The placards of babes

Only five days until NaBloPoMo. See, theoretically, I have at least three posts I could do now, or save them for after February 1st so that they actually count. This way madness lies.
So I went on a protest march yesterday. I haven't been on one in a long time. Protest marches are a fact of life in any capital city, and Victoria was no exception. In the heady days before I became a parent, I regularly joined the Earth Day March, which falls on my birthday on April 22nd. The thing is, that's in Victoria. In April. April in Victoria means oooh, about 17 degrees Celsius. The last of the cherry blossoms are raining down. Yesterday, in Hades, it said -32 on my computer when my Friend With Whom I Go For Coffee came to pick me up for the rally against the bus strike which has been going on for nearly fifty days. This meant a windchill of -37 or so, with fine snow falling even in the faint sunshine coming from the white disk up in the sky.

Friend With Whom I Go For Coffee is a veteran of protest marches. She parked her van in the Byward Market ("Never park next to the protest site"), and gave carefully neutral answers to the reporters who were attracted by the presence of her children, the only kids there, and who had made their own placards that morning. Their hands were bright with marker splotches, that's when they dared remove their mittens to open their water bottles. Friend With Whom works for a community organization supporting disadvantaged families. She says the phone volume has multiplied many times since the strike began, with so many clients needing help and thrown into crises due to no buses. However, she was at the rally as a private citizen and in case she was quoted, could say nothing that be taken as an official position for her organization. (Another fact of life in Ottawa.)

The trouble with protesting a transit strike is that the very people who are affected can't get there. About 60 or 70 people showed (not bad, considering the circumstances and the weather), and made the pilgrimage from City Hall up to Parliament Hill, a motley crew of mostly students and elderly women, lead by a phalanx of motorized wheelchairs. It was disabled activist Catherine Gardner who had organized this demonstration, the first of three small rallies that took place yesterday. She had some trouble being heard even with a bullhorn (her balaclava may have muffled things a bit), and it was a pity, because I heard her say towards the end, before the frozen demonstrators started to scatter: "Look at us! Remember our faces! These are the people being hurt by this strike." She meant the elderly, handicapped, and working poor. The news coverage that evening seemed to focus on students and middle-class types complaining about carpools and traffic.

Friend With Whom's daughters were joining the others in jigging up and down in the cold, and started joking about hitting the drivers with a pie in the face when and if they ever come back. Friend With Whom moved quickly to shush them. One of her colleagues was being interviewed at City Hall last week, and in the midst of a calm and reasoned statement, had the temerity to remark that the transit union and the city council should be ashamed of themselves. She was promptly surrounded and threatened by four burly bus drivers who had overheard her.

We decided it was time to leave, and the girls handed their home-made placards to two elderly ladies who hoisted the duct taped yokes over their heads. In the sparse television coverage (Parliament brought down a budget yesterday and hogged the air time), their placards showed up again and again ---- always on other protesters!

We walked back into the Market, and I wrestled my camera into my bag, blowing the fine-as-sand snow off it first. By the time, I got my mittens back on, my fingers were stinging.

Oh, and Friend With Whom just called. Her daughters (complete with placards) made the second page of the Ottawa Citizen. "Sure beats 'my kid made the honour roll'," she said.

The eleventh day of Christmas (drugging myself with Who news and new Whos)

There are advantages being over a certain age. I discovered that, since coming to Hades, that I can cry in public. And no one notices. So there I am sitting in Planet Coffee which is a really wonderful little coffee shop squirreled away in the Bytown Market, sorting through the thick grey sheets of younger daughter's extensive assessment report resulting from those tests back in November, y'know, when the Resident Fan Boy was knocked down and out? I had saved this for the end of Christmas, we had the feedback session in late November, so I pretty well knew what to expect, so I'm not crying from shock, it was (oh, how do I explain this?) the combination of grief over what ground appears to have been lost over younger daughter's four years of so-called integration into her local school, the consideration of how far she has come when you don't compare her to other children, but only to herself, and gratitude for the fact that somehow between the clinical terms and percentiles, this psychologist's compassion and caring still comes through. When I read an assessment report, which is never fun (unless you have a gifted child -- which I do, and even then it's a guilty pleasure, because you can't take credit for it), I look to see if I can recognise younger daughter amidst the jargon. I can, and I weep. For the compassion, for the tough road ahead, for how I've failed her. No one, as I say, notices.

