Christmas Tree

It starts with Lenore telling me that we’re getting our Christmas tree on Sunday November 30^th, a day you might recall as being balmy and green and containing no scent of the impending holiday whatsoever.   I had a grant to finish writing that day.  I also some qualms about such an early start to Christmas, so I resisted.  ‘Fine’ she said, ‘but I want you to get a tree with the boys in the next few days’.

‘Fine’ I replied.

On Tuesday Dec. 2, the weather had turned.  It was damp, cold and grey in the kind of way that your soul gets when it’s finished writing a grant.  Definitely more wintery, just not the kind of wintery that you want for cutting a tree.  So I picked up the boys from school, drove to a gas station, and took stock of how unprepared we were.   Yes, I brought a saw. No, I forgot bungees to secure the tree; no, we only have four gloves between the three of us; no, my youngest is wearing water-absorbing surf shoes; no, I  don’t exactly remember where the Cut-Your-Own tree place is. 

No, I’m not in the holiday spirit.

I asked the children if they honestly, logically felt that today was the right day to get a tree.   They became quiet and then did the most manipulative thing imaginable; they became mature.  “Dad, we don’t want to make you get a tree...we’ll be okay”

So I start driving up Highway Six to tree country.  I notice on the way the leaning pile of fulsome spruces outside the Terra Greenhouses.  I say to the boys “you know, we could save time and money and just buy one there.”   They agree, but I somehow can’t make myself do it.

We keep driving north.  It begins to snow.  Hard, angry snow.  It makes the sign for ‘Safari Road’ sound like an ironic joke.   We find the Cut-Your-Own place, the same place as always.  We tumble out of the car.   All I am thinking is that this is a mistake.   We are going to pay forty, maybe sixty dollars for a tree.  We are going to get cold and miserable in return for this extra expense. 

As we walk through what is otherwise a beautiful tree farm, I find that I am still trying to talk my kids out of cutting a tree down.  Instead of convincing them, all I manage to do is whittle down their spirit.

We walk to the back end of the property.  Instantly the snow turns from hard and biting into soft puffy snow, holiday snow.  It’s the kind of snow that happens in the movies when the asshole has an epiphany and then stops being an asshole and then suddenly there’s puffy snow.   We find a tree by unanimous decision.  A natty tiny tree, not what I would have expected my kids to choose.   The David Niven, the Joel Grey, the Bruno Mars of Christmas trees.   I settle my knee onto the ground and start sawing.  The cold wet begins to soak through my jeans.  It’s an uncomfortable sensation, but it also connects me to every single other time I have cut a tree down in my life.   The first time my dad let me use the saw; the first time I drove out and cut a Christmas tree entirely alone; the first time I brought one of my own children.

We drag it back.  My kids are elated.   I give $45 to an older Dutch man whose look and accent are eerily similar to my Norwegian father.  I get in the car and feel a deep pang.   My father has been dead for over a decade; he never knew my kids.  My sister died just a few weeks ago after a heroic battle with cancer; she won’t be with us this holiday.  Crying right now I’m sure would become one of those spooky ‘dad’s having a nervous breakdown’ moments, plus the kids have only just had their good mood restored, so I decide not to.

We drive home.   The snow has built up on the road just enough to remove all the traction.  I start playing and re-playing the recent conversation I had with my mechanic about ‘pushing one more season out of my winter tires’.  I go up and down the steep hills that typify Safari Road.  I study the deep embankments on either side, and start concocting strategies for getting roadside assistance should a catastrophe occur.  I start calculating the regret I will feel if anything goes wrong.  Meanwhile, the children are singing along to classic rock.

We hit highway 8.  It’s slow to a crawl, but the roads are safer. I somehow know that Highway 403 is backed up as a result of lingering complications from the mudslide that disabled it last week, echoes of which have reached this particular highway.   It takes us over an hour to get back to Hamilton.   We are just in time to pick up Lenore from an appointment in Westdale.  She’s waiting outside a supermarket, near a leaning stack of tree cadavers priced less than half of what we just paid.

We drive home.   Everyone is exhausted.  We eat eggs and salad for dinner.  We put the tree up in the living room.  Everything is soothing and bouyant. 

