[PHOTO] The knotted tree

The knotted tree, a photo by randyfmcdonald on Flickr.

Another resident of the southwestern corner of Dupont and Dufferin, this ornamental tree looks even more unearthly when it has its glossy green leaves out.

[URBAN NOTE] On Jack Layton, Brent Hawkes, and the space for difference

dewline's link to the eulogies given at Jack Layton's funeral reminded me of something important. The Reverend Brent Hawkes of Toronto's Metropolitan Community Church gave the longest of the speeches.

“Normally, it’s Christmas Eve, and the Metropolitan Community Church occupies this space. Normally, I look up there in the balcony and Jack and Olivia are sitting there. Normally, I greet them outside in the hall with their Santa Claus hats on.

People have said to me, ‘How do you prepare for this talk or speech.’ They say, ‘It’s probably the most crucial (speech) you’ve ever given. And I say, ‘Probably the most crucial, probably the most nervous I’ve been was my first meeting with my future mother-in-law and father-in-law.’ I know that I speak for everyone participating today that we are all so honoured to be asked. We are all so honoured to participate today, because we all want to give Jack justice.

Early in July, Jack and Olivia invited me to their home. To talk. The conversation began the way it almost began with Jack. ‘Friend, how’s John doing?’ John is my husband. And then, Jack said that … he wanted to talk to me about his funeral, and that he still intended to beat this. He still wanted to come back but he needed to cover every option, to make sure all of the plans were in place no matter what the result was. We talked about making the plans and filing the file and putting it in the filing cabinet – and hopefully pulling it out years later. And so we began a number of conversations about this service and about life and death and dying. And so today I begin to talk to you about life and death.

The interesting about Hawkes is that he's one of the most prominent queer Canadians alive, a man who performed the first legally recognized same-sex marriages in Canada. (I shouted extra-loud praise to him this Pride when his float passed by.) The really interesting thing about Layton is that, a heterosexual man, Layton is a man who openly supported gay rights from the beginning of his political career in the early 1980s, fighting against HIV/AIDS and for same-sex marriage, and, incidentally, having a gay man as his spiritual advisor.

I like living in a country and a city where this sort of thing is matter-of-fact and unobjectionable--at least, publically unobjectionable. It's nice that the space exists in Toronto to be queer and religious, to be queer and have that specific difference be just anoter one of those differences that don't really make a difference, like (say) left-handedness. It's really nice to live in a community where space for differences exists, and it's nice to have that fact be so quotidian as to be not worth special mention.

[BRIEF NOTE] The narcissism of minor differences and tourism: Canada, New England, New York

When my Friday post about how historical and ethnic links were encouraging Vermonters to look to Québec came onto Facebook, commenter Ben wondered why Canadians of any language background would visit Vermont. It's so like Canada, after all. Why bother to leave the country?

If you stop at the Canadian gift shop at the border north of Burlington, you see tons of Maple Syrup and related products. Like it's something distinctly Canadian you will never see again. Then you drive into Vermont to find it chock full of Maple Syrup. The reality is, Vermont is more Canada- it's just the US portion of Canada. No, if I was Canadian, I would keep driving until I reached something more exotic. New York City, or the New England coast.

Me, I put Canadians visiting border regions of the United States (and vice versa, too) down to another manifestation of the narcissism of small differences. Canadians and Americans--even French Canadian and Americans--have much in common: history, culture, economics. Canadians and the northeastern United States have more in common, and Canada and the northern half of New England have the most similarities of all. It's not implausible to imagine that, given the prominence of French Canadian immigrants in local history and the far easier assimilation of English Canadians, for instance, that a majority of Vermonters and New Hampshirites and Mainers have a substantial number of Canadian ancestors. Visiting the northern half of New England, then, for Canadians, could plausibly be described as visiting someplace foreign that's easily familiar enough to feel broadly home-like but just different enough to remind you that you're in a separate country. I imagine that this might be the motivation for some of the cross-border regionalist efforts behind such things a plans to link Ontario to upstate New York via high-speed rail; I know myself that, driving through upstate New York, the differences between the republican and classically-named gridwork of that territory and the more organic and British/Canadian-themed landscapes of Ontario, were interesting. Taking advantage of the fairly trivial frontier to go abroad--in a fashion--seemed like a much less daunting task than, say, crossing an ocean or a continent, even. And more fairly to the people involved, if a boundary is fairly low and honestly fairly arbitrary, treating it as impermeable doesn't seem quite smart. Let the people flow!

Perhaps western Canadians feel the same way about their bordering American states, too?