RYAN & CORRIE

Several months ago I had an email from a guy called Ryan Worden.   Ryan and his girlfriend Corrie used to be frequent photo subjects of Ivaan's on Queen Street West in Toronto.  Ryan worked in a tattoo parlour and was a regular fixture of the Queen West neighbourhood in the 1990s.

Cut to 2018:  Ryan and his wife Corrie are now the parents of four girls.  They live in Lindsay Ontario where they have their own tattoo shop.  Ryan is now 45.  They just wrote to get in touch and tell me how much they treasure this photo that Ivaan took of them just around the time they started dating when Ryan was 20 and Corrie was 19.

They were a striking looking couple then, and I'll bet they still are.  I can't wait to meet them one day when they and their daughters make the trek down to Toronto and stop by for a visit.

Corrie and Ryan Worden
©2009 City of Toronto Archives

PRAIRIE FIRE

I'm quite exhilarated to see the cover of the 40th anniversary issue of Prairie Fire with my name on the cover.  I haven't received my copy in the mail yet, but anticipation is always at least as pleasurable as the event itself.

I issue this disclaimer to anyone who is thinking of reading my story, The Bath Lottery.  It's l-o-n-g, as short stories go, and while it's a story about women, it's not an upbeat story of women's empowerment and solidarity, and there are no hearty laughs in it.  But it's a story about the basic goodness of human beings in desperate times.

If you do read it, I'll be interested in hearing what you think.

AIR BEE&BEE

Last year, I was overcome with what I can only describe as "land hunger": the dawning realization that I owned not one square inch of land that wasn't covered by concrete or masonry.  It hadn't really bothered me for years.  I have a black thumb and the only things I had successfully grown were trees.  I've planted a catalpa, a weeping mulberry, a cherry tree and a ginkgo biloba, and as far as I know, three of those four trees are still alive.  But that's the extent of my agricultural skills.

I had a hatch installed in my kitchen ceiling to give me access to my flat roof. It was a terrific idea, because it added significantly to my living space. The first time I went out onto the roof was quite unnerving and I thought, "I'll probably never, ever do this again, unless my building catches fire and I need to escape". That feeling lasted one day. Ever since, I'm out on the roof about 20 times a day in good weather.  However, once I had access, it made good sense to re-do the roof.

Once the new roof was installed, I needed to make it legal by having a perimeter railing added.  I had it set back from the actual perimeter of the building, so I could walk around the outside of the wooden railing if I needed to.  Now that the roof was sheltered by a tall railing, I started planting like a mad woman.  I'm not so much into flowers.  I prefer vegetables, because you get the best of both worlds: some flowers and then something to eat.

My crops this year include potatoes, garlic, leeks, basil, lavender, arugula, snow peas and rhubarb.  I've since been informed that the potato is basically the cockroach of vegetables, and potatoes do not require the use of any actual brain cells in order to proliferate.  I counter this received wisdom with the response that my potatoes, at any rate, are organic cockroaches.

Last winter was unbelievably long and tedious.  I suffered so much that I nearly purchased a decommissioned church with a couple of acres of land about an hour away from Toronto.  I was only dissuaded from buying the church by my friends Neil and Carolyn, who pointed out that since I wanted to plant fruit trees on the land, I should buy land that already had fruit trees on it, and if I were doing so, I didn't strictly need a church, either.

Winter ended eventually, and I became enamoured of the idea of having a beehive on the roof.  Luckily a business called Alvéole had opened up nearby. They teach beekeeping and sell supplies.  And that's how I came to have an AirBee&Bee.  Here's Hilary from Alvéole, setting up the first level of the hive.

To keep honeybees calm when you're working with them, it helps to have a smoker.  It's a bellows attached to a burner unit into which you put pieces of untreated burlap.  The smoke from the burner dissipates the pheromones in the air which would otherwise cause the bees to be nervous, feeling they were under attack.  Hardcore beekeepers do not use a smoker.  I am not hardcore.

Here are a couple of photographs of my frames. 

Even though it's been incredibly hot on the roof, the hive is thriving.  I now have seven frames absolutely coated with honeycomb, so we added a second storey to the hive last week.

The beekeeping season does not end till October or November, so it's not impossible that I'll be able to add a third storey to the hive.  I'm starting to learn the names of beekeeping equipment.  I have a bee brush, a queen excluder, and although I don't have one of those netted hats yet or a hive tool to pry the individual frames apart, I'll no doubt be getting my own, plus my own smoker, this week. 

