November 24, 2010
-6 adventure
I noticed an older woman today trying to hail a cab which didn’t stop for her. She was wincing a bit and I thought maybe she might need a phone to call a cab so asked after her if she was ok. It turned out she had twisted her ankle and was stuck, movement proving difficult. She needed to go only two blocks and could I walk her?
It was a bit of tricky tricky moment. I had my child waiting for me to turn up, was somewhat late, it was -6 and I knew he’d been out for a while and would have not put his gloves on. My instinct as a mother is towards my child and not putting him in a situation of unnecessary anxiety. In order to help this woman she’d have to detour with me a further two blocks so I could collect my son before bringing her home. That would be extra blocks on her busted ankle.
I turned and pleaded with another woman passing — could she please help this woman to go two blocks up the hill? Amazingly, the woman agreed. I reached out and rubbed her on the arm in gratitude explaining I was running to fetch my child and so on. I left, but had a sinking feeling I hadn’t done the right thing but ran to the school and hailed my gloveless, frozen son who said he’d a sore throat and a headache and a grumbling tum. This meant the music lesson we were racing to would have to be cancelled. I told him put his gloves on that we had to go and look for this old woman with the busted ankle.
We doubled back a different route and sure enough there she was, they had not gotten far she was moving painfully slowly. I relieved the woman I’d asked to help since she had been heading in the opposite direction, probably needing to get a bus and said we’d bring the woman the rest of the way home.
What followed was something akin to childbirth. By now the woman’s ankle could barely support her, so I took some of her weight across my shoulder by wrapping her arm around my neck. She tried hopping. But progressively the further up the hill we got the more she gasped in pain. We stopped. We took it v slow, but the pain was progressive. Behind us my son was kicking at the snow playfully. The hill got steeper, the woman got heavier and heavier and her eyes were getting teary with the pain. We were about half a block from where she lived when things became acute. By this point another man had joined us and had the other side of her. I kept telling her she was doing great, almost there, if she couldn’t go on we’d stop and get an ambulance, we could knock on a door and get a chair and she could sit.
The final stretch was so challenging. She kept squeezing her face and whispering how bad the pain was, it hurts so much she kept saying and I felt a bit foolish with the weight of this woman across me and the hill we’d hauled her up when in fact quite possibly we should have just figured out a better alternative at the bottom like an ambulance or some such. The progress became minimal. And yet the steps of where she lived where visible to us now. I will not forget her poor face that moved between the sense of abandonment and despair and then into the desire to go on until the pain would register again.
I cheered, I championed, I invoked, it was exactly like childbirth since I resorted to invoking all kinds of things to get her to those steps because I could. The victory of bringing her to the door and handing her over to the care staff of the facility was quite beautiful amid the weatherly contortion of -6. She asked would we come in and have tea with her, but I said my boy was not well and I had to get him home. Her gratitude followed me down the path as i gave my son a big hug, thanked him for his patience and said now we would get him a hot drink. We linked arms, wandered back down the hill, discussed the adventure and planned how we’d attend to his maladies. These are the kinds of transactions I love to have on the street. There were five of us in it, we figured it out and we triumphed collectively despite being pulled in a multitude of directions and needs. I am always amazed at how some of the most meaningful interactions one has are in the company of complete strangers on the street.
November 23, 2010
Event…Crossings: a return
Come on out people and embrace/re-embrace/ discover/celebrate your literature
Click to enlarge for event details.
November 23, 2010
Ireland: The challenge of failure. Fintan O’Toole
Fintan O’Toole, over at Open Democracy, telling it how it is and how it might be.
The long-threatened arrival of the IMF bogeymen was a major loss for Ireland as a proud, independent nation. But this should not blind us to the opportunity to reinvent and restore our sovereignty.
On the News at One on 18 November, the RTÉ reporter Brian Dowling mentioned that one of his colleagues had called the department of finance that morning to ask where the talks between Irish officials and representatives of the European Union and the International Monetary Fund were taking place and who exactly was attending. He was told: “You really have to ring the IMF.” The international bankers, it seems, were already in charge – even of the job of telling the Irish people who is in charge.
The arrival of the IMF was a case of long threatening come at last. Those three letters have been the secular equivalent of the fires of hell: the ultimate warning against resistance to the government’s strategy of making the rescue of the banks the overwhelming national priority.
