A MESSAGE FROM ANGUS

Angus and Ivor

Yesterday morning, I received an email from our 22-year-old nephew Angus, who lives in Kingston.  Angus is one of those rare people who does an astonishing number of things extremely well.  At eleven, he was a violinist with the Sault Symphony Orchestra.  He is a bagpiper and a trumpeter, a commercial pilot, a graduate of Algonquin College in Aviation Management. He was a member of the musical group The Tangible Ears, the Garrison Band, he currently performs with the Queen's University marching band, he is an instructor at an Air Cadet squadron in Kingston and has spent several summers as a member of the Fort Henry Guard.  Another thing he does well is wear Ivaan's favourite items of clothing.  They shared a lot, including a shoe size, and Angus has inherited Ivaan's beloved sheepskin bomber jacket and his black leather jacket with Ivaan's signature in red chenille lettering on the back, both of which he wears with pride and considerable panache.  He is a mentor to his 14 year old brother, Ivor, no slouch himself in the accomplishments department, who is among other things an accomplished violinist at Canta Arya School For Strings, an Air Cadet, and Vice President and Tech Support at Atelier Ivaan.

Here's an excerpt from Angus' email, reminiscing about his close relationship with "Avunculus", the Latin word for Uncle, which was Ivaan's nickname:

"Today I was fondly remembering all of the great times I shared with you and Avunc.  Whether it was eating at Le Commensal, or setting off fireworks, giving him the Doctor Death foot massage, or just hanging out at the studio, I cherish all the moments we shared.  He was, and will forever be the cool uncle I was always talking to my friends about.  I miss him terribly."

It might have been a difficult day yesterday, marking another year without Ivaan, but every time I felt gloomy, I went to the computer, reread Angus' email and was instantly cheered up.  Did I mention that Angus is also a fine writer?  Well, I guess you can sense that already.

I don't think I can say it better than Angus said it, but Ivaan, we remember you with warmest love and miss you more than we can say.

FOUR DAYS IN DECEMBER

On December 6, 7, 8 and 9,  in loving tribute to Ivaan, ATELIER IVAAN will be marking the fourth anniversary of his having left the planet by offering 20 % off all Ivaan's jewellery to registered Organ and Tissue donors.

Earlier this week, I attended the Trillium Gift of Life Network's Donor Medal event at the Palais Royale in Toronto, where I made a speech to an audience of Donor Families about being a hero.  I was thrilled to be presented with a Donor Medal engraved with Ivaan's name, in honour of his having been a donor.  It was a proud moment to be among so many wonderful donor families and staff of Trillium Gift of Life Network.  These people are indeed heroes to me.  Another of my heroes also spoke at the event.  Her name is Jennifer M.  She's a beautiful, vibrant lady, who was accompanied by her two charming and handsome sons.  Jennifer is the recent recipient of a donated heart.  Every time a potential recipient agrees to undergo transplant surgery, they become a hero: it's always a risky surgical procedure and even if it's a complete success, recipients face a lifetime of anti-rejection drugs  and constant monitoring. Seriously, it takes  huge courage to agree to undergo an organ transplant.  But every time someone does, they improve the odds of the next transplant recipient surviving, because the surgical team's expertise increases with every procedure.  Successful recipients also raise the public profile of organ and tissue donation - something Ontario desperately needs, as our number of registered donors is shamefully low.

If you'd like to acquire some of Ivaan's beautiful jewellery and you don't live in Ontario, we'll happily honour the 20% discount. If you live in Ontario but you're not already a registered donor, you you can register online in advance at beadonor.ca or bring along your Province of Ontario Health Card from December 6th to 9th and we'll help you to sign up on the spot.

And, hey, ask to see Ivaan's Donor Medal. It will be proudly on display.  I'll even post a photo of it...when I figure out how to take a good picture of something so shiny.

Ivaan, this week and every week, you are loved and missed more than I can say.   Not only are you Canada's National Treasure, you are my personal hero.

REMEMBRANCE DAY

This is my poppy pinned to the left lapel of Ivaan's navy cashmere overcoat. At eleven o'clock on November 11th, I stood in silence in the doorway of Atelier Ivaan, wrapped in his overcoat.  Remembrance Day was important to Ivaan. His third stroke took place on Remembrance Day, 2005. (With his usual sense of occasion, Ivaan marked Ukrainian Christmas Eve and Hallowe'en with heart attacks, Valentine's Day, Remembrance Day and Pearl Harbour Day with strokes. )

Although he was born during World War Two, it was the First World War that really gripped Ivaan's imagination.  Speaking about the events of the Great War, and the tragic legacy of that war, Ivaan often brought listeners, including me, to tears.  In one single year, the entire graduating class of Eton College, all of whom had enlisted, died taking part in the war effort.

Ivaan attended as many Remembrance Day ceremonies as he could, though as his health deteriorated, it was harder and harder for him to sit in his wheelchair in the cold, at the cenotaph in front of Old City Hall.  One year in the early 1990s, we watched the ceremony from inside the lobby of Old City Hall, where I worked at the time. On this occasion, Ivaan met and photographed Poland's Solidarity leader, Lech Walesa, who was also in attendance.