I don’t know what to take away from the day.  I can’t say that it was a pleasant experience getting a tree this year, but I certainly don’t regret it.   I guess the reason I cut a tree down for the holiday is that it has never felt like an unconscious transaction.   Even when it is fraught, the experience always seems to have merit.  This year, cutting a tree was like the very best kind of Christmas music or Christmas story, the kind that seems to hold love, melancholy, trepidation and wonder together in a perfect balance.

Amplify!

So here’s the next chapter in my tentative foray into democratic participation.  I have been putting together an event with an organic farmer, Chris Krucker (Manorun Farm).  We come from different spheres but we share the opinion that Brian McHattie is an ethical and talented leader whom the city would be wise to elect, but who likely needs a ramped up effort from his supporters to do so.   Together (with some encouragement from Mixed Media owner Dave Kuruc) we have quickly hashed out the basics of a bare bones event:  Testify! Amplify! Multiply!  It happens in less than two days-- this Wednesday October 22, 7pm, Melrose Church (on the corner of Homewood and Locke). There will be a coffee and a microphone.  And pure, unfettered belief.

Chris’ vision for this evening is, I think, more sophisticated than mine.  He wants to use this event to encourage the notion of ‘connectors’ (with a nod here to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point”); that there are at least ten people who straddle divergent social spheres within this city who can push the urgency of this election onto another ten people, who in turn can, push another ten and so forth.  It’s the idea of stoking one’s own conviction and then making it public, and in turn infectious.  The good kind of infectious. I like it because at its core is a fairly non-technological, non-gimmicky desire to simply connect people, have them speak, and collectively build their magnetic charge.   A good thing to do, election or not.

My vision is more bombastic I think.  It rests on a fantasy where a bunch of people get together in a space, make testimonials which get video recorded by people’s phones and then uploaded to social media, hopefully going viral in such a transformative way that the city becomes happy forever.  The unrealistic kind of infectiousness.  The kind you see in uplifting Hollywood film montages where people get their shit together in the three minutes it takes for a saccharine pop song to play out.

Yes.  I believe with my whole heart that Brian McHattie should be our mayor. But I’d be a liar if I didn’t also admit that I desperately want to be part of one of those feel good pop-song montages of people getting their shit together.   It’s because of the twelve-year old inside me that will never mature, or adjust his expectations in a reasonable way.  In other words, an urge for civic participation that relies on delusion.

But who cares.  It’s the effort that matters.  You can come on Wednesday and knit yourself into a fabric of people who want better things from their city, or come and fall headfirst into my happy and cliché-riddled fantasy.  Or do a little of both. 

Go McHattie Go!  Run hard and free like a mighty stallion!  See you Wednesday!!

TESTIFY!!

It occurred to me, perhaps much too late, that this upcoming Hamilton municipal election is unlike any other in which I have participated.  There is actually a candidate that I believe should have the job.  Not just a candidate I think is better than the rest, or is the one whom I can tolerate the most, or is the one whom I am least repulsed by.  No.  I actually think that Brian McHattie would make a good mayor.  Everything I’ve heard, witnessed, or read about the guy suggests to me that he is hard working, ethical, consensus building, and is not driven by his ego; he also has some grip on what I believe is the emerging new identity of this city.  

I can’t remember actually wanting someone to be mayor before.

What do you do with such a feeling?  Up until now, I have maintained my habit of being both silent and modest with my political beliefs, and have let this campaign drift along, fretting when I hear the polls, comforting myself when I see the lawn signs, but that’s about it.  It’s wrong.  I should be more alert to how rare it is to actually have faith in a political candidate.  It’s an event like a junebug emerging from its seventeen-year underground gestation, or a solar eclipse.   So unusual it needs special attention.

I also have this growing suspicion that there are lots of people in this city who harbour similar feelings.  Good, modest people who are bound by similar discretion and entrenched habits of remaining clear of the political fray.  People who right now wrestle uncomfortably, like a pubescent teen, terrified and aroused with strange new municipal convictions they’ve neither invited nor experienced, hesitant to do anything because they know it will only come out awkward.  Lord knows that's how it is with me.

I know there is just shy of two weeks before the vote; so yeah, I know I've left it too late.  But I can’t help wondering what would happen if all us people who normally clamp down on their municipal passions, just started talking, or posting, and making public their opinions.   What if there was big messy surge of political fervour these last two weeks?  How awesomely would that put a charge in Hamilton’s psychic cosmos?  

