Your faithful correspondent is cheery. It’s a beautiful day, crisp but sunny with leaves of scarlet and gold flying everywhere. The first game of the World Series is in T.O. tonight, and the city is abuzz with Blue Jays frenzy. Everyone is wearing merch, and streetcars have Let’s Go Blue Jays on the scrollbar above the windscreens. I feel disloyal that I’m without gear and will not watch the game tonight. Though I’ll regularly check the score and text my children happy or sad emojis.

In October 1993, Sam was nine and Anna was twelve when we sat in my bed at 10.30 p.m., watching the Jays in the final game of the World Series. When we finally won, I opened the window and we heard, even in our tranquil neighbourhood, the honking and shouting and celebrating. I’m glad Canadians have something that makes them happy and more importantly, united, a community. We all need that right now. A World Series win doesn’t matter to me, but it does to my family, my city, and even my country. Baseball is an American game, and our scrappy team is climbing to the top of the heap. Elbows up!

More cheer last Saturday, with many millions rallying against the fascists in Washington. Such a joyful day, with those absurd blow-up costumes, fantastic signs, marchers dancing and drumming. I went to the rally here opposite the American consulate, small in comparison, of course, but fervent. Below, the famous frogs, and neighbour Nancy with her blue hair and her sign.

See that grey head at the demonstration, above? Familiar?

On that note, about the latest Cabbagetown lunch on Tuesday – my neighbour Doug Fisher invites interesting people to speak while we eat sandwiches and ask questions. This time, it was conservative journalist and political analyst Tasha Kheiridden, and I almost didn’t go, visualizing a Canadian Ann Coulter, shrill and vicious, nobody I want to encounter. But she was terrific; she hates Trump and Poilieve as much as the rest of us, and says, “I’m a homeless Conservative.” She thinks PP will pass his January leadership test because it’s been rigged in his favour. When I asked how it’s possible the party supports such a vile, petty man, she checked polls on her phone and told me exactly how many Canadians support both him and Trump — a horrifyingly high number, though I forget what it was.

Sigh.

In the last post, I mentioned my interview with Merilyn Simonds about her new memoir Walking with Beth – not me, I hasten to add, although I’d walk with Merilyn anytime. My new Substack details what we talked about.

https://touchpointsawriterstruth.substack.com/p/extraordinary-ordinary-people

And Sunday is So True. Eight powerful essays have been edited and re-edited, eight readers have rehearsed with me in person or on Zoom, and we’re ready steady go. I love that we’re sharing these voices, these fine stories, with the world.

I’m reading an interesting library book: Melting Point: family, memory, and the search for a promised land. It’s about how in 1907, a Zionist settlement came to be created in Texas. I won’t read it all, but I’m fascinated by her methods: the whole story is told with quotes from newspapers, books, and letters of the time. Although her great-grandfather was instrumental in the move, the author, Rachel Cockerell, is invisible, just the person doing an enormous amount of research. Been there, done that, covering a bit of the same territory for Finding the Jewish Shakespeare, my book about my own great-grandfather, .

And finally, the Merriam-Webster dictionary online has a groovy feature: you can find out what words or phrases came into being in the year of your birth. In 1950, a few particularly relevant to me: kvetch and schlub, oral history, side hustle, BLT, dicey, funny farm, and goofball.

Also LSD, which I dropped once in about 1972 before going again to see Woodstock, and did not do again.

Over and out from this goofball schlub, whose dicey side hustle is oral history (more or less). Off to the funny farm. Go Jays go!