Trend Spotting. You're Welcome.

Of late, I have noticed a trend among menfolk in the western world. I have spotted it in city centres on a Friday night, on my Sunday morning hikes, in the line up at Canadian Tire and atop tractors in the corn fields near my house (Just so you know, the trend-spotting that I do for you never, ever stops. I am constantly on the look out for what's hot, what's not, what's up, what's down. It is an obligation that is a blessing for you and an exhausting curse for me. Just wanted you to know)

This trend knows no age barrier or demographic limitations. It is favoured by the tall and the short, the wealthy and the less financially favoured. The only common denominator to these diverse if misguided folk is that they are all, to one, "barber-challenged". I am speaking – through clenched teeth and tearful eyes – of the comb-forward.

For those you unfamiliar with the phenomenon, a comb-forward is when a man, self-conscious of his balding pate, combs the hair on the back of his head up, forward and over his flesh-flashing dome in the mistaken belief onlookers will say, "Wow, look how thick and lustrous that man's hair is! " as opposed to: "Oh look – that man has a comb-forward. Jesus H. Christ." Donald Trump is the best known and most extreme example of phenomenon and his technique - which could be a comb-over or a candy floss machine that emits hair instead of delicious hair-like candy strands -  has taken on near skyscraper proportions. In fact, according to architectural insiders, it was the inspiration for Ai Weiwei's Bird's Nest.

Gentlemen, I'm calling time on these ridiculous attempts to disguise disappearing hairlines and encroaching scalp. I am going to go out on a limb and say the following: balding does not make a man look bad. Attempts to cover up balding, however, do. In fact, I would say that they are insulting to the average person's intelligence. Do you think the world is fooled by your masterful hair disguise? Any woman worth her salt would rather spend sexy times with a man who knows he doesn't have a lot of hair than one who foolishly believes that she doesn't notice that his own hair is wrapped around his head like a turban. 

Let me be even more plain: I would rather be squired around town by Ed Harris look-alike than the Donald any day of the week.

So chaps, consider this page a cease and desist order, that you cease fretting about this whole balding thing – and you may as well, it does come to many of you in the end – and that you desist trying to disguise it. And yes, this is legally binding.

Thank you for letting me get this off of my chest. And t-shirt-wearers-who-also-wear-scraves? Consider yourselves on notice!  

True New Year

September is almost here and it’s transition time again. The leaves are changing, the kids are headed back to school and Matthew Perry is making yet another weak attempt to return to primetime (When will he learn?).  In our home, we refer to September as "True New Year". There is a sense of excitement that a new school year brings, when we shift from the schedule devil we know, to the devil we don’t know. In many ways, adapting to September's new schedule is like a signing up for your first step aerobics class (Remember when?) -- first week, just get your kids to school on time, figure out how to get them picked up. Step back and forth. Second week, dance starts. Back and forth and grapevine. Third week, back to school nights and jiu-jitsu stars starts. Back and forth and grapevine and add the arms. Fourth week, swimming begins. All that and step up and down. Fifth week, guitar begins, whatever board meeting you're supposed to go to once a month is scheduled, projects are starting to come due, and kids have the audacity to make inquiries about Halloween costumes. Back and forth and grapevine and add the arms and step up and step down and TWIRL. 

Straight on til December.

Because besides being transition season, September is also cheque-writing season. Cheques for swimming lessons, cheques for guitar lessons, cheques for agendas, cheques for Pizza Day, Sub Day, AK47 Day, dance lessons, protection from the Mob. It never ends. Plus, guess who drives them? Every September, I schedule the inevitable existential breakdown I have each year in which I question whether my university education prepared me for my job as a full-time chauffeur. Answer: not so much.

This year, though, rather than deal with it by swigging wine after hours and bitching to people who do the same, I intend on taking a page from financial guru Suze Orman: I will  show the kids how to write the cheques themselves. Nice, huh? You want the money, you write out the cheque. This will be a great way to help them to understand how much cash we spend on their extra-curriculars and it will give my hand a rest, as well as the portion of my conscience that tells me that it is important that kids figure out how much the "extras" really cost. Harsh , maybe, but a good way to help them understand that my cheque book has its limits.

