HER HOME IN TORONTO . . . 6:30 p.m.

Chicken Shish Kebab, Rice, Greek Salad, Tzatziki, Babaganoush with Pita, Spanakopita and Baklava.

THE CONVERSATION

Anna MacKay-Smith has played most of the roles she has coveted as surely as she has helped others step out of the roles they were stuck in and into the next phases of their lives. She describes herself as a woman in transition and knows that she is not alone.

Aware of her tendency to stand just outside the communities she has created as a teacher and a director, it was with her “MOMs”, the women who participated in The Musings on Motherhood Project, that she allowed herself to join the group.

The MOMs are members of the Uxbridge community who spent a year writing their stories about motherhood. Anna guided the women through the writing process, compiled their stories and selected at least one from each of the women to be performed on stage. She cast the women to perform each others’ stories, an enormous risk for a group of women who did not consider themselves writers, or performers.

Not only did Anna allow herself participate in the many, many social gatherings the cast held, she led them deeper into their own stories by sharing her own.  It is a view of leadership that is as unconventional in the theatre community, as it is in most parts of society. Even Anna did not realize the impact her story would have.

She spoke about the daughter she had when she was fifteen. Sent away to Toronto to birth the baby, by the time she returned to Ottawa, her daughter had been adopted and Anna had only her stretch marks and a newfound uncertainty about her body to mark the event. It would be decades later, after raising another five children, separating from their father and birthing The MOM Project, that Anna would grapple with her angst about her body on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.

She completed the pilgrimage despite the fact that she was not in the least prepared, amazed that the body she had so neglected still carried her through. She has since found the daughter she had as a teenager, saying, “she’s fabulous. She’s just a lovely, lovely person. She’s just perfect.”

Anna adds, “We’ve been so lucky. We had to wait a long time. It’s answered questions for her. And I was able to have closure on something that’s troubled me my whole life. It’s a happy ending.”

Anna is fully aware that there are many types of endings, both on stage and off. The M.O.M. Project was followed by The AhMen Project and The Women In Transition Project (W.I.T.).  The heartbreak she is nursing is not the amicable end of her twenty five year marriage. In fact, she and her former husband separated so amicably that their story was published in Cate Cochran‘s book Reconcilable Differences: Marriages End; Families Don’t. A radio documentary made from the tape of their story was just recently re-aired on CBC Radio.

What pains Anna is the abrupt end of her work with a group of former street women recovering from drug addictions in a Toronto shelter. She had been working with the women to write their stories, noting that she was not just cutting and pasting email files, but painstakingly transcribing the women’s words from the handwritten copies they had entrusted to her. Though Anna had expressed concern about the lack of funding for the project from the outset, the work continued while the shelter staff hoped for grant funding that ultimately did not materialize. Anna offered to continue on spec, but the project was terminated.

She says, “It is still raw. I just felt sick about it. We’d promised them and they’re women who’ve had a lot taken from them. These women are remarkable. Their stories are heartbreaking and funny and full of hope.” They are also stories that are seldom talked about and almost never told by the women who live them.

The stories and the integrity of the women telling them are paramount to Anna. She says, “A lot of these women had been prostitutes and in jail and they were good people. With their addictions, they had gone into a place that was just a nightmare.”

The premature end of the project is difficult for a number of reasons. Anna is committed to building communities among the people she works with, a well thought out and intentional approach that marks her apart. While the prevailing wisdom when she was training as an actor was to tear people down and reshape them as the teacher deemed appropriate, Anna uses her skills to build people up as they see fit.

Anna explains, “My talent is to have people trust me and I do genuinely fall in love with the people I work with. It was also about my talents of loving people and being compassionate and helping and changing people in a way that they want to be changed. ”

Whether as a teacher or director, she loves seeing the look in people’s eyes when they really understand an idea. The creativity to pass on the information in a way that they understand and the willingness to take the time to do it sets Anna apart.

She says, “I realized I could make a difference in people’s lives because I care. I like people and I like to make a difference to them. Then I also have these arts that I can use to make that difference.”

More difficult for Anna than making a difference is making a living. It has been a long time since she subscribed to thinking that her talent be used in the service of a career for her own benefit.  She suggests it is a natural part of maturing to realize that your talents are best used to serve others.  While Anna sees and creates many opportunities to help others through the arts, like many talented artists it is difficult indeed to create a steady income.

Most of Anna’s best loved and longest running endeavours generate much greater impact than income.  Her Motley Theatre Company has done play readings on the last Sunday of every month for over eight years. A committed group of regulars and many fresh faces come to hear the actors Anna has drawn to deliver the readings.

Anna understands community, carefully building it wherever she goes. It is a talent and an effort, as she notes when she explains that she lives and works in Toronto because it was simply too hard to start over elsewhere. She can describe her intentional approach directing a company or teaching a class, but the family links she maintains and the friendships she nurtures suggest she is as consistent in her personal life as she is known to be professionally.

The woman who had mixed feelings about standing alone in the parking lot after one of her greatest triumphs on the Uxbridge stage has transitioned into a woman who can choose with equal skill to stand on her own or as a part of a group.   She is well aware of the image some people have of what she was, but she is even more aware of who she is. It is that awareness and candour that has women and men ready to leap with her.

Anna knows, “It’s the best thing about acting. It’s not real life. You can be who you want to be.”  Few indeed have Anna’s awareness of what this can mean for women who are looking to be true to who they are in real life.  Through theatre, she shows them that their own lives are their best role yet. And they can trust her because she lives her life accordingly.

