Leaves and Petals

There is a house that we pass every morning when walking the dogs. It is a lovely Edwardian, just half a block from a park. The windows are stained glass, the garden is expertly arranged with flowers all in shades of blue and purple or white. Along the sidewalk, someone has embedded a mosiac in the concrete, all bits of old plates and cups and fishbowl stones, also in shades of blue and purple.

A house like this wouldn’t be complete without a cat on the front porch and this place normally has at least two or three. That’s because the folks who like here regularly leave a dish of cat food out, either at the top or the bottom of the stairs to the porch.

Of course, cat food isn’t just attractive to cats, and in a city with an extraordinary amount of urban wildlife, other visitors often stop by for a snack.

In the spring, it was a skunk. Twice we came very close to running head-on into it, and only by dragging the dog at a gallop, or pulling her into the street did we escape the inevitable tomato juice bath. On a third occasion, a school bus driver stopped us when we were about a half block away and warned us, enabling us to cross the street and avoid what the dogs are sure is a lovely fluffy black and white cat.

Over the past couple of weeks, someone else has been enjoying the catfood. Two or three times now, we’ve seen a big fat raccoon bolt over the porch railing as we approached on the sidewalk, that little burglar mask peering out at us from a gap between the porch railing and the garage of the house next door.

One morning though, he was too intent on his breakfast, and as we came upon the walkway to this house, found him contentedly sitting on the porch with the bowl of catfood evenly spaced between him and a fat orange tabby. I have no idea who was more surprised, them or us, and I’m sure I saw a look of embarrassment pass both of their faces at getting caught noshing with the enemy. I guess it’s not really stealing if the rightful owner is willing to share.

I did a double-take this afternoon. Walking the dogs past the hair salon on the corner, I watched one of the stylists step outside for a smoke. This particular girl has curly purple hair and enough gear to make it obvious that she’s fairly alternative in her lifestyle.

What threw me off was that she had a bandana tied around the ankle of her knee-high leather boot. A white one, with a black pattern.

Flash back to 1985 or so, when the scarf around the ankle was all the rage. I had a vast collection of scarves and bandanas in every colour. I have no idea why it started, but it was one of those things that seemed to have come from the New Romantic movement. I’ve always associated it with Duran Duran, but can find no photographic evidence to support that thesis. Rockers picked it up soon after, and every hair metal band seems to have at least one member sporting an ankle bandana.

Like most silly fashion trends, it was a point of teasing, just as those drop-crotch pants a few years later would warrant passing comments about shoplifting or bodily functions. I had an English teacher who joked that I’d never manage to hold up a stagecoach with the bandana tied around my ankle instead of over my face. The French teacher tried to ban the fashion statement from his classroom, but backed off when he couldn’t give a decent reason as to why. It was an era of lots of stuff, accessory-wise, and bandanas were just one item in a vast selection of everything from jelly bracelets to lace gloves and neon shoelaces.

Like most fashion trends, the ankle bandana did not score parental approval. Twenty years later, I can understand that it looked pretty stupid, but compared to a lot of other things I could have been wearing at the time (or that teenagers have sported in the past few years), it was really very harmless, and hey, at least I was carrying a handkerchief.

One afternoon, I was exiting a shopping mall with a group of friends all similarly dressed, when I encountered my Grandmother and two of my aunts. “What on earth is around your ankle? Are you hurt?”

“No,” I muttered, desperate to get away. “It’s just a thing we do.”

“Does your mother know you’re dressed like that?”

And then I got that sinking lump of dread in my gut, because I knew for a fact that my Mother most certainly *would* know I was dressed like that before I got home, despite my best effort to remove and stash half of my kit in my purse before I hit the driveway.

Sure enough, Auntie had ratted me out and I got shit when I arrived home. There was much discussion of the bad influence that music was having on me, and how I should stop being so silly and wasting my time dressing so foolishly. It was humiliating, but didn’t ultimately stop me from wearing what I wanted. I mused privately on the hypocrisy of parents lecturing their kids on fashion and music, given how they must have received a version of the same lecture a generation before. And considering the things I could have been getting into like sex and drugs and other trouble, a bandana around my ankle and a poster of Simon LeBon on my bedroom wall seems downright wholesome.

