Tag: Montreal

Tearing up my Bucket List!

compost watercolor copy — ‘My compost bucket’ watercolor © J.H. Hart 2018

A bucket list is that strange collection of wishes that every middle class retiree believes that she or he must fulfill and check-off in order to die happy. The items on the list are usually in the form of exotic travel (an African safari; a visit to the Galapagos; hiking the Amazon canopy); or a once in a lifetime experience -because it is too expensive for those of us who are not billionaires to afford to do more than once!

Our bucket lists send herds of us, baby boomers, traipsing through the Louvre; invading Venice from off cruise ships; and destroying pristine natural habitats for a couple of selfies and the bragging rights to say that we were there, even if only for a couple of hours.

And because it is a list, there must be more than one thing on it: forty things to do before turning forty years old, or as many things as we can brainstorm in an evening. The irony, of course, is that running through each item on our bucket list abstracts us from the beauty of our actual surroundings and alienates us from the people with whom we live and to whom we owe our time, money, and compassion. It is a good example of how more can actually be less: less fulfilling; less authentic; less likely to make us happy.

The bucket list is the transmutation of lived spontaneous experience into a commodity. The bucket list (from the expression “kicking the bucket” meaning dying) is a perfect way to exploit people at the time of life when they are feeling most mortal. The end of their life is approaching, and they are often reassessing what their life has been like. Hypercapitalism, through the media, aggravates the feelings of disappointment in the little we did; and remorse for the great deal that we haven’t done. It is the strange and unnatural idea of “never having enough!”

So I have decided to tear up my bucket list! (Well, to be honest, I never actually made a list, as I have been rather busy!) Instead, I am thinking about what I can do in the relatively short time left to me to improve the place in which I have chosen to live. There are no iguanas in Montreal, but the web of life here is as truly beautiful, complex, and unique as anywhere on Earth and it needs my support. And the people amongst whom I find myself also deserve my help and compassion.

And if I feel the urge to make a bucket list, I will make it backwards listing the gifts that I have already been given; and feeling gratitude for how unusually full my life has already been!

Taking care of ‘Stuff’

trash july 1 ,2018

July 1st, two weeks ago, was moving day in Montreal. Between 200,000 to 240,000 people moved their residences.The streets were filled up with worn out mattresses, broken furniture, and garbage bags of trash, recyclables, and reusable objects, all thrown together highly piggy because their owners were too rushed or too uninterested to sort out their stuff, or to take the still usable items to the local Salvation Army or Renaissance thrift stores.

It is shocking and saddening to watch these folks, who are clearly not well to do (most of them are moving themselves with the help of friends), being so wasteful with their possessions. It is as if the physical world has no meaning or reality for them. They have taken as a fact of living that it is normal to buy then to trash; to buy then to trash; to buy then to trash; and to repeat this process ad infinitum as if the resources of the earth are unlimited and they will have access to these resources forever!

But there is a secondary assumption at work here, and that is the belief that taking care of one’s stuff is somehow demeaning work! The goal appears to be to grow wealthy so that one can hire another person (less rich or lucky) to clean up and take care of one’s rapidly accumulating stuff.

So the skills of cleaning, tidying, repairing, and ordering are no longer learned nor respected. Once the skill of sewing is forgotten, a rip in a garment sentences the piece of clothing to the garbage unless one has the money and time to take it to a seamstress to be fixed. The ability to fix broken furniture is beyond the knowledge of most people even if all that is needed is wood glue & clamps. And in a disposable culture such as ours, the time needed to learn these skills makes the learning not worth doing. It is cheaper and faster to buy it new.

There also seems to me a final reason that what the care of things demands is beyond our present day understanding or interest. The world of objects, of our stuff, operates in the physical sphere which is bounded by time and energy, unlike the virtual world. It takes discipline and the ability to stay focussed to organize and pack up a household, to take on these mundane tasks in the physical world; and this is qualitatively different than our experience in instantaneous online reality where most of us spend so much of our time.