STILL DIGESTING

Fear of high ropes courses and depreciating comments about her body aside, Anna is a woman who is built to fly. And like so many the brightest among us, she has spent the most significant part of her considerable energies helping others take off.  She has already emailed me to suggest other people she could put me in contact with to continue my writing.

Anna embodies all of what she loves about working with women. She is generous to a fault, as eager to share her hard earned wisdom as she is her triumphs. It is not lost on her that while the mass media continues to churn out images of femininity hallmarked by vulnerable, young women made all the more susceptible by the fleeting nature of their tiny statures and youthful prettiness, Anna and her friends work to create their own roles.

They are witty and wise and gorgeous, equally skilled in the internal machinations that move us on film and the external work that reaches all the way to the back row of a theatre. Nonetheless, they struggle to find casting directors who want them and men who can match them, just as they are coming to realize the full extent of their worth.

They are life size in every way, with a depth that we could all do well to emulate. These women recognize the strength it takes to be vulnerable and the courage it requires to ask even more of yourself than you do of those who would follow you.

Impactful in the many roles she has moved through in her life, Anna is no longer the woman whose husband once offered to buy her champagne for actually managing to say no to a request for her time.  Anna is her own best company now, laughing that when women make themselves that busy there is probably something in the marriage that needs to be looked at. It is trademark Anna humour.

Anna’s youngest daughter leaves the table after dinner, already well versed in these stories. She is also transitioning, living with Anna while she establishes herself as an actor. Anna marvels at how much farther ahead her daughter is than she was at that age and we wonder how the world will change as her daughter moves through it.

In an industry that can be very much about image, accomplished in a craft that makes illusion believable, Anna is the real thing. Her secret is that she cares. And that willingness to be vulnerable is her greatest strength.

French toast and sausage with tea for Alice. Spinach and Cheddar Crepomlette with coffee for me.

THE CONVERSATION

Alice is a pseudonym that will most likely be outgrown. As the woman behind it continues to learn about herself and her life with bipolar disorder, she hopes to eventually reveal her true identity on her blog Alice in Bipolarland.

The blog Alice began this month speaks so eloquently to who she is that it seems contrived to be writing about her. Her own writing sears with honesty and smacks of the bravery required to share even a glimpse of who you are with the rest of the world. It is work that anyone else would be proud to put their name on, but it is not so simple.

Not everyone wants to have their name associated with a mental illness. And while the diagnosis of bipolar disorder was somewhat of a relief, all these years later Alice is using her blog to try to untangle who she is as a person from whom she is as a person living with bipolar disorder.

Alice says that the diagnosis of bipolar disorder helped her “to know that [she] wasn’t being selfish or letting [her]self be in a mood.”  She remembers a cousin she only saw at Christmases saying, “All those times in the past, I just sort of thought you were being a bitch. I understand now.”

There is still a lot that Alice herself is trying to understand. She continues to work with her doctor to find medication that is effective, after first naively hoping and then ill advisedly trying to live without it. She continues to chart her moods in an effort to understand her triggers and make the best possible choices about how to manage her life.

Alice is unsure where she fits among those who have bipolar disorder. Much of the writing she has read focuses on people who are less able to function with their bipolar disorder than she is. Alice is able to pay her rent, maintain steady employment and enjoy long lasting friendships.

But she has not forgotten that, “The thing that scared me the most was knowing that it was not something that you could cure. It was going to affect every part of my life, forever.”

Her blog highlights many of those effects and represents her perspective on how to manage life with the disorder. Alice is at a point where she admits, “I understand the illness. I’m only just understanding myself in it.

She adds, “I realized that I hide behind it a lot. I take for granted that it’s something that happens to me. I don’t really delve into it or take responsibility for my emotions the way I should. Putting it on the Internet makes me responsible to other people.”

Those who know Alice would not be surprised that she explains, “I’d rather help someone than be helped myself.” She is still haunted by the look on her parents’ faces when they came to see her at the hospital after a suicide attempt. While they want to understand, she struggles with the fact that they have given her the life she at one point tried to end.

Though she is in a better place now, Alice has a very hard time picturing the future. It is hard to make plans too far in advance because she simply does not know how she will feel when the time comes. She knows she is a writer and that she has friends and family that love her. She dreams of having a family of her own and has written a list of things to do before her thirtieth birthday next year.

Not one to minimize her illness, it is still hard for anyone who meets Alice to accept a world that would limit her possibilities because she is living with bipolar disorder. She wants the same things we all want: “to be happy, to be settled in a good job and to be in a healthy relationship.”

She also wants to help others understand bipolar disorder and take responsibility for her own life. Before she turns thirty, she plans to lie in a field of flowers and dance on a rooftop.

These are neither salves for depression, nor the whims of mania. They are the hopes of a bright young woman coming into her own.  Not only can she do these things, she is doing them with the hope that if not today, maybe tomorrow. It is a brave way of living who she is.

STILL DIGESTING

Alice fully admits that she doesn’t like talking about her illness. It is still difficult to discuss with her parents despite the fact that they want to understand. They don’t even know about her blog yet.

So it is a privilege that Alice would talk with me. She is a compelling woman both in writing and in person. Fully aware that she can alternately put on a happy face or isolate herself to protect others from seeing the severity of her moods, I trust that someone who is looking as fearlessly into themselves as she is will find something real.