Ivaan would have pointed out that bees were the symbol of the dei Medici family, the wealthy Renaissance patrons of the arts, and I kind of consider myself a micro-scale patron of the arts, so my bees seem extra appropriate.  

I know what you really want to ask:  have I ever been stung by my bees?  No. They seem to like me, actually, and come and sit on my arm as I'm working on the hive.  But I have a calm demeanour and I'm careful not to bother them for more than ten minutes at a time. 

It's hard to tell how many bees I have, but I'm guessing 50,000.  They are all named.  For ease of reference, they are all named Sam.  Except for the queen, whose name is Her Majesty.  Here's a photo of the queen.  She's the big golden one in the middle, without the black stripes.

All that to say, if you've been by Atelier Ivaan lately during the afternoon and wondered why it didn't seem to be open for business, fear not. I was probably just up on the roof, communing with 50,000 Sams.

THE McBINKEYS OF BONEHEAD: A CAT'S TALE

Lately I've been thinking about our cat, Pinky.  We found him as a tiny, feral kitten on the garage roof, a few years before we were married.  We'd heard a chirping sound and wondered if there was a bird's nest up there.  There wasn't.  There was a kitten. I guess all he'd heard were birds chirping, so he learned to chirp instead of meow.   We lured him down, over the course of several days, with saucers of milk positioned closer and closer to the back door of the house.  Within a week, Pinky moved in.

He was a tabby, and we thought he was a girl cat.  His nose and paws were very pink.  We named him Pinky in honour of Benazir Bhutto, who had just become the first female Prime Minister of Pakistan, and whose childhood nickname was Pinky.  It was some time before we realized Pinky was a boy cat. By that time, he was already answering to his name and we didn't want to traumatize him, so we kept on calling him Pinky.  As he got bigger, the neighbours started to laugh every time we called him in, so we gave him the street name of Ned.  But at home, he was Pinky.  Or Mr. Pink.  Or Jean-Marie Le Pinq. Or Pinkerton. Or Pinsky, on Jewish holidays.  Or Pinky McBinkey, whose ancestral home was in Bonehead, Sussex.

Pinky loved Ivaan, and the feeling was mutual.  Ivaan trained him to do tricks, something not all cats willingly do.  I wanted to take him for walks on a leash, but every time we put a leash on him, Pinky would flatten himself on the floor, like a fur rug.  So that wasn't happening.

Pinky was the cat of legend.  One mystery at our place was where all the cat food disappeared to.  He only ate the deluxe kind, that comes in tiny cans.  Or else baby food.  Or else cooked broccoli.  Or ginger snaps.  We decided that while we were away at work during the day, Pinky was running a restaurant on our back deck.  It was called The Cat Cafe, and it served tiny little cans of cat food.  But it also had a specialty dish on the menu, Salmon Philippe.  This is because two of our nephews are named Sam and Philippe.  The dish was named after them.

In the legend, Pinky rode a motorcycle.  His helmet was carved out of a tennis ball.

Ivaan, in moments of great affection, called him Pinkooni Ma-Sa-Sa.  Our other nephews, Angus and Ivor, always wondered what Pinkooni Ma-Sa-Sa meant.  So one day I wrote a children's book to explain how he came to have the name Pinkooni Ma-Sa-Sa.  It's called:

THE McBINKEYS OF BONEHEAD:  A CAT'S TALE
 © 2018 Eya Donald Greenland

(I have deleted the text of the story, but I assure you, it's awesome.)

THE BATH LOTTERY

In about 2005, Ivaan was telling me about the Siege of Leningrad.  He loved history, and it really came alive though his retelling.  Honestly, I couldn't even have told you when the Siege of Leningrad was, never mind what it was all about.

Oh, you don't know either?  Well, in 1941 the Nazis surrounded the City of Leningrad in Russia (now called Petrograd, or St. Petersburg), blockading it so that no one could enter or leave.  They wanted to take control of the city and they didn't want to waste ammunition by killing the inhabitants, so they basically just starved the citizens of Leningrad.

The Siege lasted for two and a half years.  Millions died of starvation.  Food was rationed at 125 grams per day per person.  Eventually one winter it was so cold that the lake on the border of Leningrad froze over and supplies were able to be smuggled in, but the death toll was tremendous.

Stories about the Siege of Leningrad are always told from the point of view of men.  Films show tanks and guns, fighting men and barking dogs.  Little is said about the lonely, desperate lives of women during the Siege and how they coped.