Get Down Off the Letdown

Post-Olympic Letdown, a photo by jjdorsey57 on Flickr.

It was a rite of passage for my sister and I growing up in Northern Ontario to make a pilgrimage each summer to the Canadian National Exhibition. The CNE was held a special place in our hearts because it meant we got to go to the big city (translate: my Nana's ground floor apartment in a high-rise in Scarborough), see people we never saw in our small town (translate: grubby ner-do-well carnies who could build and operate complicated attractions whilst smoking AND asking if "I WANTED TO GO FASTER?") and watch my sister projectile vomit onto a metal ramp of The Enterprise after eating too many Tiny Tom donuts. Priceless.

As we slipped into our teenage years, the Ex's allure gave way to another attraction: the Ontario Place Forum, an amphitheater which lay just across the lakeshore. Throughout the summer, this venue would play host to scores of bands, from the most obscure rock outfit to the most popular jazz ensemble. It was six dollars admission to get in and, at night, the park came alive with teens lining up to hear their favorite rock and roll, disco, new wave, or hip hop music. By now, my parents had split up and my sister and I were spending our summers in the city and we would take the streetcar down from my mother's downtown apartment and catch any number of bands: Kool and the Gang one night, Al Green another, Triumph (Why not!), Parachute Club,Wynton Marsalis. The musical genre was irrelevant. We couldn’t wait for nightfall.

I hadn’t thought of the amphitheatre in a long time, until a few nights ago when I was stretched out on the sofa watching the closing ceremonies of the 2012 Olympics in London. I had appreciated the opening ceremonies and the challenges faced by the host country of presenting such a complex and rich history to a world audience: the opening pastoral scene with a little Shakespeare thrown in, which transformed quickly into the industrial revolution, a parade of the proletariat. I even kinda enjoyed the uncomfortable and overly long celebration of the National Health Service, with some sort of morphine induced Mary Poppins versus Voldemort montage. All interesting.

But this closing stuff was a different business all together.

I guess having dispensed with the entirety of British history in 30 minutes, the only other direction to take the closing was a celebration of pop music from the last thirty years. Really? There was no other way to go then reuniting the Spice Girls and slap them atop some taxis? Okay. And then I realized where I had seen it all before … at the Ontario Place Forum! Except this thing came with bubbly dancers performing overly choreographed moves, singing the same songs I had sung in my youth. All I needed was a glow necklace, a giant pretzel, and a Slurpee to complete the memory. I still enjoyed the evening. I sang along with songs. It was just like being back at the EX and amphitheatre all those years ago. Only they were theme park for kids. London is one of the cultural hubs of Western Civilization. Or was. And so I slapped on my Whatever goggles and went along for the ride.

Fear and Parenting at the Movies

In the small town where I grew up, there was no movie theatre. The closest was a 45 minute drive away in Sudbury and screened films weeks after they'd opened in larger cities, months after they were released in the US. I remember my parents driving in to see the film, MASH. An hour before they were expected home, our babysitter received a phone call asking if she could stay another four hours. The reason: my father had laughed over most of the jokes in the 7 o'clock show. They were staying for the second screening so my mother could hear the ones she'd missed. Aside from too much laughing or terrible winter weather -which was frequent - there were very few things that would keep you from going into Sudbury to see a movie, if that's what you wanted to do. But one thing was certain: if slag was being poured on the way there, the movie was cancelled.

For those of you who didn't have the pleasure of growing up in a town whose fortunes were based on the rise and fall on the price of nickel, the pouring of slag was a hot, bright reminder of our town’s fortune. Ore was scraped from the earth in the mines a few miles below us, fed through screens and crushers until it is the size of a marble and then ground to powder to which water was added to make slurry. Nickel and copper were separated and the waste - or slag - was taken away in special slag pot cars on the railroad and taken about 3 miles to be dumped as waste. This operation took place about every 2 to 3 hours, 24 hours a day using 10 car trains requiring two electric locomotives and poured off of the side of a hill right beside the highway. If it was night and your car was driving by it on the way to a movie you didn't make that damn movie. It was hot, molten slag dropping off a hill, for the love of God! What can beat that? I remember praying to God on the way to my first screening of Star Wars to please, please, please not drop the slag as I didn't want to miss the greatest movie of all times. He took pity on  me and I got to see Luke Skywalker get his hand chopped off by his father. Good times.

