In addition to this website's collection of writing, I also compose pieces on people's objects, their heirlooms, their keepsakes. For other object histories, please visit: The Heirloom HistorianSometimes parts of who we are can be found in what we keep and what we leave behind.The Heirloom Historian ## It’s About to Start a New Journey At this moment, it stands in an apartment in downtown Toronto, beside a sofa, holding a lamp. Its owner, James, is about to move, and he has decided to let it go. But before it leaves the family that has kept it for well over a century, James began to look at it properly, and felt the pull that inherited things sometimes have. He will part with the table, but not without its story. These pages are that story, and they will travel with it, tucked beneath its top, for whoever owns it next. Before we come to the specifics of this particular table, let us take a moment to conjure a scene. ## The First Home The table was made sometime between about 1870 and 1890. Its first home was probably in or near Hamilton, Ontario, with James’s maternal family. Perhaps it came to the house by wagon; perhaps it was a wedding gift. We cannot know, we can only imagine. Imagine, then, that its arrival was met by the family: a corseted wife in a long dress, her husband in the dark suit of the period. They would likely have been pleased as the table was carried into the parlour. The wife ran her fingers across the surface of the wood, chose a place for it at the centre of the room, and set something on it: a lamp, a vase, perhaps the family Bible. From that moment, the table’s life in the family began. But it had already lived a long life before it ever reached that parlour. ## The Walnut Tree It began as a tree. The table is walnut, almost certainly the American black walnut that is native to the warm southern edge of Ontario and to much of the eastern United States. Walnut is a solitary, slightly forbidding tree: its roots, leaves, and husks release a compound called juglone that discourages many other plants from growing near it. The walnut used by furniture factories in the 1870s and 1880s was rarely planted. It was cut from old forests and farm woodlots, from trees that were often a century old or more. The tree that became this table may well have been growing before Upper Canada existed. ## The Burl Look at the panels on the front of the table, on either side of the carved medallion. Their swirling, rippled figure comes from a burl, a rounded growth that forms on a tree’s trunk or at its root crown, often in response to injury, insects, infection or some other stress. The tree cannot undo the disturbance; it can only grow around it, and the twisted grain is the record of that growing. What began as an accident becomes something rare and beautiful. It is hard not to think of people who have been through difficult things and carry the pattern of them in whom they become. But there is a sharper thought here too: a burl shows its beauty only after the tree is felled, and the growth is sliced thin and laid across a parlour table to be admired. ## Shellac, Glue, and Iron Other materials came from much farther away. If the table was finished as such tables usually were, its surface was coated in shellac or varnish. Shellac is made from a resin secreted by tiny lac insects on trees in India and Southeast Asia, gathered by villagers, processed, and shipped halfway around the world. The veneer was laid with hide glue, boiled down from the leftovers of tanneries and slaughterhouses. The screws that hold the table together were most likely iron, and in the 1870s and 1880s much North American iron came from the ore ranges around Lake Superior. That iron has the longest story of all. Iron is forged inside stars and scattered when they explode. The Lake Superior ores were laid down nearly two billion years ago, on the floor of an ancient sea. Microbes were then releasing oxygen into a world that had almost none, and as that oxygen met the iron dissolved in seawater, the iron rusted and settled to the bottom in layers. It is quite possible that the screws beneath this tabletop hold metal that settled out of an ocean when the air itself was first being made breathable. ## Those Who Touched It And then there were the hands. Fallers felled the tree in winter, and teamsters hauled it out. Sawyers cut it into boards that dried for months, perhaps years. In the factory, men ran the planers, band saws and lathes that shaped the legs and turned the central column. Others laid the veneer, assembled the parts, filled and stained and finished the wood, and crated the table for the railway. Then came a dealer, a salesman, and a delivery man. By a conservative count, dozens of people touched this table before the family ever saw it. What came out of all that work is a walnut parlour or centre table in a style that blends two Victorian fashions. From the Renaissance Revival come the framed burl panels, the bold carved medallion at the centre of the apron, the small turned finials where the legs meet the column, and the turned drop beneath it. ## Eastlake and Renaissance Revival From the style named after the English writer Charles Locke Eastlake come the flat-cut, angular legs and brackets and the shallow lines incised into them. Eastlake had argued for honest, restrained design. American and Canadian factories borrowed his name and his flat ornament largely because both were cheap to produce by machine. So the table carries a small irony: its Eastlake features are what made it affordable, and its Renaissance features are what made it look expensive. When new, a table of this kind was neither a luxury nor a trifle. A similar walnut table with a marble top sold in the 1870s for about thirty or forty dollars, at a time when a labourer earned roughly a dollar and a half a day. A wood-topped table like this one would have cost somewhat less. It was furniture for the respectable middle class: shopkeepers, clerks, tradesmen and prosperous farmers, families with a parlour to furnish. ## The Shrine in the Parlour The parlour was the front room, kept for visitors, Sundays and family occasions, and the centre table was its heart. On it stood the household’s brightest lamp, the family Bible, the photograph album, a vase of flowers. In the evenings the family gathered around it to read, sew and play games. One museum curator has called the Victorian centre table a shrine to the ideal of the close-knit family. It was where a household showed visitors, and itself, who it hoped to be. ## The Decline of the Parlour and the Walnut Fashions change, and the parlour did not last. In the 1890s a new term, the “living room,” began to appear in writing about home decoration. Edward Bok, the influential editor of the Ladies’ Home Journal, campaigned against the parlour, which he thought a useless room, and the house plans his magazine sold replaced it with a living room or a library. Walnut fell from favour at about the same time, partly because so much of it had been cut that good timber grew scarce, and lighter oak took its place. Heavy, dark Victorian furniture began to look old-fashioned, then simply old. Many pieces like this one were sold, broken up or burned. Others were moved out of the way, into back bedrooms, attics, and cellars. Those are often the ones that survive. A table in daily use is scratched, knocked and eventually replaced. A table nobody much thinks about is left alone. This one owes its survival, in part, to having gone out of fashion. ## The Family and its Table James’s mother’s family traces its roots to Loyalist settlers at the Head-of-the-Lake, as the Hamilton area was once known. No one now remembers who first owned the table, only that it belonged to the Hamilton side of the family. It passed to James’s maternal grandparents, then to his mother’s sister, and in the 1960s to his mother. She lived first in Cooksville and later in Port Credit, both now part of Mississauga, Ontario. She liked older things and kept several family pieces: delicate Victorian chairs, a love seat, an ornate desk and an elaborate coat rack. The table was never one of the featured pieces. It lived in the basement recreation room, the informal family room of postwar suburban houses. It had followed the parlour’s own decline quite literally, from the front room of a Victorian house to the basement of a suburban one. There, largely overlooked, it was kept safe. Around 2010, as her health began to fail, James’ mother moved to Cambridge to be closer to her granddaughter, and the table went to James in Mississauga, and later moved with him to Toronto. The rest of the Victorian furniture is gone now, some to family, some to friends. The magnificent desk, now the property of a granddaughter, awaits with family while she resides on another continent. The coat rack is with James. Of the parlour furniture that once surrounded it, only the table remains. In James’s apartment, it has found its way back to its old work. It stands beside the sofa and holds up a lamp: the same job it was made to do some 140 years ago. ## These Notes are for You If you are reading this (“you” being the next owner of this object), you have probably turned the table over, and you are not the first to leave or find something here. On the wooden crosspiece someone long ago scratched a set of numbers, which seem to read “30” and “10” on either side of a long slash, with “80” beside them. It is tempting to read them as a date, 30 October 1880, and that would suit the table’s style perfectly. More likely they are a workman’s note: an order number, a batch, a way of keeping track of parts. On the underside of the top is a large looping mark in blue-grey crayon, of the kind factory hands used to keep a top matched to its own base as it moved through the shop. No one can now read it. These are the only words the makers left us, written where no owner was meant to look. No one now remembers who first owned this table. Only the table remembers, and it has kept its own notes underneath. This essay is the newest of those notes. It was written at the request of the last family owner, so that the table would not leave the family empty-handed, without its history. Whoever you are, it is yours now, to use, to enjoy, and one day to pass on. Look after it. It has come a very long way. * * * Written for James, Toronto, October 2026. ## Sources and further reading The identification of the table rests on examination of the owner's photographs. Where the essay speaks of what is likely or possible, it is drawing on the general histories below, not on documents about this particular table. ### The parlour, the centre table and its cost * Illinois State Museum, "Center table," in At Home in the Heartland. Source for the uses of the centre table, the "shrine" to family life, and the 1870s price of about $30 to $40. * Richard H. Thornton, _An American Glossary_ (1912), "Centre-table", World English Historical Dictionary. * Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED, Laborers' Average Daily Rate of Wages for United States, 1860–1880 (NBER Macrohistory data). * True West Magazine, "Shopping from Home in 1897 with Sears Roebuck". ### From parlour to living room * Edward Bok, _The Americanization of Edward Bok_ (New York: Scribner's, 1920), Chapter XXI, "A Signal Piece of Constructive Work". * Karen Halttunen, "From Parlor to Living Room: Domestic Space, Interior Decoration, and the Culture of Personality," in Simon J. Bronner, ed., _Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920_ (New York: Norton, for the Winterthur Museum, 1989). Catalogue record. Cited here through the summaries below; not consulted directly. * Wikipedia, "Living room" and "Edward Bok". * Rancho Los Cerritos, "Status, Style, and Culture: Interpretation of the 1870s Parlor and the 1931 Living Room". ### Style * Charles Locke Eastlake, _Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details_ (London, 1868; first American edition, Boston, 1872). ### The walnut tree and the burl * Ann Joy, Brian Hudelson and Laura Jull, "Black Walnut Toxicity", University of Wisconsin–Madison Division of Extension, Fact Sheet D0021 (rev. 2024). * Wikipedia, "Burl". ### Shellac * Wikipedia, "Lac (resin)". ### Iron and deep time * John F. Slack and William F. Cannon, "Extraterrestrial Demise of Banded Iron Formations 1.85 Billion Years Ago," _Geology_ 37, no. 11 (2009): 1011–1014. * Wikipedia, "Gunflint chert".

