Obsessive Garlic Disorder

I developed a serious case of this newly identified (to me) syndrome this past weekend.

I attended Mooseman: a precompression Burning Man regional event. Five days of survival camping in the forest of Haliburton. No water. No electricity.

The first 36 hours of the event were like a roller coaster of new experiences - both positive and negative, both personal and interpersonal. The first night I met some truly lovely people around a very large fire held in a large circle of stones. The following day I experienced a few interactions that were less than ideal. My physical challenges were brought home to roost and I considered leaving in case they worsened. The team of onsite Rangers helped mediate what was a challenging and baffling situation for me and I ended up staying due to their support. Two of the 10 Burning Man principles were driven into me throughout the beginning part of my experience at Mooseman:  Radical self-reliance and Radical inclusion.

On the Saturday of the event after I had rested (I was exhausted from the emotional roller coaster and physical demands of survival camping set up!) I ventured back to the sacred circle. I was told that there was garlic braiding down at the main house (the owner of the property) and that it was a lot of fun.  I decided I would rather take a walk through the forest which was set up with four theme camps and I wanted to see what they looked like in their finished state (I saw the skeletons of these camps on a Thursday night walk about).

The effort put into these theme camps is dumbfounding and humbling. One of the camps, Powder Monkeys, had a pirate theme and the decorations and plounges were so creative. This camp also hosted a Baconade on the Sunday morning and everyone who participated in that achieved Peak Bacon. There were two types of bacon, bacon dip, bacon brownies, bacon apple pie, bacon/cheese roll-ups, bacon chocolate chip rice krispies, etc.

On the way into the forest there was a Toga Toll Camp. These lovely people provided a candy tray that they also took throughout the event at times. There was bug spray on offer and other provisions if needed. Did I mention that all Burning Man events operate on a gift economy basis? No money exchanges hands. Every participant is expected to gift what they can and high octane volunteerism is the norm.

I didn't spend as much time as I would've like to at the Big Rig Rockin Robin's Truck Stop Jamboree. They had built a replica of a truck complete with a truck stop diner and a country store that I shoplifted a pocket knife from (I had lost mine). They had some fine trombone jamming happening on Saturday night when I was there.

Lastly there was a Hammock Camp at the end of the forest trail. Peace and tranquility was found in one of the hammocks hanging there :)

On Sunday afternoon after dancing in the forest for a few hours to some wonderful beats I remembered the garlic braiding and wandered down to the main house (past the coffee cafe which served delicious free coffee all weekend long!). Outside of the house was a circle of chairs and instruments of garlic disorder. I stood and asked the three people about what was going on and shared a bit of my food justice passion with them. Doug, the owner of the property, saw a fellow food spirit and he eagerly invited me to sit down and try cleaning some garlic myself. Silvie, another Mooseman attendee, patted a chair and proceeded to show me how to clean the garlic (rub the stalk and bulb with love to remove the dirt, trim the hairy end and brush out the dirt). In the course of learning this new skill, Doug, Silvie, another young man and I got into a wonderful conversation that alternated between philosophy, therapy, camaraderie and hilarity.

After a few minutes of this pleasant learning - interactive engagement Doug became perturbed while I was talking. I wasn't staying on task since I use my hands while I talk. He told Silvie to take me down to the shed to see the enormity of the garlic cleaning task at hand.

Have you ever seen 1700 bulbs of garlic in various stages of 'processing'? Doug had already informed us that it takes 20 passes through human hands to fully process garlic (now you know why most of it comes from China since it is so labour intensive!). So when I rounded the corner into the shed I saw how massive the operation was and how many uncleaned bulbs there were - well, that was when the disorder struck me.

I returned with Silvie and spend the next few hours mastering the art of conversing while cleaning garlic bulbs at a steady rate. I was rewarded with a fine meal from Lynn (Doug's partner) that included potatoes freshly harvested from their garden and the opportunity to braid my very own set of bulbs which I later purchased on my way out of the event.  The ideas, love, inspiration and garlic imbued soulfulness of the experience will last my lifetime. In fact, the whole weekend will. The final of the 10 principles of Burning Man was cemented into my heart that afternoon and sealed with the burning of the Moose effigy that night:

Immediacy

Immediate experience is, in many ways, the most important touchstone of value in our culture. We seek to overcome barriers that stand between us and a recognition of our inner selves, the reality of those around us, participation in society, and contact with a natural world exceeding human powers. No idea can substitute for this experience. (source)

Unbraided but cleaned fruits of our Obsessive Garlic Disorder

There are no rats in this race. None.

