The International Kitchen

And now for something completely different. I’d heard about cooking vacations from a B&B host in Stratford a number of years before and the thought had been kicking around my subconscious since. She cooked beautifully. The breakfasts were a sight to behold. And, as I was the primary cook in the family, I wished my meals to look and taste as good. How to do that? Cooking classes. And since there were vacations that catered to such tastes, I thought I might like to dip my ladle in.

There were a number of companies who offered cooking vacations, with names like Epitourian Vacations and The International Kitchen and such. I chose The International Kitchen. They offered an Italian (obviously) cooking course in Tuscany that caught my eye. It wasn’t just cooking classes. There are some like that, but this vacation offered classes in the morning and tours of the surrounding countryside in the afternoon. That pairing appealed to me. It also offered a number of lengths, as well: two days, four days, seven days. I decided that four days sounded just right, because I wanted to spend some time in Rome, as well.

We booked the dates. We packed and boarded the plane. Timmins to Toronto to Frankfurt to Florence. I did not sleep as well as I hoped. My feet swelled, my legs prickled. There were a couple infants in our section that defeated my use of ear plugs. I did sleep a little, but it was a long, and thankfully short, night. We had five hours to kill in Frankfurt, so we strolled, we browsed the duty-free shops, we had breakfast and I had a bit of a snooze under Bev’s watchful eye. I had a beer with my croissant for breakfast. It seemed the thing to do, my having seen more than a few people having the same. When in Rome, or, when in Frankfurt, and all that. The beer helped me sleep. There’s that to recommend it.
Disaster! I left my book and prescription eyeglasses on the plane in Florence. Sadly, it had left by the time I noticed, and it hadn’t really been that long between disembarking and the discovery, but planes are not idle, are they? That pissed me off. I was becoming addled, my memory a fleeting thing, of late. I blame stress. Either way, a reader losing his glasses is a big thing. What to do when you can’t see the written word? Fret. Worry. That’s what’s to do.

Figline Valdarno

We were shuttled from Firenze (Florence) to Hotel Casagrande in Figline Valdarno after said disaster, with me fretting about my foggy vision, barely taking note of the Cyprus trees and vineyards that rushed past us on either side of the highway. I’d asked the airline to attempt to retrieve them, but I knew it was a lost cause. They didn’t sound hopeful. In truth, I doubt that they even made inquiries. They’d likely made it into a bin by then. I thought I might buy some cheaters from a drug store.

Hotel Casagrande

We checked in, my mind still set on finding some eyeglasses. The hotel radiated ambiance. It sprawled. Narrow halls. A cobbled and treed courtyard. High walls. It was once the Lord’s manor, converted to its then fate years before. Rooms were small, but they were Renaissance cool, both in decor and temperature. Stone and tile and all that.

We took in the town upon arrival. The piazza was barely thirty seconds’ walk from the back gate, almost in our backyard. I fell in love with it on first sight. Terracotta and red tiled, the shuttered 2^nd and 3^rd floor rose up over the arched pillars of the ground floor. Frescos divided rows of windows. A church sat at the head of its length, its stained-glass rosette an eye that looked upon the faithful. Embossed wooden doors were scattered about, as were balconies and planters and a tower of two.

We were pleased to find that there were Renaissance games taking place in the piazza. Contestants were dressed in house faction frocks, competing for the honour of their “families.” Voluminous white shirts, brightly coloured pantaloons. There was jousting, archery, feats of strength and artistry. Barrel hopping, foot races and the like. The officials looked like they’d be at home officiating for the Borgias. It all looked to be great fun for the gathered spectators, who took it all in from the perimeter ropes and the cafes, over wine and antipasto. Children raced about, as children will, thrilled by the proceedings but aloof to them, all the same.

How the competitors were able keep to their feet is a mystery. The piazza was cobbled and paved, and slippery. It wasn’t level, either. It dipped ever so slightly to the centre. It was scattered with stalks of grass. There might have been a few patties here and there, too. Horses. You get it.

Unfortunately, the farmacia was closed. It was Sunday. Everything was closed, everything except the cafes, that is.

We were picked up at 7 pm for the welcome dinner at Chef Claudio’s. The meal was a marathon, three and a half hours long, spanning eight courses, each one as wonderful as the last. Add wine to the mix and the excitement of meeting new friends, and I had little resistance. By meal’s end, I was bloated. I could not eat another morsel. But I did have a little shot of grappa to clear the palette. It was bright. It was airy. And for a moment it seemed to alleviate my gastral discomfort. But by the time I took to my bed, I was treated to the discomfort of my excess, once again. There was nothing to be done but sleep on my side. No other position was possible. I vowed to not do that again. I broke that promise, but only daily.

