After we returned home, we Googled ‘em up and pretty much confirmed that, despite their unlikely location on a residential street, it appeared there had indeed been a red fox recently on our walkabout route.
Fast forward one day to a suppertime TV newscast when the BBC happened to show an item about a vixen that had been adopted as a pet by a family who lives one floor above a pet shop in England. Apparently someone had rescued a newborn fox kit one day and, having no animal rescue service anywhere in town, brought it to the pet shop in hopes of saving its life. The pet shop owner enlisted the help of the upstairs residents and by the time the animal was old enough to manage for itself, everyone involved concluded that it had become so completely domesticated it would likely be a cruelty to attempt to return it to the wild. Hence one of England’s more unusual family pets.
A mere couple hours later, I was driving Katie to somewhere she needed to be. It was dark, and by way of conversation, I started telling her about the fox that had been adopted and turned into a wonderful, if decidedly unusual, English family pet. And at the precise moment I was regaling her with the animal’s conversion from a weak, baseball-sized mound of newborn fur to healthy adulthood, Katie, looking ahead of the car where our headlights were illuminating the snowy street, suddenly said, “Speaking of foxes...”
At the same moment, I stepped on the brakes because the animal that had suddenly stepped from a side street directly into our path was indeed a full-grown red fox. And it stopped – obviously manifesting the [animal name here]-in-the-headlights paralysis that has become such a cliché. When the car was fully stopped, we were sitting no more than 10 feet away from it. The car’s stopping action obviously un-hypnotized it, because after blinking a couple times, it turned and casually trotted along its original route across the street in front of us. Pausing just long enough at a snowbank to turn and, I have no doubt, think something along the fox-talk lines of “Thanks very much for that”, it disappeared up a neighbouring driveway around the house.
Still later that evening, as Leslie and I took another stroll, I withheld telling her the story until we reached the driveway. At that point, I drew her attention to the same trail we had seen a couple nights previous, and then told her that Katie and I had actually seen the trailmaker.
It isn’t the first time we’ve seen a fox in the neighbourhood – several years ago we saw one trotting bold as brass in broad daylight right down the centreline of our own street. Rabbits, raccoons and skunks are frequent visitors – one of the latter one day let go a blast that we figured must have deterred a cat attack right outside our living room window because the sudden stench inside the house was so powerful it made our eyes water. And we’ve had the occasional hawk show up casting covetous eyes on the smaller birds clustered around our backyard feeder. But a fox is a rare sighting and its coming on the scene as it did with a scriptwriter’s sense of timing was what will cement it forever as a truly Rod Serling-esque moment in my mind.
= = = = =
I have, in the past, occasionally slammed the bureaucratic lunacy that seems all too pervasive in the Government of Canada department in which I toil.
Oh hell, let’s be honest, when I have had anything at all to say about it in the past, it’s been to slam it. After all, I work for the same government whose first major spending decision after being elected was to take the literacy funding contributions that the previous government provided for hundreds of organizations across Canada that ran thousands of programs aimed at improving adult learning and literacy in what the government itself calls “The Knowledge Economy” – programs that co-ordinated the services of tens of thousands of volunteers – and cancelled them. How can you not slam organizational thinking like that?
But lost among the numbing sea of my departmental procedures and approval hierarchies and Agenda for Excellence Achievement Award reports are the people with whom I work. And I actually like them – many of them a lot. I find especially that my affection has grown tremendously since I began working at home a few months ago (but admitting that would probably give the wrong impression. “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” is the reason, not what you were thinking.)
But really, what can you say about someone who welcomes you to that most dreaded of bureaucratic days – The Team Retreat – with a little Japanese-sushi-bamboo-lunchbox style of kit just full of odd little objects and this Table of Contents? (Quoted verbatim – right down to the punctuation – and in its entirety... actually, in its English language entirety. Every one of the following sentences was also thoughtfully provided in French.) (Oh, “MCS” is “Ministerial Communications Services”. That’d be us.):
= = =
“MCS Survival Kit
Marble – So you’ll have an extra one when you lose yours!