This missive serves as a formal thank-you note to the parenting warriors I know.  And no, you do not need to be a parent in order to be named a parenting warrior.

All of us wear, as a public front, the results of our parenting.  So if I directed you here I was informed by you and your actions as to my own parenting choices. I likely talked about you with Daughter in the form of "There is this really cool person I met from a food thing/school thing/random thing (including the internet)...this is their story or why they are cool". And some of you I know more intimately than that but I might not have directly named you in my story telling.

The internet allows me to mask identities with Daughter if I have intimate knowledge of something and I was to pass along a great story but not reveal true identity.  More often than not I have chosen to share stories of action rather than stories of identity so I guess that means I've fully rejected most notions of idolatry .Which also happens to make me a really great atheist, eh?

There are tumultuous times as parents. Birth. Toddler. Preschool/early school. Grade 6 (for estrogen heavy children especially). And then, finally, the holy grail of parenting: Teenagehood. A last childhood stage that hopefully finales with a goal towards further education (formal or otherwise) and intelligent voting (I'm not joking).

Daughter moved away to university yesterday. She and I both entered a whole new world. One where my role as a parent will have shifted away from one thing to another.  And, according the to the God (Dr.) Seuss :  Ah, yes of course. Thing 2 would like to clarify that just because he wears the number 2 does not imply in any way that he's inferior to Thing 1. 

And like everything else in this world, when life is tumultuous one tends to turn to others in order to support and inform. And sometimes literally carry you (extra long hat tip here to The Parents, luckily both still alive and healthyish).

So whether or not you knew it, if I've directed you here then you were part of my own personal strongly social media infused Information and Support Team: Parenting Branch. (Brief Aside to an interesting fact. I first went online in 1993 seeking out parenting support after a devastating miscarriage. This makes me an original netizen).

You were the people on whose backs I often trod. And most of you know I'm kind of addicted to learning so many of you were just plain teachers. But the best kind of plain teacher is the one that you actually learn from. So thank-you for teaching me even if you had no idea I used you for my parenting role model (especially if you are not a parent lol).

Parenting was the biggest challenge I ever took on and I had heaps and heaps of learning to do on the subject since I was not part of any large familial structure as a first generation Canadian. An extremely grateful Canadian, now.

Some of you I do not or can not name because our interactions were so brief I failed to obtain a name.  And some of you I do not name because you do not getz the social media internetz thang (remember, I am 45, GenX - we GASP wrote snail mail in our youth and many of us still do...not me though lol).  But I might actually snail mail a few of those sorts of characters.  And, of course in the age of social media, some of you I name, but do not know face to face since we have never actually met.  And sadly, there is one dear friend who I especially wish to thank but she recently passed on. She was, ultimately, a fatal victim to her own childhood demons.

Memory, being what it is, will forget some. And memory, being what it is, will enlarge some.

Be that as it were, I now attempt to name you here via various sorts of social media avenues including good 'old fashioned' email. Because, you see, in the land of social media I can now name my not-necessarily-blood-related-clan. And not only name you but sometimes to also publicly thank-you, without a face-to-face ceremony. And ceremonies traditionally employ food and it just so happens that I've broken bread with most of you. And much of it good healthy AND tasty food at that :)

I am transitioning to stage II parenting now. And I certainly feel a ceremony should occur. So this is mine.

My transitioning parent ceremony will occur over the course of the entire month of September and I will attempt to blog here regularly about my reflections on parenting as I drive across Canada from Vancouver to St. John's along the Trans-Canada Highway.  I'm also hoping to get a few cross Canada harvest food related stories up on my newish food themed blog (but not recipes: they are here).

Namaste and again, thank-you.  Go forth and multiply the intelligent and humane sorts of folks that we are capable of creating.  Be a seed, as it were.  Plant yourself, flower and prosper.

ECON 101: Sustainability Work is not Sustainable

I saw two call outs for food activist writing in the last few days.  One was for a chapter/story in an anthology of food writing. The other was for article proposals in a well known magazine on environmental matters.