Alice writes and speaks of herself with the critical eye of one who needs answers and knows that she must make her own.  In my struggle to write about someone who can so clearly write about themselves, I had a chance to peel back another layer of what sustains us.

This project is really about reflecting back to people the impact they are having. I have already written about how closely I have had to look at myself through this process and a number of readers have shared their own reflections. I am not sure if I have written clearly enough about the impact the people I eat with make without realizing it.

Alice is extraordinary, even though she does not know it yet. Her power lies not in the happy face she can put on, but in who she really is when she lets it down. In a world where journalists are often encouraged to expose people, it is a true privilege to be a writer who documents people exposing themselves.

There is a power in who we are and when we take responsibility for that power, we are indeed impactful.  The fact is that the tough stuff is what we transform into the best of who we are. Alice is not bipolar disorder, but she is using the fact that she has it to understand herself and approach others with more sensitivity.

We spoke about the difficulty friends, family, colleagues and even some professionals have knowing how to address people who are struggling beneath the rather impersonal diagnoses and issues that plague so many. Whether we write about ourselves, read about others or simply enjoy all the conversations in between, there is more to us than the labels we use to understand and ultimately transform what ails us.

For Alice, like most of us, it is the company of a friend who is comfortable saying nothing at all that provides the greatest comfort.  When we say nothing at all, whether we sit alone or in company, we’d do well to take a moment to be amazed by the courage it takes to be human and to consider the fact that we all have it.

THE CONVERSATION

DJ’s daughter has asked him why they don’t just go and live in Jamaica. It is his other daughter who explains that the opportunities in Canada are important, especially with regards to education. DJ himself was not much older than his girls when his family decided he would come to Canada.

He begins our conversation with a simple statement.  DJ says, “Everything is racism for me.” He grew up in Lachine, Quebec where he encountered white people in the flesh for the first time. The racism of his childhood was “blatant and in your face. We weren’t thinking of language. We were thinking of race.” 

He notes that his family is from the same place as Bob Marley, while explaining that when he was a child only great singers, elite track athletes and children of very affluent parents had any hope of leaving Jamaica. DJ’s father was a Civil Engineer educated at Concordia University. He was the family’s first university graduate and recognized the opportunities education created.

While education was the attraction to Canada, DJ has no illusions about his parents’ motivation. He says, “Reality is my parents’ view is they needed to move me out of the ghetto or out of the shanty town before I became a gangsta.” He was six years old when he left Jamaica.

As his youngest children approach the same age, DJ teaches them that “it is good to be a part of society and blend in with the norms because we are in a place where we should share. It is important after that to experience your culture and understand what it is and what it has done for you.”

While it is hard for his children to believe, slavery is a more recent part of history than many like to admit. And many children grow up without any understanding of the cultural history that began in the great civilizations of Africa.

“Our kids are so confused about who they are personally, spiritually, socially, culturally as well. We have a cultural crisis that is going on. The system has failed black children all over the world”   DJ explains that the segregation that was in place in America is a problem that Americans are still trying to solve. He sees the legacy of Brazil’s assimilation policies as a problem that society grapples with.

DJ dreams of afterschool or weekend programs where young people can learn about their culture. He stresses the importance of parents and teachers. While he acknowledges that it is more easily said than done, he wonders, “What are we working towards? If we aren’t working together, what are we working on?”

Though religion can be divisive, DJ considers spirituality to be a defining characteristic of what it means to be black. He talks of a connection to forefathers and grandfathers that emphasizes nurturing, a sharp contrast to the media images that promote violence. This violence DJ stresses is a contradiction of the proud history too few understand.

He asks, “What positive stereotypes? What role models? Other cultures came in and took our ideas, improved them and called them their own. I had to learn these things on my own. If you weren’t taught these things, how would you know?”

The turning point for DJ was at college. He was away from home living with many different nationalities. He was also excelling in sport, eventually playing professionally for a year in the Canadian Football League (CFL).

Growing up, sport had given him an outlet for his aggression and he credits it with teaching him both obedience and teamwork. He says, “When you have a win, there’s harmony amongst the group. It teaches you a different life lesson than the one you’re living.”

It was his passion for sport and physical fitness that carried him through one of the more challenging times in his adult life. A Child and Youth Worker with expertise working with youth in the school setting, he also has his own gym where he trains elite athletes. 

Again, his explanation is direct. He says, “There is a reason why I have my gym. 1995/1996 was the year of the gun. Six of my students died. I took some time to put myself back to peace. I took some time to do something I wanted to do.”

DJ certainly wants to be doing the work he continues as a Child and Youth Worker, recognizing the courage it takes for those who work with troubled youth to put aside their pride to try to make something better for others.

Despite a very full schedule running his gym and working fulltime as a Child and Youth Worker, DJ plans to return to Jamaica as a volunteer working on programs for youth. He dreams of writing a book and sees the need to take up a greater advocacy role.

DJ will also help his daughters with their school work, be it for English or French. He delights in the singing of their voices when they speak their mother’s Barbadian Creole and smiles at their giggles when they speak his more aggressive Jamaican Patois.

Not only does he hope that the rest of his daughter’s generation will have the same opportunities to understand and enjoy all of the parts of their identity, he will do everything he can to make it so.