Rubber Band – To stretch yourself beyond your limits.
Penny – So you’ll have enough cents to realize you’re a valuable asset to our team.
Eraser – Because everyone makes mistakes. That’s OK, so long as we learn by our mistakes.
Hugs and Kisses chocolate – To remind you that someone cares about you!!!
String – To tie things together when everything falls apart.
Paperclip – To help you hold it all together.
Gum* – To remind you that if you stick with it, you can accomplish anything.
Pen – To list your accomplishments everyday.
Lapel pin – To remind you that we can overcome and not fear change.**
Stress toy – When nothing else works, hold on tight and take a breath!"
= = =
* The gum brand? Excel, of course.
** It is actually a pin left over from the days when our department had a different name. So apparently when I wear a no-longer-applicable lapel pin to promote our department, I am actually saying, “I do not fear change”. Maybe I’ll give it to a panhandler.
Continuing with our Fun Times at Work theme, recently we had yet another branch meeting in order to inaugurate a new “initiative” in our Department – employee awards! (I’m seriously beginning to think the only way to get through these branch meetings is to take my lead from their name and fortify myself in advance with several ounces of bourbon and branch water.)
The moment we arrived, the lights in the auditorium-cum-theatre in which we were seated darkened. Wonderful! It seemed they were actually going to forego the usual rah-rahs from senior bureaucrats for whom “public speaking” typically sits far down their skill sets in favour of a professional production.
The onscreen appearance of the renowned National Film Board of Canada logo onscreen further cheered me. We had been advised in advance that there would be a “dress code” for this branch meeting – “black and white”. And so, as the theatre’s speakers gave forth with the first few notes of a classical piano, for one brief sparkling moment I thought that perhaps we were in for a showing of a stunning work by Norman McLaren, one that would have been wholly appropriate to the theme: Pas de Deux.
(Photo source: www.tbray.org)
But alas, it was not to be. Here are a few highlights from one website’s synopsis of the half hour to which we were next subjected (CM Magazine, Vol. XI, No.17):
“Mr. Mergler's Gift is about how a chance meeting in the park between an old man and young girl has a life-transforming effect on both of them.
Daniel Mergler is a 77-year-old man suffering from colon cancer. He is in the last year of his life, has just retired from teaching piano and is sitting on a park bench, not doing well emotionally. A man and his daughter ride their bicycles through the park; then the father sits on the next bench while his nine-year-old daughter plays on a swing. The father and Daniel Mergler strike up a conversation...
Mr. Mergler soon realizes that Xin Ben is the most gifted student he has ever had. She learns with such speed and with such feeling that it exhilarates him, and he forgets about his illness. He teaches her about the great composers and gets her to read about them in books from the library. He tells her to know the story of the music in her mind so that when she plays it, the story is playing in her mind.
After the twenty-sixth lesson, Mr. Mergler's cancer progresses to the point that he becomes very weak and can no longer walk. He falls down while alone at his apartment and needs to call 911. He mails Xin Ben's parents a note and tells them of his situation. He asks that they visit him but not bring their daughter because it would be too emotional for them.
This is a sad time for all of them. Xin Ben's piano lessons mean more to her than anything else, and she is devastated by her teacher's illness. Mr. Mergler feels a responsibility to Xin Ben. He cares for her like a daughter, but he also recognizes that her gift cannot be wasted. His fear is that she will end up with a mediocre teacher who will not develop her talent...
The documentary would also be a good launching off point for discussions about death and dying.”
= =
I am not exaggerating in the least when I tell you that as the lights came back on, people in the theatre were openly weeping. On with the feel-good awards!
To their credit, the event’s emcees tried gamely to bring the mood up somewhat from the profound sorrow into which it had sunk by extolling the message of finding inspiration within oneself, but as I said to another correspondent after the meeting, it had the same effect of launching a retirement party by showing a documentary about the horrific effects of the Hiroshima explosion, then going immediately to a segue like, “You think that was a blast??!! You ain’t seen nothin’ yet! On with the party!”