Reading through the details of both of these call outs for contributors got me thinking about an announcement that was made to a large room of food activists here in Toronto recently.  The announcement was made by one of the partner organizations for the event.  The executive director proudly announced that they had taken the funding for one full time job and cleverly carved out eight one day a week jobs. This cleverness was applauded by the gathering.  I was appalled.

I had seen the advertisement for the eight (identical) part-time positions.  The position demanded a wide range of skills and talents but only offered $15/hour with no benefits (unless you count TTC tokens and lunch every second week) and for only eight hours on that one day.  The contract was for only six months with no guarantee of renewal.  And oh yeah, you had to be a welfare recipient.  So that means that this clever NGO took a job originally intended as one decently paid full time position and created eight ridiculously underpaid jobs out of it.

Underpaid you ask?  Doing the math:  8 hours/day one day a week for 6 months = $3120. If you multiply that amount by 8 for the number of part time positions they created then you get $24960.  So the original grant was for one full time job that would have earned one person $24,960 for six months.  That full time worker would have had benefits and taken home less than that but still it is recognized that this is a living wage and values the wide set of skills necessary for the advertised position.  So back to the eight people who were'lucky' enough to land one of the new part time jobs.  The before tax low income cut off (LICO) line (based on 2006 data) for a single person the city of Toronto is $22,637 and for a family of two is $28,182. Even if each of these people were able to land similar jobs for the other four days of the week - which you and I both know is extremely unlikely, their equivalent earnings would only be $3120 x 5 = $15,600 which is marginally better than the LICO for a single person and pretty close to the LICO for a two person household.  And just because TTC tokens and an occasional meal are thrown in doesn't make the reality of the meager income any more attractive.

At the end of another recent event I volunteered at, every single person from the participating organizations was called out and asked to stand to receive applause as thank-you for their efforts for arranging the event. All of the people asked to stand were getting paid by their own NGOs to organize the event. At the very end of the long list of people called and asked to stand, the MC for the event mumbled "And oh yes, the volunteers too" and didn't ask us to stand but merely started clapping and the audience weakly joined along while also rising from their seats hurrying to get out of the hall (it had been a long day and the long list of contributors and clapping was unnecessary).

Both of the call out for food activist writing submissions I mentioned at the beginning of this post had a token honorarium offered in lieu of a meaningful payment.  A payment that values the work of writing.  In reading these announcements I was also reminded of the truism: the rich get richer.  For surely the only people writing for these type of outfits (Huffington Post being the classic example) are people with decent jobs, businesses or cushy retirements.  Officially, in Toronto, for a single person, that would be a job that earns at least $22,637 (using very old 2005 data).  Anybody else that takes on these kind of positions ($15/hour or token honorariums) is not realizing that by accepting these types of opportunities they are contributing to an unsustainable world.  Not in the climate change way but in the economic change kind of way.

Women have historically been the volunteers.  The ones whose often back breaking work is not valued.  The new economic reality is that now not only women are doing slave type labour but also students and the long term unemployed.  The people desperate for the crust of a loaf of bread  - to toss a Dickensian metaphor out there.  Earning under $22,637 in the city of Toronto is the seemingly new normal in the activist circles I move in.  Applauding the people who manage to earn (significantly) more than that and those that dream up clever ways to perpetuate poverty is ironic in rooms filled with people that publicly pledge allegiance and work towards food justice and food policy change making.

The food justice community in Toronto, with their offerings of meager dollars for work that wants to eradicate food poverty, seems to be part of the problem and not the solution.

Harsh?  Please offer your feedback.

I'd like to see evidence that at least one other person concurs with my observations and conclusions.

Words are not Wordz

Lately I find I often grapple with the words to describe things.

For example, I worked long and hard on this sentence:  "The idyllic days of youth are more closely strung together whilst in our elder years the moments are."


I intended the quoted sentence to be a central theme to a blog post and I guess it is but not in the way I had originally jotted down my thoughts.


And that's the gist of this post.  Words are often not used as they were originally intended.  This post is going to be about two particular words that are pervasive in our culture and have acquired meaning beyond their original one.  I am not going to name them as yet because I'd like my thoughts to be digested before evoking a reaction from you, dear reader.