In the winter months, however, someone in town came up with the brilliant idea of circumnavigating the mesmerizing allure of slag: they would screen movies in the high school gym. And so popcorn was popped and sold for a quarter, mats were spread over the gymnasium floor for the younger kids to sit on (and the older kids to lay down and make out on) and instead of being pushed out into the yard and told Not-to-come-back-inside-until-I-call-you-...I-mean-it!, an entire afternoon was spent watching films. Genius! And let me be clear: these were not first-run films. The afternoon always started out with at least an hour's worth of cartoons, and not the kind that kids watch today where lessons can be gleaned from a talking aardvark. These were the violent kind where overly dressed-up members of the animal kingdom chased each other off of cliffs with farming implements, their souls drifting dreamily out of heir bodies and into the ether only to return in the next cartoon, newly formed and oblivious. The cartoons were followed by a double feature whose only criteria seemed to be that it contain Judy Garland or Ma and Pa Kettle. I saw more grand-scale MGM musicals on that gym floor than it seems humanly possible and though we grumbled and wished for a Clint Eastwood revenge film, you could have heard a pin drop during most of those movies.

I shared this story with my 12 year old son on the way to screen the newest installment in the Batman franchise after he asked me what "summer" movies we went to see as kids. We didn't categorize films by season back then, I explained. Movies were what you watched when they showed up and you could get in to to see them, provided the slag didn't get in the way. Did you have to worry about being shot at the screening, he asked? His question took my breath away. 

The world my son he is growing up in is not very different than mine on the surface. Like me, he lives in a small-town, surrounded by family and friends and people who love and care for him. But in many ways it is very different from mine because unlike my childhood, his is influenced by the 24-hour news cycle. Despite my best wishes, it creeps into his wet-wear and makes him believe that going to the movies means not just seeing bad guys with hand guns in the screen but imagining them sitting in the seat beside him. I pride myself on not being a fear-based parent. I let my kids walk and drive their bikes to school and go to the store unsupervised.  I don't always trust the world around them but I know that giving in to that fear has a price, and the price, I think, is greater than any of us should be willing to pay. Fear robs us of the profound joy of living in the moment with our children, of experiencing, with guidance and nurturing, the vicissitudes of life that are found in the most ordinary of days and so I thought long and hard before I answered him on the way to that movie.

No, I told him. And I don't worry about it and neither should you. Okay? He nodded and we kept on driving. 

Fear is the only thing I know of that has the power to turn good parents away from the careful, reflective human beings they once were. It has the power to twist their thinking and undermine their behavior and, I believe, it is as fatal to the simple joys in life as it is detrimental to our children’s greater good. As overwhelming as it sometimes is, though,  I have chosen to let go of it. I poured  mine on a slag heap somewhere far, far way and instead of stopping by the side of the road and watching it smolder, I chose instead to move down the road go see a Batman movie with my son in a dark theatre where I didn't know a soul and instead chose to believe that, like me, people want the best for the world. Even at the movies.

Dockside Reading

I know it's been two weeks since school let out but it has taken me that long to get my "you-know-what" together. Sigh. I have no excuse, really. Isn't "The heat makes me sluggish" the middle-age equivalent to "The dog ate my homework?" Anyway, I have very few plans this summer beyond gorging on summer fruit and reading on the dock. Melding the two is the only thing I plan to do with enthusiasm.


To that end, I have already read two exceptional books: The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern - which was delightful and reminded me of the excellent novel The Prestige - and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn There's not a lot I can tell you about Gone Girl without ruining its dark surprises, but I can tell you that it's an ingenious and viperish thriller — and that no matter how smart or blase you think you are when it comes to reading thrillers, it's going to bite you. The novel concerns a missing wife named Amy and a husband named Nick who's either (best-case scenario) a big, fat phony or (worst) a full-on psychopath. I don't read a ton of thrillers but this book had me hooked from the first page. I read the entire thing on a rain soaked Tuesday and am the better for it, I tell you!