STILL DIGESTING

DJ’s optimism that his daughter’s experience less racism than he did from his classmates is hard earned. He talks about the physical fights that finally taught the white guys in his neighbourhood not to use racial slurs.

He has followed his mother’s advice to work twice as hard academically and physically to succeed and has lived up to the heavy responsibility of being the eldest of 13 brothers and 2 sisters in a family where his parents spent most of the time away from home working to support them. And he knows what it feels like to watch women clutch their purses and cross the street when they see him coming.

He says that he knows too much. He agonizes about the cultural crisis he sees around him as young people have no understanding of their own history and cultural identities.  He shares the Ma’at principles with me and they sound like as profound a plan as I have heard. He lists truth, justice, order, reciprocity, balance and harmony as the fundamentals. It is just the antidote to the chaos and confusion he sees young people struggling with daily, and yet another idea from Africa that other cultures might do well to adapt.

DJ lives by his philosophy professor’s advice that if you really want to know someone, you need to close your eyes and listen to them speak. It is an exercise worth repeating. We probably need close our eyes to the current reality to really hear what truth, justice, order, reciprocity, balance and harmony might look like. And all of us need to be working at least twice as hard to bring that vision to life.

You see we all lose people and things and opportunities. Sometimes they are things that we appreciate very much and know we hold dear. Sometimes they are things we took for granted, even tricking ourselves into thinking that they might not matter at all. Even when we think we’re ready to let go, grief is still a process we can never quite prepare for and ultimately can’t avoid.

I lost a marriage and the family that went with it. In the process, I lost a lot of the ideas I had about my own family.  So I have been questioning all of my notions of myself.  You have seen some of the machinations of that inquiry in my writing. I know it’s not been pretty.

Those of you who have actually sat down with grief and made its acquaintance know that it requires you to lose a part of yourself. Sometimes the loss being grieved is precipitated by the loss of self. Without exception, once a loss has occurred, it is our greatest fear that we will lose ourselves entirely.  Perhaps the only greater fear is that no one will notice.

Each loss impacts who we are to ourselves and others. One way or another, grief can define us. We can resist with too much terror or engage with too much despair.  Embraced gently, like the breaking, beating hearts we all are, grief redefines us, over and over again.

So these dates that didn’t make my calendar have been a long time coming. They say grief waits. And I have certainly waited to try to avoid dealing with it. But eventually it catches up with you, you catch up with it, or, in my case, I run so far in so many different directions that I end up crashing into myself, again.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, a name mentioned more than once in the course of my dinners to date, has written a book entitled No Matter Where You Go, There You Are. I suspect it could be the working title for all of our lives, but I know it has resonance for mine.

We can get lost in the searching and forget who we are.  Grief’s greatest gift is the chance to reacquaint ourselves with our own hopes and fears. It is a reminder to live on purpose, intent on making the most of what we have while we have it.

Grief is a way to strengthen ourselves so that we can open our hearts even further, fully aware of the courage being asked of us. We go on loving and hoping and dreaming and making our mistakes not because we might get hurt, but because we will get hurt and when we do it is the good that will sustain us.

My encounter with grief has physically manifested in a very bad cold, an intellectual reminder that I cannot separate any aspect of my health from another. But here I am, hungry to be writing again, despite the figurative lump in my throat.

My time grieving has me thinking about resilience. We all lose things and we all grieve. We also create and find ways to thrive. Grief simply changes our perspective, blurring our vision to force us to turn inward before washing our eyes clean to face the world again.

TIM HORTONS in OSHAWA . . . 12:00 p.m.

Bagels and Cream Cheese, Donuts and Coffee.

THE CONVERSATION

For the past decade, the people who have had the greatest impact on me have been students and their families. Today was a chance to connect with two exceptional students who continue to grapple with the pressures of growing up and a sincere desire to impact and be impacted by the people around them.

To teach in the public education system is a greatest privilege. There is virtually nowhere else in our society that one can be so sure to encounter a full cross section of society, albeit a segment ghettoized by age. I can’t imagine that there is a better place for adults, especially those who have spent their lives in school, to learn about the world they live in, if they dare.

The system isn’t perfect any more than our society or governments are; but for all of the things it is still trying to figure out how to offer to students, the education system affords enormous opportunities to those who work in it.  The opportunity I am most grateful for, and most exhausted by, is the sheer volume of meaningful contacts with people.

If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that our young people need us. They need us to look beyond ourselves and our systems to see the people they are and the people they are trying to become. In a world that moves at a dizzying pace, they are looking for some firm ground to stand on. At a developmental stage when they are becoming independent of their parents, they are looking to the other adults in their lives to provide the mentoring that builds on what foundations they received at home.

As I have said to many a concerned parent, teachers, coaches and employers often get the best parts of adolescence. The young man and young woman I spoke with are as passionate and candid as we expect young people to be. They are also as eager to please.

They worry about the peer pressure that they feel requires them to take harmful risks in order to be accepted. They rely on their friends to talk to them honestly about the issues they are experiencing, when adults in support roles too frequently speak from a clinical or textbook perspective.

They agree that mental health is “huge” for young people. The young man says, “The world has changed so much and mental health has been underemphasized because so many people don’t understand it. I think they should have a lot more support. I think parents should be educated.”

The young woman is taking an extra year to finish high school and the pressure to decide what she will do next is so great she tears up talking about her uncertainty about what she’d like to do next. She says, “I just have everything shot at me lightening speed. I can’t get a hold of anything.”