When Daughter was around six years of age we had our first meaningful sex education moment.  I think she already knew the birds and the bees (or birds and birds or bees and bees, I've been quite liberal in my approach to these issues, much to her chagrin as she got older).  I think she had probably just discovered, on her own, the pleasures of touching yourself 'down there' and she was doing this around me, at home.  I think she was doing it over her clothes...and perhaps even subconsciously, I don't really recollect the specifics.  At any rate, once I was certain of my observations I said to her that she needed to stop doing that in public because yes, it feels good, but there are things that we do in private and this was one of them.  I told her that what she was doing was called masturbation and it was a very pleasurable activity, yes, but it was something that each of us did in private.


The clearest part of my memory of this rather ordinary yet quite significant parenting moment is that her eyes widened at some point during my mini-lecture and she said, with incredulity in her voice:  "There's a word for that?  Wow!".


Hopefully you'll think that story was as cute as a button because that's what she was, in that moment, to me.  Absolute innocence.  It is also a stark reminder of the power we parents have, eh?

When people talk of their maiden names I always wonder (and sometimes voice) whether they were a virgin before they got married.  Not so long ago, women were property and men married virgins as unspoiled property and calling yourself a maiden harkens back to that time.  So why do most women still do this whole name changing thing again?  It truly baffles me the number of people that do and refer to themselves as maidens.

Anyways.  Back to words.  They have power.  Using the words masturbation or maiden in 2012 is, for the most part, uncontroversial despite my hatred of the word maiden due to the patriarchal culture it reinforces.

But these other words, the words I have in mind, used to be ones that caused no controversy and yet in the last week one of them has been tossed out into our cultural landscape without regard to the legions of mostly silent people that are most offended by it's use.


Have you guessed them yet?  Before I let them out of the hat let me talk about a speaker I heard at TEDxStJohns, Philip Riteman (pictured below).  In the photo I've posted from the event he is holding up his arm to show the audience something.  His Auschwitz tattoo.  His permanent reminder of the horror of losing each member of his immediate and most of his extended family.  His tale was powerful.  It took him forty years to tell his story, the pain was that great.  He choked up numerous times during his talk and it humbled each of us in attendance, I'm sure.  He put it best:  "Each of you live in heaven."


Now imagine Mr. Riteman attending a stand up comedy show and the comedien saying "some very generalizing and declarative statements about nazis always being funny."  Imagine Mr. Riteman then shouting out from the audience: "Actually, nazi jokes are never funny."  Would the comedian responding with "Wouldn't it be funny if that guy got taken by nazis.  Like right now.  And his whole family too." get a laugh out of the crowd?


Is that funny?  To anyone?  Would it be funny if he was not a holocaust survivor?  Why?  


A comedian in the States thought that using the word rape in almost the exact same context this week was appropriate and his attack was met with laughter. Note that I have no idea if the person who shouted out from the crowd has been a rape victim.  And I don't care.  I applaud her actions and hope that I would be as brave in a similar situation.  The ensuing 'controversy' over this guy's remarks (and the number of supporters he has) has made my head hurt.  Note that he has apologized.


So suffice it to say that these two words:  rape and nazi, are words whose uses are almost sacred to me and to many people that it has affected either directly or indirectly.  I dream of an age where these words will just be ancient relics of a barbaric society that also used terms like maiden to describe a human being with a high market value.

Today's culture is full of mostly wordz it seems and it saddens me to think that after the events that went down this week, rape is one of the new wordz on our radar joining other ones like nazi and feminist and maiden.  Do you have any others to add?

Holocaust survivor Philip Riteman showing his Auschwitz tattoo.
Click on the photo to go to the TEDxStJohns fb page where this was originally posted.

Awakening the privilege within

I snapped last night.  Publicly.  And then, like a "typical woman", I started crying.  I use quotes because that is what the man said after I had snapped at him and then started crying.

Here is what went down.  I was attending a community cafe event.  He was being critical of the food being served at the event and while he was talking I brought out the food I had brought.  Because,you see, the food that was being served at this event didn't meet the criteria of the diet I follow because I have MS.  He did not know this and unthinkingly made another negative sarcastic comment about the fact that this was some kind of cafe where people brought their own special food.  Yesterday was a challenging day for me on many levels:  emotional, physical and professionally.  Suffice it to say that his comment upset me and contributed to the isolation I was feeling on all of the aforementioned fronts yesterday.  So I snapped.  Not in a freak out way.  I merely addressed his unthinking comment by angrily informing him of my truth.  And my truth is so painful and was so pervasive to my every ounce of being that yesterday it brought me to tears to face it publicly with this unthinking and unaware man who is likely living in his own circle of fear and oppression and had the misfortune to try and vent that on me last night.