It was a mixed morning. Elder daughter and I left younger daughter bellowing with excitement as she slid down the steep hill at McDonald Gardens Park, and I listened as elder daughter regaled me with the antics of "vloggers" (video loggers at YouTube) into town. Her clarinet teacher did not come down from his rather posh apartment to collect her at the lobby; he's a rather scattered young university student, so I sought out a payphone and left a rather curt message on his voice mail, informing him we'd been waiting 15 minutes after a 45-minute walk into town due to the bus strike and would wait another five before hiking back. He showed up a few minutes later and told us there would be no charge. Elder daughter informed me I'd scared him, when she joined me at the coffee shop an hour and a half later and my tears had long been safely put away. I thought I'd been firm and certainly not abusive, but I guess I'm a dragon lady after all. I heard all about Twilight on the way home; she thinks the movie is cheesy but Robert Pattinson is hot.

Matt Smith (the new Doctor on Doctor Who after David Tennant's imminent and lamented departure) is not what I'd call hot (not that I use that terminology) but he looks "interesting" if way too young. Elder daughter is miffed when I pretend to check his neck for bolts. I'm sure he'll be fine; there's always Steven Moffat's writing for consolation. Just as I'm taking this ridiculous kerfuffle as consolation now.

This morning, I told younger daughter that school starts again tomorrow. She began to weep quietly, while I told her how brave she was, and that I would do everything I could to help. Then I went into the bathroom and had a little weep myself. When I came out, elder daughter was curled up in her bed, looking at me quietly. The heating vent from the bathroom opens out into her room.

The fifth day of Christmas (a seasonal rant on respect)

I am wiped. The first four days of Christmas in Hades this year were a parade of frigid temperatures and blowing snow, followed by rain then freezing rain, followed by powerful winds that managed to topple a couple of trucks on the highway and blow out power lines (not in our neighbourhood, thank goodness). This meant four of the most sedentary days ever. With the bus strike in full swing, there was no way we were going anywhere. It wasn't horrible; we have our new DVDs, books, and CDs to amuse us, but today, we decided we'd been in hiding long enough and took advantage of a reasonably temperate day to walk the 3½ kilometres into town to see The Tale of Despereaux. (Not a bad film, although one has the odd feeling that big chunks have been edited out of it.) The trip home, up the slow, slow incline that is Rideau Street, in my heavy Sorels soon had my calves cramping and telling me exactly how four days had thrown me out of shape.

However, this is scarcely a hardship. Despite all evidence to the contrary, we are reasonably able-bodied and as long as what we need or wish to get to is in the neighbourhood or in the downtown area, we will be able to manage. On the way in, though, we passed dozens of elderly ladies loaded with groceries and other shopping, some pushing walkers through slush and ice, others juggling their canes with their bags. Hundreds more are virtually prisoners in their homes and residences, one of the few Christmases left for them ruined. This is to say nothing of people struggling to get into work, either hours on foot or begging for lifts. Or those whose already precarious businesses are thrown into crisis because of customers and employees who can't reach them. People have missed long awaited operations because they couldn't make the requisite medical appointments. Children have missed therapy sessions and lost valuable ground. The nefarious thing about a transit strike is that the ones who feel the blow are the most vulnerable citizens of this god-forsaken city.

So why is there a bus strike? The media tells us it's to do with who has the power to schedule split shifts. As far as I can tell, the management wants that authority, and the union feels that this should be based on driver seniority. I don't want to be a union-basher; workers should have recourse against injustice and abuse, and yes, split shifts suck, but who exactly is getting abused here? In short, it would be so much easier for me to have some sympathy for the drivers if, after eight and a half years of using this particular system, I weren't left with the impression of the overarching contempt and disdain OC Transpo drivers have for their ridership.

Item 1: The elderly. More than once, I've seen drivers actually criticize older passengers with canes or walkers for not getting to the exit quick enough. I've tried to catch seniors as they're flung off balance when they don't sit down quickly enough for the operators.

Item 2: Mothers with young children. I've personally been scolded for stopping a bus at a bus stop after running half a block from a so-called connecting bus stop in a snow storm on a Sunday (when the next bus come in half an hour). The driver told me he had a schedule to keep up. I've run three blocks in the rain with a child in tow to catch a bus which had sped by the bus stops with a "Not In Service" sign on. The driver, who I recognised from my outbound trip, was reading a novel at a timing point as I climbed, drenched and panting, into her bus. I've had younger daughter (the one with PDD-NOS, remember?) summoned to the front of the bus to re-show her transfer while the driver gave me another lecture. I've been told off for not ringing soon enough at night, in the snow, when the windows are grimy and the neighbourhood is unfamiliar.