I was up bright and early the next morning, waiting for the farmacia to open, with little time before we were to be picked up for our first day of lessons. I can’t say I was pleased with my purchase. The cheaters were a bright orange. Not particularly comfortable. But better than the other options that seemed to cater to women more so than men.

But at least I could see.

I’m a reader, after all.

To not be able to read was a torment.

False Friendship

It had been years since I’d had a circle of friends. Friends slip away in my experience. My friends throughout high school had moved away to wherever life had taken them. A string of dedicated bachelors replaced them, men who had slipped into the trap of self-inflicted loneliness, their lives devoted to work and their siblings’ families. I had no desire to become one of them, so I replaced them with others more suitable to my age and interests. Long story short, I found myself peripheral. Not really fully completely apart of their circle of friends. They got together. I was met at wherever.

Maybe that was my fault, or partly my fault. I’m an odd sort. I straddle the line between introvert and extrovert. I crave company. But on my terms. I require substantial downtime, usually during the workweek, and in that time, I rarely saw anyone outside my family. That’s just how it worked out. I worked shiftwork. They did not. And I worked underground. They did not. Then they too slipped away. They married and had kids and moved away. Some craved younger company. I suppose I grew stale after ten years of acquaintance.

Then I too married. And those friendships I had drifted away further. Some of them divorced and expected me to play until all hours with them now that they were “free,” but I begged off, citing my new circumstances. I was married now, after all. And they weren’t. They wanted to meet women. New unmarried women were just a temptation for me. So, those divorced friends slipped away, too.
I was on the lookout for new friends for years and never found them. I became a solitary soul outside my marriage. But I still went out. Habit, and all that. But without friends, it was just drinking. The glow and lustre of the night had paled without companionship.

Then I met someone at work, close in age and, as it seemed at the time, of similar interests. Not a perfect fit, but no one is. But I believed we had some sort of report, so I asked if he’d like to join me for a beer one Friday evening. His wife was out of town on business. He was home alone. I thought he might like to get out of the house for a change.

He agreed and met me at the bar, Mickey Jay’s (Big House). There was a “quiet” band on stage. A two piece acoustic electric. Quiet by all performing standards. He arrived just before the band went on stage for their second set, he stayed for just one beer, and he left minutes before the band finished their second set, when he could have had a half hour of all the quiet he could stand. But before he left, he went into a fit about how he couldn’t hear and that pubs ought to be quiet so people could talk. He went on about how pubs ought to be silent whispery affairs, much as he was accustomed to in England, where he’d grown up (contrary to Ben Thompson who loved loud, rowdy bars and live music, and he grew up in England, too, so go figure). Personally, I don’t think he liked music that much. He was never attracted to live music, never listened to music at his desk, and didn’t have a varied collection, preferring to only listen to the music that was popular when he was a teen. When he did come out to see live music with me and Bev and his wife, he never tapped his toes, never whooped it up, never applauded or raised his hands in elation. He was a statue, throughout. Getting back, he had his fit and left. I was taken aback by that, a bit.

My “friend” didn’t like to go out, it turned out. He didn’t like going out to restaurants, either. He did like eating a greasy spoons that cost $5 a plate. Value, he called it. He preferred going to someone’s house, or better yet, having people in for dinner. He was generous with the wine, I’ll say that about him. There was much talk, but sooner or later, he’d had more than enough and the TV was turned on and channel surfing began. Conversation lagged.

What he did like was conspiracies. He loved them. He never stopped taking about them, about how the government was pulling the wool over our eyes, how they were watching us, analysing our emails and browser histories, tapping our phone lines. How GMOs were poisoning us. He also believed in ghosts, telling me on more than one occasion how his entire family had been haunted in their dreams by the same ghost one night; how it had run through each of their dreams in succession, terrifying them.
I listened to each of these stories in turn, and said that I didn’t believe in any of those sort of things. I’d never seen or felt a ghost, I said. And I thought governments had a hard time paving the roads, so I doubted they could control weather or keep tabs on us all, or keep it a secret, if they were, for that matter. Governments are just people, after all. You’d think he’d have taken the hint; but no, the conspiracies grew wilder by the year, if not the month.

I caught his wife rolling her eyes as these subjects came up, but she never shut the discussions down. Neither could I. Each denial of whatever he was pontificating about turned into a challenge to his beliefs.

