Balancing the Books

              What to do with all these books?

              There are so many of them, filling tall shelves all over the house, and stacked on tables and deskstops here and there. And I keep buying more. I love books.

              Years and years ago, after moving almost a dozen times, and going through many variations of book turnover and re-cycling, I gave myself permission to be a glutton about my books, to never discard another that I didn’t want to part with.

              I love the over-indulgence. Love having rows and rows of books I’ve read and remember the joy of discovering, and ones that tantalize but that I haven't dipped into yet. By habit, I organize my books according to size, to be efficient with the use of space, at least. Otherwise, they are shelved randomly, so that I can have a paperback of classic sci-fi short fiction next to a textbook on economics, abutting a recent novel by an unknown that I picked up in a remainder’s bin, then a biography next to an all-time favorite epic.

              But books are dusty and heavy! And down-sizing is going to come, sooner or later. I dread having to move again before I've thinned these shelves! As loved as they are, I begin to think about living without all of these books within arm's reach. And as I prepare myself for that psychic shock, a desire grows to somehow catalog my books so that, once they’re gone, I have a way of maintaining touch with them.

              And Goodreads.com has appeared as a helpful solution. Over the past couple of months, I’ve been trying to list the books I’ve read in my life under the “My Books” tab on the site. I don’t expect to get all of them, but hopefully I’ll be able to sketch out the highlights of a long, soulful connection with worlds on pages.

              In my first two or three visits to the site, I just added books by memory as I could recall them, but I didn't even come up with two hundred titles. Going through some of the ‘Favorites’ lists on Goodreads got me another few hundred. Then, I spent time at my actual book shelves, adding a few hundred more. 

              But I knew that, despite my long ago allowance to myself, there were lots of books I’d read and loved that were neither of my growing list, nor on the shelves throughout the house. And that’s what brought me to my journals.

              Over the last week or so, I’ve been scanning my thirty-plus artist's sketch books, filled with my self-conscious document of my times: my wonderings and wanderings, my steps and stretches toward figuring myself out, with all the jobs, the dreams, the adventures, loves and travels of living my life. 

               Among the photos, drawings, notes to self and ticket stubs in my journals were lists of books I'd read, and I went looking for them.  And I've been finding them one at a time, and each time I'm taken down a side road I'd forgotten, picking up scraps of those different people I've been and have known and lived among. All from the titles of books and their authors' names, sometimes a sentence or two about how the work struck me.

               I was surprised at having failed to remember so many books that worked magic upon me at some time, that had wholly possessed me, had prodded me along my path. But the memories came rushing back. I was more surprised at the so many other books that I couldn't remember reading even after confronting the evidence of my lists and my notes! There is such an interesting contrast between those books remembered in vivid detail, decades after a single reading, and those that are completely forgotten. Of course, it's like that with people, too. And looking through my journals never fails to remind me of the peculiar workings of my own mind.

               It's been a fun way to spend some of my self-isolation time since my jaunt into New York State. I'm enjoying these wonderful, brief visitations with the books of my life, with the other minds that wrote them, and into the worlds they spin. It's a joy I'll never give up entirely.

p.s. One of the small side bonuses of the pandemic has been peeking into the private domiciles of media figures, and those of friends/acquaintances I've connected to virtually. I love catching glimpses of their bookshelves and trying to read a title or two!

A Canada Special

Have you ever found yourself in a group of four, five, six people, and realized that you were each born in a different country? I’ll guess that there are vast areas of the world where this would be highly unlikely, where it hardly happens at all. And there are doubtless other places where it wouldn’t be particularly rare. New York, London, Hong Kong suggest themselves. But I’ll also bet that there aren’t very many places on Earth where this happens with such regularity that it’s almost commonplace. Toronto is such a place.

I’ve never before had a name for this phenomenon. But since I decided to write about it, I think it needs a tag. And because one of my first experiences of it was during a long ago summer in Montreal, I think that ‘A Canada Special’ will do the job.

But what to call it doesn’t matter. Let me get to why I think it’s worth writing about. And the simple answer is that it gives me a feeling for how big, variable and yet inter-connected the world is. It animates my sense of being an Earthling, with roots in the Planet that I share with each of my fellow Earthlings. And I thrill in the random complexity of Life, and the completely random chance that ‘we who gather’ found our ways here, to this moment and place, via such disparate routes and reasons.

So what exactly is a Canada Special? It’s a group of several people that also represents several countries of origin. There doesn’t necessarily need to be a 1:1 correspondence, exactly as many countries as individuals, but that makes it ever more wonderful. We could call that a Canada Extra Special!

                      (image courtesy of 4Chan on Reddit)

That first experience of the phenomenon that I mentioned takes me back to when I was nineteen. A fellow American and I decided to spend a summer in Montreal, and we wound up with jobs selling Colliers encyclopedia door-to-door. Because we had an English language product, and because Quebec was something like 80% francophone, we spent most of our time on crews travelling out-of-province. After our training, we were flown out to join a crew in Halifax. The crew was led by a recently immigrated Parisian and his Canadian born wife. And the crew, numbering about a dozen, had members from Greece, England, Vietnam, Nigeria and India. Eight countries among us. We were all young, and most of us were students, and I remember being so fascinated as we compared notes on our individual slices of the World.

My wife, her son and I form a Canada Special, as I was born in the US, she in Poland, and her son here in Canada.

My writers group is a Canada Special, the five of us landing on Earth via Canada, the US, Scotland, Poland and Hungary. And we’ve had former members from other countries.