Amy has had the mug for more than sixty years. It has a boxer on it: a fawn dog with cropped ears and a black mask, the word BOXER printed beneath him in small capitals. No one in her family was especially fond of dogs. The mug came to Amy around the turn of the 1960s, and for most of her childhood her mother set it at her place every morning, filled with milk. As a child, it had been her favourite breakfast mug. Now it serves a new function, standing on her kitchen table in Ontario, holding pens, pencils and paper clips. It is not a valuable piece, at least not in terms of market value. Mugs from the same series turn up online for about fifteen dollars, and this one was never kept for display: the inside is crazed and stained from years of use, and there are rust-coloured flecks around the foot. When Amy left home in her twenties, the mug stayed behind with her mother. It went into the kitchen cupboard and stayed there, and it never came out when Amy visited, not even for a cup of tea. After her parents died, Amy inherited the house and everything in it, and the mug was still in the cupboard, where it had waited for fifty years. The family didn’t dislike dogs; they simply weren’t a dog household, or much of a household for pets at all. And yet Amy loved that mug, and the boxer on it. And yet her mother kept it, through all the years after Amy left, in a cupboard she opened every day. Why a child chose that dog, and why a mother held on to his mug, are small mysteries of motive that will never be solved. This humble object, now repurposed as a pen holder, carries its own history. But, as we will see, the mug does not give up its origins easily. Here is what we can surmise. ### Who in the World and Where in the World? Turned over, the mug shows its only direct testimony: a crown printed in black, with the initials W.L.E. Ltd arched above it and MADE IN ENGLAND curving below. The initials belong to no maker in the standard lists of British pottery marks. Whoever W.L.E. was, the firm has left almost no trace beyond its own backstamp. The mug was not made alone. Others like it turn up in online listings: a French poodle, a beagle, and a shaggy Old English Sheepdog confidently labelled “English Shepherd,” which is a different breed. Each has a breed portrait on the side and the name printed underneath in the same lettering, on what appears to be the same straight-sided body with three rings at the foot. This was a series, one plain shape dressed in interchangeable dogs, sold to whomever liked, or happened to buy, a particular breed. Both the boxer and the mark sit on top of the glaze; a fingertip can feel the difference. That suggests they were applied at the same stage, after the plain mug had already been made and fired. W.L.E. may not have made the mug at all, but only decorated and marked it: a finisher, or a trading firm that bought plain wares from one of the many potteries of Staffordshire, added its dogs and its crown, and sent them out into the world. Where they went may be inferred from the dog itself. The boxer’s ears are cropped to tall points, a style long discouraged in Britain but common in North America. The mug was probably made with buyers on this side of the Atlantic in mind. As for when: dealers list these mugs as 1930s, but they give no evidence. The firmest date is the one Amy supplies herself. The mug was in her hands around the turn of the 1960s, so it was made before then, most likely in the decade or two after the war. Who made it, who decorated it, and who first brought it home are still unknown. ### How in the World? What the mug cannot tell us about its makers, it can tell us about its making. It is earthenware, the ordinary material of English kitchens, not bone china or porcelain. Held against a bright light, it lets none through. Its clay was probably a blend that the potteries of Staffordshire had refined over two centuries: ball clay from Dorset and Devon to make it workable, china clay from Cornwall for whiteness, ground flint or quartz for strength, and Cornish stone, a feldspar-rich rock that helps the mixture fuse in the kiln. None of these ingredients was rare or expensive. Brought together in the right proportions, they made the everyday white crockery that filled kitchen cupboards across the English-speaking world. The mug was not thrown on a wheel by a potter at work. Its straight sides and the three neat rings around its foot suggest it was shaped by machine or cast in a plaster mould, one of thousands identical to it. The handle was made separately and attached while the clay was still firm but not yet dry. The mug then went into the kiln for its first firing, at more than a thousand degrees, which hardened the clay into what potters call biscuit. Next came a clear glaze and a second firing, giving the mug its smooth, white shine. Whether that glaze contained lead, as British earthenware glazes long did, or was one of the lead-free glazes that were becoming common by mid-century, cannot be determined by eye. ### Here Comes the Boxer Only then did the boxer arrive. He was printed as a transfer in ceramic enamels, coloured glass ground fine and tinted with metal oxides: iron for the browns of his coat and darker mixtures for his mask. The transfer was laid on top of the glaze and fixed in a third, cooler firing. The crown and the letters W.L.E. Ltd on the base were almost certainly added the same way, at the same stage, which is why both the dog and the mark can still be felt as a faint ridge under a fingertip. Decades of use have left their own record. Around the foot, where the glaze has worn away, the clay has darkened from white to brown, a record of the mug being set down and picked up thousands of times. ### Truly Deep Time But what about the truly deep history, the time-travelling of this humble object? There is much we don’t know, but one thing is clear: there is gilding on the lip. It is chipped, but some remains. It is a very small amount of gold, probably applied as “liquid gold,” a solution painted on and fired until only a thin film of metal was left. Where that gold was mined can only be guessed. In the years after the war, most of the gold traded in London came from South Africa, from the reefs of the Witwatersrand, which then produced more gold than any other region on earth. That is the likeliest source. But gold is almost never used up. It is melted down, refined and reused again and again: coins become jewellery, jewellery becomes bullion, bullion becomes the film around a mug’s rim. Some gold on Amy’s mug may have been dug from the ground a few years before it was fired. Some of it may have been in a ring, a coin, or a cup centuries earlier. And before any of that, the gold was not made on earth at all. The universe began with almost nothing but hydrogen and helium. Stars, burning across billions of years, built heavier elements in their cores, but they cannot make gold. Gold forms only in the most violent events the universe knows, above all the collision of two neutron stars, the dense remains of dead stars, which spiral together and break apart in a burst of newly made elements. The gold scattered by such collisions drifted through space, became part of the cloud that coalesced into our solar system about four and a half billion years ago, and was gathered into the young earth. Most of it sank to the planet’s core; what we mine today may have reached the surface later, carried by meteorites that struck the early earth. So the thin gold line that a child’s lips touched every morning, above a mug of milk, was made in the collision of dead stars long before our sun existed. Not such an ordinary keepsake after all. **References** _On the mark and the series_ Birks, Steve. "Initials used as Pottery Trade Marks – W." _The Potteries_. https://www.thepotteries.org/mark/w/index.html. Accessed 29 September 2026. Godden, Geoffrey A. _Encyclopaedia of British Pottery and Porcelain Marks_. London: Herbert Jenkins, 1964. TheGoslingCollective. "Vintage 1930s French Poodle Mug: W.L.E. Ltd, Gold Rim." Etsy listing. https://www.etsy.com/listing/1456192785/vintage-1930s-french-poodle-mug-wle-ltd. Accessed 29 September 2026. Rex's Tresures [sic]. W.L.E. Ltd "English Shepherd" item. eBay listing no. 167049085016. https://www.ebay.com/itm/167049085016. Accessed 29 September 2026. _On materials and manufacture_ Hamer, Frank, and Janet Hamer. _The Potter's Dictionary of Materials and Techniques_. London: A & C Black, various editions. _On the origins of gold_ Abbott, B. P., et al. (LIGO Scientific Collaboration and Virgo Collaboration). "GW170817: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a Binary Neutron Star Inspiral." _Physical Review Letters_ 119 (2017): 161101. Kasen, Daniel, et al. "Origin of the Heavy Elements in Binary Neutron-Star Mergers from a Gravitational-Wave Event." _Nature_ 551 (2017): 80–84. Willbold, Matthias, Tim Elliott, and Stephen Moorbath. "The Tungsten Isotopic Composition of the Earth's Mantle before the Terminal Bombardment." _Nature_ 477 (2011): 195–198.

## The Ditch I am angry. Beneath the anger is a grief I haven’t yet let myself feel, but the anger came first and it hasn’t left. A neighbour has set out poison in the ditch where a skunk lives. Consider the facts. His property is large, and the ditch lies at its far edge, well away from his house. He never walks there. His car sits nowhere near it. He has no dogs, no cats, nothing that might blunder into a skunk and come home reeking. And the skunk rarely sprays; more on why later. The animal asked nothing of him but to be left alone in a corner of land he does not use. I have tried to find a reason for what he did. Fear, perhaps? Southern Ontario lived with rabies for decades, and that fear has outlasted the facts behind it. Or habit? The old rural reflex that treats every wild thing near a house as vermin. Or plain indifference? I can name these, but I can’t forgive them. He didn’t have to understand the skunk. He only had to leave it alone, and he chose poison instead. Frankly, my thoughts about him are dark indeed. But before we delve into the history, the benefits and other “skunkiana,” I want to explore the remarkable scent of our neighbourhood skunk. ## The Scent To the human nose, the smell of a skunk is a single thing, instantly known and instantly regretted. To a chemist, it’s an ensemble. For most of the twentieth century the textbooks got it wrong: an analysis in 1896 named butyl mercaptan as the culprit, and the claim was repeated for decades. In 1975 two American chemists, Andersen and Bernstein, took a closer look with instruments their predecessors lacked. They found that the main ingredient was a close cousin, (E)-2-butene-1-thiol, together with a good deal of 3-methyl-1-butanethiol. Thiols are the heart of the matter. They are the sulfur twins of alcohols, with the oxygen swapped for sulfur, and the human nose can detect them at concentrations of a few parts per billion. Gas companies add a thiol to natural gas for exactly that reason: we will smell a leak long before we are in danger. The skunk had the idea first. In 1990 William Wood, a chemist at Humboldt State University, added to the ensemble. Alongside the thiols he found thioacetates, compounds that smell comparatively mild when first sprayed. Their trick is patience. When they meet water, they slowly break down into thiols again, which is why a dog sprayed on Tuesday seems nearly bearable by Friday and then reeks anew after a walk in the rain. A third group, the quinolines, ring-shaped nitrogen compounds, add to the spray’s staying power. What comes out of the skunk is a yellowish, oily liquid from two glands beside the tail, aimed through small muscular nozzles. It can travel a few metres, as a fine mist or a focused stream, and it stings the eyes as much as it offends the nose. ## Beer and Cannabis, Anyone? The skunk’s molecules, or their near relations, turn up in surprising places. Beer left in the sun in a clear bottle “skunks” because light breaks down compounds from the hops into 3-methyl-2-butene-1-thiol. That molecule differs from the skunk’s 3-methyl-1-butanethiol by a single double bond. The same compound turns out to be the source of the famously skunky smell of cannabis, a discovery made only in 2021, after decades of blaming terpenes. And the skunk’s own 3-methyl-1-butanethiol is listed by the World Health Organization’s expert committee as an approved flavouring agent, used in minuscule amounts to lend savoury depth to food. It is quite possible that you have eaten skunk chemistry without knowing it. ## The Smell of Uranus Nor is the skunk’s chemistry confined to Earth. In 2018 astronomers confirmed that the cloud tops of Uranus contain hydrogen sulfide, the rotten-egg gas. That is a cruder sulfur molecule than the skunk’s, but a relative