He didn’t just rattle on about those odd beliefs. He bitched about his family to me. In private. He complained about his wife’s spending habits. He complained about their debts. He complained about his daughter and his son and their choice of education. He complained about how they ganged up on him. I didn’t want to talk about his personal problems, but he began asking me for advice. I didn’t want to get involved. Bev and I were likely to have dinner with them in a couple days and I didn’t want to have all that baggage about them in my thoughts when I saw them. It colours a person’s perspective, whether you want it to or not. And I’d have to keep his secrets, then.

Before I knew it, he was treating me to tales about how the U.S. government had been behind 9/11. I asked him to stop. He began sending me links to websites that when researched turned out to be conspiracy minded rags that never tabled any proof other than references to other conspiracy websites.
When I tried to suggest what I thought were reasonable explanations to the conspiracies he spoke on, or how governments and political parties might not be trying to enslave us, he began telling me that I was brainwashed by mainstream media.

He turned on me, in time. He began to “back check” anything I said on Wikipedia, unwilling to believe anything I said. That was tantamount to calling me a liar every time I spoke. He said that I spoke in “broad, sweeping statements.” That I lumped people and things together. It was like being picked at every day. It wore on me. It wore me down. It sapped my self-esteem. Then he began to ridicule those things he knew I liked. He marginalized what I had done, the travel, the music lessons, he went as far as to suggest that he and I should both write a short story or short screen play and have HIS family judge our efforts to see which was better. Like they weren't biased against me by then, because even his children had begun to talk down to me. It was like he was jealous. It was like he needed to break me to best me, no matter the cost.

Why didn’t I walk away? Because I thought he was my friend. There were statements of admiration at first. What seemed earnest complements. Then there were a few widely spaced backhand compliments. They became less widely spaced. Before long, I felt a knot in my stomach. Then there were shunnings. Somehow, I felt rejected. I tried to make things right, but after four years of courting a “friend’s” friendship, and failing, I’d had enough. I walked away. He kept at me to join him for lunch at work and I caved. I joined him. We made our peace, of a sort. Then he would lash out again and there were more shunnings.

We endured a car pool for a short time, but it was very short lived. He argued incessantly. When I finally lashed out after another barrage of insane conspiracy statements about GMO poisonings, the Queen’s assassination plots, the US surveillance of every person on the planet, the US shooting down passenger flights, I told him to “Shut the fuck up. I didn’t want to hear about it anymore.”
He got a speeding ticket on the way home. Somehow it was my fault.

As he pulled into my driveway, he beat me to the punch. He told me that, “It wasn’t fun, anymore,” and that he thought we shouldn’t travel together anymore. He wouldn’t look me in the eye or speak to me anymore at work, either. He would change direction when he saw me in the hall.

Soon after, he couldn’t get away from me. We bumped into one another at a corner. He turned and stared at a spot on the wall as I passed.

I looked straight at him. My gaze was withering. “Coward,” I said.

He scuttled away.
This is the most important thing I can ever tell you: Take a hard look at the people in your life. If they’re toxic. Get rid of them. As fast as you can. They want to destroy you.

Cross Country, Part 2

Jasper, Alberta

We did not do a lot in Jasper. We did enough, I suppose, looking back. We took a trip to Jasper National Park where we crossed Maligne Lake to see and stand on Spirit Island. It’s a long lake, long and narrow and boxed in by high peaks, the round trip to Spirit Island taking about ninety minutes, not counting the time spent there. It’s worth the trip; it’s one of the most iconic images of the Rocky Mountains. Otherwise, we stayed in the city. We visited the Park Museum. We went to a few restaurants, and shopped. There was a fair bit of people-watching, too, as we sat in cafes and took in the ambiance of Patricia Street, the Athabasca and surrounding snow-peaked mountains. Everything looked brand new. Impossible, due to its fame and foot traffic. But very little of it showed much wear and tear.

Evil Dave's, Jasper

We did eat at a restaurant named Evil Dave’s Café. That was a must. Obviously. It was not the best restaurant we ate at, though. The food was passable, locally sourced, a little too spicy for Bev. We both walked away thinking that we’d had better. But I did have my picture taken under its black awnings sporting my namesake. Of course I did. Wouldn’t you?

And we met people. Short term Euro pals, expiry date today. Mainly people we kept stumbling across, but would soon discover that they were headed out to the trails the next day. We were not, we were waiting for the train.

Most importantly, I purchased a new carry-on that met the specifications set out by VIA Rail. More or less. It almost met the specs, it had to be scrunched down a little to be made to fit in the chrome template, but it passed. Barely. Sigh of relief.

