for emergency surgery. We continue texting. She is outside the operating room, saying it is pointless for me to be there, they have diagnosed her with a perforated appendix (I know, I know, I should be a diagnostician)and are taking her in for the surgery immediately.

All digits are crossed for her. I am so glad she had the sense to take herself off to the hospital once the pain hit and that she is now in good hands. I won't relax though until I know she is OK and I hope to see her tomorrow.

I find it extraordinary that in a few short years so much has changed in how we communicate and how instantaneous and immediate it all is.

Dis & Dat

Back by popular demand, a picture of the happiest dog on the planet taken by Grandgirl before we left Newfoundland.

At my age I don't take too much for granted. Like this evening, going downtown in this blessed cool weather (The Avalon in Newfoundland where I live is now warmer than Toronto, go figure!)with Daughter and Grandgirl and walking around together and bookshopping and then hitting a new cappucino spot. How lucky are we to have each other? And we are all aware of this. Understanding each other. Very clear on these First World privileges that allows us to do such things for how many can't?

Daughter has MS and I've had a few health issues in the past year so the fact we are both mobile and free to celebrate these three generational events is something we never take for granted. There is almost a bitter-sweetness to it.

Connecting with friends here is also wonderful. I've missed them. I always do. Though I never second guess my decision to move to Newfoundland which has opened up my life in a way that would never have happened here in Toronto. My perfect life would allow me to spend two months of the year here, plugged in to enough family, friends, culture, art and music to fill me for the other ten months. Toronto is a wonderful, vibrant city and I love it.

Destination!

I tried so hard to get a closeup of this pretty and unusual flower but Ansa kept butting in. OK then.

Dateline: Toronto

I must be wrecked. I am not used to this heat and noise anymore and to land into a heatwave and overhead plane practices for a Labour Day airshow along with all the usual city noises of screaming ambulances, firetrucks and police car sirens batters my psyche intensely until I assimilate once again. And after 2 days, this has not happened yet.

Planning the social (and work) calendar is something else again - fitting the old friends in for catchup time. Daughter says I can use her house as a base and entertain here if I want.

I am hoping the weather will cool down. I can't imagine what the 50C+ weather conditions were here in the height of summer. Now it is over 30C (humidity factor is always calculated into these figures) and it sucks the air out of my lungs. Wuss=me.

Meanwhile I am basking in the air conditioning and barely stick my head outdoors.

Toronto, Transition, Traffic & Transit.

This post was inspired by Grannymar's post on traffic in Ireland.

It isn’t easy getting into city mode again. The traffic. Mein Gott, the traffic.

I got locked into some kind of maelstrom outside Yorkdale Mall today.

A place where ramps run off other ramps until you’re left with nothing but a gigantic snarl.

In every sense of the word. Snarling drivers, snarling SUVs, humping Hummers, me in the middle in my little Echo. Stopped. Slight claustrophobia. Darted off down a side street and took my breath and mourned my little village in Newfoundland. I was returning from dropping the grandgirl off at her house in Toronto from Markham where I’m living for the next few montha.

Public transit sucks the bag, big time, when it comes to the outlying suburban areas of Toronto. While it is superb in the city core itself.

Here is what a web request for transit information looks like for a 30km drive that takes me 30 minutes to my daughter’s house in Toronto:

We could not find any connections between the origin of your trip and the destination (ending point) of your trip at the requested time.
This may be due to one of the following:
· Your request is for times during the day when service is not available.. .
· Your start and/or end points are not within 0.8 km of the closest transit stop.
· Your ride will require an unreasonable number of transfers or a duration of longer than three hours.

Longer than three hours. Transit involving bus, train, subway and bus. A good runner could manage it in less. Hell, a good horse could probably halve the time.

I’ve been bleating about the lack of efficient public transit, 24 hour public transit, for more years than I’d care to count.

Why can’t it be managed? Yes, the public will have to subsidize it, like it does education, healthcare, police and fire services et al. But the benefits would far outweigh the costs, both on the environment and less traffic on the roads which often involve 16-24 lanes across in Toronto. Also serious vehicular carnage might be reduced or eliminated.

Here is info from CBC (2004, I could find no recent stats.):

With nearly 20 million cars and trucks on our roads, automobiles have become a fact of life for Canadians. But our reliance on them comes at a cost. Over the past 50 years nearly 200,000 Canadians have died in traffic accidents — more than were killed in both world wars combined. In addition, despite vastly improved safety measures automobile accidents continue to be a major cause of death of younger Canadians.

My inner cynic, always active, follows the money to the foundering Big 5 of the auto industry, the massive construction and maintenance of highways, the complete over-usage of trucks and our old friend Big Oil and its powerful lobby.

But with the days of cheap, accessible oil just about history, perhaps Gaia will once again assert herself and the days of Happy Motoring to and from Mammoth Malls and MacMansions will be replaced by solar powered trams. Now that’s a project worth throwing a couple of billion at, surely? Let's call it a Bail-in.