To ease my conscience therefore, to make one slight step towards citizenship, I will now awkwardly attempt to go beyond the work currently being done by my lawn sign.  I will now testify:

Go McHattie! Go Strong into the Fray! I am still too timid to be an official part of your campaign, but that is beside the point!  I believe in you!

Who’s with me?

SuperSmall 2014

photo: Ralf Vandermeulen

My biggest complaint about Hamilton’s Supercrawl is strangely enough also my biggest compliment. It goes like this: I don’t ever get to enjoy the headline events 'cos I get sucked into a haze, wandering with no intention, talking to a zillion people, getting distracted by a myriad of tiny moments.

In fact, every year I grow a little more convinced that there are actually two events going on, one that features rock and noise and fire and bombastically complicated food, and the other that just features people absorbed in multiple acts of subtle communion.  But the two events somehow need each other.  The spectacle and chaos somehow allow the tinier moments to occur without them getting too precious.  If there wasn’t a constant throbbing din, it would be just a bunch of people standing around telling each other how much they love each other, and that would feel weird.

Conversely, the communal spirit humanizes Supercrawl in a way that doesn’t often happen with festivals of that scale.   I mean yeah, the GreenBelt Harvest Picnic is communal and beautiful, but it is also a more sedate setting, a more homogeneous group of people, a single tribe who agree on a rootsy backbeat in both their music and their food.  So it makes sense.  

photo: Jeff Tessier

Supercrawl is bigger, more urban, more diverse, with no single point of focus, and worst of all, it generates these nerve-wrackingly tight throngs of shoulder to shoulder people.  Supercrawl has the bad paintings, the super-precious busker-singers, and hucksters who sell magical pieces of fuzzy crap on an invisible string that your children will lust over and never ever get to work.  It has the guy with drill and the potato and the deep fryer who makes some kind of twisty soggy french fry pinwheel abomination.  So much to panic and fume over, yet the pervasive neighbourliness is never shaken.

And that neighbourliness gives you the will to root out those moments of craft and polish that count: Rudi's boutique popsicles, or the zippy screen prints of the Jelly Brothers, the fashion of Vespidame or Blackbird, or the ragtime washboard zeal of the Vaudvillian, holding their crowd without a stage.   

The opening gesture of my 2014 Supercrawl experience was my ten year old son prostrating himself to kissed the road.  “That’s what I’m talking about’, he says.  And this is what’s great about kids, is that they don’t put their pleasures in a hierarchy.  Getting to walk down the centre of the street was as palpable a thrill as Circus Danger, or whatever they were called  (I didn’t get to see them because I was chatting).  My other son went into a twenty minute epiphany because someone had propped a bubble machine in a second story window. 

For seven hours on Saturday, I had the pleasure to be the MC at the Supercrawl fashion stage.   It initially felt awkward –I have virtually no relationship to fashion---but then became nearly sublime.  The stage set up was relatively humble, and at full tilt could only service a crowd of maybe two hundred people.  And yeah, you had to pump out thumpy rock or disco music to make it work, yeah I had to yell like a tent preacher, but only to initiate a fairly intimate ritual of people just carefully looking, appreciating these details and tiny flourishes that can make clothes and people so interesting.

And speaking of interesting clothes, twice over the weekend I put on one of Andrew McPhail’s anxiety t-shirts (he bedazzled the word of a number of personal fears—'moron', 'cad', 'twat', 'wimp', etc.—and loaned the shirts out for the weekend).  I liked this project because it obligated you to be a disseminator of McPhail’s premise; it became something you had to explain to people in your own words.  And his premise was precisely the opposite of the ‘plop and drop’ works that vie for attention by concentrating themselves into a single declaration.  McPhail succeeded through dispersal, a thousand disjointed messages wandering every which way.

photo: Andrew McPhail

On Saturday night,  walking home with my family along Barton St we come across a handwritten sign on cardboard in front of All Souls Catholic Church.  It read ‘tacos 2$’.  We went in, had a brief tour of the church’s awesome ceiling murals and then went down to a basement joyously occupied by a chunk of this city’s Latin Catholic community.  Disco salsa on the dance floor, families convened around tables, a bevy of Mexican women serving traditional food in the kitchen.  It was the festival in microcosm:  Grand art, loud music, hot food, but at its heart, just a bunch of people happy to hang out. 

And if we didn't catch sight of that tiny crappy carboard sign outside the church, we would have missed it.