And the job I retired from a year ago boasted a staff full of immigrants, from Palestine, Jamaica, Afghanistan, Ghana, India, Antigua, Iran, England, China and quite a few other countries, so we were always forming Canada Specials.

Then there's Regent Park, Canada's largest public housing development, in which I was priviledged to work for several years. The twelve thousand residents hailed from over ninety countries! Imagine the possibilities. Particularly in a community where the youth did not always and inevitably gravitate to their own kind!

This diversity is such a regular part of life in the urban centers of Canada, and it is a beautiful blessing and benefit. I vividly remember my first visit to Toronto, and being tantalized by all the snippets of other languages I heard. I looked at the various brown complexions I came upon and realized it was a different experience than when I’d grown up on New York’s Upper West side. At that time, I’d generally assume that the brown skinned people I encountered who didn’t look African-American were Puerto Ricans, and I was probably right a lot of the time. But in Toronto, an identical shade of brownness could as likely belong to someone from Venezuela, Pakistan, Tonga, South Africa, or to a Native Canadian. Or to some other nationality or ethnicity that didn’t occur to me.

There is something very freeing about such diversity. It softens prejudices when it’s impossible to assume where someone is from. There were many times in those early days when I spoke to someone, assuming them to be a native-born Euro-Canadian, and had my assumption dismantled the moment they spoke with an accent. And I shouldn’t say ‘early days’ because it happened when I first spoke to my wife, ten years after that first visit. And she tells me that people often interpret her Polish accent as French.

Canada Specials are a gift of living here. They nudge us daily out of the lazy assumptions, judgments and generalizations we so easily form about how other people live, think and feel. And in exchange, we gain a richness in perspective and shared experience that broadens us, even when we don’t particularly want to be broadened. It's clear that one of the main reason that people in urban centers are more liberal than those in rural and suburban communities is that the former are exposed to a much broader array of people.

So here’s celebrating Canada, and its cities like Toronto and Montreal and Vancouver, which are like microcosms of the World, and which have so much to teach the rest of the World. And may you experience your own little Canada Special, wherever you are!

Conversations With My Neighbor

I live in the Toronto Metro area, a very diverse, densely populated, modern, cosmopolitan city. As might be expected, the politics of the area’s population leans sharply left. And I have a vacation residence about two hundred miles south of here, in the Southern Tier of New York State. Addison is a small village of farms and other small and family businesses. There is a sizable Amish community. The politics here leans sharply right.

When I drive down, I often turn on the radio and scan the am dial. There is quite a bit of religious programming, a portion of political talk radio, and even some stations that blend the two. Though I’ve been making this trip for eight years now, I continue to be astonished that political ‘norms’ can differ so completely over such a short geographical distance.

I met a neighbor six years ago who has helped us to settle in and maintain our property. And though we only have contact during the few short periods I’m down here every year, I’d say that we’ve become good friends. We hang out a bit, share meals and a beer, watch football and toke a little marijuana. We talk a lot, about life and everything in it. We’re close together in age though otherwise our life experiences have been very different.

Politics has been a difficult topic for us however. We tend have opposite opinions on just about any issue. So we’ve learned to tread carefully. We’ve had discussions that have descended into shouted, emotional salvos flying back and forth. And there have been many times, when on the brink of such, we’ve managed to “agree to disagree” and to get off of the subject.

We both see it as absolutely intolerable that the other side might prevail in the upcoming election. He feels that liberals are destroying America and that Trump’s reelection is essential to preventing its continuing slide. I feel that Trump is destroying America and that his ousting is essential to prevent a continuing slide. We both feel that a degree of armed revolt looms as a real possibility if Trump loses, and that in some respects a state of Civil War already exists. I think it’s fair to say that we both realize that his side is much better armed and prepared to fight than mine (as was the case at the start of the Civil War of the 1860s).

We both recognize that it is precisely this – the increasing impossibility of political opponents to even discuss matters civilly – that is at the core of America’s current dysfunction. Actually, it goes beyond that. We seem unable to even agree on the nature of the political universe that we share, or the challenges we face.

This is nothing new. For decades now, the abortion issue has been cast as a matter of the sanctity of life by one side and as the right of women to own their own bodies by the other. On the battlefield however, these positive values become twisted into their negatives: one side is accused of murdering children and the other of oppressing women, hateful charges on which there is no possibility of compromise.

Similarly, gun control devolves from a debate about the right to self-defense balanced against the right to community safety, to a pitched battle opposing those who are insensitive to the random murder of innocents to those insensitive to the loss of personal liberty.

And it keeps getting worse. Language itself is weaponized, and positive values are overtaken by their shadows. Black Lives Matter is translated into White Lives Don’t, and All Lives Matter is interpreted as Black Lives Don’t. Defund the Police becomes Let Anarchy Prevail, and Law & Order becomes White Supremacy Forever. Honest, serious debate becomes impossible when every word becomes a code word for something else. Negotiation can never progress when the worst interpretation of the other’s words becomes the only possible interpretation, when their most feared intentions are seen as the inevitable objectives.

My neighbor and I are at a kind of crossroads. It’s questionable whether our good rapport will continue if we both see the other as bent on the destruction of the country. What may save us is my certain knowledge that he wants things to be better, despite the fact that he envisions a completely different path to reaching better than I do. I hope that he knows the same about me. I know that my life is better with him as a friend than it would be without him. I trust that he feels the same.

Unfortunately, I believe we’re at a point where California believes that the US would be a better country without Alabama, Mississippi or Tennessee. And those states seem convinced that it would be a blessing if California collapsed into the Pacific tomorrow. How shall we overcome?