Tag: As It Happens

Work In Progress

WordPress prompt: What’s your dream job?

I‘m happy to report I’ve already had dream jobs. A couple of them.

I was a researcher and fact checker at Maclean’s newsmagazine back in the day. That was sweet. They essentially paid me to read profusely and catch errors in articles written by successful, well-known, well-established writers before the articles were published.

Wow. Prestige AND money.

I loved my colleagues in the Maclean’s research department. Each and every one of them near genius. Geniuses in that understated kind of geeky way where those kind of people know a lot but don’t flash it around. They would have made excellent Jeopardy contestants.

So if there has been a recurring theme in my favorite jobs, it has been those where I learned a ton. As part of my radio producer role with As it Happens at CBC Radio, I HAD to buy about a dozen newspapers every day and as many magazines every month. That the CBC paid for! Then I got to read them cover to cover. I felt like I was stealing.

I don’t rightly know why learning and constantly stretching my brain are so important to me. I shouldn’t dismiss it. Had I not leaned that way from early on, I would not have been able to figure out and make sense of the looniness that plagued my childhood.

Smarts allowed me to gather three degrees which did wonders for my resume. The missing link, however, was that my emotional tank wasn’t quite as full. I finally figured out that with $5 and all of my degrees, I could get a coffee at any Starbucks. Likely closer to $8 now, but you get my point.

My real life work has been emotional. I had to learn self-regulation. I had to learn to sit with my pain. I had to learn not to act out my pain or fear or anger. This was by no means a dream job. But it was a vitally important one.

In emotional healing, I had to deploy the basics of project management. I could not achieve my life goals until the foundational elements I missed out on were addressed. That was terrifying but necessary work. A successful outcome was never guaranteed.

Emotional damage cost me relationships. It cost me jobs. It took a lot of what I had been or who I thought I was and threw it out the window. It turned me into someone I am only just getting to know. This me is more stable and more cautious than emotionally overwrought me. Less impulsive than I was in my youth. That alone is saving me a lot of grief.

So growing up has been neither a dream job or a cake walk. But it has been necessary. I’ve offloaded a lot of what doesn’t serve me any more. I’ve picked up some skills and attitudes along the way that I thought would be forever out of my reach.

And I’m living a life that at one time seemed would be an unattainable dream. My learning and growing process has been erratic and full of stops/starts and highs and lows. Like most everyone, I figure

Our minds and hearts are often kinder to us in retrospect than we are to ourselves. I look back now on those dream jobs I had and give thanks that they happened at all. Even situations that went south taught me lessons I needed to learn.

We all occasionally say: “I wish I’d known then, what I know now.” But we didn’t and we couldn’t and now here we are. So, like loving parents, we must applaud and love ourselves for what we’ve learned and how far we’ve actually come in life.

As a wife in a happy marriage with a daily blog I get to write, I’d say this is about as close to a dream job as I ever wanted. A far greater purpose than I could have imagined when I was young.

At the end of the day, no matter how wonderful your work is, and how much satisfaction you get from your career, a job can’t love you back.

That was the greatest learning and takeaway from all the jobs I got to do.

And I’m good with that.

Straight Up Medicinal

I am sitting in a fine little library in a small Southern town. Uncluttered open space. The unrelenting order of books lined up on book shelves. All at attention. Spines out. Neatly labeled. Looks like the Dewey decimal system from here but I could be wrong.

Big windows look out on local greenery and shrubbery. It is a big room, brightly lit both by sunlight and thoughtfully placed interior ceiling lights.

And it is quiet. So quiet.

So many of us struggle with externally imposed stress and relentless demands to perform and produce in this “modern era.” A library is a place where there are no demands upon you except to keep to yourself, keep your voice down and your clothes on. Generally agreed upon adult behavior.

Looking around a library imparts a clear sense of how much you don’t know and how much you have yet to learn. There are clear limits on what is possible for one human being to learn in one lifetime. I finally and reluctantly accepted that.

I had a crisis of faith midway through graduate school. Granted I was still very young. But I realized nothing I researched and wrote about in a thesis would add more than an iota of knowledge to all of the accumulated knowledge already available in the world. An atom’s worth at most.

Pretty piddly payoff.

The secret to studying something successfully for a long period of time is passion. You need to be pretty sure that the learning path you embark upon is going to to be just as fascinating to you years from now as it is now. And how would you know that? Well, there’s the rub. You likely won’t.

So much of life is coming upon something, sizing it up based on what we presently know and need, deciding whether or not that opportunity/experience/job/lover will fulfill our current needs and moving forward or back having considered all those things.

I’ve learned that passion sustains itself if it engages your heart and soul and not just your head. If you end up making a decision in any important areas – opportunity/experience/job/lover – using your head over your heart, the outcome isn’t likely to be all that gratifying or sustainable.

I should know. I used to make that mistake consistently. A job was likely to be a lot of fun? Oh no. Couldn’t take that job as it would be too frivolous. A job that would stretch my intellectual limits but had uncertain long-term prospects? Oh heavens no. I needed a steady, nine-to-five job with a predictable work schedule and future.

To my point and chagrin looking back, I remember a conversation with Carol Off, longtime host of the CBC Radio program As It Happens. She talked about a short-term contract she was offered and how she was looking forward to it and all that (her first season on-air with the national daily current affairs program).

