“I’ve been waiting for a new post, Miss Lazypants,” wrote my friend Chris. Jeez! Take a few days off from blogging and they’re on your case.

Chugging along here. Keeping busy. Went to the symphony Saturday night to hear Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt play Bach and Mozart piano concertos, conducting the symphony at the same time. My parents used to go see her in Ottawa in the seventies and admired her enormously, and so do I. She’s lithe and graceful with hands that move at lightning speed; she effortlessly commanded that vast beautiful room. The music was a banquet. (Photo below before it started.)

On Sunday I took Sam, his girlfriend Amy and Wayson to dinner at the Pearl Court, the Gerrard street restaurant that’s Wayson’s mainstay. They know him like family there and chatter in Cantonese which he speaks haltingly but impressively nonetheless. And then back for “The Durrells in Corfu” which Sam had taught me how to PVR – save on the TV. Barely understood how but managed to find and replay it, to the delight of my older friend and me. The young ones had gone by then. The Durrells in Corfu definitely not their kind of show.

On Monday, a huge treat: I went to hear David Suzuki speak as a guest of Ryerson’s Chang School, the school of continuing studies where I teach. He’s an extraordinary speaker, fiery, funny, his speech apocalyptic yet warm with personal asides and details about his own life. He showed that we have known since the seventies about the perils of climate change and yet our western world has done nothing. Harper is his great villain – “He should be in jail,” he said, and I agree. He spoke of how happy he was when Trudeau was elected, immediately dealing with gender parity in cabinet and setting off for the Paris climate accord. But, unfortunately, “He gets a big fat zero for action.”

The problem, he said, is that the changes needed to save our species from extinction are longterm, and politicians simply want to be re-elected and are unwilling to take the courageous risk of making them. Also, they’re in thrall to corporations. He said: Where is the place for the sacred in our
society? We value all the wrong things. We value the economy, the market –
created by human beings. We do not value the things that keep us alive: air, water, the good soil and sunlight that produce our food. Earth
air fire and water – sacred to First Nations people, meaningless to
us.

Of course, good advice for Teach too, who is dallying as always. A student asked me, with all I do, how do I have time to write, and the correct answer is, really, I don’t.