Told from alternating points of view, we get to know Amy, via chatty journals she kept before her disappearance. She narrates the arc of her relationship with Nick, which begins with lovestruck flirting in Manhattan and a giddy marriage in Brooklyn. It's when Nick gets downsized from his job as a magazine writer and insists they move to his hometown of St. Louis that things reaaally get interesting.
That said, the chapters of the novel that involve Nick, mostly unfold like a television procedural from the police investigation which unfold shortly after he rushes home one day looking for Amy and instead finds her blood on the floor, to the ultimate media frenzy that sweeps us up in its wake. What I loved was how Flynn doesn't paint Nick as the most sympathetic narrator: he lies, he whines and he ends up revealing himself as somewhat of an ass as he story unfolds. How refreshing! But what saves him are his moments of honesty. He does incredibly stupid stuff, given the circumstances and has - in his own words - a face you want to punch. It's the second half of the book, though, that is the real stunner. Just about halfway, Flynn pulls the rug out from under you and does it in such a way that you cannot believe that you've been reading the same book!


I really am going to shut up now before I spoil what is, seriously, the best book of the summer.


Better than this Fifty Shades of Grey which I tried to read - I really did! - but made me want to quit the earth about halfway through. I have decided that there is a reason that I am immune to this book and that's because I have engaged with a better, more entertaining version of it called Mad Men. Because isn't Christian Grey really just Don Draper in disguise? 

Replace the chain-smoking, bourbon-drinking and workaholic tendencies with helicopters, chilled white wine and effed-up e-mails and Tada! you've got Fifty shades of Grey. It's hard to engage with a handsome embodiment of the American Dream in book form when you can look at Don in re-reuns every Sunday night on AMC, non? Double crap! This is not a book for me.

To the Lighthouse

My dad was everything a girl could ever hope for: tall, dark, handsome and crazy about my sister and I. And he possessed a winning attribute on his dad scorecard: he mostly left us to our own devices which is pretty much what every kid wants, regardless of age. He was also well-read, a terrific golfer, said "musn't" instead of "must not", wore Clark desert boots regardless of the season and was, much to my surprise, a pretty good dancer. Never arrive early to a party or yawn audibly, he told us by way of advice. Never date a man you find boring or who can't make you laugh. Sandles are for beach-wear only.... and even then. Not bad for a guy didn't even start his parenting until well into his forties.


Though my sister and I have tried not to idolize him, it has proven very difficult. A task made more so by the fact that he left us so young, while we were in our twenties and still figuring out who we wanted to be. It's only now that I realize that my model for who to be was living in my house all along, sending me off to school each morning and handing me off my allowance on weekends. I wish everyone could be so lucky.


After my father left us, I found myself trolling the obituaries each morning before I started my day and discovered that I took great solace in reading about the lives of others. There is nothing more fortifying than basking in a life well lived. This spring, I read the obit of a gentleman in Nanaimo named Mike Matthews who seemed cut from the same cloth as my father. A "gentle man" who was also a gentleman, he died after a "brief confrontation" with cancer. It was clear from the beautiful tribute that was written about him that Mike left this life far before anyone would have wanted him to but who, nonetheless, lived and laughed a full life that inspired those who had the privilege of being around him. I loved the obit so much that I cut it out and pinned it to my wall in front of my computer and reached for it frequently throughout the season. I felt connected to this guy for some odd reason and when I was feeling low, it made me happy to know that someone like him had been around to make an impact on those around him.


I told his family as much in the Father's Day card that I sent them last Friday. Though, I may not have ever met Mike, I told them, his obit had made me happy every time I read it. As happy as I know he made them. I wanted them to know that on Father's Day. There are people like my dad and like Mike Matthew who are like lighthouses, big, stand-alone structures who spend all of their life shining their light and illuminating everything around them for miles. I feel happy to have stood in their glow, brief though it may have been.

MIKE MATTHEWS

Born in Aklavik June,1937, Mike Matthews died on February 25th, 2012 in Nanaimo, B.C. after a brief confrontation with cancer. His wife, daughter and beloved dog were at his side.