Then, adding insult to injury, the trio of awards they disbursed included the presentation of a “Creativity in Communications” Award to a department whose job description can be pretty much reduced to “Do communications creatively”. I think next year I’ll nominate myself for accepting a paycheque every two weeks – the Analysis of English Language Media Award. (“And the winner is... Holy cow! Our English language Media Analyst!”)
Works for me.
= = =
Bits and pieces of this and that...
-- I suppose I should thank the Globe and Mail for freeing up my time to read other things. All it took was encountering this sub-headline on the front page of a recent weekend’s G&M’s "Focus and Books" section to send me and my Saturday morning café au lait to the day’s Ottawa Citizen instead: “The vagina doesn't always agree with the brain, says Meredith Chivers, Canada's rising star of the science world.”
-- "CONGRATULATIONS YOU HAVE WON THE WINING PRIZE" was the title of a recent e-mailed message that got by my SPAM traps. At first I was thinking maybe this whiny little corner of the blogosphere had finally garnered a significant trophy. Then I realized the typo could have just as easily have been perhaps not a typo at all and maybe I’d won a random draw from the Natalie (“Red and White and Drunk All Over”) Maclean monthly wine bulletin I receive. Sadly, it will forever remain the stuff of speculation because I didn’t open the SPAM message to discover in which incarnation I’d been designated a “winer”.
-- A few days back, we had to have a tech from Rogers home video drop by to discover that the problem a telephone-based cable signal troubleshooting technician had earlier determined from a remote location did not, in fact, exist. Why was I not surprised? When I first booked the appointment with a telephone-based customer service person, I advised him we have call identification and asked how I would know it was the Rogers tech person calling on the day of the appointment to confirm I was at home. The phone tech had no idea so I decided I’d just take my lumps during the assigned three-hour phone confirmation window and answer anyone who phoned at that time.
I needn’t have worried. Barely an hour into the three-hour window, the phone rang and the call identification window informed me that the call was coming from someone named “Tech Nition”. Obviously Mr and Mrs Nition knew with Nostradamus-like clarity where their little boy Tech would wind up when they held their naming ceremony for him.
-- While I appreciate the Damascus-like conversion to “clean” energy and “economic stimulus” by the Harper Tories to all things Obama-ish since the day the Prez dropped into Ottawa for a Beavertail, I am already so sick and tired of their repeatedly invoking the new President as the source of all Tory policy that if I hear one more Harper cabinet minister drop his name during Question Period, I am going to e-mail the US House of Representatives and urge them to sue the Harper government either for plagiarism or false advertising.
-- To whom do we owe a thank you for creating a world where it seems harder and harder to get a simple apology for a simple error? I only ask because I was recently in our local corner store (actually, it’s in a strip mall, not on a corner, but “corner store” evokes exactly what it is) and took three items to the cash: a can of spaghetti sauce; a package of pita bread and the Sunday Ottawa Citizen. The cashier rang it in and pronounced the total to me: $15.44.
I paused in the act of opening my wallet, looked at him, looked at the LCD panel on the cash register where $15.44 was indeed happily glowing away in bright green light, and said, “Fifteen forty-four???!!”
Then he looked at the three items on the counter, and at the glowing number, and said, “No, that’s not good, is it?” He picked up each item individually and keyed them in again. This time the number lit up as $9.49. We did our eye contact thing again. Without a word, he re-entered, for a third time, a trio of prices and got a number very close to what I had already mentally tallied as a total: $6 and change. All he had to say next was, “You want bag?” No, what I wanted was to hear something like, “Sorry about that.” Not a lavish apology; not an offer of free corner store groceries for a month; simply a halfway contrite acknowledgement of the mistake. But instead, what I got was really a response that seemed to suggest it happens all the time. No big deal.
On a different day, or perhaps the same day many hours later and much closer to bedtime, I might have passed over a $20 bill, accepted the $4.56 in change and gone on my way without even absorbing the mistake.
