Tag: CBC Radio

But I Don’t Wanna

Getting up and on with it every day is a choice. Even raising the question may baffle some people. “Of course, we have to get up every morning and face the day.”

No we don’t. Not really. And therein lies the miracle and mystery of our lives.

It has been a long time since I heard the phrase “will to live.” We have not been actively and daily engaged in close-to-home wars or other mass traumas that provide us with examples. Yet I believe it is still very much a thing. How else does staying alive make any sense after heart shredding and gut-wrenching losses?

I watch in wonder at beautiful young men and women whose limbs have been blown off in foreign lands. They come home to recover and rehabilitate. What they have to recover from defies understanding. How they manage to go through the rehabilitation required to re-engage in their lives stupefies me.

These young men and women are lucky enough – if you can call it that – to have well-supported systems in place to aid in their recovery. And they go through recovery with fellow travelers dealing with similar injuries. They help each other find a reason to keep on living and moving forward.

War has always been riddled with stories of hope and recovery even in the most miserable and bleak conditions imaginable. I recently finished watching the mini-series The Pacific on Netflix. Not only did I not know much about the skirmishes that took place in the Forties in that part of the world, the story unfolds unsparingly episode by episode in reflecting the horrors of war.

I winced (as did any others who watched the series, I am sure) during a scene where an American Marine tosses rocks into the open skull and exposed brain of a recently killed Japanese soldier, sitting upright with his rifle still in his hands.

I did come away from that series with a better understanding of why veterans share such a deep and intractable bond. Sharing extreme experiences can do that.

Parents whose children were murdered in mass shootings. Victims of natural disasters. They likely use the same god-given techniques to get through and live with it. That experience was and would always be “theirs.”

Opportunities for extreme bonding generally diminish as we get older. Gone is the fresh blush and deep impact of first experiences (reflect on your first kiss or lover). We are more open and malleable in youth.

In fact, a key part of staying “young at heart” is remaining open. Which can be quite a challenge. Many people don’t even bother.

I recently attended a high school reunion where it was exciting and fun to catch up with our remaining high school buddies. The telling part was the stories of those who are still around and didn’t come. They hated high school then and saw no good reason to relive it now in their dotage.

Fair enough. But that attitude comes at a cost to everyone. Both themselves and those of us who missed seeing them again. It is very likely now that we never will.

We eventually learn to roll with life’s punches. We realize loss is a constant as life continually renews itself. “Out with the old, in with the new.” Like leaves in autumn, our friends start falling from the tree of our lives. Celebrities who defined our adulthood start to leave, too. Ryan O’Neal most recently.

Even political stalwarts like Henry Kissinger and the first woman to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor have recently died. (I recall trying to reach her by telephone for the better part of a day for an interview on CBC-Radio when she was first appointed back in the Eighties. My calls were not returned. A missed journalistic coup.)

So this morning (if it wasn’t obvious), I didn’t wanna get up and face the day. No harm would have been done by me whiling the day away in bed. I’ve done it before. But, no. There is a “to-do” list to face. And a husband to make coffee for. And a blog post to write. And Christmas looming.

We may never fully understand and appreciate what external and internal forces get us up and moving forward every day. But I’m sure our will to live has something to do with it. And our tacitly held expectation of pleasant and happy surprises. Especially around Christmas.

This season of light and miracles practically demands we engage with or at least acknowledge the beautiful mysteries and possibilities of life. That’s enough to get me up and going on most days even as I balance less beautiful challenges with utterly no mystery.

It is all part of the whole that we eventually learn to accept as life. Both the astonishingly good and the horrifically bad.

A line from the poem Desiderata sums it up: “With all of its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.”

On it – even if somewhat sleepily and reluctantly this particular morning.

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.

Say What

I am taking part in the Facebook Ultimate Blog Challenge. The ask is to post daily for the 30 days of April. If we do, I think we win a badge. That makes me happy. I am big on badges. Money would be nice but a badge will do.

If I’m honest, I had a bit of a head start on daily blog-writing, publishing my first post on March 14 and committing to do that daily for a year. (That could change and for an exceptionally good reason which I will address in a later post.)

Paul Taubman is running the challenge. Since April 1, he has been posting prompts I have blithely ignored until now. I have lots to write about. But his prompt today was not only an interesting ask but potentially valuable to me. For the memoir, I have to describe my ideal reader. As of now, I don’t know exactly who I should be writing for. Imagine, Paul suggests, sitting in a cafe with one of your blog readers. Letting them tell you what they need to hear. The exact words of Paul’s prompt:

Have Coffee With A Reader

If you were sitting in a coffee shop with one of your blog readers, what would you chat about? What would you like them to know? Or what would you like to know about them? Share it in a blog post.

I am naturally garrulous and gregarious (ie, verbose) and a former multi-media journalist. Talking to people is easy for me. Not just easy but usually enjoyable and occasionally fascinating. I believe every single person has a story to tell. Finding them was my main bread and butter as a CBC journalist. The newsroom hierarchy was such that you weren’t rising on the corporate ladder unless you were bent on pursuing “hard news.” My bent was more toward “human interest” stories. That is the sole reason I did not become the female version of Peter Mansbridge, the legendary CBC TV news host, of my set.

I did a few stories I was exceptionally proud of. Annie Cairns was an orphaned Middlemore Home schoolgirl who was moved from England to Canada at 14 in the 1940s. Her story was analogous to Anne of Green Gables as she evolved from a mistreated child to eventually become a settled wife, mother, and homemaker.

Annie’s story was broadcast on CBC radio and ripped off the cloak of shame she had worn all her life. She eventually traveled back to England and elsewhere around the world in the remaining years of her life. Free as a bird. That pleased me greatly. It was my first real-world experience of giving voice to a miserable history allowing them to drop the veil of shame that changed someone’s life for the better.

So, back to the present and Paul’s prompt, what would I ask a blog reader? I would want to know what grabbed them about any particular blog post they had read. What bored them? Or confused them? Did any of the posts delight them? Or repel them? I would want to know how to address readers’ concerns more directly. What would they want to know more about? What would they prefer never to hear tell of again?

I enjoy sharing my take on what I have learned about life in our time. It makes life make more sense to me, in fact. The lessons have been abundant. Sometimes hilarious. At other times, searingly painful. Wondrous. Perplexing. Savage and sacred. The whole enchilada.

I would like them to know about the lessons I have learned from the greats of history. Antoine St. Exupery’s The Little Prince taught me that we find love and meaning by pouring them into something we care about and watching it grow. Don Miguel de Ruiz’ The Four Agreements taught me to lighten up and not take everything people said personally. And to do my best no matter how lowly the task. Gandhi taught that lesson well as he cleaned latrines along with the untouchables caste in his Indian compound. That is the very definition of walking a mile in someone else’s moccasins.

I’d say more to my blog readers if I knew I had their ear. I’d ask them more questions. I’d probably get up and get us another coffee. And a couple of biscotti.

Writing this blog is something like starting a conversation. A little one-sided at the moment I grant you. But it is written in the hope that one day that conversation will become a two-way street. Even a multi-way street. Which would be – to use the parlance of the time – awesome.

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.