all the same. Farther out, in the vast cold clouds where stars are born, radio astronomers have detected methanethiol, first found toward the Sagittarius B2 cloud near the centre of our galaxy, and ethanethiol, confirmed in another galactic-centre cloud. These are small thiols, simpler siblings of what the skunk carries in its glands. A drainage ditch also has, in its humble way, the chemistry of the galaxy. Strangest of all, our aversion to the smell may not be innate. Critical studies of newborns find that infants do not reliably distinguish odours adults call foul from those they call pleasant. Young children in older experiments were untroubled by smells their parents found revolting, and adult-like aversions appear to settle in only around the age of seven. The eye-stinging burn of a close-range spray needs no teaching; that is irritation, not disgust. But the recoil at a faint whiff drifting across a summer evening is something we probably learn. My neighbour learned it too. ## Here all along There are stories about skunks, appropriately First Nations tales, as the skunk is truly a North American creature. It did not catch a ride on some immigrant sailing vessel. It was here all along. Or nearly all along. For tens of thousands of years, the land beneath my feet lay under ice more than a kilometre thick. Nothing lived here. As the glaciers retreated, beginning roughly 13,000 years ago, life followed them north: spruce and then pine, caribou and then the creatures of the broadleaf forest. The striped skunk came with them. Geneticists who have studied its DNA believe its ancestors originated in the Texas–Mexico region and spread north in several lineages, one of which settled into northeastern North America. People came north at roughly the same time. The first peoples of this region arrived as the glacial ice withdrew, and the skunk arrived alongside them. They have shared this country ever since. The skunk has no more been imported than the Credit River has. It has not always been as common as it is now. The dense forests that once covered much of southern Ontario suited it less well than the open land that came later. A Canadian Wildlife Service publication notes that the skunk has adapted well to people, and that its range has grown far beyond what it was in pre-settlement times. Cleared fields, woodlots, hedgerows and, eventually, suburbs gave it the edges and open ground it prefers, along with a steady supply of grubs, fallen fruit, and our garbage. Today a Toronto skunk may spend its whole life within a single square kilometre. The one in our ditch is almost certainly a local, born within walking distance of where it now lives. ## Pepé I promised you a First Nations tale, but first let’s have a lighter look at Pepé Le Pew. Or a darker look upon further pondering. The world’s most famous skunk made his debut in 1945, in a Warner Bros. Cartoon called _Odor-able Kitty_ , directed by Chuck Jones. He was not yet the character we know. In that first outing he is revealed, in the final gag, to be an American skunk named Henry, with a wife and children, merely putting on a French act (so, an adulterer). By 1947 he had become Pepé Le Pew, a name that puns on the English exclamation for a bad smell. In 1949 _For Scent-imental Reasons_ won him an Academy Award. The formula never changed. A female black cat, Penélope, accidentally acquires a white stripe down her back, usually by brushing against a freshly painted fence. Pepé mistakes her for a skunk and pursues her with florid pseudo-French declarations of love. He is oblivious to her frantic efforts to escape, and oblivious, too, to his own smell, which empties every room he enters. There is a zoological joke buried in all this: a French skunk is an impossibility. Skunks are creatures of the Americas. Pepé is drawn as a striped skunk, the same species that lives in our ditch, and he would have had a very long swim to Paris. Jones said later that Pepé was a kind of inverted self-portrait. In his autobiography, _Chuck Amuck_ , he wrote that the character embodied a romantic self-assurance Jones knew he lacked. The joke was always on Pepé, on his vanity and his deafness to refusal. In 2021 that reading was put to the test. A _New York Times_ columnist, Charles M. Blow, argued that the cartoons had taught audiences that “no” was just the opening move in a chase. Around the same time, it emerged that a scene featuring Pepé had been cut from _Space Jam: A New Legacy_. The two events looked like cause and effect, but they weren’t. The scene had been dropped months earlier, after a change of director. Warner Bros. nonetheless indicated it had no plans to bring him back. The most famous skunk in the world has been quietly retired, not for his smell but for his manners. It is worth pausing here, because the problem with Pepé is not a matter of changing fashion. The cartoons never asked us to find him charming. The joke was on him, on his vanity and his conviction that every refusal was a coquettish invitation. Penélope runs, struggles and flees, and we were meant to laugh because her unwillingness was so obvious. Audiences assumed that ridicule was protection enough. Repeated for decades in front of children, it was not. The chase became the pattern, and the refusal became part of the game. What was tolerated was never acceptable. We should recoil at it now, and it’s fair to ask why so many of us took so long. There is an irony in the casting, too. Of all animals, the skunk is the one that says no most clearly. It stamps, it hisses, it lifts its tail and turns to show its stripes, well before it resorts to anything more drastic. Its whole existence is a lesson in reading refusal. The most famous skunk in the world is the one who never learned it. ## The Windy City The older skunk of this continent is far more formidable. In the Ojibwe word _zhigaag_ , the skunk has a name that belongs to a whole family of Algonquian languages, a family that also gave English its word “skunk.” One relative, the Miami-Illinois _šikaakwa_ , means both “skunk” and “wild leek,” and French explorers wrote it down as _Chécagou_. A city of nearly three million people – Chicago – is named, in part, for the smell. ## The Great Skunk – Coexistence not Conquest The great skunk story of the Anishinaabe is the story of Aniwye, also called Mishi-zhigaag, the Giant Skunk. In the versions recorded among the Ojibwe, Algonquin and Cree, Aniwye was a monstrous skunk, or in some tellings a man-eating giant, whose spray did not merely offend but killed. People sickened and died from it. The animals united against the monster, and it was brought down, by Great Fisher in some versions and by Wolverine in Cree tellings. Then came the part that matters most. The monster was not simply erased. Either Fisher or Nanabozho, the great teacher and trickster, transformed it into the ordinary skunk we know: smaller, less deadly, still carrying its weapon, but now able to live among the other animals. In some versions the monster is killed before it is changed, and in others it is simply diminished. Either way, the story does not end in eradication. The danger is not abolished; it is brought down to a size the world can live with. The skunk keeps its spray and its warning stripes, and everyone else learns to give it room. It is a story about coexistence, not conquest. There is a lovely piece of natural history hidden inside it, too. The fisher, _ojiig_ in Ojibwe, is one of the few real animals that will prey on a skunk. The hero of the story is also one of its actual enemies, which suggests these stories were told by people who knew the forest very well. The skunk has other uses in Anishinaabe life as well. One Anishinaabe woman told a journalist of her ancestors travelling each fall from Lake Superior to the mouth of the Chicago River, trapping young skunks for their musk. Ojibwe medicine people used it as a treatment for pneumonia. The creature my neighbour chose to poison was, for others, a source of healing. ## The Fellow Earthing in the Ditch And the living skunk more than earns its keep. It is a true omnivore; in summer it eats mainly insects: grasshoppers, crickets, beetles, and the white grubs, cutworms, and armyworms that gardeners and farmers spend money to destroy. It will even dig out wasps’ nests and kill the wasps with its front feet. In autumn and winter it eats plant and animal food in about equal measure: berries, black cherries, fallen fruit, mice, the occasional carrion. The seeds of the fruit it eats pass through it and are scattered across the landscape, and its digging turns and loosens the soil. It is not a saint. The same appetite that clears a lawn of grubs also sends it digging in the sand for turtle eggs, and in southern Ontario, where most of our turtles are in trouble, that is no small thing. The skunk is not a hero of the story. It is a fellow earthling, with mixed effects upon the place it lives. But it was my neighbour long before my other neighbour. ## An Expensive Aroma As for why our skunk so rarely sprays: the answer is economics. A skunk carries only enough spray for a handful of discharges, and refilling its glands takes a week or more. Spraying is expensive, so the skunk does everything it can to avoid it. The stamping, the hissing, the raised tail, the black-and-white coat that can be read from a distance: all of it is the same offer, made to almost every creature it meets. I would rather not. The spray is the last word, not the first. Only one predator reliably ignores that offer. The great horned owl hunts at night, as the skunk forages at night, and its poor sense of smell leaves the skunk’s defence all but useless against it. Great horned owls take skunks regularly, even though a skunk may weigh three times as much as the owl that kills it. ## No Longer Anger, but Grief That is where my grief finally overtakes my anger. Poison does not stay where it is put. If the thing in the ditch is the kind that kills slowly, as many of these poisons do, a sickened skunk will wander, weaken, and become easy prey. The owl that takes it will take the poison too. A man who could not bear a skunk at the far edge of his land may end up killing the owl that would have taken care of the skunk in its own way, as nature always has. The Anishinaabe told of a monster that was brought down to a size the world could live with. My neighbour has done the opposite. He has taken a small creature, one that asked nothing of him, and made it a monster in his own mind. The skunk in the ditch is made of the same chemistry as the clouds of Uranus and the nurseries of stars. It came north with the retreating ice and has lived beside the peoples of this place for thousands of years. It deserved better than to die in a ditch for being what it is. **Sources** * Skunk spray, Molecule of the Month (University of Bristol) * Prenylated volatile sulfur compounds in cannabis (ACS Omega, 2021) * 3-Methylbutanethiol (WHO JECFA database) * Uranus cloud tops and hydrogen sulfide (NASA) * Dimethyl sulfide and ethanethiol in interstellar ices (PCCP, 2026) * Children's hedonic response to odour (Stevenson & Repacholi, 2003) * Infants' hedonic responsiveness to food odours (Flavour) * Striped skunk (Government of Canada Publications) * Striped skunk genetic structure (PLOS ONE) * Home range of striped skunks in Scarborough (Canadian Field-Naturalist) * Odor-able Kitty (Wikipedia) * Pepé Le Pew cut from Space Jam sequel (Cartoon Brew) * Pepé Le Pew and Space Jam (Deadline) * zhigaag (Ojibwe People's Dictionary) * Proto-Algonquian *šeka·kwa (Wiktionary) * Aniwye, the Giant Skunk (Native Languages of the Americas) * Skunks in the history of Chicago (Atlas Obscura) * Striped Skunk (Hinterland Who's Who) * Skunk (Ontario Fur Managers Federation) * Great horned owls and striped skunks (Naturally Curious)

Here is another family history I have been commissioned to compile. There is additional information on this family, including charts and various lists — all of which the family is happy to share should anyone inquire. Meanwhile, here is a bit of their story to enjoy as it was presented to the family in Ontario, Canada, who have authorized this publication. ## Ancestors of John Noel Bellington Every family tree eventually runs out of ink and into weather — a name with no birthdate, a place with no fixed spelling, a person who exists only because someone else’s marriage record needed a witness. This one runs out at Thomas Roe, who left nothing behind but a son, sometime before 1665, somewhere in the low, wind-flattened country around Poulton-le-Fylde and Kirkham in Lancashire, England. Everything that follows is built on thin paper, all the way down to a departure from Liverpool in 1952 and a death in Toronto in 1996. I’ve tried to walk it the way it happened — oldest to newest — while being honest about the places where the ink itself gives out. ## The Fylde, in Roes and Whitesides John Roe, born about 1665, married Jennet Towers at Kirkham in 1690; their daughter Jennet Roe married a Whiteside, whose son George married a Briers, whose daughter Mary married a Waterworth, whose daughter Mary married an Edward Billington of Kirkham in 1823. Say it quick enough, it sounds like a nursery rhyme, which is more or less what parish-register genealogy always threatens to become once you get past the point where anyone had an opinion worth recording. What we’re left with, generation after generation, is essentially weather and occupation: labourers, a power-loom weaver at 7 Lawsons Street in the 1851 census, a daughter tentatively down as an “examining tenter” — someone who checked the woven cloth on the frames, if I’m reading that faded trade term correctly, though I’ll say plainly I’m not fully certain of the exact wording. The mills of Preston and Kirkham were in this family’s bones before anyone thought to write down why. By 1892, a William Billington was born to John Billington (the name originated as Billington and much later switched to Bellington) and Mary Langton, in a household eventually settled at 63 Gorst Street, Preston, with nine children scattered across it like buttons off a coat — Gerry, Mabel, William, Edward Lancaster, Lillian, Mary, Florence, Charles, and Cicely. William was the third; he would be the one to leave Lancashire, and Lancashire’s flat weaving-town rhythms, behind. ## Drumcondra, and the ridge that may or may not belong to someone named Conra The Irish side of this story settles, generation after generation, into a few square miles of north Dublin — Drumcondra, Clonturk, Puckstown, Beaumont, Santry — and it seems worth pausing on what those names are actually carrying, since the people who lived under them clearly weren’t going anywhere. Drumcondra’s Irish name is usually given as _Droim Conrach_ — Conra’s Ridge — though there’s a rival, older reading that would make it “the ridge of the contract,” which I find almost unbearably apt for a family whose own paper trail is one long sequence of legal instruments: marriage contracts, court orders, workhouse admissions, pension deeds. The Tolka runs through it; so did one of the ancient roads said to converge, at least in legend, on Tara. By the time your people were living there, Drumcondra had already absorbed its older name, Clonturk, and was well on its way to being the unglamorous, church-and-hospital-dense suburb it is today — the Church of the Holy Family on Aughrim Street, the old Drumcondra Hospital (built as the Whitworth), the North Circular Road running past it all toward Mountjoy. Puckstown, where Patrick and Mary Kelch’s family lived at least twice over — the 1901 census, the 1926 census, the run of petty-sessions entries in between — is the better story, and I want to tell it carefully, because it very nearly isn’t the story you’d expect. In Irish folklore, _Púca_ is the shape-shifting, mischief-making sprite — the root behind Puck in Shakespeare, James Stewart’s invisible 6 ft (1.83 m) white rabbit friend in the film _Harvey (1950)_ , and behind a whole scatter of Irish townlands with names like Poll an Phúca, “the hollow of the púca,” usually attached to some suitably lonely bog-hole or sea-cave. There _is_ a Puckstown in County Louth that’s exactly this: an English mistranslation of Poll an Phúca. It would be a wonderful thing to tell you that your Puckstown, north of Dublin near Artane, carries the same pixie under its floorboards. But the place-name scholarship is fairly clear that it doesn’t. This Puckstown — logainm.ie lists it under what’s now Grace Park Heights, Collins Avenue, and Thorndale — is flagged specifically as being of English-language origin: most likely the ordinary English surname Puck, or Pook, attached to a townland the way Grace’s family gave their name to the road beside it. No fairy, just somebody named Puck, who once held or worked that land. I’ll admit I’m a bit disappointed on your family’s behalf, and also a little delighted — because the _coincidence_ of it is almost better than the folklore would have been. A family repeatedly summoned before the Drumcondra petty sessions for drunkenness, for threatening language, for a nighttime scrap that ends in “dismissed on the merits,” made their home — without knowing it, and possibly by nothing more than an accident of an English landholder’s surname — on a townland that sounds exactly like the address a mischief-spirit would give if a magistrate asked him for one. ## Grangegorman, three times over If Drumcondra is this family’s home ground, Grangegorman is its recurring appointment — and I don’t think that’s overstating it. It is worth knowing (if you don’t already), that “Grangegorman” isn’t one building. It’s a single sprawling complex on the north side of the city that has, over roughly two hundred and fifty years, been a fever hospital, an asylum, a workhouse, and two entirely different prisons — one for men, run alongside the North Dublin Union workhouse itself, and, separately, the Richmond Penitentiary, which in 1836 became the Grangegorman Female Penitentiary: the first prison in Britain or Ireland built to hold women exclusively. For half a century it doubled as a transportation depot — something like three thousand two hundred women and children passed through it on their way to convict ships bound for Van Diemen’s Land, before the practice ended. Women there were set to scutching and cloving flax by hand, work considered heavy enough that a doctor had to sign off on assigning it to anyone judged too weak. Your family touches this one patch of ground at least three times, for three unrelated reasons, across nearly a century. The earliest, and the shakiest, is the prison record for an eighteen-year-old “Maria Tyrrell,” admitted to the Grangegorman Female Prison in October 1888 on a soliciting charge, with a birth year that lines up — loosely — with your Mary Tyrrell. I want to be honest that this is may not be a match; the name is close but not identical, and the researcher who first flagged it was careful to call it a possibility rather than a fact, which is the only responsible way to hold it. The second is Patrick Kelch — Mary’s husband, Elizabeth’s father — who was admitted to the North Dublin Union Workhouse twice in September 1900, at Grangegorman, once described as “sickly,” once not, each time giving Puckstown as his home and, oddly, a half-legible birthplace the clerk seems to have rendered as “Yellow, Lancs.” (I couldn’t run that place-name to ground with any confidence — it may be a mishearing of a small Lancashire village, possibly Yealand, but that’s just speculation.) The North Dublin workhouse at Grangegorman had, by the 1890s, been the subject of a British Medical Journal inspection that found the female “lunatic” wards housed in conditions the inspectors said were fitter for animals than people — not evidence of anything about Patrick’s particular experience there, but the general air the institution was breathing at the time he walked, or was carried, through its gate. The third is William Billington himself — Elizabeth’s husband, your great-grandfather — who ended up not in Grangegorman the institution but Grangegorman the military cemetery, in Cabra, where he’s buried under a stone recording R.A.S.C. service from 1909 to 1921, with Elizabeth laid beside him. Between a workhouse admission and a soldier’s grave, “Grangegorman” in this family’s records manages to mean almost every register a working-class Dublin life could be filed under — poverty, punishment, and, at the very end, official honour. ## Patrick Kelch the younger, and Mountjoy Patrick and Mary’s son, also Patrick, born at Puckstown in May 1898, was committed to Mountjoy Prison in July of that year, on a charge that the surviving register renders, as best as it can be made out, as an attempt to steal a motor car. Two years’ hard labour, inferred from the abbreviation “2 years H.L.,” though the surrounding notation is genuinely too faint to expand with confidence. It’s worth knowing what kind of building he was walking into. “The Joy,” on the North Circular Road in Phibsborough, opened in 1850 and already, by 1923, one of the most politically loaded buildings in the new Irish state; the great republican hunger strikes of that autumn saw some five hundred men refusing food inside its walls. One of them, Andy O’Sullivan, dying of it that November. Patrick’s offence had nothing to do with any of that; he was, as far as the record shows, an ordinary young man convicted of an ordinary crime in an extraordinary building at an extraordinary moment, which is its own kind of dissonance worth noting. By 1926 he was back in Puckstown, twenty-seven years old, still unmarried, working as a builder’s labourer and living with his widowed mother and a young relative named John Redmond — the record noting, almost in passing, that Mary claimed to have borne five or six children (the clerk himself wasn’t sure which) and that none of them, John Redmond and Patrick excepted, were living with her by then. ## The marriage that stitched the two counties together On 9 January 1916, at the Church of the Visitation in Fairview — a few minutes’ walk from the Drumcondra ridge whose name may or may not honour a man called Conra — Elizabeth Kelch married William Billington, the Lancashire weaver’s grandson who’d become a non-commissioned officer out of Islandbridge Barracks. He’d go on to more than three decades at Guinness, in Traffic and then Administration, at a starting wage that history hasn’t bothered to record; she raised six children in a family whose addresses shift, document to document, the way working Dublin addresses tend — 42 Arklow Street, 8 Beaumont Avenue, both a short walk from Drumcondra and from the ground at Puckstown, where her own family had lived for at least two censuses running. Their eldest, Mabel, died at St Patrick’s Hospital in August 1940, twenty-three years old, nicknamed “Bebe” — the family’s grief notice, that August, extended to Irish Textiles, Shell Manufacturing, and the whole of the Guinness Traffic Department, which tells you something about how thoroughly this was a family embedded in the working institutions of the city. Edward, or Edmund, married in 1949. Annie lived on past 1970. Patrick — Paddy — worked at Guinness like his father, from 1947 until his death in 1992, remembered in his obituary alongside a sister, Connie, and a brother, Noel. And Connie herself appears only by name, one more life the record didn’t stop to fill in. ## Crossing over And then there was John Noel — youngest, or near enough — who in June 1952 walked up the gangway of the _Franconia_ at Liverpool with an occupation of “layer” against his name and an Irish address of 28 May Street, and sailed, alone, for Quebec. By 1954 he’d married Florence Manger in Toronto — her own family Channel Island stock on her father William’s side, arrived in Canada in 1921, settled by 1931 into a four-room brick flat on Vine Avenue in High Park, a five-month-old Florence just barely caught by the census sheet before it was cut off. John Noel and Florence built a life in Toronto that, according to the 1974 voters’ list, had already folded in another generation under one roof — a John Jr. Working as a press worker alongside his filler father and packer mother, at an address family memory insists was 25 Royal even though the official record says Runnymede, which is its own small, ordinary example of how a family’s spoken history and its paper history can simply disagree. John Noel Bellington died in Toronto on 21 January 1996. Florence followed him on 21 October 2003 — closing out, in a Canadian winter and a Canadian autumn a world and two centuries away, a story that started with a nameless ridge in Lancashire and a townland that only sounds like it was named for a sprite. * * *