The bogeymen are now in the building, but their coming has been foreshown so often that it seems both inevitable and anti-climactic. Watching the furtive shots of the disappointingly avuncular-looking Ajai Chopra, whose IMF team had come to scrutinise our books and negotiate our fate, it was hard not to think of TS Eliot’s line from The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends: Not with a bang but a whimper.”
Or, in our case, with a drone. Instead of drums and trumpets, our little apocalypsewas played out against the background noise of the taoiseach and the minister for finance murmuring evasive and mechanical denials. When the world’s media tuned to a Dáil speech by Brian Cowen on 16 November that was expected to address the crisis, they heard only robotic assurances that there was no “impending sense of crisis” and impenetrable Cowenspeak about the “front-loading of consolidation”.
If anything, indeed, the only thing the government managed to communicate in the course of the week was its own terrifying irrelevance. With Brian Cowen assuring us that Ireland is “fully funded” and Brian Lenihan claiming as late as 17 November that the Irish banks had “no funding difficulties”, the effect was merely to present Irish self- government to the world as a comic distraction from the real business at hand.
The two Brians painted themselves as the most deluded optimists since Comical Alistood before the cameras in Baghdad and insisted with a straight face that the Iraqi army was crushing the Americans, even as the latter’s tanks appeared on the horizon.
The new motto of the state seemed to be drawn from the Roman satirist Juvenal’s summation of autocratic folly: Hoc volo, sic jubeo, sit pro ratione voluntas. Or: This is what I want, I insist on it. Let my will stand as a reason.
(this part republished under Creative Commons licence)
November 23, 2010
Vancouver is place where it is not easy to find work. I constantly meet people from other places in Canada (and the world and Vancouver for that matter) who report this experience of Vancouver. I was in a bookshop recently in Victoria, where there was a very helpful woman working who told me how she’d recently moved to Vancouver for a period of time, tried to find work and encountered not just a difficult time, but rudeness and attitude in her job search. She had returned to Victoria and her job. Last week it was a woman from Ontario, who said she’d had enough and was going home, where she could find opportunities. She had gone to school for graphic design and graduated and worked in domestic service type work.
Concurrent to the difficulty of finding work is a pious attitude towards unemployment and the unemployed. The system that exists EI freezes a great number of people out, and you can only access certain training programs if you’ve been on EI. Welfare rates are inhumane and you must undertake what can only be described as some kind of cattle trial before you can even consider applying. The idea being to shake any scrap of dignity you may have to dust and hope you’ll go home destroyed and live under a bush rather than return to face more of it.
Where does it leave people?
It leaves people bearing an unnecessary and additional sense of shame and failure, when the fact of the matter is this is a difficult place to find work! You watch people unwind on facebook as their job search produces nothing for sometimes months, years even. The pious attitude surrounding unemployment certainly does little to help these bright, capable people. This sense of piety also produces a risk averse work force, so people may tend to stay put.
It’s easy to forget how brutal unemployment can be when you haven’t been touched by it in a very long time. It’s easy to feel smug and satisfied and fuel the piety.
But hark we are living in the midst of a property bubble here that will eventually burst and we never think that’s going to happen do we? The other strange thing about the sense of isolation that exists around the unemployed is the history of this city shows difficult recessions, so it’s odd that this has not informed a more healthy attitude. Except in this province there’s always such a sense of fracture and distance and disinterest. If it’s not happening on my doorstep … seems to be a prevalent attitude.
My recent reading of strike pamphlets from the 1930’s supports this. There was incredible isolation in the relief camps. The particular book I was reading the writer constantly referred to the “stiffs” coming from the city to face an awful labour, and that word did not seem to be travelling back of how brutal their experience was. It was anguishing to read the young man’s descriptions.
November 23, 2010
2 hot waterbottles x 22 boilings.
3 press conferences (1 live, 1 pretending to be live, the other after the fact)
The Week in Politics, Vincent Browne, Scannal, Olivia O’Leary radio 4 doc, Vincent Browne crisis special, The Week in Politics crisis special
Bailout bulletins by Skype.
Bailout bulletins by email.
Bailout beverage by night with stateless beauty.
Discussion over the gentle nature of heifers, in a pub in Vancouver — empty but for 2 single men and a massive screen with football.
We enter and they put on the Blues radio channel.
Today caught headline goat thefts are on the rise in the Lower Mainland.
November 22, 2010
Worth a watch: Vincent Browne nailing Cowen and discussion that followed after bail out was admitted.