Item 3: People of colour. Somehow, white people are rarely called on the validity of their transfers. The people humiliated and put off the buses for expired passes almost invariably have accents. The most egregious example of this was an old Caribbean man who was checking with the driver to see if he was on the correct route. The bus driver checked his transfer and informed him he would have to buy a ticket. The little man asked if he would wait while he purchased new tickets at the nearby booth. The driver refused. The little man pleaded his diabetes. The driver called the authorities, and refused all offers by others to pay for the man. At this point, the little man swore and the driver accused him of being abusive. As a number of us got off the bus to wait for another while this was being settled, a woman said to me: "If it were my mother, ill and alone on the bus, I wouldn't want her treated this way." I replied, "Is your mother a little white lady? Then I don't think she would be treated this way..."

Item 4: People with mental and intellectual challenges. There's a fellow who greets us every day from the porch of the group home down the street. One day, he was getting off the bus as I got on and the driver snarled after him: "Your tranfer's expired!" then grumbled at me, "He rode all the way out to the shopping centre and back on that transfer..." "Did he?" I smiled vaguely at him. "I'm sure he didn't mean to; he's a sweetie." Quieter grumbling as I took my seat.

Then there was the bus driver who decided to use his own form of profiling one summer afternoon and summoned each and every young man who boarded his Transitway bus from a rear door (which is permitted on articulated buses so long as you have a bus pass) to the front of the bus on the loudspeaker
with a voice dripping with suspicion.

Each OC Transpo bus has a large poster proclaiming "Respect Goes Both Ways".

Canadian Christmas traditions (part one?)

Yesterday, elder daughter and I set off into the snowfall smothering Ottawa. I knew we were in trouble when the CBC website described the snowfall for our area as "heavy". Quick translation: "flurries" = "light snowfall"; "light snowfall" = "heavy snowfall"; "heavy snowfall" = "no sidewalks to speak of and cars that resent your crossing the street because they're scared to stop". So elder daughter and I trudged through the ankle-twisting snow, trying to hit sidewalks where many pedestrians had been before us to wear a path down. Tricky on a Sunday, but more likely given the bus strike that has been going on for nearly two weeks and is unlikely to end anytime soon. (I'm planning to blog on this, but somehow none of my sentiments fit in with the Christmas spirit...)

We figured about fifty minutes to make it to the National Arts Centre, which is a little over three kilometres (2 miles for you Yanks), and we were about right, even with the wind whipping white into our faces. We joined the Resident Fan Boy and younger daughter, who had spent the morning at church and had lunched downtown. I took off my boots to relieve my stressed toes and chafed shins and watched my daughters watch the show for which we'd made the pilgrimage.

For the past five years or so, the Resident Fan Boy and I have been taking in Stuart McLean's Vinyl Café Christmas Concert. The Vinyl Café has been playing on CBC Radio for the past fourteen years; the Resident Fan Boy listens to it every Sunday as he prepares lunch. Stuart McLean is kind of like Garrison Keillor of The Prairie Home Companion, but not quite. His radio show showcases a bit of music (predominantly Canadian artists, particularly new jazzy, bluesy, country, or folksy ones). Somewhere in there he started telling the stories of Dave, the proprietor of The Vinyl Café, which is of course a vintage record store, and his wife Morley. The stories took off and are now the eagerly-awaited focus of the programme. The show, concerts and stories go year-round, but the Christmas stories have become a Canadian custom, particularly an early one entitled Dave Cooks the Turkey which now has legendary status. My personal favourite amongst the Dave-and-Morley Christmas stories is Polly Anderson's Christmas Party, and my favourite non-Christmas story is called The Cat in the Car which has actually physically hurt me; I was laughing that hard.

Anyway, this is the first Christmas we've taken the girls along, and I watched for their reactions nervously. Those tickets were expensive. Younger daughter grooved to the music; Christmas carols and songs expertly played by top-notch musicians. Also, a school-mate was invited to come on stage and distribute give-aways; she caught a glimpse of younger daughter in the loge and waved. Then I watched as elder daughter giggled helplessly to the three stories, which included Christmas at the Turlingtons, the first story we heard live five years ago, and I knew we were going to be okay. There was now simply the matter of trying to get home...

The Vinyl Café can be heard on a selection of public radio stations in the States, and on BBC7 in Britain, but I think you can hear most of the stories I've mentioned for free here.