Mike was a vibrant and witty man, a larger-than-life presence, treasured by his friends and family for his irreverent exuberance. Growing up in Vancouver, he went to Magee High School, which he described as a peak period in his life. He celebrated his lengthy undergraduate career at UBC, where he hung out at the Players Club and the Ubyssey. In Montreal, he worked at the McGill Library, attended graduate studies at Sir George Williams University, and played baseball with the York Street Tigers where his nom-de-baseball was Magic Mitt. Back on the West Coast, he began his thirty-three year career teaching English at Malaspina College, now Vancouver Island University, and busied himself with theatrical activities, running (7 marathons), and writing book reviews and articles about food, wine.

Mike dearly loved his family, especially for his granddaughter Charlotte and his talented dog Victor. He took pleasure in chatting to checkout clerks, bank tellers, shopkeepers, colleagues, passengers on the Protection Island Ferry, and whomever else would respond to his skill-testing questions, word games, rants and puns, encounters which he believed brightened people's lives. The natural world delighted him, and he was a constant champion of the Protection Island Community Garden. He loved the music of Handel, Mozart, Blind Willie Johnson, and all the Protection Island musicians. An enthusiastic cook, his specialties were plantain frittatas and Saskatoon berry pies. He was keen on crossword puzzles, and his extensive collection of pens and reading glasses was renowned.

He detested cruelty to animals, orange safety vests, sentimentality, bragging, car alarms, plastic water bottles, and the use of the word "multiple" rather than "many", or any long word when a shorter one would do. 

Mike is survived by his wife Carol, daughter Alison (Alex Taylor), granddaughter Charlotte, brother Dick (Diane), in-laws Rod Dobell (Marnie), Ken Dobell (Pam), eleven beloved nieces and nephews, and sixteen great-nieces and great-nephews.

Those who share his passionate love of animals may wish to make a donation in his name to the SPCA. In recognition of his love of teaching, donations may be made to the Vancouver Island University Mike Matthews Scholarship Fund. In appreciation of the wonderful care he received in his last few weeks, donations could be made to the Palliative Care Unit at the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital.

Embrace the Boredom

Summer's here...[Explored], a photo by pianogram (mostly away) on Flickr.

Summer is coming soon. I can feel it in the softening of the air but I can see it, too, in the state of my kid's backpacks -filthy!- and in their homework agendas, the binder plastic ripped and frayed at the edges. An old remembered glee rises up in me because I know what lays ahead. Open windows. Fresh stone fruit. Day trips to the beach. Boredom. Especially the boredom.

Summer is the season that was the making of me as a human being because it was when I was bored for the longest period of time. Boredom breeds downtime and downtime is when we most become ourselves: looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, taking bike rides to nowhere, sitting in the backyard staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I believe that you can't become who you want to be - writer, actor, neuroscientist - without plenty of nothing to do. Boredom is nothing more than the quiet moving of the wheels inside your head. In my world, this is the sound of progress.

Apparently, in the last twenty years or so, Canadian kids have lost about four hours of unstructured play time per week. Recesses are getting shorter so that kids can get home faster for structured after-school activities or jobs. How did this happen?

Adults did it.

There is a culture of adult mistrust that suggests that a bored child who is not attending science-enrichment programs or cooking classes is out boosting cars or knocking off liquor stores. This is utter nonsense. I'm not saying these classes aren't for the good. I'm simply suggesting that if kids aren't left alone every once in a while, when are they ever gonna contemplate whether Wolverine could kick Green Lantern's ass? And then draw a cartoon of that exact thing. In the sand, with a stick.

That type of summer doesn't have to be gone for good. I've got two kids: one spends a good portion of her early summer at summer camp in Algonquin park, her days filled with new activities and almost constant social interaction. She loves it and I wouldn't change that for her because it's where she lives. But, she has a brother who thinks that scenario is like being stuck in the seventh ring of Hell. He spends his summer days sleeping in, playing with his Lego and swimming in the lake. He lives for the summer because that's when he lolly-gags, as my father once called it, busy exploring the inside of his own head. It's a wonderful place to be.

This year when you're rooting through the backpacks on the last day of school and chucking out the snacks left to mold in baggies at bottom's end, can I make a suggestion? Take a respite from the clock and throw out the schedule, too. Drop the organized day for a week or two. Embrace the boredom. Get outside and don't come inside again unless it rains or I call you, my mother would yell at me every day of my childhood summer. I intend for this sentence define my kids' fate this summer. Their characters depend on it.