They agree that the world is changing at an ever increasing pace. They regularly see their friends’ Facebook status updated at one or two in the morning to indicate that they have just completed their homework.

Despite the increasing demands of the curriculum, the young man says, “There’s a course that should be offered in high school – mental health. You give us so much for post secondary and for jobs, give us something for life.”

They agree that anxiety about the future is one of many issues they see their peers grappling with. They say that instead of wondering what high school holds, young people are wondering what the world holds.

It is a world where they feel they are creating a new template. They note that “The generation above ours was in a very different predicament than we are now.” They feel that they are finding their own way and it can be frightening indeed.

STILL DIGESTING

The voices of young people are extraordinary if we choose to listen. They are passionate and direct. And youth has a certainty that many of us miss as we grow older. That certainty can be dangerous, if it is certainty that the world is a scary and hopeless place.

No matter how many times people confide in you that they are considering taking their own life, it has an impact each and every time. And while the impact is intense no matter who is making the confession, suicidal intentions are particularly alarming when voiced by young people.

Both of the former students who I ate with today have come to me in the past concerned that they would take their own lives. It is a brave thing to do. And we need to be the kinds of teachers, parents, friends, mentors, neighbours, family members and people that others can come to when they need guidance towards the supports that will keep them safe.

There is no doubting that we live in a world filled with pressures both real and exacerbated by our own thinking. There is also no doubt that mental health issues are as real and pressing as other issues that may seem easier to talk about.  If we are sincere about being impactful, part of our work is surely to learn about our own mental health and to teach our communities about caring for our individual and collective mental health.

It is who our young people need and want us to be.  And we can show each other the way.

THEIR HOME . . . 6:00 p.m.

Shrimp and Rice with Green Beans. Tossed Salad. Sorbet and Ice Cream

THE CONVERSATION

Mark and Nancy have contributed hours of their free time to designing sets for community theatre projects. While they laugh that temporary stage sets require a different set of skills than one would bring to the building of a home, it is clear they are skilled in both.

Mark gives me a tour of the renovations they are doing to the family room.  He laughs that it’s a good avocation, but that he’d never be able to make a living at it. Nancy is just grateful that they have been able to replace the half inch walls with the layers of insulation that now make the family room the warmest in the house.  On a winter night in January, the original window that hangs in the entry as a decorative feature is a chilly reminder of just how close they were to the outdoors.

While they consult on any designs for home improvements, Mark takes the lead inside and Nancy outdoors.   The family room is coming along and there will be a new garden this spring, but by far the best feature right now is that their only son Graeme has been home from Queens for the last few weeks.

By the age of eight, Graeme had chosen Queens. He was doing a school project on a solar powered car designed there and had a chance to visit one of the libraries. He says, “I remember looking up and just seeing stories of books. It was designed after a castle with towers. I though that any library with this many books must be the finest library in the world and to have such a library must make Queens the best school.”

Graeme is not the kind to be locked in a tower and Nancy and Mark are not the parents to allow for it. Graeme took an extra year of high school to complete a few more courses and test the work world.  He calls it “the best decision I wish I’d never made. Taking a step out of academic life was necessary. It really helped me figure out what I wanted to do and that I didn’t want to work in a factory.”

There have been many more things that Graeme has wanted to do in his life and Mark and Nancy have felt very strongly that he do them. Nancy says, “We didn’t make Graeme’s hemophilia a barrier to family activities. We modified the activities. We’ve always been the thin edge of the wedge.”

Graeme is even more direct saying, “It was always depressing to go to the hemophilia meetings. I was the hemophiliac kid who played rugby, went snowboarding, went to punk concerts, went cliff jumping and got tattoos. Some of the others were living in a bubble.”

Like many things, the tattoos do not pose a significant problem for Graeme. He and Nancy spoke with their team at Sick Kids and after some prodding were able to receive a protocol for how Graeme could be tattooed and healthy. While Graeme thinks that the reluctant, visiting doctor may have been reacting to his pink Mohawk, Nancy knows that the doctor didn’t have the information to answer their question. Graeme is certainly a good argument for asking the questions others may not have thought of and managing hemophilia as a part of, rather than a deterrent, to living a full life.

While Graeme has spent more time than most in hospitals, the setting that was most important to his development were the gifted classes he has taken since Grade 3. The program was offered in a neighbouring town and the opportunities it provided were so essential that the family organized itself around shuttling Graeme back and forth so that he could not only be a part of the school program, but participate in a vast array or extracurricular activities as well.

Though father and son can laugh at themselves and each other, Mark makes it clear that he is proud of Graeme. Mark left highschool before the finishing Grade 13 and has built a very successful 37 year career in banking. Of Graeme’s success at university, Mark says, “It suits him well. At his age I was not him. I don’t expect him to be me. I benefited from being able to be in the work force and it benefited from me being there. It’s two different things.”

One setting that the whole family shares is the cottage. Nancy grew up spending all summer at her family cottage. A number of improvements have been made since flooring was first added to keep the mosquitos from coming up through the joists, but the family takes pride in the fact that it is a true cottage accessible only by boat and powered by propane. Of the importance of the cottage to Graeme, Nancy says, “It’s under his skin.”

If the cottage is in the blood, a love of theatre is a part of the air they breathe. They talk knowledgably about the work that each other does. Just as Mark and Graeme reflect with pride on the Ontario Theatre Association Award Nancy won for stage managing Alice in Wonderland, they can laugh about her performance as a woman married to a man with a severe addiction, to motorcycles.

