Mentorship as the power of reflective pause

As I was preparing for Annual, ALA’s office of international relations contacted me with an invitation to provide me, as an international participant, with an American mentor to help me through conference. Nice offer but not applicable within the parameters.  I responded graciously–graciously enough that instead I was assigned as a mentor.

And what a boon that turns out to be!  On the one day of conference that I ahven’t scheduled myself into silliness, I got to spend the first chunk of the day talking with someone who had good, crisp questions not only about maneuvering ALA Annual but thinking about her own career development. We got to talk about the digital native/immigrant divide (a, experience but not a conceptual term for her); the attractions of information management; the shibboleths of weeding (she works in the legislative library, not a public one); staff continuing ed.

The power of such conversations with a stranger who has come prepared to the discussion ready to engage is that it provides a reflective pause:  why do I do what I do with my work life?  Not a bad gift from a passerby to it.

realio trulio summer weather*

*with appropriate apologies to Ogden Nash

After a month of living in what seems to be a cloud chamber, I’m ecstatic to see today’s blue skies over Chicago.  Better, it’s not even typical-July-in-the-Midwest hot and humid….yet.

So, while you’re remembering my buddy Custard, via the above link, I’m back into the summer and off to the convention center.

Travel, with occasional vampires

Today’s travels were filled with more than a few vagaries: scrupulous security at the airport (yes, ma’am those are Canadian fives in my pocket); overlong hallways in the hotel (didn’t bring a GPS to relocate the elevator); the need to make two, instead of just one, trip to to get a cell phone (can’t carry my work one across the border).

But after that, I set out with a friend to get from point A to point B (with GPS) and we managed to find C and D before getting our heads screwed on.  It was almost as if the streets of Chicago had morphed into Anytown USA and wouldn’t let us bat our way back to specificity.  But we did, recovered our spirits–and took some in–at the Peninsula’s bar and then tried to collect supper.

We walked, on the theory that something would appear.  And, eventually it did.  How were we know that it was an unusual something until we were well inside?  Tilted Kilt, Pub and Eatery sounds pretty tame.  Not so much.  The kilts aren’t titled; they’ve abridged nearly into invisibility, aren’t kilts at all because they’re on women not men, and, best feature of all:  these people don’t record on cameras.  Eo ipso:  they must be vampires.

We both gave it a shot, or two or three or four.  But these wait staff were not recordable.

And, oddly, my caesar salad had no garlic in the dressing…..

Getting out of town

Today in Halifax feels like San Francisco in the summer:  cold, grey, neither damp nor dry.  The workers in front of my house have dumped a large pile of gravel through the chain link fence, obscuring the last of the narrow sidewalk between my front step and the fence. They continue to bump and thump on the shreds of pavement, between blow-ups that have left the truck tire “blasting blanket” in shreds.

And I have to go to Chicago tomorrow?  Ah, gee whiz!  And miss all this?

Winnarainbow or two

One of the wondrous and benign legacies of the 60’s is the over-30-year summer camp Wavy Gravy runs on the hot side of Mendocino County.  This is Fred’s tenth year there, his first as a recognized adult. And one of the perks of adult status at camp is being able to leave the grounds during his time off.  He’s been writing to me about that, which is both endearing and slightly eyebrow-raising, given that I am, after all, a parental unit.  So far, no harm, no foul, but a bill for a motel in metro Garberville (a place where the word “metro” is completely nonsensical).

Added to these messages from hippie summer camp, I got another kind of wonderful rainbow blast this morning when I discovered nearly 100 photos from Janice and Mo’s wedding, a Berkeley event stuffed with late-20-somethings who literally span the rainbow of human diversity.  The beauty of that particular rainbow–besides the fact that, at least while the camera was snapping, everyone was having great good times–is its lack of self-consciousness. These pictures couldn’t have been taken in the 60’s; they show a post-modern eclecticism that runs through the core of the subjects’ beings, not donned like costumes for a trip to the country.

My faith in the next generation wasn’t in doubt, but this morning they are, indeed, looking as promising as Noah’s rainbow.

Soaked

My plan for a three-hour hike this morning got cut in half by an act of nature that I find utterly delicious:  the full-on, immediately soaking-to-the-skin summer storm. While feeling sympathetic for all the camping Nova Scotians of whom I know this weekend, cityside, this outburst is everything I love about summer in the Northeast:  completely encompassing, audible, and being the same temperature as the air, not the least chilling.  Within a block, my jeans were soaked entirely and the puddles in my shoes left me feeling like I was walking on a water bed.  There was no need to skirt puddles–and that would have been nigh on impossible at some intersections.

It’s a windless rain, falling not only hard and thick but also straight down, so if one holds one’s head in coordination, it’s easy enough to see the way ahead, even wearing spattered glasses.  Fortunately, my route was along the south end of Tower Road, so street traffic was minimal and slow. Nova Scotian drivers, ever polite, don’t try to beat out pedestrians approaching an intersection in the rain.

It’s a release, too, from a week of fog and occasional spatters of half hearted drizzle.  Everything’s already muddy and green and shiny, so this simply adds the lustre that a jeweler’s touch might add to a diamond. The air already feels better, less like living in a cloud chambre, more like a summer day when picnics will have be eaten under the cover of pavilions and clothes will become second skins quickly and need to be changed every time one returns from abroad.

