Gratitude
Last year on the day after Christmas, family members and I boarded a plane in Toronto. Five and a half hours later we were enjoying a late lunch at a lovely Chinese restaurant in Richmond, British Columbia. We texted relatives that we would catch the six o’clock ferry to join them on Bowen Island and anticipated the celebration of marriage of a family member and her new husband the next day.
This year some of the same family members picked me up to transport me to the one permitted household - with presents for exchange,, a floral arrangement sent from the BC relatives, home-made cookies from an exchange among Toronto friends, and my dinner contribution of an English trifle. We settled in for a leisurely lunch, while my son did the cooking and viewed an interchange on his laptop in the kitchen and the rest of us visited with extended family members on another one in the dinning room – one from a recently purchased schoolhouse getaway in Eastern Ontario, one from a dacha outside Moscow, another from an apartment in Winnipeg, Manitoba at minus forty degrees – where Fahrenheit and Centigrade temperatures actually meet – colder than the home of one of the residents from Finland – and another stuck in Ottawa where the meeting of the Canadian Senate kept him from flying home in time.
On Christmas Eve we had gathered on Zoom for an even larger gathering where another family member read “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”. Three generations of one family had lived there, either teaching at or attending one of the United World Colleges. Members were now spread out in different countries but still seeing one another on the screen. Another presented a radio presentation, where he acted as Trinculo in Shakespeares’ The Tempest - reprising a performance that his grandfather had done decades earlier. Another accompanied himself on a guitar while singing a Psalm in both Hebrew and English. His sister played and sang a carol. His aunt played a clarinet to show us what she could do after working with one for only six months. I read my Covid parody.
And all this is seen as possible – and normal during a pandemic. And we would never have thought to connect with so many at once - until we couldn’t do so in person.
How different it is from the pandemic of 1918. My father was 18 years old that year and my mother was 15. I never thought to ask them what that pandemic was like for them. This morning’s paper details some similarities with the present one. The number of patients strained the hospital and the number of deaths - 50,000 in Canada – 50 million around the world – meant the large number could not be interred quickly enough. Businesses were shut down. Prime Ministers caught the flu. The Stanley Cup was postponed. But there were differences too. Children and young adults were the most threatened. There was little government help – either national or provincial – and local governments had to work on their own.
Let’s hope that some of the patterns don’t recur. There were swings between opening up and needing to shut down again. There was initial avoidance of the severity of the pandemic. There was resistance to closings. Public health officials were both congratulated and denigrated. Health workers were infected and shortages were severe. Quack cures prevailed. Indigenous communities were hit hardest. The disease faded away in most countries but Canada continued to have sporadic outbreaks until 2020.
The key difference is the development of vaccines. Some were developed in 1918 at Queen’s University and by Connaught Laboratories at the University of Toronto. What scientists did not know then was that the disease was produced by a virus. Their vaccines did reduce the severity but vaccine development with both new understanding and speed of production were decades away. We are so fortunate to live in the new century where over time we will overcome the effects of the current one.
The amazing opportunities afforded by technology where we can see each other from a distance and be safely together in new ways is so taken for granted that we forget the creators of so many inventions. I searched for a timeline and found one here
And I was fascinated by those with impact on my own life:
My Mediaeval Manuscript
The handwritten page from a psalter hanging above my electronic piano had some precursors. Anod of course they were followed by the printing press to allow books to spread through the known universe, open up learning and change the world
My great grandfather hated the telephone
When the family in Parry Sound installed on the first in the town, he hated the idea of people intruding on his privacy. Now I text my grandchildren.
This doesn’t even show how I do it now
A Google Nest responding to my oral request to play some Christmas Carols on Combo - with a number of the best ones sounding in three different rooms on three small units.
My TV watching at home started in 1950
Now I ask my TV to head toward Prime or YouTube on the big screen with hundreds of choices in spectacular colour - or switch back to one of the many cable stations - not exactly like the small screen of the past.
Communication machines
In university, the weekly newsletter in my college was printed on a ditto machine - and I still have a purple version. Then came the fax machine in the 80e where in 1985 one board member had one - and 1986 where only one member didn’t - and no parctically no one does. I’d still like it better if my all in one printer would print in colour even though only the demo does.
From turning on a desktop in 1984
To meeting the family on Zoom in 2020. It’s been an amazing journey through it all.
As I write, I am restricted to my apartment but my life is both safe and rich. It is so easy to forget how fortunate I am compared to most of the world during a pandemic. Mu family came up with an innovative way to enjoy company on my balcony in cold weather – electric fleece throws. The view from there of the canopy of trees is beautiful even missing their former leaves and the lake and sky still dominate the extensive built environment.
An obituary of famous nature writer Barry Lopez reminds me to put all this technology in perspective. We, like the wolves he spent time with and wrote about so lovingly, are also creatures of the planet.
The New York Times quotes the British writer Robert Macfarlane as he put it this way in The Guardian in 2005 writing about the author. “Throughout his writings, Lopez returns to the idea that natural landscapes are capable of bestowing a grace upon those who pass through them. Certain landscape forms, in his vision, possess a spiritual correspondence. The stern curve of a mountain slope, a nest of wet stones on a beach, the bent trunk of a windblown tree: These abstract shapes can call out in us a goodness we might not have known we possessed.”
The technological and the natural are part of our lives in the Anthropocene and both bring us grace.. Many of our journeys this season involved a much smaller carbon footprint, though they depended on electricity and that is a small benefit to the planet. The human connections in my small world were made well – while all around us there are evidence of such connections and care that are made badly. So much will depend on our choices and sense of a sacred that we must receive with grace as we move ahead.