I told her I would never be comfortable working like that and needed to find a “real job.” What a putz I was. I never ended up finding that “secure” job. To start, it turned out I hated the “predictability” of a nine-to-five job. I had more entrepreneurial spirit than I would own up to. I was looking for guidance from others and a “sure thing” for far too long into adulthood.

And as it turned out, I got a loathsome 9 – 5 government job. Carol Off went on to become a much respected, award winning multi-year national CBC radio host who kept working from contract to contract. So much for “real jobs.”

Happily, career angst was low on the list of neuroses I had to deal with. In the end, I worked. I made enough money to keep body and soul together. It “worked out.”

And all that I lived up until now led me to this beautiful little library where I am sitting today. In my working days, the library’s unflappable atmosphere of calm and order might well have driven me round the bend. Nowhere near exciting enough. Today I experience it as a tonic for the senses and the nerves.

Libraries never were designed to be social hotspots. They are designed for people who are comfortable with their own thoughts and self-directed intellectual pursuits. And little kids. Libraries are great for little kids with the right programs and activities and boundless learning opportunities.

Things I once mocked for what they weren’t and didn’t offer have now come full circle in my head. Libraries are oases of sanity and peace if you are inclined to appreciate that. Life is inherently risky and unstable. But if you have the courage to believe and follow your own instincts, you may end up where you wanted to be anyway.

Carol Off might agree with me if I met up with her now. The hell with security. Take the contract and run. You might just get a chance to learn what you are really capable of. Hindsight it is said, is always 20/20.

Death Unbecoming

Yesterday I learned about the recent death of an old CBC colleague radio producer Michael Finlay in Toronto. Michael was randomly assaulted in the dead of winter on the street by a stranger. He was out grocery shopping when he was attacked. He was pushed into a concrete planter on the sidewalk, breaking several ribs and puncturing his lung. He died of his injuries five days later.

It is important to mention that he was safely installed in the hospital when they decided to send him home just two days after his injuries were sustained. Soon after he arrived home, his condition rapidly deteriorated. He stopped breathing for about twenty minutes in the ambulance on the way back to the hospital. He was declared brain-dead three days later and was removed from life support.

If you had known Michael Finlay, you would understand how incongruous his name and the words brain-dead would be in the same sentence. Michael Finlay was one of those geniuses buffered by a cynical and sarcastic and caustic exterior. But as many of his closer CBC colleagues wrote about working with him, not only did he care deeply about the words and stories that were published on-air, he also cared about them personally.

My memories of Michael Finlay were the rigor and ridiculousness he brought to CBC’s As It Happens newsroom back in the day. It was during the Falkland Islands War and for reasons still not fully understood, the newsroom inherited custody of a huge and grotesque tarantula spider. Michael named s/he/it her Malvina – as the Falkland Islands were known in Spanish. My colleague and later boss Hal Doran took charge of the care and feeding of Malvina.  Four crickets from Eaton’s department store pet section every third Saturday.” Tarantulas don’t eat much,” he recalled dryly. I only hoped the cover on the thing’s tank was secure.

I was a so-called intern at As It Happens which was code for knowing essentially jack squat about radio production. The senior producers were accommodating and tolerant towards me personally. Behind closed doors, not so much I gathered. Michael Finlay was the brooding presence in the newsroom. He followed each producer’s progress as stories from around the world either came to fruition or blew up for some reason leaving a hole in the show that quickly had to be filled. Michael – rather Finlay as he was known – was intolerant of lightweight journalism. He often shook his head and complained that the upcoming show was going to be “a dog’s breakfast” or was “going down the toilet.”

Finlay once set me on a project to track down an English-speaking Pole. They were looking for someone who could speak to the mood in Gdansk, Poland, following a major development in the ongoing power struggle between communism and the Solidarność” labor movement. We all had to learn to pronounce Lech Walesa’s name correctly: WA-when-sa. Rube that I was I called the Gdansk Solidarność” office and reached someone who spoke English. The woman claimed to have no official role so I hung up and told Finlay. “Call her back!!” he roared. “She speaks English!!” Whoever she was, she was interviewed and ran on the show that night as a color piece about the mood in Gdansk.

I was there during an odd summer in the history of CBC and As It Happens. The NABET technicians who ran the boards and production studios were on strike. Music programming filled the airwaves for weeks instead of the news. Barbara Frum had recently given up the chair as host of As It Happens to transition to television and an exciting new TV news program, The Journal. When the strike was resolved, a number of guest hosts from across the country filled the chair in a bid to land the job permanently. No one wandered away from the As It Happens newsroom that summer. In the world of Canadian broadcasting, there were no greener pastures. I eventually left As It Happens “to pursue other opportunities.”

Finlay continued for many decades on a number of other important CBC Radio shows. Finlay spearheaded a particularly strong radio program that was a digest of stories from CBC foreign correspondents called Dispatches. That it was brilliant and exceptional programming isn’t the least bit surprising knowing Finlay was involved.

Finlay was one of those guys you figured you’d meet up with again up the road one day. It upsets me tremendously that I won’t. I hope he delved more deeply after retirement into the poetry he wrote on the side when he wasn’t busy making a living. I hope he knows the place he occupied in the esteem and affection of countless colleagues who saw through his crusty exterior. We’ll never know. His death is another stark reminder of life’s cruelty and capriciousness. A random assault against an esteemed artist who deserved more time on the planet. For his own sake and for those who knew his true value.

RIP Michael Finlay. He has left an unfillable void.