(A few years back, on a long drive along Highway 401 that included a very late-night fuel stop at one of their service centres, I filled up and gave the attendant – who had helpfully come out to my car – enough money to cover the number I pronounced aloud. He gave me a quizzical look, but he gave me the right change. About ten minutes later, several kilometres down the highway, I suddenly realized I’d never spent that much for gas in my life with this car, even when the tank was nearly bone dry. Then it hit me – the number I had pronounced had been the number of litres I had pumped into the car. The two tally wheels, of course, sit one atop the other on a gas pump and I had given the attendant the volume count, rather than the price. Gas then cost somewhere in the vicinity of about $0.50 a litre, as I recall. Obviously, I was not going to turn around on the 401, and had I elected to exit at the next ramp, backtrack to the first ramp on the other side of the Service Centre so as to come back to it and argue with the attendant, I would have consumed a measurable quantity of the gas whose payment I would have been disputing. But what galled me – and why that recollection sticks so clearly in my mind – is that the attendant actually turned to look at the two numbers on the pump, and even though he knew I had read aloud the wrong one as the price, he silently accepted the money and, I have no doubt, pocketed the difference.)
My point in recalling that episode is that I probably don’t always pay 100 per cent crystal clear attention to every single cash transaction I make. Coming back to my corner store on this sunny Sunday, had I not been vaguely conscious of the approximate price of the three items, I might well have paid what I was told to pay. No questions asked. I hasten to add that I’m not suggesting his error was deliberate. But error it was. And my Mom and Dad taught me to say “Sorry” when I make a mistake.
(Incidentally, for the past year or so I’ve been paying for gas by swiping a credit card through a slot at the pump. No contact at all with an attendant. I might still occasionally misread the money total, but the magnetic stripe reader on the pump never does. Score one for technology over bleary-eyed late-night drivers.)
-- Talk about covering your bases... Here’s a recent Globe and Mail headline: “McGuinty calls on banks to pass on rate cut”. So if the banks follow the Fed’s lead and reduce their lending rates for the ordinary consumer, Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – pass the Fed’s rate reduction on to the small borrower”. And if the banks refuse and keep their consumer lending rates where they are, Mr McGuinty can say, “That’s what I told them to do – give it a pass this time and keep those rates right where they are.” I guess that’s why we pay our politicians the big bucks. Because they’re never wrong.
-- I’d like to close by issuing an open apology to a whole bunch of generous friends, family and neighbours. Over the years, we have been the happy recipients of all manner of home-prepared jams, jellies, chutneys and, in larger measure, wine, cakes, cupcakes, even leftover roast lamb on one occasion. The end result has been a steady growth in the population of our pantry’s store of Mason jars
and an almost endless variety of Tupperware (none of whose lids seem to match the containers when I’m looking for one, incidentally, but I digress). And not one of which I can recall our ever having returned. So I just want to apologize here and now to all of the aforementioned people who muttered darkly at discovering they lacked enough preserving jars to use for this year’s project because Mike and Leslie didn’t give last year’s empty gift jar back. (Although I will gladly add that I use “Mike and Leslie” merely for identification. All blame is mine and mine alone. First of all, it’s in the husband job description. Secondly, only one of us is an incurable hoarder – even in the kitchen – and it’s not Leslie.)
PS...
If you haven’t already seen it, do see “Slumdog Millionaire”. You can debate the flood of Oscars it got this year until the sacred cows come home, but it is an immensely watchable movie. It’s a tough slog at times (after all, vast chunks of it are set in the slums of Mumbai, not the best of “feel good” atmospheres) but its difference from the Hollywood type of movie alone makes it a thoroughly mesmerizing diversion.
À la next time, when I”ll (hopefully) rivet you with some observations gleaned from a recent three-day sojourn to Montreal. (Literally “rivet”. I touched a few that were used to hold a section of the RMS Titanic’s -- Yes, that one -- hull plates in place.)
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