I don’t know if ankle bandanas are enjoying a resurgence or if the purple-haired stylist was just in a retro mood when she got dressed this morning, but it put a smile on my face. Yeah, it looked kind of silly, but so what? It’s not like she was flashing her buttcrack in low rider pants, or struggling to keep a too short skirt from revealing her underwear. A little extra square of fabric certainly beats a lack of fabric.

My Aunties should have been cool enough to let me enjoy my folly without ratting me out and making me feel stupid. Every generation has their “ankle bandana”, after all, and silly fashions and swooning after unattainable rock stars is a safe and sensible way for teenagers to mature without getting hurt. One little piece of fabric will not be anyone’s personal downfall.

I took these shots at the Birds of Prey demonstration at the Canadian National Exhibition about a month ago. Although the owl was actually the hardest to photograph, I managed to get a few decent shots. The eagle and the kestrel shots (there were four birds in total at the demonstration) didn’t turn out well – I couldn’t get any face shots at all, and truth be told, the kestrel was a little scruffy looking.

This shot took so many tries.

Mostly, he was an aloof fellow who spent a lot of time ignoring me.

Or yelling his protest at an ear-piercing level.

A couple of weeks ago, Greg and I went to Black Creek Pioneer Village for their first annual beer festival. It was a bit of a trek by TTC (about an hour and twenty minutes each way), but that you can even get there at all by public transportation is kind of cool. Not getting out to the ‘burbs all that much, I sort of expected the village to be in the wilderness, but it’s bounded by Jane Street, Steeles Avenue and the York University campus. But the village itself is secluded and genuinely feels as if you’ve gone back in time. Based around the original farm buildings from the mid-1800s, many of the other buildings came from other areas of Toronto and Ontario and were all put together in the 1960s to form a park. It’s a favourite with school groups, as would be expected.

I didn’t take a lot of photos of the buildings, but more of the flora and fauna we encountered.

The apple orchard. We smelled this before we saw it. If there’s any smell that says “autumn” it’s the scent of ripe apples.

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This is really one of those posts that I’m creating for myself as a future surprise. Four or five months from now, in the dark, grey, depressing days of late winter, when everything is covered in that layer of crusty road salt and the promise of spring in not yet in the air, I will be sitting here at my computer, listlessly killing time while I’m supposed to be doing something productive, and I will come across this post, and I will remember.

The last bouquet of summer sweet peas, bought at the farmer’s market from the sweet family who run the apiary and primarily sell honey. I nestled the small bouquet into a bag containing a bunch of basil to protect them from getting bumped and bruised by things like apples and potatoes.

The smell that emanated from that bag fills my nostrils still; the peppery sweetness of the sweet peas combined with the savoury, hearty smell of the basil. I’m sure some of the people sitting near me on the streetcar ride home must have thought me either a bit crazy or that I was a huffer with a secret stash of gasoline, so often did I smush my face into the folds of the bag to get at the leaves and flowers, inhaling deeply and emitting a loud sigh.

Sweet peas are quite possibly my favourite flower ever, up there with the wild roses my Grandmother used to have in her front yard, and the lilacs my Mom craves every spring. Like so many smells, they’ve got an emotional attachment, and remind me of the huge planter my Dad fills every year. I always had a bouquet of sweet peas in my room during the summer as a girl, and now as a grown-up, I buy a new bouquet for my desk every week when I visit the market – until September when they’re finally gone for another year.

I came across a plus-size magazine the other day. This one is called Figure and is at least the third or fourth attempt in the past ten years to create a fashion magazine exclusively for larger women. Both Grace and Amaze appear to have folded and there was another one from some years back that I can’t remember the name of. Can these folks manage where others have not? It’s hard to say. Supposedly 60% of women in North America are a size 14 or bigger, yet that demographic seems to prefer the glossy fantasy of regular fashion magazines over seeing women who look like them sporting clothes they could actually wear. And with only so many plus-sized clothing companies around to run ads in these magazines, the base of potential advertisers is significantly smaller.

