Sleep

“Death is something that makes men weep,

Yet one-third of life is spent in sleep!”

—Lord Byron

I like to sleep with the window open when the weather is warm enough. (I heard that Pierre Trudeau also did, but his wife Margaret didn’t like it.) Sometimes there’s noise outside, especially on Wednesday nights when they pick up the trash, but that’s a price I’m willing to pay.

On Wednesday morning I woke up to my open window and there was a funny smell in the air, a bit like someone was burning tar or barbecuing nearby.  It was the smoke from the wildfires reaching Toronto!  I closed my windows for several days, though now I’ve opened them again.

I’m hoping that this smoke in big cities like New York will be a turning point, and we’ll finally get serious about slowing down climate change.  Maybe this will turn out to be another “Where were you when…” moment, like 9/11 and the onset of covid.  Someone on Twitter was saying that supporters of a Green New Deal aren’t serious, and I responded, “Is it more serious to do nothing and hope that things work out?”

I was in London a decade ago and went to Roger Rhys’ one-man show talking about Shakespeare and such.  I’m afraid I dozed off during the show!  I sure hope Roger didn’t notice…  I also got sleepy watching the Greenland movie The Journal of Knud Rasmussen.  Something about those snowy Arctic locations makes me feel like hibernating!

Do you like lullabies?  I recently realized that many of my favourite musical pieces are berceuses.  I remember when the FM CBC had an afternoon music show titled Disc Drive and they’d sign off with the berceuse from Gabriel Faure’s Dolly Suite.

Empty nest

"In every parting is an image of death”—George Elliot

I come from a fairly close-knit family.  You know how most kids daydream at one time or another that they’re the offspring of other people and just got adopted into their current family?  I never had that fantasy!

I remember seeing a TV ad for long distance phone calls when I was young.  It showed a young woman leaving a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere to catch the bus that would take her into the city, with her rather old-looking parents smiling and waving goodbye.  I found that commercial really, really sad!  The point was that she wouldn’t be completely cut off—she could still speak with them on the phone sometimes—but that went over my head.

Another long distance commercial I recall showed a young woman sitting around on a Sunday afternoon with time on her hands and looking glum, with sad guitar music.  But then her phone rings and she answers it all smiles!

Ever see the movie Born Free?  It’s about a gamekeeper couple in colonial Kenya who adopted three orphaned lion cubs.  Two of them got sent on to zoos, but they decided to wean the third off them and make her an independent mature lioness.  I remember the first time they left her alone, and when they came to check up on her she’d barely survived and they had to return to Square  One!  I saw it just a few weeks before I lived on my own for the first time…

In my late 20s and early 30s, I spent a couple of years living on my own but often visiting home, then lived at home again for a couple of years, then moved to Toronto with my sister for three years, then at 33 I spent eight months completely alone in London, England—the best eight months of my life.  But then I came home to Toronto and my parents had moved in with us, and I’d live with them for the rest of their lives.

My mother left us about 10 years ago, my father about three years ago.  Don’t I wish I had a phone line sufficiently long-distance to speak to them now!