After Ivaan had told me about the Siege, he asked, "If you had to give up everything, what would be the hardest for you to live without?"  I instantly answered, "A hot bath.  I would rather do without food than a hot bath".    So we started telling each other a story, back and forth, about women during the Siege and how they managed.  We called our story The Bath Lottery.  We had always envisioned writing it as a play.

Life got complicated and we never got our play written.  Part of the reason was that neither of us knew how to write a play, but another part is that we kept on adding to and subtracting from the story, so it was a pretty fluid project.

Last year, I was moaning to my friend Mary Ann about wanting to write this play, entitled The Bath Lottery, and explaining that the reason I hadn't done it was because I did not know the mechanism for writing a play.  I wondered if I should take a course in playwriting.  Mary Ann wisely suggested that I write it as a story,  adding that once I had a story on paper, I could easily see if it could become a play.

So I wrote the story.  In fact, it poured out of me surprisingly quickly.  I sent it to my sister, who often reads things I write.  She was generally encouraging, but found it hard to understand why the story was so bleak.  She was hoping for some laughter and some female bonding at the end.  Clearly, this woman has never lived through a siege!  I've been hearing stories about the Holodomor, the forced starvation imposed by Stalin on Ukraine in the early 1930s, all my adult life, and I've witnessed first hand the Soviet-induced paranoia that is bred in the bone of everyone who has ever lived in Ukraine.

I then sent it to my friend Norah, who is a writer and whose parents were of Ukrainian heritage, so she understands the culture.  Norah forced me to clarify and to simplify.  It was so helpful to me to see the story from her perspective and I was grateful for her skill and generosity.

Having finished editing the story, I had to decide what to do with it.  I didn't even know if I liked the story any more.  I subscribe to a literary quarterly, Prairie Fire, and as they had a literary competition in conjunction with the Banff Centre and McNally Robinson Booksellers, I decided to submit the The Bath Lottery.  After sending it in, I was cringing, thinking it would be so amateurish compared to the offerings of the professional writers who enter and win literary competitions.  Eventually, I forgot all about it.

Last Tuesday, coming home from university, I saw a flashing light on my answering machine and started listening to the message as I was doing household chores.  It wasn't until the message was nearly over that I realized it was from Prairie Fire Press.  They were asking for my email address.
I thought they probably just wanted to send me a list of the winners, but I replayed the message and was dumbfounded to learn that I had won Second Prize in the short fiction category.  I had to play the message one more time to be sure I'd heard correctly.  Then I phoned Mary Ann. I was slightly hysterical: crying and laughing at the same time.  When I awoke the next morning, I just assumed I had dreamed the whole episode, so I played the message again, and there it was.

Then came the fun of having to compose a short bio of myself:  "Eya lives in Toronto.  She enjoys ironing.  She has terrific friends."  Then I needed a photo of myself.  My good friend Crystal sprang into action and came right over with her camera.  She took a whole lot of very professional photos of me.  I'm so glad I didn't submit that 'selfie' I was planning on using.  She made me look like my best self.  She's an excellent  friend that way.

So this summer, The Bath Lottery will appear in Prairie Fire.  Then there's all the other things: the prize money, the publication money, the book tour (only joking about that bit) and sharing with all my friends the excitement of this total coup de foudre.   Here's my picture, as it appears on the Prairie Fire Press website.  I've realized that The Bath Lottery will never be a play.  Not enough dialogue, too many scene changes.  But it's done, and I imagine when summer comes I'll be feeling pretty chuffed.

IMAGINE PEACE

This year I decided I'd like to return to Iceland in October, to attend the annual lighting of the John Lennon "Imagine Peace" memorial on Viðey Island, very close to Reykjavik. The memorial was 10 years old, and John Lennon and Ivaan share a birthday, October 9th, so I felt this was a significant year to attend.

I've been to Iceland many times, but never this late in the season, and never twice in one year.  I'd also never been there alone, so I was looking forward to the adventure. I decided to stay in an expensive hotel instead of the bare-bones apartment I normally occupy in a very old house. Frankly, next time I'll stay in the bare-bones apartment, but that's another story!

Yoko Ono chose Iceland for the location of the Imagine Peace memorial because it is a country without an army, and because there is so little pollution that the blue light from the memorial shines straight up into the heavens. Every year, she attends for the lighting. As she's becoming frail,  and the weather was cool and rainy, this time she opted to stay at the Reykjavik Art Museum, on the mainland just across the harbour from Viðey Island, and to appear at the lighting by video link. At five-thirty p.m. on October 8th, public transportation is free of charge in Reykjavik, in honour of John Lennon's birthday.  This includes Gestúr, the ferry to Viðey Island.  Special buses took us right to the ferry docks.  We climbed aboard and headed for Viðey.