His truth probably involves watching (yet another) group of mostly white middle aged women 'helping' out the people in his poverty stricken area of the city by sweeping in with their 'high-falutin' ideas and feeding people cheap food (his earlier negative comment was to do with the fact that he felt that the $5 meal price was a bit high for the quality and quantity of food he had eaten...I responded by saying that I was sorry to hear that he felt that way and I would tell the organizers this feedback).  At the table where we were both sitting were a few of my other friends from outside the cafe that were both in attendance for their first time to this event so there was other socializing occurring beyond the interaction I had with this man.  So when his next comment was delivered after I had hauled out my own food (again, feeling very isolated in the community cafe with respect to the diet choices I have made, in full agreement with my neurologist, since I could not partake of any of the prepared food on offer).  All of these thoughts and feelings were floating around when this man made his unthinking and uninformed comment.

So I snapped.  I told him that the only reason I was eating my 'special' food was because that I could not eat any of the food on offer because I follow a special diet due to having a medical condition that prevented me from eating many ingredients.  He said, in a slightly sarcastic tone, "What, like one of those food allergy things that is so popular nowadays?"  The anger was palpable in my voice when I said, no, I have multiple sclerosis and follow a diet to hopefully prevent going blind or ending up in a wheelchair.  At that point the emotion overtook me and I started crying.  I then said that the day had been really rough (which it had) and this was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

I was humiliated.  I have never broken down so publicly before in a setting where I knew people in a quasi-professional way.  But what happened next was that I was engulfed by arms and hands that immediately reached out and across from the two friends at my table. Immediate support was offered.  Kleenexes were offered by a stranger at the end of the table.  And all this was offered to me, the white middle aged woman.  Not to the man whose anger and isolation was so much less apparent to anyone looking just on the surface.  

This man's comments will forever remind me that yes, to some it may appear that those of us that call ourselves social justice activists are just privileged (mostly) white folk.  There are many that have had a long life time of poverty and seen repeated cycles of efforts by people of privilege coming in to 'rescue' them from their plight. And, in all honesty, that includes people like myself, because even though yesterday was a rough day, my life is basically charmed.  And I got the immediate arms and hand of support - and the kleenex.

We are all in this together. And those hands and arms that reached out to embrace me last night need to be there for all of us in the literal and metaphorical sense.  I have had many dark days in which I felt there was no arms or hands out there to help me and in many ways that was my truth as a single parent struggling with health issues that went undiagnosed for years.  As someone who still faces a mountain of challenges I am grateful that I was given an opportunity to receive immediate support in a setting that is hoping to be the first community cafe in the city of Toronto.  A cafe that is meant to support the people that live in the area.

Daughter and I, Ottawa, 1995

Seize the Seed

I am not a biologist but I am an urban farmer.  So seeds are something I'm well familiar with. I've grown food inside my home in my windows and under grow lights and outside directly in the earth and in containers.  I've gleaned bounty from seeds that I've purchased, swapped, and found.

As an urban farmer I've witnessed, many times over, the joy of the first indication of life (to the visible eye).  This first glimmer of a sprout poking up through the earth is a moment of pure joy.  It is a moment of connection.  My life symbiotically sprouts with each sprout.

A seed needs fertile ground in order to 'spring' into action.  That is why the metaphor of sperm being a seed is used.  A woman's unfertilized egg provides this fertile ground for one sperm seed to spring forth a new human life.  The birds and the bees metaphor takes this imagery back into wild life where the birds and bees provide the mechanism by which plants can bear fruit with their blossoms.  The flower blossoms are the eggs and the seeds are the pollen that is transferred by the birds and the bees.

The whole cycle of seed to fruit is the cornerstone of the circle of life and my humble practice of urban farming allows me to witness and absorb this every single calendar year.  I hope I never grow too old or feeble for this. An ideal death for me would happen in the harvest season after my latest crop has been harvested - however small that might be at that stage.