One of the greatest tragedies of the Great War, as Ivaan told it, was the lasting legacy on future generations.  In Canada, virtually every young and middle aged male in reasonably good health went overseas to fight in the War.  Being exempt from enlisting, through poor physical or mental health, or because one was needed at home to work for the war effort, was a source of great shame for men and for their families.  Yet the casualties of the First World War were so high, and the conditions under which the men fought were so horrific that the few who returned home after the war were damaged beyond repair.  Loss of limbs, the effects of breathing mustard gas, loss of hearing, shell shock, and loss of mental stability were just some of the effects of the war on returning combatants.  But most were simply slaughtered, and in retrospect it is hard to reconcile the events at places like Passchendaele with the results, particularly for Canada.  Canadian men were used, plain and simply, as cannon fodder. They went overseas to fight for freedom from oppression and for justice, but there was none for them.  Once enlisted, there was no turning back.  Desertion meant death at the hands of one's own army.

The end of the War in 1918 left a much depleted inventory of men for young women to marry.  There were the men who were exempted, on grounds of poor mental or physical health, and there were the men who came back permanently damaged by their experiences.  This was the pool of men from among which one might find a spouse.  The result, as Ivaan calculated, was that it would take five generations to undo the effect of wiping out the cream of the Canadian and British male population.

Ivaan, whose physical health was so compromised by the circumstances of his birth in a Nazi slave labour camp, never forgot the sacrifices of the World War One veterans and of their families who suffered the ravages of the War.  Right until the end, Ivaan was there at the cenotaph with his camera, so those veterans would live on through his pictures.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, IVAAN

I went to the cemetery today with a loaf of bread and a pebble from our trip to Iceland last June, to wish Ivaan a happy birthday. The squirrels were dancing around his plot, still full of carbs and olive oil from the herb fougasse I brought there yesterday. Rule number one when visiting Ivaan's grave is: bring only fresh bread.  Ivaan insisted on only the freshest bread for his birds and squirrels.  A few years before we were married, I remember dropping by Ivaan's house and he'd be out on the verandah feeding the sparrows.  They'd be so stuffed with bread, their little legs could hardly touch the ground, but they kept right on eating.

It was a bit like that with the squirrels today.  They had the decency to back off and let me sweep up a bit  and have a peaceful visit, but when I started tearing off bits of bread and making a circle of bread around the plot, I suddenly looked up and realized I was surrounded by black squirrels waiting for me to leave.

You have probably never contemplated the intelligence of squirrels before, but Ivaan had.  He claimed that grey squirrels were much more intelligent than black ones.  I think by this he meant that they were easier to train.  At our house on Portland Street, we had a second floor deck at the rear of our house. I'd lie out there in the summer, reading and sunbathing.  One afternoon, dozing on the deck, I felt an extraordinary feeling on my back and found that Ivaan had positioned a row of peanuts in their shells along my spine, and a grey squirrel was sitting on my back eating peanuts.

Next time I go to the cemetery, I think I'll bring some peanuts in their shells, place a row of them along the plot, and return the favour.

BAR CODE

IVAAN'S "THUMBSCREW" CORKSCREW

Ivaan's thumbnails were always a sight to behold.  His thumbs were an important resource in his arsenal of tools for making and polishing jewellery, and his thumbnails came in handy for protecting gemstones while he was working on the polishing machine.   That meant that his thumbnails were usually quite battered, with fairly deep ridges running lengthwise, and they were often blackened from jewellery polishing compound.  It was easy to tell when he'd been in hospital, because following some time away from the polishing machine his nails became well tended once again.  Back at work, the inevitable would happen, and once again his thumbnails would look like a chewed boot.
The nephews were perennially fascinated by his thumbnails, and this is where one of Ivaan's urban legends originated.  He told the nephews that his thumbnails so closely resembled product bar codes that he had scanned them at Loblaws one day and a price of 79 cents came up on the cash register.
"That's what I'm worth, 79 cents!", he'd tell the nephews, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes.  Needless to say, the nephews were anxious to see this in action, so much of Ivaan's attention, when they were visiting, was focused on finding distractions so the nephews would not insist on being taken to Loblaws to scan their uncle.
I just remembered this a few minutes ago, when looking at my own thumbnails.  I try to be careful, but it doesn't much matter if you wear protective gloves or not when you're polishing jewellery.  It's going to get ugly. But, Ivaan, in case you are wondering, to the nephews and to me, you are worth a whole lot more than 79 cents.

WHAT BUGS ME THE MOST

I can see how this renovation is going to unfold.  It will take a lot of time and it will appear to be taking place in a random fashion.  There is nothing random about it, however, because I am operating on a rational principle: that I will renovate the thing that bugs me most.  If that means living with no kitchen for a very long time (and it most assuredly does), then I will live without a kitchen for a very long time, and I will not complain about it.