We wrote messages of peace on paper tags and hung them on the branches of trees that were collected in bunches for this purpose.

Food and hot drinks were available. We listened to music by John Lennon.  We attended the tiny Lutheran church on Viðey Island.

When nine o'clock came, we were all assembled around the Imagine Peace Memorial, a white marble cylinder bearing the inscription IMAGINE PEACE in 24 different languages.  A beautiful women's choir sang a gorgeous rendition of John Lennon's song Imagine, and you couldn't tell if we were crying or not because it had started to rain.  I had a good umbrella with me so I was protected, but  still it was very cold.

There were about a thousand people on hand from all over the world.  Babies.  Elderly people. Young people. Couples.  Families. Individuals.  We didn't all speak the same language, except the language of peace.  We all spoke that.

It was a great week for me.  The weather improved day by day, until the day I left when it was basically sunbathing weather.  Icelanders were thrilled.  Other highlights of the trip were visiting the Art Museum and Háskólann Í Reykjavík: Reykjavik University.  It is modelled on the Star Wars X Wing Fighter.



It's a small, brilliant university and I wish I'd had more time to explore it (and the geothermal beach next door). The various corridors are named after planets in our solar system:



This working Formula One car is a class project by the Mechanical Engineering students.

 I also slept a surprising amount, ate very well, and had plenty of time to think - something you can't always do when you're playing tour guide.

Each time I visit Iceland, I come away with a few new words and expressions in Icelandic, and I am amazed how many similarities there are between Icelandic and Russian, both in grammatical structure and in actual words.  Iceland is becoming increasingly expensive.  The locals tell me they can't afford the restaurants and clothing shops frequented by tourists.  One bus driver told me that it's cheaper for him to fly to Germany and buy clothes than it is to buy them on Laugavegur, the shopping street, or at Kringlán, the little shopping mall.

My purchases were simple this time:  Icelandic liquorice as gifts for liquorice-loving friends and relatives, an Art Museum t-shirt for my Reykjavik-loving nephew, and a brand new vintage suit for myself from Rauđi Kross, the Icelandic Red Cross thrift shop.

I came back feeling light and free, energized and happy.  And I felt that for one night, I had been among totally kindred souls.  I could, in fact, imagine peace.

"RING" AUDIO: THE STORY OF MY VINTAGE STEREO

About a year ago, I started to miss listening to my small but excellent vinyl record collection, so I decided to invest in a fully restored vintage stereo system.  Naturally, I went to Ring Audio. I'd worked part time at Ring Audio in the mid 1970s and I liked the equipment from that era. Ring Audio is no longer in the original location, nor is it owned by the original proprietors, but the current owners were part of the Ring Audio community back in the 1970s.  Ted Syperek and his son, Nick, now run it out of a warehouse at the foot of Carlaw Avenue.

I emailed Nick (honestly, I remember when that kid was born, and he's now a married man) and told him what I wanted.  He said he'd look after it, but it might take some time.  It did. It took so long that Nick went to Korea on his honeymoon before I had my stereo.  So I exchanged a few phone calls with his dad, Ted, and one fine day Ted called to say he had an admirable system put together for me.  It was exactly what I wanted: a Dual turntable, Boston speakers and a Luxman receiver...all at a substantially discounted price. I was so excited, I rented a car and drove right out to pick it up.

Luckily, I remembered how to hook those things up.  But it didn't feel quite complete so I looked on Kijiji and found a Harmon Kardon CD player for sale that would blend in well with the system.  I now have an awesome sound system. I was so thrilled with it, I invited Ted to let me return the favour by providing a piece of jewellery, as a thank you.

So Ted and his beloved, Victoria, came over.  It's a miracle that she and I hadn't met before.  She owns a vintage clothing and accessories shop called Gadabout, and we've been at many of the same vintage clothing shows. We know quite a few people in common.  So Victoria tried various things and finally selected a pendant for herself.  It looks terrific on her.  Then she mentioned that she has quite a few good gemstones and has always wanted to have them all set in a ring.  So she looked through the inventory of Ivaan's rings and was very drawn to one in particular.  Oddly, that ring and my stereo system are the same vintage exactly.  She brought me her gemstones and I made up the ring in white gold. It ended up looking spectacular, partly because her diamonds were absolutely terrific.

 Every time I turn on my stereo, I think of Ted and Victoria and her ring, and I do a little dance of joy, because I am so lucky.