Mark actually grew up in the theatre. His mother was a professional actress and both of his parents were active in community theatre. He had not been involved in theatre since his early twenties, when Graeme began performing. Mark quickly returned to the smell of glue pots and support roles backstage. He has even returned to the stage on occasion and especially enjoyed the challenge of performing beside professionals in the Trafalgar 24 fundraiser which Nancy stage managed.

Graeme says, “In the last 7 or 8 years, there has been literally nothing that has gone on theatrically in town that we haven’t had our hand in somehow.”

Mark explains the appeal, “It builds skills. We got into it because we knew it would build self esteem for Graeme and be fun too. It’s all transferable. I use more theatre in my professional life than business analysis.”

If Mark is performing at work, the performer in Graeme currently rants in the Golden Word, Queen’s weekly humour newspaper and the only one of its kind in the country. He is a regular on the cover, performing for the time being in two and not three dimensions. Nancy and Mark continue to be named as contributors to the set on the program of virtually every theatrical production in the community. More often than not, Nancy is mentioned as stage director, a thankless task that has her holding the production together without so much as a clear view of the stage.

Nancy explains, “If you’re in the cast you act. It you’re in the audience you enjoy. But someone has to make the illusion of the setting.”

There are no illusions at their supper table. The performer in Graeme entertains with his ideas on any topic raised. Mark is quieter with an eye to the setting they are in and an actor’s patience to wait for his cue despite having missed lunch as a result of another hectic day at work. Nancy co-ordinates it all with the aplomb of an award winning stage manager capable of improvising as the need arises.

They all understand and have done the work of the others so there is a mutual appreciation that ensures there is never any competition for applause. As individuals, they mention at different times that they are interested in performing a little bit more.  It is Mark who points out how much they’d like to do it together.

I can imagine a full house.

STILL DIGESTING

Nancy, Mark and Graeme are quite the cast of characters.  They are also an impressive ensemble, skilled at improvisation and grounded in the fact that what goes on behind the scenes is every bit as important as what is occurring on stage.

They have lived in the same neighbourhood as my parents for all of Graeme’s life and much of mine. I babysat Graeme and share a passion for outdoor education with Nancy. I have watched Mark working in the garage in the little bit of spare time he gets.

Still, it was a treat to sit down with them and talk about some of the things that matter to them. I wrote yesterday that the best neighbours are friends; I didn’t mention how close the daily pleasantries could bring us, even if we rarely make the chance to talk much further.

As neighbours we may see things that friends don’t.  I have seen Mark leave for work well before the break of dawn and have seen him return long after the sun has set. I watched as Graeme grew too old to play outside. I saw Nancy take up running and walking.

I hadn’t ever spoken with them about their commitment to the theatre. I had no idea that Mark had built a successful career out of experience rather than education. I couldn’t have guessed that Graeme was studying history with an interest in how folklore shapes who we want to be. Nor did I realize the extent to which Nancy was delving into writing and performing.

Every time I sit down to dinner, I am reminded that there is an enormous amount of back story to who we are. Performers create the history that helps them bring their characters to life; as real people we live our own histories to become who we are.  We bring ourselves to life through our experiences and we bring our communities to life when we share them. There is a lot to be learned from talking to our neighbours.

My mother and father moved into the twin house beside Mrs. Smith when the town was still small and they were outsiders.  Listening to my mother speak reminded me of another time. She spoke of welcoming people to the neighbourhood with baked goods and celebrating baby births with gifts.  And she spoke of being there through tougher times like the loss of Mrs. Smith’s only son when I was still a child and the loss of her husband when I was a young woman.

A lot happens in forty years. As a neighbour, Mrs. Smith watched us ride bikes in and occasionally off the side of my parent’s driveway that bordered on her carefully tended roses. From her kitchen window, she knew how much we delighted in snapping the snap dragons in her garden. It is entirely possible she knew some things we’d rather she didn’t, although she never spoke of them.

Much older than my parents, Mrs. Smith became one of my mother’s best friends.   She watched over my parents’ house when they were away and even when they were home. When she moved to a retirement home in a neighbouring community, my mother went to visit her and, as often as she could, she brought one of us along.

Watching my mother talk about the importance of neighbours, I was reminded of her mother, my granny. The neighbours my mother grew up with were also a part of my childhood.  My granny’s friends lined her street and were as frequent guests in her home as her grandchildren. My mom knew all about neighbours before she met Mrs. Smith.

It should be no surprise that my sister has absorbed these lessons. She walked next door just last week with a bottle of wine to welcome her new neighbours. And she lets others use her driveway when their children visit so that everyone has a place to park. She shares more than her middle name with our Granny.  Like generations in my family, she is a good neighbour.

It is more surprising that my brother and I have never stayed anywhere long enough to become a part of a neighbourhood. Even from across the country, my brother was sorry to hear that Mrs. Smith had died. The truth is that where we live matters, even if we think we are on our way somewhere else. For the time we spend somewhere, be it the four months of a semester or forty years of a lifetime, we are neighbours.

The time may be passed when this concept was in vogue. While cookie cutter subdivisions sell the idea of neighbourhood, we are often on our way elsewhere before we arrive, perpetually looking to upgrade. The quality of a neighbourhood cannot easily be quantified in a real estate listing because it is about the people not the properties.