When our departure date came due, we made our way down to the station on the banks of the Athabasca. That, at least, had a timeless quality to it, much like one imagines what train stations always looked like. Wood benches, a post office, brown paper packages wrapped with twine.

Jasper Station

We heard what we expected as the Canadian pulled into the station, a distant blare of a horn, a closer still ring of a brass bell. We stood and inched closer to the tracks with the other expectant passengers, waiting for that first view of the train approaching. Everyone always seems to do that, don’t they, stop and watch a train approach and pass, waiting for the horn to blow, the brass bell to ring? It approached, it slowed, it stopped. We mounted the stair the conductor set in place, directed to which way to go to find our cabin.

It was much the same as the last one we had, but we were far closer to the middle of the train than we were last time. Our observation car was mid-train this time, as was our activity car. The dining car was the same, there being only one.

We stowed our luggage and took our complimentary champagne and drinks in the activity car, disappointed to hear that there was no musician-in-residence that trip, with none expected. That left books and the magazines I’d picked up from the Maple Leaf Lounge in Pearson as the primary source of entertainment, aside from our watching the country flow past us as we made our way east. We did have music and TV and film, of a sort. I’d filled an album of CDs and DVDs before leaving home and took it with me, expecting that there might be some long hours to fill during the trip. There were. One can only watch so many hours of the Great Plains or the Great Boreal Forest before tiring of them. Especially the boreal forest, as I’ve had a spectacular view of it my whole life.

And so began our trek across country. It took four days, our only stops in Edmonton and Winnipeg and Hornepayne. We didn’t see Edmonton. We pulled into the station in the middle of the night, when we were asleep. We saw little of Winnipeg, arriving at the station at 11 pm, our only glimpse of the city a steady stream of streetlamps and the pot lights of the station. We were just going to bed and had no desire to step out onto the platform in the dead of night, with no inclination of what to do or what to see and no idea when the train might be pulling out again, so we closed the blind and tucked in and bid Winnipeg adieu. There were one or two other stops along the way. We always stepped off for a moment or two, just to take the air and stretch the legs, but those stops counted in minutes and not the potential hours those other three might have afforded. We arrived late at Hornepayne, so the potential hours we might have spent there were limited to minutes, as well. Not that we there was much to do or see in Hornepayne. Unlike Longlac, where we skirted past while at breakfast, without actually stopping. It was pretty, well kept, with manicured parks, and seemed a-bustle with all manner of activity. People stepping out of church. Baseball in the park. Mother’s pushing prams. Mind you, it was late morning and sunny as we passed there; that might have made all the difference in my perspective; and this is not to say that Longlac wasn’t much the same as Hornepayne, either, both being working-class lumber towns.

The weather deteriorated after breakfast, the clouds rolling in, the rain lashing the train, reducing the view from the observation deck of the activity car to a rain dappled rush of windswept pine.
It cleared after a time, the rain, not the cloud cover. It remained damp and grey when the clouds did clear as we approached Hornepayne, twilight taking hold by then.

We pulled in and got off. There wasn’t even a station, just a faded metal sheet sided butler building alongside the gravel stretch the followed the track a short ways. We got off despite what we saw, just to take the air and stretch the legs. We climbed the shallow rise away from the tracks, rounded the two-bay fire hall and past the Home Hardware, seeing the G&L Variety down the street. A Credit Union was across from it, a garage up the street, and little else. There were a number of For Sale signs. There were one or two boarded up buildings. There were “closed” signs in all the windows except the G&L’s. Beyond it, we saw nothing but a worse-for-wear residential zone, sidings faded, lawns an unkempt afterthought, vehicles that had weathered a number of winters. Maybe it was the twilight.

Hornpayne

Maybe it was the aftermath of the rain. But Hornpayne looked like it had endured more than a few minutes of stormy weather. It looked like it had been suffering an economic hurricane that had been raging for years.
We got back on the train after doing our best to support the local economy, buying what sundries we saw at the G&L, mostly a few bags of chips and a couple cans of pop. Those others who’d made the short trek up that short shallow hill did much the same.

The sun set and we carried on, wiling away our last evening on board before arriving in Toronto the next day, where there was shopping and Blue Jays games, the end of our vacation more familiar than usual. Familiar pubs, familiar restaurants, familiar streets, retracing time-honoured steps that we considered well-trod. Queen, King, Wellington and Yonge. John Street. Dundas and Spadina. We’d been to Toronto many times before and knew it as well as any who don’t actually live there.

It almost feels like home.