Is it any surprise then that, as we are unable take care of the simple objects that make up our households, we find the natural world with its complexity, its vastly slower and infinitely longer time; and its profound subtleties beyond our understanding or concern?

A Yankee travels Dallas

shadows at bus stop 2-18 watercolor web — At the bus stop: just me and the bus sign.

Some of the things I do here in Dallas, like walking, are seen as something only a Yankee would do, though I think that taking the bus is a very Southern tradition especially for working people-think of the Montgomery bus strike.

Certainly, my experience of using the bus system here in Dallas has been very different than using the bus and metro system in Montreal. One similarity (and a good one it is!) is that in both places I, as a senior (over sixty-five years old), can buy a monthly pass for $40 U.S. (49$ CAD, which is roughly the same price).

The big difference seems to be that the transit system in Dallas is not the first choice for getting around town. The buses are busy during the morning and evening rush hours, but are almost empty on the weekends. They also run on once an hour schedules during the weekends. Sometimes I have been the only person on the bus or the DART trains in the middle of a Saturday afternoon!

It is a peculiar sensation to wait for a bus or a train in a deserted station or all alone at a bus stop. In Montreal, there are always people in the trains, or getting out at my stop even if it is after midnight on a Friday or Saturday night! But here the preference for the young & hip is Uber.

The mass transit here is also, like the neighbourhoods, de facto segregated by income, race, and ethnicity. Almost all the passengers are people of color, either working folks or indigents. However, I have found the atmosphere on the buses very warm and welcoming, much of which is the result of engaged drivers and a Southern feeling for hospitality even to strangers.

The drivers too are, almost to a person, very considerate of their passengers. The buses have a ramp that can be let down to allow people in wheelchairs to roll up more easily into the bus. Then the drivers must get out of their seats to attach the wheelchairs to the bus. And when the disabled person needs to get off, the drivers have to disconnect the chairs again, and let down (and then take up) the ramps. This is a very important service that the Dallas transit offers their customers, but as there is no one on board to help the drivers with this job, the buses often run behind schedule!

So, once again, a better choice for transportation is in place, but the difficulty is getting people to opt for this choice, and by upping the ridership, create improvements to the service.

Compost Orphan

compost watercolor

This is my lovely bucket of kitchen scraps: lemon rinds, coffee grinds, avocado pits, carrot ends, beet skins, and Chinese cabbage leaves. One half of all the garbage I generate in my kitchen is from my mainly plant-based diet. But I am bereft! I am a compost orphan. I wander the streets of my very well kept, highly manicured neighbourhood looking for a place to dump my compost!

Occasionally a landscaping company comes through the condo compound where I live; and the guys with the loud leaf blowers kindly allow me to add what they call my “organics” to the bags of leaves that they collect and haul off to some distant leaf composting station which I have yet to locate.

But I generate too much compost too fast, and I am on my second bucket by the time they come back two weeks later. I have tried neighbours, but no one here gardens! (It is a lovely community artfully landscaped, but a virtual green desert.) I went and asked at all the local groceries including Whole Foods: no joy! Even the local juicing place doesn’t compost (sigh*).

I will admit to being very spoiled. When I lived in the country in Vermont, I had composting piles out back by the garden beds. Even in Providence, Rhode Island, a good sized city, I was able to build a small compost heap behind my apartment building. And then, of course, there is Montreal, which just instituted curb-side compost pickup (be still my heart!) last year in my neighbourhood (Verdun).

I have even considered starting a worm farm in my apartment. But though it would take care of the kitchen scraps by turning them into fabulous worm castings, perfect for fertilizing a garden, I would then be reduced to trying to find a place to donate the worm fertilizer. Also, this is a temporary stay for me, and my daughter is adamant that she will not adopt the worms when I return North.

It is times like this that I have the unsettling feeling that I have moved to an alternative reality!