What obviously needs to happen – but never will – is that mainstream fashion magazines need to embrace all sizes of women within their pages – on an ongoing basis, preferably based on actual reader demographics. That is, if 50% of the readers are over a size 14, then 50% of the clothing shown should also be shown on models who are over a size 14.

We’ll continue when you all get up off the floor and wipe your eyes from laughing so hard.

One person who is making headway into the world of fashion with the message that fat women can be beautiful too is Gok Wan. He is the host of the inspiring and innovative UK show, How to Look Good Naked (showing in Canada on the W Network, although they’ve started with Season 2, for some reason). And despite the title, the show is not about dieting at all, but about learning to accept and love your body just the way it is. Gok does this by insisting the participants on his show strip down to their skivvies (or less) and then putting them side by side with other women of the same shape so they can get some perspective, as well as hanging a gigantic poster of them in their undies out in the public square. What for most women would be fraught with embarrassment, shame (wear your nice knickers when going to see Gok!) and humiliation generally turns to joy as passersby are asked if they think the body in the poster (the face is not shown) is unattractive. Maybe the British are just terribly polite, but the majority all seemed to think the body was just right, despite the owner considering themselves to be dumpy and doughy.

He then goes on to give fashion advice a la What Not to Wear with a strong focus on proper foundation garments. Gok is all about the engineering. From a personal standpoint, this is the only part that bugged me, but that’s probably because I’ve got a hate-on for polyester of any type, and those scary gut-cincher things just look like shiny beige torture. I can’t even mention them without imagining how hot and sweaty and itchy they must be. But yeah – I hate the plastic.

I’d love to live in a world where fat gals didn’t need separate stores or separate magazines, where people of all shapes and sizes just blended together and the superficial stuff didn’t matter. I hope the magazine does well, that it manages to survive where others haven’t, but I look forward to the day when we don’t need it – when a hundred women can stand on TV in their underwear, all proud and happy of the bodies they inhabit, whatever their size and shape.

The Labour Day parade goes right by our apartment. It’s senseless to try and ignore it – it’s loud and raucous and it takes a full two and a half hours for all 25,000 marchers to go past. That’s the right number of 0s there. Crazy, huh?

Parade marchers get into the Canadian National Exhibition (the finish point of the parade) for free on Labour day. Many groups had extras of the wristbands that are given to marchers and were handing them out to people watching the parade at the end of the route where we were. We were offered wristbands a half dozen times – next year we’ll plan on taking some and joining the crowd.

What I didn’t know was that Labour Day actually started in Toronto, but apparently this was the first place where people marched, in 1872. There’s a long history of the city being a “union-town” and with so much history, it’s easy to understand why.

People marched with their kids and dogs and families. Almost all unions had snazzy matching shirts or even jackets. There were plenty of bands, especially steel drum bands. While I still find it hard to muster up sympathy for things like the recent job cuts that will affect unions like CAW (Canadian Auto Workers) because I really believe there should be fewer cars on the road, I grew up in a union household (both my parents belonged to unions, as did I at my first job working at a hospital), so for the most part, I believe and agree with the presence and power of the unions.

The parade is really a celebration of humanity and what people can achieve when they pull together. Our society owes a lot to the work of unions, and while they’re not always perfect, they do a lot to make our quality of life one of the best in the world.

The Toronto Firefighters pipe band.

Hotel workers union.

SEIU and Tommy Douglas, father of the NDP.

Hellooooo! The Steelworkers float.

Opening photo of the gal in the Caribana Mas costume was also part of the steelworkers group. She walked the entire parade route, including one fairly steep hill where she had to drag that costume with her – in 4-inch heels.

A friend sent me a link to photos of my high school reunion last year. I didn’t attend, didn’t even know about it until months after the fact, but it’s still left me feeling very uneasy and odd. I’m not sure I would have attended, to tell the truth, even if I had known.