Today there are disturbing trends around the world that centre directly and indirectly around seeds.  There are multinational corporations that have successfully patented seeds (and DNA).  There are governments and religions that wish to ensure that a planted seed, in a woman's womb, stays there without asking for her opinion.  Conversely, multinational seed corporations have successfully taken farmers that have had their own fields polluted by GMO seeds to court.  The power of the seed, that same power that I feel with each and every sprouted planting, has literally been seized by the state {ergo, the corporation}.

So this spring grab some seeds at a local Seed Swap (Toronto locations are listed here).  Or go to a local farmers market (Toronto list is here) and buy some squash and harvest the seeds to plant yourself.  Imagine if all public spaces contained edible plantings (like Incredible Edible Todmorden).

Seize the seed and feel it's power.

Mayonnaise and Aeroplanes

As of the end of February I will have travelled over 50,000 kilometres around the globe in the past calendar year.


That might seem shocking but chances are, in any given day, the ingredients in the food you will eat and the drinks that you will consume will have travelled much more than that.


How is it that we now live in a world where people don't travel large distances that often but our food does?  


About a year ago I went to the travelling Titanic artifact exhibit in Kitchener and it really stuck me then how many people were travelling a century ago.  Technology had progressed to the point that large luxury liners were being built and people were taking advantage of this and going off and exploring.  And today, with travel technology having advanced to the point that the middle class should be able to well afford travel often, it is not happening like I suspect that our forefathers of a century ago would have predicted.  My grandfather was born in 1912 and three of his far flung children allowed him to visit three continents with regularity, especially upon his retirement.  His passing in 1996 allowed my mother to pass along a small amount of money to me that I used embark on my first solo hostel trek to the Rockies and down 101 to San Francisco.  I chose to do that with his money in order to honour him and acknowledge the tremendous influence he had on my explorer nature.


So, fast forward back to today.  I had the chance to re-watch this compelling video promoting local food consumption in Canada.  Ironically, this video just happens to be made by a food company owned by Unilever, one of the world's largest multinational food corporations.


Re-watching this video and pondering the ethics of a multinational creating a local food promotional video got me thinking of my recent travels.  Especially the travels I've taken since having strict dietary restrictions.  I have been dismayed by many food 'movement' related things.  I think that some of these concerns would be most easily presented in a list form:

1. The westernization of the Peruvian food system:  quinoa, a grain I cook with a lot, is native to South America but I only saw it on one menu down there whereas wheat, a non-native South American grain, permeates their food culture now.  I really expected to see this item (and corn) to be pervasive. But sadly, wheat based products were the norm for breakfast/lunch items that were provided by all of the travel industry hospitality providers (hostels/hotels/plane/trains/tourist delis/cafes).
2. A traditional Parisian delicacy is the macaron.  These are supposed to be made with almond flour.  In Paris I had a difficult time finding ones that did not have gluten-based flours added.  Only the really upscale cafes had them.
3. In Newfoundland it has become a bit of a joke with my family.  The outport stores and restaurants are nearly entirely supplied by Kraft.  And who knows? Maybe Hellman's (Unilever) is hoping to penetrate outport Canadian markets with an ad like the one above....there is only Miracle Whip (Kraft's competing salad dressing product) on the plates for most of Newfoundland and perhaps in other remote locations throughout Canada too.
4. Everybody marvels about the food in New York City so I was surprised at how difficult it was to find food that wasn't laced with gluten and dairy. However, the Big Apple redeemed itself when we found Friedman's Lunch via a Manhattan gluten free search on yelp.  This delicious place is located in Manhattan's historic Chelsea market and I heartily recommend a trip there followed by a stroll along the adjacent High Line if you get a chance.

So again, I ask....how is it that a century ago the western culture was focussed on shipping people around the world and in the span of 100 years we now ship food around the world?  A We are shipping basically homogenized food that is easy to grow, store, and prepare (wheat/soy).  Local cultures are being processed into extinction.  It is readily recognized by every culture on the planet that food is a unifying force and the rituals around food are what bring people together.  If a culture can not claim their own local specialized and easily available food then it is less likely to have a strong community.  

Food is a linchpin in all religions and given the long lasting and pervasive power of all of the major religions I think us food activists could take a page from them.  The more we scream LOCAL the more likely we will succeed not only in community building but also the preservation of localized culture.  And if Unilever, or any other person or organization of power, wants to use food to further their own agenda we should be throwing our hats into the air with a celebratory cheer.  

Me at Friedman's Lunch in NYC December 2011.  Best gluten free hamburger, ever!