Perfume advertisements are almost always highly sexualized — for both genders. Often creative, even artistic, they range from the evocative to the elegant to occasionally the rather absurd. There is, however, a new commercial airing for a new fragrance — Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu — that strikes me as one of the most disturbing I’ve seen in years. I will explain why later in this essay, but first I will tell the story of the advertisement as though it were a fairy tale. ## Karina in the Tavern > Once upon a time, not so long ago, there was a beautiful young woman who was so attractive that people followed her everywhere, just to glimpse at her loveliness. One day, her attendants — for she was a special woman with many servants — were busy grooming her: applying make-up, helping her dress in an elegant white ensemble, and combing a hairpiece of long brown tresses that Karina (for this is the name we will call her) would often wear in public. Once she had been suitably groomed and attired, she was whisked away in a beautifully appointed carriage, where she removed her wig, revealing her true hair, and then took a moment to apply a light spray of a magical perfume. It was then that the very handsome driver of the carriage looked seductively and with desire upon her, as almost everyone tended to do. > No matter, they had arrived at their destination, where a throng of male admirers pressed against the side of the carriage, hoping to catch a glimpse of Karina, and perhaps capture an image of her to keep and share with others. Karina closed the curtains of her carriage, and then, to everyone’s surprise, when the door was opened, she was nowhere to be found, having quickly escaped through the door on the other side of her conveyance. She had begun to run, casting off her outer clothing and her lovely dress, quickly running on fashionable white and black shoes, now wearing only a thin gossamer white chemise. The admirers spotted her in the distance, and attempted to run after her, but she was too swift, turning a corner and evading her pursuers. > Karina found herself just outside an elegant tavern, filled with many men and a few conservatively clad women. Music was playing inside. Intrigued, she opened the door, and in that very moment, a bright light surrounded her, eclipsing everything else. The music stopped, and everyone turned to stare appreciatively at her loveliness. By comparison, all the other women were drab, but Karina was a vision in abbreviated white. She walked through the tavern, pausing at each table, the heels of her beautiful shoes tapping audibly on the stone floor. She was enchanting. > As she walked among the tables, Karina began to imagine herself dancing. > She reached the bar, tended by a sombre woman dressed in formal black clothing. She leaned into it and noticed a handsome man registering her image on a photographic device. This pleased her, and she smiled. There was a golden pinball machine nearby, with three men around it, and Katherine joined their play, subtly thrusting at the machine as pinball players often do. She reached high scores on the golden machine and was delighted. > She began to dance then, taking a black hat off the head of one admirer. Several men joined her dance, and she began to energetically shake her hips in rhythm with the lively dance music that had begun to play once the pinball game started. Another man now knelt behind her, following her suggestively gyrating hips. Two men lifted her up, twirled her around, and placed her on top of the bar. Karina was delighted and began to dance there, high above everyone else. Then, with complete abandon, she fell backward into the waiting arms of a crowd of men. The crowd now included the admiring chefs, who had left the kitchens to enjoy the spectacle and the cheers of the crowd. Again she was raised aloft by several men and set down again to dance with many partners. Some other, more drab and conservatively clad women were dancing as well, but no one really had eyes for them — it was all about Karina. > Then, something changed. > There was now a gap in Karina’s world. > She next found herself outside the tavern, running in her tiny white chemise, having lost her shoes, running away barefoot in the rain which had begun sometime during her time at the tavern. She was soaking wet and alone. Despite a rueful smile that some claim to have seen on her face through the rain, no one could say what had ultimately happened in those final moments — or hours — in the tavern, and what ultimately became of the lovely Karina. ## Not Really A Fairy Tale — A Commercial What I have just described is not, of course, a fairy tale at all. It is the advance publicity film — an “extended cut,” in industry parlance — for a new Chanel fragrance: Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu, a flanker to the house’s 2001 Coco Mademoiselle, itself a descendant of the original 1984 Coco. The film was directed by Joe Wright, a filmmaker whose earlier work — adaptations of Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, Anna Karenina — has made a career of women constrained by social systems, longing rendered as spectacle, the camera lingering on the body as the site of meaning. That sensibility, applied here to roughly 120 seconds of perfume advertising, is not an accident. It is a skilled hand doing exactly what it has always done, in a shorter form. ## What’s In A Name? Chanel’s own language for the fragrance leaves little room for alternate readings. The official copy describes it as embodying _“the power of attraction at its most potent, whose pull is impossible to resist”_ — a scent _“magnetic in its intensity.”_ Read plainly, this is not language about a woman choosing to wear something. It is language about a force acting upon her, and upon everyone near her: power, pull, magnetism, resistance rendered futile. The vocabulary is borrowed wholesale from coercion and applied, without apparent hesitation, to romance. The name itself repays a closer look. _“Crush”,_ in its everyday romantic sense — an intense, often youthful infatuation — is not, etymologically, a separate word from its violent twin. Both descend from the same root: force applied until something gives way, the sensation of being flattened by an effect one cannot control. A “crush” of people is a crowd pressed dangerously together. To be “crushed” is to be destroyed. Chanel has not invented an ambiguity here; they have simply selected, from a word that has always meant both desire and destruction, the half they wish the customer to hear — while leaving the other half fully intact, doing its work beneath the surface. ## No One Seems to Notice As far as I can tell, there has been no push-back whatsoever on the commercial, an absence I find utterly remarkable. The feedback online is largely positive, and leaning — surprisingly, or perhaps unsurprisingly — toward “empowerment”. Empowerment… of all things. To me there is an ocean of distance between what we, collectively, notice and what we do not. Before I delve into the darkest heart of the commercial, let’s look at a glaring example of what appears to have gone unnoticed and unremarked: The choice of soundtrack. ## The Darkness in the Soundtrack – Pimps and Coercion The soundtrack chosen for the film is “ _Young Hearts Run Free_ ,” recorded by Candi Staton in 1976. It is, on its surface, a clever choice — a buoyant, dance-able classic, instantly recognizable, evocative of exactly the joy the fragrance house wishes to invoke. It is also, on any closer listening, a warning. The song was written and produced by David Crawford, but not from imagination. In a 2010 interview, Staton described its origin plainly: she had been involved with a man named Jimmy James — a pimp, by her own description — a relationship she called _“very difficult to leave,”_ one that was _“very threatening and abusive.”_ Crawford, listening to her describe it over lunch, began taking notes. _“I’m gonna write you a song,” he told her. “I’m gonna write you a song that’s gonna last forever.”_ He did. What he wrote, from her testimony, is not a love song. It is a song about the impossibility of leaving. The chorus does not celebrate romance; it envies its absence, mourning young hearts still free, still unhung-up, in a way she and her man never quite managed. Beneath the pre-chorus’s determination — self-preservation is what’s really going on — sits its honest, unresolved counterpart: the admission that turning loose, wanting to, trying to, is not the same as being able to. This is the song now playing beneath a young woman’s ecstatic surrender to a crowd of men — lifted, twirled, passed hand to hand, set atop a bar to dance above them all. A song born from one woman’s real account of a coercive, threatening relationship has become, decades later, wallpaper for a scene it would, on any honest reading, warn her against. Whether the choice was made in ignorance of the song’s history or in full knowledge of it and a calculated indifference to the dissonance, the effect is the same: Staton’s testimony, offered once at lunch to a man taking notes, has been stripped of everything but its rhythm and repurposed to sell the very entrapment she was trying to name. The choice of soundtrack was likely closely pondered. I cannot imagine otherwise, given the magnitude of the company behind it and the prestige of the director. And here is where I question another choice made in this advertisement. I wonder if anyone else watching this small piece of film advertising has noticed the disturbing parallels with the movie _The Accused_ , and the real-life case that inspired it? ## A Disturbing Parallel – The Gang Rape Cheryl Araujo was twenty-one, the mother of two young daughters, when she stopped at Big Dan’s Tavern in New Bedford, Massachusetts, on the night of March 6, 1983, to buy a pack of cigarettes. She played the jukebox. She watched some men shooting pool. When the other woman she’d been talking to left, one of the men locked the front door, and Araujo found herself the only woman in the bar. What followed was a gang rape on the barroom pool table, carried out while other patrons reportedly watched, some cheering. She escaped, and was found by passing college students wearing only a coat — accounts differ on the particulars, some describing a single remaining sock, others a torn sweater, but converging on the same essential image: a woman who had fled with her shoes gone, her clothing destroyed. The case became the basis for the 1988 film _The Accused_ , starring Jodie Foster. In dramatizing the assault, the film made a choice the real case did not offer: it staged its own version of the bar scene around a **pinball machine** , the woman surrounded by admiring, then predatory, men, her attire scant, one of only a few women present, the others dressed conservatively by comparison. Stills from Chanel commercial (top) and The Accused (below) Watching the Chanel film closely, the echo is not vague. It is architectural: the pinball machine, the crowd of men, the woman as the only spectacle in the room, the conservative women rendered invisible beside her, the eventual flight. ## This is Not Victim Blaming I want to be precise about what I am, and am not, arguing. A woman should be able to walk naked down a street and not be assaulted. A man should be able to fling hundred-dollar bills across a crowded bar and not be robbed. That neither is safe to do is not a failure of the woman or the man — it is a failure of the world around them, and the moral weight of what might happen belongs entirely to whoever chooses to do harm, not to whoever was visible. I do not believe Karina, or anyone she stands in for, invited anything by wearing very little in a room full of men. But I do think an advertisement that stages precisely that scenario — a woman alone among strangers, elevated, passed hand-to-hand, ecstatic and unguarded — and offers it back to its audience as pure glamour, without the faintest shadow of the risk such a scene would actually carry in the world as it exists, is doing something quietly irresponsible. Not because she should have known better. Because the advertisement does, or ought, but chooses not to say so. And there is a second thing worth separating out, because the film and the copy writing do not agree with each other. Chanel’s own language sells power: potency, pull, magnetism, a force she wields. But the visuals sell something else entirely — desirability. Karina does not act upon the room; the room acts upon her. She is lifted, not lifting. Carried, not carrying. Set atop the bar by other hands, not climbing up there herself. To be desired and to hold power are not the same thing, and the advertisement quietly trades on the confusion between them, letting the copy claim the one while the camera delivers the other. A woman whose value depends on her youth, her beauty, and how little she is wearing has not been given power. She has been given a currency — one for which she did not set the exchange rate, spent in a room where everyone else decides it’s worth. ## Mind the Gap Does any of this matter? Mattering is not the first concern; noticing precedes it. Nothing can matter that has not first been seen — really seen, turned over, questioned rather than simply absorbed and enjoyed. An advertisement is built, with tremendous skill and enormous budget, precisely to be felt and not examined: 120 seconds of music, light, and motion, engineered to bypass the part of the mind that asks what is it actually looking at. Most of what passes in front of us passes exactly as intended. This one did not pass by me quite so easily. I do not know whether this small act of noticing changes anything. One essay does not unmake an image that has circulated, relabelled and reused, for as long as advertising has existed. The next campaign will likely do something very similar, and most of its audience will feel, correctly by the ad’s own design, delighted rather than uneasy. _But I am watching._ I noticed the pinball machine, and the golden light, and the borrowed song, and the woman running barefoot through the rain while the crowd that adored her, moments before, simply vanishes from the story, unaccountable, unquestioned. I noticed what the copy claimed and what the camera actually showed, and that the two did not agree. I cannot make anyone else notice. I can only report what I saw, and ask, gently, that the next time something this carefully made asks for nothing more than your delight, you look a little closer before you give it. And consider that fairy tales, like our Karina story, almost always have an underlying reason — a wolf, a warning, a door that should not be opened. Ours had one. I wonder if Chanel’s does. Here are links to both the Chanel advertisement and _The Accused_ movie scenes: * * * ## References and Primary sources: ### The campaign itself * Chanel. "Coco Mademoiselle." Official product page. https://www.chanel.com/ca-en/fragrance/coco-mademoiselle/ * Chanel Coco Mademoiselle Crush Absolu — extended campaign film. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snr7XqNweMQ ### The song * Staton, Candi. "Young Hearts Run Free." Written and produced by David Crawford. 1976. Lyrics: Genius. https://genius.com/Candi-staton-young-hearts-run-free-lyrics * Enzinna, Wes. "Featured Alabamian: Candi Staton." Interview. _Oxford American_ , 2010. Archived version: https://web.archive.org/web/20101211180429/http://www.oxfordamerican.org/interviews/2010/dec/02/featured-alabamian-month/ ### The Accused / Cheryl Araujo * "Cheryl Araujo." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheryl_Araujo * _The Accused_ (1988), directed by Jonathan Kaplan, starring Jodie Foster. ### Word origin * "Crush." Cambridge Dictionary. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/crush

* * * It is an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, and Robert is talking about a fountain pen. In speaking with Robert, one senses that he is usually a reserved individual, not prone to exuberance — but this item is clearly a source of enthusiasm. Some might look at Robert’s pen and blandly comment that “ _yes, it’s certainly a nice pen,_ ” but they would be missing the point. This pen is meaningful. It has its own story, that has over time become part of Robert’s story too. ## An English Made Fountain Pen Here is the moment to be precise. Robert’s pen is an English-made Parker Duofold Maxima fountain pen. It has survived seven decades and still serves its intended purpose. It is considered a collectable, and there is a market of specialists who would wish to acquire this particular pen — which makes this a fitting occasion to say plainly that this is not an appraisal, not an assessment of market worth. This is a much deeper, and arguably more meaningful, look at a seemingly everyday object. Better defined, perhaps, as a working collectable. Robert and the pen are roughly the same age, with both coming into being in the 1950s. They — Robert and his pen — now live in Texas, but the pen has only lived there since Robert acquired it, sometime between 2015 and 2020. Robert cannot place the acquisition more precisely than that five-year window; the memory of exactly when has not survived as clearly as the pen itself has. And this would seem a good place to write more precisely about the pen and its life before Robert. The nib tells you most of what is knowable before you even turn the pen over: _Parker England 50_ , the “50” not a whim but a code — the largest nib Parker’s Newhaven factory made for this range, reserved for the Maxima, the flagship of a lineup that ran up through Slimfold, Junior, Demi, and Senior before arriving at this. The wide chevron band at the base of the cap says the same thing in a different register: it marks the pen as the top of the line, not merely a Duofold but the largest and most deliberately made of them. Parker’s own nib-marking convention of the period typically stamped these nibs “14K Parker England 50” — Robert’s pen reads “Parker England 50” without a visible 14K mark, though the nib is understood to be 14-karat gold. Whether the mark is present but unnoticed, worn away, or genuinely absent is not something that can be settled without closer examination. ## Going Back to Newhaven The pen was almost certainly made at Parker’s factory in Newhaven, England — the plant responsible for the entire postwar British Duofold line, Maxima included, and the source of the “England” stamped into the nib. The factory that made this pen sat in Newhaven, a small port town on the Sussex coast at the mouth of the River Ouse, England — a working harbour town, not a manufacturing hub in the way Birmingham or the Midlands were, which makes the presence of a fountain-pen works there something of a historical accident. The site had begun life not as a factory at all, but as a First World War army transit camp used to move troops and materials across the Channel to France. The camp was abandoned in 1921 and a pen manufacturer named Felix Macauley built a factory there. In 1930 the facility was sold to Valentine & Sons; then finally acquired outright by the Parker Pen Company in stages through the 1940s. By the time Robert’s pen would have been made in the mid-1950s, pen manufacturing had already been on that site for roughly three decades. The 1950s themselves were a period of active expansion at the Newhaven works — new factory bays were raised in 1951, and a large brick office block, still known internally as “H Block,” went up in 1955 to house a rapidly growing administrative staff. How many people were on the factory floor specifically in the middle years of that decade is not a figure that turned up in the sources available — the clearest workforce numbers on record are around a hundred employees under Valentine & Sons, and over a thousand by the 1970s, once Newhaven had become a major regional employer. The true number for 1955 or so almost certainly sits somewhere between those two points. ## When in the World? A precise year of manufacture is harder to claim with confidence. Collectors and dealers who specialize in these pens regularly assign individual Maximas to specific years — the mid-1950s, or 1956, or 1958 — but the model’s exact production run and the year the Maxima itself was introduced remain points of open discussion even among dealers, and no single date can be stated here as settled fact. What can be said with more confidence is the decade: this is a 1950s pen, likely the middle years of that decade, made in the same stretch of years in which Robert himself was born. Inside the barrel is a filling mechanism built for use with an ink well or bottle of ink, rather than a cartridge: a rubber sac compressed by a metal pressure bar, the two working together so that a squeeze of the barrel expels air from the sac, and its release in the ink draws the fluid back in. This was Parker’s aerometric filling system, which replaced the older button-filler mechanism used in Parker’s British pens into the early 1950s. What the design achieves, whatever its exact materials, is repairability — the sac can be replaced, the bar reset — which is no small part of why a pen built for a desk in the 1950s can still be filled, and written with, on a desk in Texas seven decades later. ## The First Owner Not much is known of the pen’s early life. Robert found it offered on eBay in the UK, where the seller was auctioning off the possessions of a deceased family member — an online estate sale, of sorts. There was no history of the pen included in the original listing, just pictures and features and talking points of interest to particular fountain pen enthusiasts. Perhaps the deceased uncle bought it new, nestled in the original and subsequently lost box. Perhaps it had changed hands between its inception and the eBay auction. We will never know. Things can only be traced from eBay forward, the pen travelling through the mail from the Old World to the New. ## Why Acquire a Fountain Pen? When Robert was asked why he chose to purchase this particular pen, he had a short but interesting response. He had become a “fountain pen enthusiast,” for no precise reason other than he was experiencing, at that particular point in time, some turbulence in life. He chanced upon the notion that he might find some solace, or some distraction, by means of what he now terms “the pointless exercise of being a collector”. He termed it “buying gifts for myself” and in this case by acquiring the “best” fountain pen of its type for that time. And yet, despite the “pointless” exercise, the pen has remained with him and gained weight — in meaning — as we shall explore later. But before we call up the present, this is a good place to explore the deep genealogy of the pen itself. ## The DNA of a Fountain Pen — Out of Africa Of the pen’s materials, gold is the one worth pausing on longest, because its journey to the nib is traceable in outline even though its exact origin is not. In the 1950s, the overwhelming majority of the world’s newly mined gold came from South Africa, and by long-standing arrangement — one that had defined the trade since the nineteenth century and was freshly reestablished when the London gold market reopened in 1954 — South African mining houses shipped the bulk of their production to London to be sold and refined. It arrived unrefined, was assayed and refined by relatively few London firms working to strict purity standards, and was then sold on through the London bullion market to manufacturers who needed it, jewellers and dentists and instrument-makers among them, pen companies too. Parker’s Newhaven factory did not buy finished gold sheet from outside; it ran its own in-house “melts” operation, where gold was weighed, alloyed to the correct karat, and rolled into the sheet from which nibs were stamped — a detail confirmed by former Newhaven staff who recalled the melts book as the literal control ledger for the department. Gold entering Britain in the 1950s came overwhelmingly by way of South African mines and the London bullion market, refined by one of a handful of London houses, before reaching a manufacturer’s own workshop. What it cannot do is name the mine. No document survives — or at least none that this research has found — connecting a specific bar of gold to a specific nib stamped “Parker England 50” on a specific day in Newhaven. The most honest claim available is a systemic one, not a particular one: this gold almost certainly passed through that South African-to-London pipeline, but its deeper origin, the specific seam it came out of the ground from, is unrecoverable. The tiny fused ball at the very tip of the nib — the actual point that meets the paper, separate from the gold body around it — sits in a similarly uncertain place, though for a different reason. Pen nibs of this era were conventionally described as “iridium-tipped,” and iridium is itself one of the platinum-group metals, historically sourced primarily from South Africa’s Bushveld region alongside a smaller supply from the Ural Mountains in Russia — so, geographically, a story that echoes that of the gold. But the word “iridium” on a mid-1950s nib carries a genuine asterisk: industry accounts consistently note that tipping alloys largely stopped containing actual iridium by the mid-1950s, priced out by its rarity, and were increasingly replaced with alloys of the more available sister metals — osmium, ruthenium, ruthenium-tungsten blends, and similar mixtures loosely grouped under the same “iridium” label out of habit rather than accuracy. Robert’s pen was made right at that pivot point. Whether its tip is old-style true iridium or one of the substitute platinum-group alloys already coming into use by then is not something that can be determined by looking at it, and is left here, deliberately, unresolved. The black material of the barrel and cap is the section where the sources actually disagree with one another, which is worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Some dealer and collector descriptions of mid-1950s aerometric Duofolds — including pens of this same general type and era — describe the material as black celluloid. Other accounts place Newhaven’s shift to injection-moulded polystyrene barrels specifically in the late 1950s, and specifically in connection with Parker’s cheaper Duofold models rather than the flagship Maxima. Robert’s pen, as a mid-decade Maxima, sits