Lockdown? What lockdown?

I ran with Fred this morning, as usual. But I almost lost him.

My original loan of the 30-plus-hour audio book (the original is over 900 pages) was from our local library. It was to run out today, and somebody else, I discovered only this morning, had put it on hold. Oh, no! 

Luckily, I found it available at the Pima County Library in Tucson, to which we still belong from our winter sojourn there in 2013. I borrowed and downloaded it. It automatically replaced the London library copy, while keeping my place in the book. Pretty slick.

The split with the American Anti-Slavery Society has gone from implied, by Douglass's embrace of some of the tenets of Gerrit Smith's political abolitionism, to downright nasty, with recriminations and accusations flying back and forth between Douglass and his former friends. 

I said yesterday that rumours of Douglass's affair with his business manager, Julia Griffiths, were started by pro-slavery enemies, and probably they were, but they were broadcast far and wide by AASS hard-liners, including its founder and Douglass's one-time mentor, William Lloyd Garrison. 

It's a bitter, nasty dispute that finally begins to die down only after the peace-making intervention of Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose best-selling novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), has vaulted her into a position of fame and influence surpassing even Douglass's among black abolitionists.

*

A couple of articles in Saturday's Globe & Mail that I read this morning got me thinking, one way and another.

The first was one in the Opinion section, headlined "For Humboldt reporters, the tragedy was a strange devastation." The tragedy, of course, was the 2018 bus-truck crash in Saskatchewan that killed 16 and injured 13, most of them 18-to-20-year-old members of the Humboldt Broncos Junior A hockey team. The author was at the time the editor of the local newspaper, The Humboldt Journal.

I wouldn't normally be drawn to a story like this, but the headline immediately made me think of a somewhat parallel episode in my own early journalistic career. I was, for a brief time when in my late twenties, the editor of The Thamesford Town Crier, a long-defunct weekly newspaper based in a village just east of London. 

In April of the only winter I worked for the paper - 1977, I think - a freak blizzard caused a terrible car accident that wiped out most of one family of Thamesford area residents. I couldn't tell you any details of the story today, because I never wrote it. 

Well, I wrote a short piece on the front page that simply repeated what I'd learned from other reports. I never tried to interview local residents who knew the family, never tried to interview extended family members who lived in the area. I was pretty sure I should have, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it, to intrude on their grief. Or, if I'm honest, to expose myself to the raw emotions I must have known would be in play.

That episode probably made me realize I was not cut out for mainstream journalism, the kind my brother Tom, for example, has made his career - a kind that I think of as heroic because so necessary. Me, I didn't have the stomach for it. 

Talking to people who wanted to be talked to, that I could do, and did for more than 25 years. But trying to trick, cajole or strong-arm information out of unwilling, vulnerable or emotionally distraught people? Not for me. Just as well I learned it early. 

There in fact weren't many real parallels between my experience and the Humboldt editor's. She was a native of the town so was grieving at the same time as trying to cover the story. She does imply distaste for the lack of sensitivity on the part of outside journalists who would crash memorials and funerals and buttonhole victims' families and friends. The story was covered across Canada and the US so there were a lot of reporters on the scene.

The other piece was a very interesting article by a woman who has written a book about Jewish women resistance fighters during World War Two. (The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Figher's in Hitler's Ghettos by Judy Batalion.) 

What she talks about in the article is how their stories have helped her put in perspective and find the resilience to weather "the daily miseries of isolation and illness."

My thought on reading it was, am I stressed, am I miserable? Yes, I probably have some stress, possibly the reason I've been exercising so much - exercise was always my go-to stress buster. But miserable? No. Far from it.

We talked about this later with Caitlin and Bob on a Portal call. They of course have also known isolation and illness in this pandemic, but I wouldn't have said they'd been "miserable" either, except perhaps when they were actually sick with Covid. 

But as Bob pointed out, families with two working parents, both working at home, with multiple children, also at home, have  gone through hell. As have singletons, especially older people on their own. This is not to speak of families that have lost multiple members to the disease. They are the truly miserable.

There has been a huge disparity across social groups and individual families in the amount of suffering this pandemic has caused. And Karen and I - so far, touch wood - have, as we have all our lives, been among the fortunate. 

*

I went for a bike ride in the afternoon, intending to head towards Springbank Park and stop along the way to take pictures. It felt a bit cool, despite a reported temperature of 17C. I ended up just cycling non-stop, out to Springbank, and right through to the Byron end. 

The park was jammed, probably as crowded as I've ever seen. Lots of family picnics, lots of strollers strung out across the path, parking lots full. I kept my mask up the whole time, and must have called out, 'On your left!' as I went around people a dozen times. At one point, a little dog, off leash, ran out in front of me and I was only just able to stop in time.

If you want to get an idea of how multi-cultural London has become, head to Springbank on a sunny Sunday. I would say 50% of the people I passed were non-white. As Karen pointed out, non-white immigrants are apt to be poor and without private outdoor space. Also, it's probably part of their culture to share outdoor spaces.

I couldn't bear the thought of fighting my way back through the crowds in the park to get home, so I rode up Sanatorium Rd. and turned into the subdivision. I wiggled through residential streets and a short stretch of woodland path, and came out on Riverside just west of Hyde Park Rd. I cycled home along Riverside. A bike lane that begins at Wonderland Rd. and, with one half-kilometer stretch where it disappears, goes all the way to the Forks.

*

Part of the reason I didn't stop to take pictures is that I realized I was more anxious to get home and work some more on my winter 2016 photos. Most of the ones I worked on today were taken at the Women's Hospital and Chapel of Our Lady of Carmen, an 18th century hospital that is now mostly shut down, although it houses some diocesan offices. The chapel is gorgeous.

The chapel is very well maintained, the rest of the building, not so much - as these photos, taken in the entrance hall, show. (The numbered tile plaques are stations of the cross.)

This last one was taken in the old city centre.