Nourishment 101

"Her eyes were quivering." I am a voracious reader so I no doubt have read this description more than once in my life. Until this past Friday night I hadn't witnessed it first hand without emotions overwhelming me simultaneously so the trite description didn't immediately spring to mind in real time.


I have a certain type of face.  The type of face that strangers regularly approach for directions.  And the type of face that says:  You can confide in me; I am all ears and empathy.  I can thank genetics for this - it runs in the family.  At times it can be uncomfortable but it is always a moment of real communion with a fellow human.


I had such a moment on Friday night.  I attended the approximately bi-monthly, and for now, roving St. Jamestown Community Café.  I learned about this endeavour at the monthly (intentionally roving) Foodie Drinks.  The organizers I met (Nancy Slamet and Lucas Lu) certainly captivated my interest and I attended not only to support their efforts but also as a detective.  I was sussing out the vibe in order to bring back info to my upcoming community association meeting.  The St. Jamestown Community Café is hoping to eventually create an incubator model for other cafés and since Nancy herself interned at the long time successful Queen Street Commons café in Kitchener, I have tremendous faith in the likelihood of the success of the St. Jamestown Community Café.

St. Jamestown community café Friday November 18th, 2011.

I spent most of the evening parked in the same chair munching down on delicious and healthy food that attendees purchase using a pay-what-you-can system so that anyone, with any means, can come participate in the café.  The pay-what-you-can model has been utilized in a few well known establishments and I foresee a huge increase in it's use due to changing worldwide economic circumstances and the increasing popularity and acceptability of social enterprises.

While I stayed stationary at the same table, the cast of characters surrounding me completely turned over three times.  I first enjoyed an amusing rapport with three long term residents (30+years!) from the community.  These three women have raised children and buried husbands together.  The only one with a walker departed by getting up and dancing her way to the front of the room (where the musicians were providing an excellent foot tapping show) before returning to collect her walker and go home.  I was still giggling when a much older woman with a walker came through the door.

The elder woman's paid caretaker saw my now empty table and got the woman seated and her walker stashed away before going to collect her a plate of food.  The woman settled quite close to me and I asked her her name.  She told me and was quite delighted to find out that I knew it was italian since one of my own neighbours that is about the same age (91) has the very same unusual italian name that has fallen out of favour since the earlier part of the 20th century.

This woman was as sharp as a tack and her immediate familiarity with me was a little daunting but quite enjoyable.  We meandered our way through the niceties and I found out that she too is a long time resident of St. Jamestown and in fact moved to the area after her mother died in Kapuskasing, ON.  She was 20 years old so that means that she has lived there for over 70 years!  A veritable walking history book!

In the course of the conversation I thought to ask her if she had any children.  That is when her eyes started quivering and I simultaneously thought of the trite phrase whilst panicking at what I was to find out.  "Yes, my daughter.  But she left me.  Five years ago.  I buried her.  She had taken a job since she was broke.  She hit her head.  Her work didn't phone a doctor, and so she just went to bed that night.  AND DIED."  I capitalize since by the end of this halting speech the tiny frail woman was wailing.  And I was bawling.  And during the course of her delivery I had instinctively reached out and grabbed the tiny arm and felt the life force of this woman humming along, albeit in vast amounts of pain.   I could not choke back my sobs.  So we sat there and cried a bit with me holding on to her arm with both hands now - an awkward but universal type of embrace that is instinctive to humans sharing pain.  After a few minutes I said that I applauded her courage to get up every day and go out and that no mother should ever have to bury a child.  After a few more weepy minutes we gravitated away from the subject and she entertained me with stories of her life as a cleaning woman in Toronto and her cat and the bedbugs that her nursing home is fighting.  She left after eating a healthy sized meal for a 91 year old and I hope to see her again.

The last cast of characters at my table were also fascinating and engaging people.  Two of them were the musicians finally enjoying their repast after entertaining us so wonderfully.  In fact we were all so engrossed in conversing with one another we were literally kicked out (laughingly)!  I had not realized that the tables were being packed up around us and ours was the very last table to be dismantled and put away.

Kudos to the St. Jamestown Community Café.  If my experience can be considered representative of other attendees, I have no doubt that your community development efforts will be successful.  I left the event nourished completely in both body and spirit and I can't imagine any other measure of success that such an effort would desire.