close to that dividing line without falling clearly on either side of it based on the sources available. It may be celluloid; it may be an early use of the injection-moulded plastic that would come to define Parker’s later, cheaper British pens. Both are plausible. The pressure bar and the spring inside the aerometric mechanism are almost certainly some grade of steel — a metal chosen for its ability to flex thousands of times over decades without fatiguing, which is exactly what the mechanism has, apparently, been doing for seventy years. Whether it is specifically stainless steel, as it visually appears to be, is not something this research can confirm beyond the visual impression already noted, and no further claim is made about its alloy. ## How the Pen is Used Today Robert uses this pen regularly, and it does more than mark words and numbers on a page. He is an IT professional, which means — like many of us — he types and uses keyboards and devices all day. His Maxima came to have special uses, not related to his “pay the bills” life. The pen enables him to truly write, or better put, to scribe. He can act as his own personal amanuensis — at once the one composing the words and the one setting them down, the pen forcing a small distance between the two that a keyboard doesn’t. He cites the physicality of the object first: its heft, its size, the feel of it in the hand. This, he finds, helps create focus — writing that is legible and deliberate, rather than merely fast. The touch on the page is more delicate than that of a regular ballpoint pen; there is no need to “grind” it onto the page, only to let the ink (and his thoughts) flow. The nib’s own form makes the writing itself more visibly elegant — downstrokes wider, cross-strokes narrower — so that the motion of writing becomes more conducive to the pondering and choosing of meaning. The pen’s mechanical demands, in other words, impose a discipline on his thinking that a keyboard does not. The ink is a further, deliberate choice. He seeks inks from England when he wants a deep, saturated black, and others from France when he wants something closer to earthy tones. ## A Working Collectable with a New Purpose Just a fountain pen? Just a collectable? Clearly, this is not the case. For an appraiser, it might carry a modest market value; for the collector, a certain cachet. But for Robert, this humble object — part of his life for a decade or less — is something more. It is the embodiment of an emotional period, one that culminated in the ability to create words of worth and meaning. Not a bad purchase. A “keepsake,” in the truest sense of the word. * * * ## Sources consulted _NB: several sources are dealer listings, enthusiast blogs, and collector forums rather than peer-reviewed or archival sources._ ### On the Duofold Maxima and the Parker UK Duofold range * Nishimura, David. "English & Danish Aerometric Duofolds." Vintagepens.com. https://www.vintagepens.com/Parker_UK_Duofolds.shtml * "Parker Duofold Maxima, No. 50 14ct Gold Nib." The Old Pen Shop. https://theoldpenshop.co.uk/products/parker-duofold-maxima-blue-with-no-50-14ct-gold-nib-p0428 * "Vintage Parker Duofold Maxima." Worthpoint archive. https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/vintage-parker-duofold-maxima-465798670 * "1957 Parker Duofold Maxima" (forum thread). Fountain Pen Network. https://www.fountainpennetwork.com/forum/topic/323750-1957-parker-duofold-maxima/ * "Parker Duofold." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Duofold * "Parker Duofold UK — New Standard, Blue, Aerometric" (two listings). Peyton Street Pens. https://www.peytonstreetpens.com/ * "Parker New Duofold UK Senior (1950s)." Peyton Street Pens. https://www.peytonstreetpens.com/ * "1950s Parker Duofold Senior Aerometric — Black Celluloid." Protopens. https://www.protopens.com/1950s-parker-duofold-senior-aerometric-made-in-england-14k-gold-f-size-nib-black-celluloid-fountain-pen.html * Goodwriterspens's Blog. "Newhaven Parker Duofold Demi." https://goodwriterspens.com/2012/10/23/newhaven-parker-duofold-demi/ * Goodwriterspens's Blog. "English Parker Duofold Aerometric." https://goodwriterspens.com/2018/07/19/english-parker-duofold-aerometric/ * Fountain Pen Chronicles and More. "Parker 17 Duofold." https://fountainpenchronicles.blog/2024/07/08/parker-17-duofold/ * Parkercollector.com. "Parker 17." https://www.parkercollector.com/parker17.shtml * Parkercollector.com. "Parker Centennial." https://www.parkercollector.com/centennial.shtml ### On the Newhaven factory and its history * Walton, Carol. "Parker Pen Company." Our Newhaven. https://www.ournewhaven.org.uk/topics/businesses/parker_pen_company * "Former Parker Pen Factory." Geograph Britain and Ireland. https://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/3103949 * "Newhaven project on the history of the Parker Pen Factory receives national funding." Sussex Express. https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/heritage-and-retro/heritage/newhaven-project-on-the-history-of-the-parker-pen-factory-receives-national-funding-4528931 * "Did you or someone you know work at the Parker Pen factory in Newhaven?" Sussex Express. https://www.sussexexpress.co.uk/news/people/did-you-or-someone-you-know-work-at-the-parker-pen-factory-in-newhaven-4500260 * "Parker Pens: Stories from Newhaven Town, East Sussex." Press Play Films. https://pressplayfilms.co.uk/parkerpens/ * "A Brief History." Penshop.co.uk blog. https://www.penshop.co.uk/blog/a-brief-history-parker * "Parker Pen Company." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parker_Pen_Company * "The history of penmaking around Britain." Heritage Hunter. https://heritagehunter.co.uk/the-history-of-penmaking-around-britain/ * Rupert Arzeian, Fountain pen blog. "Nine years with the Parker Frontier fountain pen." https://rupertarzeian.com/2020/04/23/nine-years-with-the-parker-frontier-fountain-pen/ ### On gold sourcing and the London bullion market, 1950s * "After the War is Over, The London Gold Market Reopens: 1954–1968." Alchemist, LBMA. https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-95/after-the-war-is-over-the-london-gold-market-reopens-1954-1968 * "Learn About the London Gold Market." BullionStar. https://www.bullionstar.com/gold-university/london-gold-market-trading * "Origins of the London Bullion Market." LBMA. https://lbma.org.uk/origins-of-the-london-bullion-market * Blagg, Michele. "The Royal Mint Refinery." Alchemist, LBMA. https://www.lbma.org.uk/alchemist/issue-71/the-royal-mint-refinery * "1. Introduction." LBMA OTC Guide. https://www.lbma.org.uk/publications/the-otc-guide/introduction * "The First Gold Fixing." LBMA. https://www.lbma.org.uk/wonders-of-gold/items/the-first-gold-fixing * "The Daily London Gold Fix." The Tontine Coffee-House. https://tontinecoffeehouse.com/2021/08/09/the-daily-london-gold-fix/ * "The Reopening of the London Gold Market in 1954." An Exchange Rate History of the United Kingdom (Cambridge University Press). https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/an-exchange-rate-history-of-the-united-kingdom/reopening-of-the-london-gold-market-in-1954/9EC83D5D143E4E1C298BE35056D70182 * "The London banking house." Guide to the Rothschild Archive. https://guide-to-the-archive.rothschildarchive.org/the-london-banking-house/depts/the-daily-gold-price-fixing/history-of-the-gold-price-fixing * "Rand Refinery." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rand_Refinery ### On nib manufacture and tipping materials * "The Art of Pen-Making." Parkerpen.com. https://www.parkerpen.com/parker-pen-making.html * "Vintage Pen Catalog: Parker, 1945 to the present." Vintagepens.com. https://www.vintagepens.com/catill_Parker_2.shtml * "Parker Fountain Pen Nibs." The Online Pen Company. https://www.theonlinepencompany.com/fountain-pen-nibs/parker-nibs * "Nibs." Parker75.com. https://parker75.com//Reference/Nibs/Nibs.htm * "Nibs." Parker45Pens.com. https://parker45pens.com/nibs/ * "Retipping." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retipping * Nishimura, David. "What is iridium?" Vintagepens.com FAQ. https://vintagepens.com/FAQbasics/iridium.shtml * "Nibs, Then and Now." Fountain Pen Chronicles and More. https://fountainpenchronicles.blog/2022/02/22/nibs-then-and-now/ * "Pelikan's Wolfram-Iridium Alloy." The Pelikan's Perch. https://thepelikansperch.com/2023/09/13/pelikan-wolfram-iridium-nib-tipping/ * "Precision in Nib Crafting: Iridium Tipping Techniques." Fountain Pen Revolution. https://fprevolutionusa.com/blogs/news/precision-nib-crafting-iridium-tipping-techniques * "Fountain Pen Nib and Tipping Materials Explained." Bottle and Plume. https://www.bottleandplume.com/blogs/learn/fountain-pen-nib-and-tipping-materials-explained-and-gold-vs-steel-myths-busted * "Fountain Pen – Nibs." Technology Trends / Primidi. https://www.primidi.com/fountain_pen/nibs * "4.4 Nib Materials." Fountain Pen Design. https://fountainpendesign.wordpress.com/fountain-pen-nib-design-function/fountain-pen-nib-materials-composition/ * _Minerals Yearbook, 1954_ and platinum-group metals data tables (1955–56). University of Wisconsin Digital Library. https://search.library.wisc.edu/digital/

Some objects announce themselves. They arrive with hallmarks, with maker’s stamps pressed into brass, with palette-shaped labels that promise, however falsely, a name. This is not one of those objects. It is “just” a potholder. ### The Potholder It is a square of quilted cotton, a scant 5-1/2 inches on a side, bound in gold bias interfacing gone soft with age, with a small barely frayed loop at one corner for hanging. Gray letters, stamped in a diagonal band across its face, still declare, faintly but legibly: Don’t burn your hands. BURN OUR Quality Coal and Fuel Oil. KOENIG COAL & SUPPLY CO. 1486 Gratiot Ave. Order Department. All Yards. WO 1-1584 --- No museum will ever accession this object. It is not old enough to be a proper antique, not distinctive enough to be delightfully quaint — barely, if judged scrupulously, old enough to be called a collectible at all. It occupies a strange, unglamorous middle ground: too young for reverence, too ordinary for nostalgia, and yet somehow still here. It was never bought. It was given away — a small commercial gesture, free with a delivery, the kind of object that existed by the thousands and was meant to be used until it wore through and was thrown out. This one was not thrown out. It has survived for something on the order of seventy years, and it is worth asking why an object built for so little permanence has managed so much of it. ## Koenig Coal & Supply Co. Detroit, Michigan **The company on the label was real, and it was not small.** Koenig Coal & Supply Co. Traced its origins to 1870, when Peter Koenig began selling firewood in Detroit — a modest enough start for a business that would, over the following decades, expand into hard coal, then fuel oil, then building supplies and concrete, growing into one of the city’s most substantial independent fuel and materials firms. By 1932, the company was established at 1486 Gratiot Avenue, the address printed on the potholder, in a building given a striking black-glass Art Deco face as part of a broader modernization of that stretch of the street. By the mid-1960s, near its own centennial, Koenig was being described as the largest independent firm of its kind in the region, combining coal, fuel oil, building supplies, and concrete under one name. The building still stands. It has since become, at various points, a bar and a venue — a small, ordinary irony, that a company built on heating strangers’ homes should end its working life as a place where strangers gather to be warm in a different sense entirely. ## What’s In A Number? The telephone number does something the company’s own history cannot: it dates the object with real precision. “WO 1-1584” is not a modern phone number missing a few digits — it is a complete one, in the format the Bell System adopted as a national standard in the years following 1947: two letters representing a named exchange (here, almost certainly Woodward), followed by five numerals. This format had a surprisingly short reign in the United States. It became the settled national convention only in the postwar years, and the telephone industry began actively phasing it out in favour of all-digit dialing starting in 1961, a transition largely complete within the decade that followed. A potholder printed with a two-letter, five-number Detroit exchange, then, could not have been made much before the early 1950s, and almost certainly not much after the early 1960s. The object dates itself, independent of any story its owners might tell about it. ## Detroit and St. Clair Shores – late 1950s to early 1960s And there is a story, though not one the potholder can confirm on its own. It belonged