Pop (bang) quiz

It’s Friday.  You are walking home after a long week.  You are on your own street, half a block from your house when you see this sign:

 

South Park Street, with traffic still coursing toward the blast site

 

 

Do you…

A. Take a hard right into the parking lot you are passing and check yourself into its accompanying hospital?

B. Dash across the street at a hard left and check yourself into the cemetary?

C. Turn around and go back and check yourself into the library?

D. Go home, note that the blasting crew is packing up early for the day, and go inside to make a pot of tea?

Generations of older folks

I started my public day in a huge crowd at the opening gong (well, no gong really, opening time) of the local blood bank, a place organized for the literate (you must read a wall of instructions upon entering in order to figure out the next step) and outfitted to hold about 50 at a go.  I was literally number 56 and didn’t mind foregoing a chair.  It gave me the chance to do some circumspect people watching.

A couple of elderly men–definitely late seventies or further–worked hard to give each other the one remaining chair nearest me.  Both were good natured and even looked a fair amount alike, as though years of awareness of the other had transmogrified what might have started as two very different looking young men.  They finally settled on which would sit and which would lean on the chair back when…

…enter an even more senior woman, somewhat spryer than either of them but not a candidate for a long stand.  They–yes, they, not just the seated one–offered her their chair and as she sat, the three sets of eyes connected.

“Oh, do you remember me?” one man asked her, sounding like he was about seven.

“Yes,” she smiled, “Do you remember me?”

“Grade four! Do you remember my name?”

“No,” she admitted, “I had a lot of students after you.”

None of the three of them seemed to find the meeting startling and I am sure they’ve seen each other across many of the years since he was nine and she might have been 20.  But they reverted to that generational span–as it must have seemed then–so fast and with such deference. They weren’t three elderly people but two boys and the young woman who had been their teacher.

Not a bad reward for the early trip and the wait.

Canada Day, seriously?

Things have changed in every avenue of life since my first experience with Canada Day, which was back at the beginning of the 1970’s, when I found myself stranded in Thunder Bay, Ontario, on a date when nothing was open except the movies and Dairy Queen. It as quiet all day, deadly hot, and the movie that I ended up paying to see (while also enjoying a couple hours of air conditioning) was Clockwork Orange. Supper was a Dilly Bar.  My memories of the holiday that year are…jaded.

Last year’s Canada Day I spent in what seems to be an endless plane ride, including an unscheduled overnight stay in Chicago.

This year, I am seeing the updated, Atlantic Canada version, which seems to include a propensity for sticking flags in one’s ponytail (girls, any age) or the back of the baseball cap (guys of only a certain age). Clearly these folks haven’t heard the warnings against wearing red (or blue) in certain neighbourhoods, because the streets are awash in garments the true hue of the Canadian flag:  windbreakers, peddle pushers, t-shirts, baby blankets.  Some shops are open (wouldn’t have been as hungry here and now if my circumstances had been what they were in Thunder Bay all those years ago) but mostly people are out walking, as though the whole outdoors is a festival.

At the band stand in the Public Gardens, there’s a coed band covering Beatles’ songs (well enough to be recognizable.  On the Common, some other event is underway but from across the road all I can see is the crowd as a sea of red and a bit of white. The amount of hot dogs being consumed seems to be commensurate with what will happen south of the border this weekend. Every man, woman and grandma seems to be snarfling them down like there’s a prize in every bun.

Counterpoint to all that, every work crew is also out in force, so the digging at my doorstep has been ceaseless, as has the quarry-like pounding down the street at the Trillium site.

So, the part about “statutory holiday,” still eludes me, but folks sure do seem to be putting their all into the day.

Sic transit gloria not today*

*this is not real Latin….

Transit fares are increasing on the first of the month, which is tomorrow. It’s a hefty little lift, which I am willing to pay but not so willing as to fork over daily cash instead of the optional discounted tickets or even more discounted monthly pass. So, as I left work this evening, the last evening of the month by which the current fare structure is in place, I stopped at the ticket booth to get some of the new scrip…and good luck with that.

“Can’t sell you thsoe until the fare changes.”

“Doesn’t it change tomorrow.”

“Yup, changes the first of the month.”

“And won’t you be closed tomorrow for the holiday tomorrow?”

“Yup. I can sell ‘em to you tomorrow but we’re closed tomorrow, so come back Thursday.”

“Oh…hm.”

(Trying to be helpful?) “I can sell ya a sheet of 20 of the current price tickets.”

Let’s see, could i actually burn my way through 20 tickets, each of which also gets me a free transfer, by the time buses stop running before the fare changes?  No.

“Thanks, no.”

I am reminded of two stories:  Alice in Wonderland facing the dictum: “Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday but never jam today“; and also a wonderfully funny story about the need to keep trains running exactly per the rules all the rules all the time, in which the refrain was “Pigs is pigs” and some poor schmuck wasn’t allowed to ship his pair of guinea pigs as pets because the rail line had a rule stating that pigs are livestock.

Maybe I should put jam on a guinea pig and offer that as my fare Thursday morning?