I was a bit of an outcast in high school; the fat girl, the punk freak. I didn’t really fit in anywhere, and spent more time hanging out with friends from another local high school than I did my own. The day they handed me that diploma was the last I saw of my high school friends. When I got on a plane a year later and moved a thousand miles away, that was pretty much the last I heard from anyone.

Twenty years later, Facebook has allowed people to find each other very easily and I’ve been in contact with a couple of people who I genuinely liked back then. It’s been fun to reconnect, learn about each others’ lives and make plans to meet up the next time I’m home.

But these were the few people I liked and trusted. I’m not sure how I feel about my own personal “mean girls”.

One thing that shocks me the most is how these folks have changed physically. Twenty years is a long time, and everyone has aged. But they almost all look older than I imagine myself to look. I don’t think that’s vanity on my part – I don’t feel 38, and I’m pretty sure I don’t look it. But some of these folks look ten years older than that. It’s disconcerting.

And you never get an honest story from people at high school reunions, anyway. A friend who went pointed out that “people don’t really reveal anything… everyone wants everyone else to think their life is the shining example of success but no one really gets down and dirty and says, yeah, I had a drug addict boyfriend I lived with for a while… that sucked” .

So the whole exercise is about pretending. Did you turn out okay? Better than everyone else? Did you get fat? Skinny? I don’t remember you having that nose.

Which makes me wonder why we care. Why we still, two decades later, want to impress the people who made our lives so very miserable. Because no matter how mature we believe ourselves to be, walking into that room of our graduating class peers causes all the old lines to be drawn again. I’m told one gal showed up and refused to talk to half of the people there. Which begs the question of why she bothered to go in the first place.

As the outcast freak of my graduating class, I probably had/have more to prove than the whole lot of them put together. I would have had to go back not just better and stronger than who I was, but better and stronger than all of them. To prove that they were wrong back then. To show them that despite their teasing and torture and general hatefulness, I turned out not just okay, but great.

That’s where perspective comes in. Because while I think I did turn out pretty great, while I’ve had an incredibly interesting life up to this point, in their eyes it wouldn’t matter. I ran a record label, cooked for rock stars, and now run a successful web site with a staff of 16. But I don’t have two kids, a picket fence and a secure but boring office job. Based on their value system, I’d still be considered a failure.

In those photos, everyone looks so very normal. And conservative. Safe. No one is revealing the skeletons and dirty secrets they all must have. Last night I dreamed I did attend my high school reunion, only all the pretend shiny happy faces came as their real selves. One guy had lost an index finger and was a cross-dresser. The gal with the fake tan and the new nose turned out to be a junkie. Another had a massive collection of child porn. They stood up one by one and revealed who they really were. Because those people in the picture, all smiles and happy to see one another – that’s no where near the real story.

And Happy Birthday to my new blog.

September always feels much more like the new year than January to me. Despite being a childfree lady of somewhat middle age, I still get that urge every September to go buy crayons and glue and scribblers and binders.

Besides the kids going back to school, September is the start of the cultural season for things like theatre and ballet. People get back into a regular schedule after the lazy days of summer where anything goes.

So it seemed like the perfect time for me to start a new blog.

For many years, I kept an account over at LiveJournal, but was never completely happy with the format. Initially I started a journal because all my friends were doing it, but it was never what I truly wanted it to be. There’s an ongoing joke that bloggers start blogging because they have meaningful and interesting things to say to the world, but end up using the forum to mostly bitch about work and talk about what they had for dinner. This was much more the case at LiveJournal where many people took the “journal” part very seriously.

Which is fine, if that’s what you’re in it for. But I’m not.

Leaves and Petals will be the place for what I call my “pretty writing” – observances of things I come across that happen to move me or inspire me, and which I think others will enjoy as well. No work bitching, no dinner posts (I have a food blog at Save Your Fork for stuff like that, although it skews more towards food politics than dinner), just (hopefully) interesting and amusing commentary on the world as I see it.

I hope you’ll stick around to watch the progress.

Cheers!