Our world is changing, at once shrinking and expanding.  When my parents were growing up, they lived in neighbourhoods. Many of my friends are looking for such places to raise their own families, without always being able to identify what’s missing.

When we were growing up, people didn’t go as far a field looking for people with specialized interests to match their own. People didn’t have to travel across countries to find people they could relate to. And it wasn’t gauche or unsophisticated to realize that the people next door to you might have something to share by the simple virtue of living beside you.

As I go looking to expand my community through this project, I regularly ask myself what I am missing right in front of me. My friends and family tease me about whether or not they meet the criteria for my project and of course they do, despite being reluctant to have me tell their stories.

It is no accident that tonight I am having dinner with one of my parents’ neighbours. Nor is it a mistake that in broadening my horizons I keep returning home to the community I grew up in. It is no more or less perfect than the others I have lived in since, but it is a community and we do our best to support each other.  It is that support more than good fences that makes a neighbourhood.  And it is individual people like Mrs. Smith who make good neighbours simply by offering their friendship.

SYLVIA’S HOME IN TORONTO . . . 7:00 p.m.

Quesadillas, Nachos with Salsa and Guacamole, Tortilla Soup, Chicken Mole with Rice, Jicama Salad and Sangrita, Sorbet with Chocolate Mousse Cups and Lattes.

THE DISCUSSION

Sylvia Bereskin feels like she’s lost her understanding of time completely. After rushing through a very successful career, she is still reconciling herself to the pace of retirement. She is also unapologetically aware that she is a part of the first generation of women to have grown up with feminism.

These women are now retiring from careers that formed an integral part of their identities. Sylvia warns, “It’s like childbirth. Nobody really talks about the hard parts.”  With a characteristic interest in learning, Sylvia is talking about it all.

While her relationship with time may have changed, it is not lost on her that the time is now. Sylvia is writing a blog about feminist women retiring entitled For the First Time. The response has been very positive despite the fact that she was warned that using the word feminist would put people off.

Sylvia has always been passionate about social justice. The first Canadian born child of parents who survived the Holocaust, she grew up speaking more Yiddish than English. She also learned some tough lessons very early on.

Her first day of Kindergarten was a disappointment to her because by the end of the day she had not been taught to read or write. They had, however, taught her to sing Jesus Loves Me and Jesus Bids Us Shine With a Bright Clear Light. Knowing her father’s love of music (he was a canter in Synagogue), she eagerly sang for him.

He was on the phone to the school immediately. Sylvia notes, “I learned on that first day of Kindergarten that I would have to hide from home what was going on at school and hide from school what was going on at home. So many kids are still doing that. We can’t give them any dignified way of being who they are or of being honest.”

Sylvia credits the fact that her childhood was not an easy one with helping her relate to others. Though she had hoped to be a medical doctor, she studied social sciences and worked for a time as a Social Worker.

She recalls being fired from her job at the Orange County Welfare Department in California. Six months pregnant at the time, the mistake was not hers but her husband’s. A client had collapsed and Sylvia’s husband administered CPR until the ambulance arrived. He saved a life, but they both lost their jobs as a result of their inability to represent the philosophy of the department.

No longer with that husband or in social work, Sylvia still bristles at the idea that a life could be considered less valuable because it belonged to someone needing social assistance. Long after the days in Orange County and her accidental step into teaching as a career that was compatible with raising children as a single mother, the social justice issues were close to home.

Upon returning to the classroom after a stint teaching teacher candidates at Trent University, Sylvia suggested to her principal that the traditional Christmas door decorating festivities be expanded to include other celebrations. Not only was she shunned by staff, her classroom and then the lawn of her home was plastered with Christmas decorations.

Sylvia says, “It was a violation. It was really scary.”  A consummate teacher, she used it as a learning opportunity for her students that culminated in a multicultural celebration in her classroom. She says, “The kids got it really quickly. The adults still don’t.”

From Sylvia’s perspective, it was another accident that she ended up working at the Ontario Ministry of Education. Among her accomplishments, she was active in the establishment of the Ontario College of Teachers and coordinated the writing of the new curriculum, a role that afforded her the opportunity to work every day of the week and spend nights sleeping in her office.

She had her reasons, saying, “I could do more good trying to hang around than if I left. I don’t have a good capacity to keep my mouth shut. I had this funny notion that my job at the Ministry was to speak truth to power. I could catch someone’s attention long enough to start something, but they couldn’t sustain it. They couldn’t hold the vision. Not only can they not hold the big picture, they don’t see there is a big picture.”

Sylvia’s view of the big picture has challenged her not only to teach others that there are no innocent bystanders, but to ensure that she herself does not stand by.  When the erosion of rights in Kosovo struck her as similar to the Holocaust, she became involved with the refugees in Canada, volunteering four or five times a week while holding her job.

She says, “I’d always wondered why people hadn’t done anything. This is sort of where I got to put my money where my mouth is.”  That commitment to justice infuses all she does, in retirement as in everything else.

“It really is the first time in my life I could do anything I want.”  For Sylvia, that includes being available at any time to work as a part of the Red Cross that responds to local crises. It also includes writing a book on the emotional adjustments women face in retirement, renovating her kitchen, training teachers and travelling.  Her goal is not to over schedule despite her difficulty saying no to things that interest her.