But once I had the bamboo floor in the office levelled, I became obsessed with replacing the baseboards because the existing ones did not connect with the floor.  So I had new baseboards installed.  It was a stressful few days with a tradesman who was not feeling well.  So actually it felt like a few weeks. But while he was here, he mentioned that he had a cousin who was very skilled at cutting and installing tiles.  This made me think of my basement bathroom.   The basement bathroom was clean and well maintained, but that was the full extent of its virtues.  This is a photo I took the day of the home inspection.  Perhaps this will give you some idea of how I felt about it.

I do believe this may have been the bathroom Noah had on the ark.

I tore the vanity out the next morning. You could hardly believe how solidly it was in there. Whoever had installed it 50 years ago was preparing for the apocalypse. Then I started trying to remove the floor tiles. I used a claw hammer. That was a joke.  I could drop it with all my force onto the floor and not even chip a tile. I used an axe.  I might have cracked a couple of tiles with the axe. A sledgehammer was next. Then the axe combined with a grout cutter.  Finally I put a masonry cutting wheel on the rotary grinder, removed the safety shield, and tried that.  Sparks flew.  But the tile remained. I wore out the cutting wheel, replaced it, and was well on my way to wearing out the second one, getting virtually nowhere. So I took myself to New Canadians Kitchen and Bath Outlet and spent a happy couple of hours choosing wall tiles, floor tiles and new fixtures.

It took the tile cutter two days to rip out the old tiles and install the new ones and the fixtures.  I was delighted to find that the faucets I had chosen were hands free:  they turned themselves on with a light touch, and turned themselves off 10 seconds  later.  I love my new basement bathroom.  The new pedestal sink is capacious enough that I could conduct baptisms in it.

See what I mean?

Perhaps now I'll be inspired to head upstairs and get to work on the second floor bathroom - or maybe the kitchen.  Just don't expect me to start cooking.

THE SIEGE OF LENINGRAD: THE BATH LOTTERY

Ivaan, as I've mentioned before, was passionately interested in history.  He spoke about certain historical events as if he had actually been there.  One of the events that captured his imagination was the Siege of Leningrad.  For Ivaan, I suppose, it wasn't really a historical event, because it took place around the time he was born.

We often spoke about what life must have been like for Russians during the Siege of Leningrad.  Because it took place over a considerable length of time, and got worse as time  passed, it must have taken both physical and moral strength to survive.  Ivaan once asked me what I thought I'd miss the most under conditions like that, and I told him the unrelenting cold weather would probably be the hardest for me to endure.

It was during a discussion about the Siege of Leningrad that Ivaan and I came up with a play about an imaginary group of women during the siege.  Ivaan named it The Bath Lottery.  Here's the story:

In an abandoned warehouse in Leningrad, a group of six women who are strangers to each other begin congregating and as they get to know each other they start acting as a collective, meeting almost every day and sharing their personal stories.  Their husbands, brothers, sons are all absent from their lives: fighting the enemy, dead, in prison, or have simply abandoned them.

The women share what little they have and provide emotional support and comfort to each other.  One day, in a conversation about what they miss most, one of them says that even more than food and warm clothes, she misses having a hot bath. This gets the women thinking, and one of them, realizing there is a large metal tub in the warehouse, suggests that they collect all the wood and paper they can find, light a fire, fill the tub with snow from outside, melt the snow and heat the water over the fire, and hold a lottery. The winner of the lottery gets to take a hot bath, and the rest of them get to sit around the hot fire and keep warm.

They put the plan into action.  Over a number of days they collect anything they can burn, build a firepit and start piling the snow into the tub to melt.  On the day of the lottery, one of them rushes into the warehouse with a pile of half-rotten, frozen potatoes she has unearthed from somewhere.  They put the potatoes in the embers to cook and draw straws to determine who gets the hot bath.  The rest will sit around and eat the potatoes.  The eldest woman, Masha, wins the lottery for the bath.  Once the water is the right temperature, the other women help her into the tub.  They sit around on the floor eating the potatoes and talking.  Finally one of them passes a potato to the elderly woman in the tub and says, "Here, Masha.  Have a potato.  You will feel like you're in heaven."  No response.  "Masha!" calls the woman, thinking she's fallen asleep.  No reply.  The women get up and look into the tub and see that Masha, lying in the warm water, has died.

Everyone who hears this story thinks it's the saddest story and would make a horrible play. But I agree with Ivaan.  It's a beautiful story.

When I wrote in an earlier blog post that I felt like I was living through the Siege of Leningrad, it was because I was without a bathtub for two days.  Fortunately, I did have a giant rubbermaid bin and plenty of hot water, so it was a poor facsimile of the Siege of Leningrad. A friend actually volunteered to come over with potatoes.

I have this advice about bathing in a rubbermaid container.  It's easy to get into.  But it's very hard to get out of without tipping the entire thing over.  Just bear that in mind, in case you're ever required to play a part in Ivaan's play, The Bath Lottery.