For now, some of her greatest freedoms are driving slowly and stopping to talk to people. She laughs that it sometimes takes her so long to get started that she doesn’t start at all. Sylvia also takes some pride in playing with time by starting the Terry Fox Run early so that she isn’t demoralized when the lead group passes her.

This metaphor is so amusing because it reflects a woman who had not been demoralized. Sylvia is leading her own life. No longer racing to meet the demands of a career and raising a family, she is in it for the long haul, as she does things for the first time and creates her own history.

STILL DIGESTING

Sylvia is committed to social justice. When training teachers she asks them to consider what they are asking their students to hide. It is a useful question for all of us to consider, in every setting we enter.

Sylvia does not hide her feminism. Nor will she stand by as people are isolated or forgotten. She knows that there are no innocent bystanders.

Never again will she simplify a complex idea into a few bullet points for the sake of a presentation. She has no interest in hiding the depth and complexity of her ideas any more than she suggests that we hide from the depth and complexity of our identities.

The fact is that we are all in this together so we might as well know who we are. Sylvia speaks out and takes action. A wise supervisor once explained to her that since not everyone can do what Sylvia does, the rest of them would do their part by supporting her.

We all need to know who we are and why we do what we do. Though Sylvia believes life will make you pay in some way for walking your own path, she and many others are prepared to meet that challenge.

My question is why do any of us let ourselves be less than we are? It all comes down to what we are afraid of. And when we are afraid of ourselves, we are afraid of everything.  The decision is ours. We can fear our way into history repeating or we can face ourselves over and over again for the first time.

I spent less of the holidays writing than I had hoped, much to my own consternation.  And I spent less time than I should have trying to book dinners. I am still learning about asking for what I need and hope that those of you who have been encouraging interesting people to contact me will continue to do so. Like me, this project is a work in progress.

I love writing this blog and am encouraged by the commitment so many of you have made to reading it. I know that the courage of those who have told their stories makes a difference. There are close to 50 000 hits to the site each month coming from over 450 different IP addresses. Even more exciting is the fact that the average visit is over 10 minutes. That means that you are taking the time to read. Thank you!

I certainly dream of more dinner invitations and more readers. I think that the stories I have been told deserve as large an audience as possible. My original premise remains intact. We have so much to share and to celebrate. And in doing so I am sure we all move a little closer to the people we want to be.

The holidays certainly reminded me that I am still learning, struggling sometimes to share who I am and to celebrate what I am trying to accomplish. I say this because some of you have been there too; we can doubt ourselves even when we are doing good work. In fact, there are times when the earnestness of the effort creates all the more uncertainty.

Over the holidays, I wanted to write more lessons than I did. And I wanted to book more dinners. I also wanted to take a harder look at how to market the project. Instead, I came face to face with the fact that I was exhausted, just as many of you had predicted.

So I spent time with friends, did my best with family and said some goodbyes to Christmases past.  It was a much needed rest from the pace of the last few months, but it has left me with more questions than answers.

I already feel like I have more than enough information for a book, though I still have so much more to learn. I am excited about spending more time improving the writing so that you are reading people’s stories in a form that is a closer approximation to just how compelling the stories are when told over dinner. I am less excited about pacing myself, but will have to do so nonetheless.

Sustaining myself this year means seeing this project through. It also means taking a hard look at my own story and taking good care of myself so that I can move into the next stage of my life, certain of the contribution I have to make. I know that in your own ways, many of you are doing the same thing.

We live in a world of constant change. Last year’s holidays probably did not look like this year’s. And who knows what next year’s will bring. At its most powerful, the New Year is all about reconciling who we have been with who we are becoming. The wisest among us take the time to savour that process, knowing that change is occurring in every moment, not just in grand statements and resolutions, but more significantly in the small gestures we make and keep making.

When I began this project, I had a plan of sorts. I was certain that having dinner with a different person each night would draw some curiousity about who I was actually meeting and what we were talking about.  I knew that I would go out each night, write every morning and try to spend my afternoons taking care of booking additional dinners.

I also thought that I might be able to support myself by selling advertising and I hoped that it would be easy to find people who would have dinner with me through the people that I already knew.  Early on I realized that I had not built the time in to run the project as a business and that I might have saved myself a lot of anxiety by setting up my schedule before I launched the project.

All that is easy to see in hindsight and I was probably even aware of it at the time. That of course brings me to the topic of time, which is of the essence for all of us. We simply do not seem to have enough of it or make enough of it.

As I began my interviews, I was amazed how many of the people I met were not big planners. They certainly had direction and passion, but none were living according to a five or ten year plan. As if to confirm this discovery, those who had once thought they had everything mapped out to go according to plan had without exception had that plan derailed by something beyond their control.

To a person, I heard about the opportunities that had defined people’s lives despite the fact that they were unexpected and could not have been planned for. The people I meet are of course incredibly well prepared to offer valuable skills. They work at knowing themselves and learning from everything they experience, the good and particularly the bad.

What I initially talked about as being responsive to circumstances as opposed to futilely trying to control for every possibility has come to look more and more like intention.  And while intention is important in determining what we do, it is even more important in determining how we do it.

I have learned about my own intentions in the first two months of this project. I am trying to show that there are generous people who are doing meaningful things for other people. I hope to learn how people make these contributions while taking care of themselves so that they can continue to be effective.

As the New Year approaches, intention is on many people’s minds. If only it would stay all year round. I for one will certainly be resolving to stick to my intentions and appreciate any help in doing so that you can offer.