to a woman who will be called Marie here, and subsequently to her daughter who will be called Jackie — their real names kept out of this account, in keeping with the practice of these essays generally — who lived in Detroit and, for a handful of years in the later 1950s, in the newly incorporated suburb of St. Clair Shores, some fourteen miles up the lake from downtown. St. Clair Shores had become a city only in 1951. When Marie arrived, it was still becoming itself. Locals of the period remembered parts of it, only half-affectionately, as “ _Muddy Acres_ ,” for the unpaved roads and unfinished storm sewers that left the ground as swampy as it had been when French settlers called the place _L’anse Creuse_ (meaning Little Bay or Shallow Bay) two centuries before. It was, during Marie’s residency, the fastest-growing suburb of Detroit — a young family’s landscape of half-built streets and lakefront promise. The Jefferson Beach Amusement Park, with what had once been the longest roller coaster in the country, closed its gates in 1959, somewhere in the middle of Marie’s years there — a landmark she would have known either as a going concern or as a thing newly and locally mourned, depending on exactly when she came and went. She would have read, in whatever paper came to the house, that a Soviet satellite called Sputnik had gone up in October 1957, and felt — as most of the country did — the particular unease of a technological argument being won, for the moment, by another side. She would, if she were still in the area come November 1960, have read about John F. Kennedy’s election, one of the narrowest in the nation’s history. And sometime around these moments, Kern’s, a long-loved downtown Detroit department store, closed its doors for good in 1959, one small local grief folded into a decade of larger ones. ## The Oilman, the Milkman and the Breadman Somewhere in this window, an oilman handed Marie a potholder at her door. For precision, it was an oilman, not a coal man, despite what the potholder itself advertises; Marie’s household burned fuel oil rather than coal, a detail confirmed by her daughter, Jackie. This is the detail, the physical contact, is worth sitting with longest, because it is not really about the object at all. It describes a mode of commerce that has almost entirely vanished: a company representative, in person, at the door, handing something directly to the person whose house he had just filled with coal or fuel oil — an ordinary transaction with an ordinary human gesture built into it, unremarkable at the time, now nearly unrecoverable. The oilman himself has vanished as completely as two other once-familiar callers of the era, the milkman and the breadman — figures who arrived at the door as routinely as the mail and now survive mostly as figures of speech, evidence of just how thoroughly that whole mode of personal commercial contact has disappeared from ordinary life. ## ‘Tis the Season Detroit’s oil-heating season ran roughly from autumn through February or March; whatever else was or was not true of Marie’s household in a given year, the delivery itself would have come in the cold months, carried in by a stranger she likely knew by sight, if not by name. Whether anything else was true of that particular winter is practically unknowable, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What is certain is that Marie was pregnant in 1957 and 1958. A household expecting a child in early spring might have known, in those same winter months, a particular kind of restlessness — sore feet, a sore back, the low hum of apprehension and anticipation that attends any coming change. It is tempting to fold that possibility into the object’s story, to imagine Marie’s hand closing around a still-warm potholder while some other, larger warmth was building in the house alongside it. But nothing in the object itself, and nothing in what survives of the household’s account, fixes whether such a thing was happening in that particular winter, or a different one, or not at all in any way connected to this potholder’s arrival. The two facts — a coal company’s seasonal delivery, and whatever else was unfolding in Marie’s life across these few years — sit beside each other without ever quite touching. What can be said, and said with certainty, is smaller and stranger for its smallness: her hand touched it. ## The History of the Object The object’s own materials tell a story with a different kind of confidence — strong in its middle, honestly uncertain at both ends. The cotton was almost certainly American-grown; there was no economic reason, for an object this ordinary, to look further afield than the country’s own Cotton Belt — the Mississippi Delta; the Texas and Oklahoma plains; the fields of Georgia, Arkansas, and the Carolinas. Where that raw fibre went next can be said with more confidence still. By the 1950s, American cotton textile manufacturing had all but completed its long migration out of New England and into the Piedmont region of the Carolinas and Georgia, consolidating around a handful of large, vertically integrated firms — Cone Mills, Burlington Industries, Dan River, J.P. Stevens, Deering Milliken among them. It is entirely plausible, though not provable for this specific piece of cloth, that both the plain backing and the printed face of this potholder began as yardage from a mill in exactly that region, at almost exactly the moment of its greatest concentration and output. Where the story goes soft again is at the very last step: the cutting, quilting, printing, and stitching that turned plain cloth into a finished, branded object. Some larger Southern mills operated their own finishing divisions capable of carrying goods all the way to this point. Equally plausible, a separate premium or “advertising specialty” manufacturer, a genuine mid-century industry built specifically to produce branded giveaways for companies like Koenig, might have been located anywhere from the same Southern mill towns to the Midwest, closer to its client. The potholder carries no manufacturer’s mark — these giveaway pieces essentially never did — and so this last leg of the journey is a gap that cannot honestly be closed. Somewhere between a Carolina loom and a Detroit doorstep, cloth became a gift, and no record of exactly how survived the transaction. The ink follows a similar pattern of confidence and honest limit. A single-colour design on a short run like this was, by every reasonable expectation of the period, produced by screen printing — a method that had its origins in advertising and display work near the turn of the century, decades before it found its way into fine art. The grey-black pigment is consistent with carbon black, the default colourant of the era, very likely bound in the kind of synthetic resin system that had become standard in commercial textile printing by the 1930s. Why the lettering reads as grey rather than a truer black today is a question with two equally plausible answers: it may simply have been printed that way from the start, a cost-conscious choice for an object made by the hundreds and given away for nothing; or it may have faded, decade by decade, through sun and laundering and the slow oxidation of the binder itself. The object does not tell you which, and there is no easy way to make it do so. ## Why did Marie keep it? This is the question that matters most and can be answered least. She died more than twenty years ago and cannot, obviously, be asked. What survives is not an explanation but a fact of placement: among the things she left behind — some with real market value, some still in daily use, all of them, in one way or another, explicable as things worth keeping — this potholder sat quietly in a linen drawer, tucked in among the good tablecloths and the guest towels it did not remotely resemble in quality or purpose. It is not fine. It has no resale value worth mentioning. It does nothing that a newer, prettier potholder could not do better. Yet it stayed. The object’s own condition offers a modest clue toward one possible answer. Its hanging loop is only lightly frayed, and the potholder itself is notably clean — free of the scorching, staining, and heavy wear that decades of real stove-top use would be expected to leave on quilted cotton. Jackie, asked directly, reported that her mother was not especially fond of cooking, that it was for Marie simply another household task to be managed rather than lingered over. That temperament may explain the object’s pristine state more plausibly than any theory of careful, deliberate preservation: a potholder rarely used has correspondingly little chance to wear out. It is fair, too, to ask whether this survival reflects something more concerning than ordinary sentiment — whether Marie was, in the clinical sense the word has since acquired, a hoarder. Jackie’s answer is a clear no. Marie kept a great many things over her lifetime, by her daughter’s account, but not at any level that would raise real concern; she was an accumulator in the unremarkable way that most people are, not someone for whom keeping had become a compulsion. Perhaps it meant nothing in particular to her, and was simply too small and too little trouble to discard — the kind of object that survives not through reverence but through sheer inertia, the drawer never quite emptied, the thing never quite in anyone’s way. Or perhaps it was kept precisely because it had been given, not bought — a small unearned gift from a stranger at the door, in an era when that kind of encounter was still ordinary yet quietly pleasing. Neither explanation can be confirmed against the other, and it may be that both were true in different years, or neither, or that the question would have struck Marie herself as a strange one to be asked about a potholder. What can be said is only this: whatever quiet, unexamined status it held during her lifetime has shifted, now that she is gone. Before her death, it was merely another object among many — unremarkable, indistinguishable from a dozen other small things a household accumulates without thinking. Since then, it has taken on something closer to pathos, not because the object itself changed in any way, but because it was touched by a hand no longer here. An object she touched, that survived her, that outlasted several better and more expensive things — that status is not something the object earned by being kept. It is something death conferred on it, after the fact. ## A Time Traveller It did not travel far, in the end — Michigan to Ontario is no great geographical distance, a lake crossed rather than an ocean. But measured in years rather than miles, it travelled a great deal further than that: Call it, without much exaggeration, a time traveller: an object built to last a single heating season, that instead crossed seven decades intact, arriving here essentially unchanged. From a Detroit doorstep in the last years of a two-letter phone exchange, through a linen drawer that outlived its keeper by decades, it has been quietly waiting, as objects so often do, patient in a way no person can be. And here, now, it has its brief moment to come into the light and declare whatever meaning can still be discerned**** — an accounting, a small declaration of whatever meaning a workaday object can still be made to yield, before it goes quiet again. ### Notes and Caveats Established as fact: Koenig Coal & Supply Co.’s founding date (1870) and its occupancy of 1486 Gratiot Ave. From 1932; the two-letter, five-number telephone exchange format as the U.S. national standard from the late 1940s through the start of its phase-out in 1961; St. Clair Shores’ incorporation as a city in 1951 and its documented status as Detroit’s fastest-growing suburb through the 1950s; the closures of Jefferson Beach Amusement Park (1959) and Kern’s department store (1959); the launch of Sputnik (October 1957) and the election of John F. Kennedy (November 1960); that Marie’s household heated with fuel oil rather than coal, and that Marie was not fond of cooking — both reported directly by Jackie. Probable, not confirmed: that the potholder’s cotton was grown in the American South and woven in a Piedmont Carolina or Georgia mill, consistent with the overwhelming concentration of that industry in the region by mid-century; that the printing method was screen printing using a carbon-black, resin-bound pigment; that the object’s clean, lightly worn condition reflects infrequent use rather than deliberate preservation. Speculative but grounded: any connection between the potholder’s arrival in the household and a pregnancy, a particular season of physical or emotional change, or any specific year within Marie’s known residence in St. Clair Shores; the specific manufacturer or location responsible for cutting, quilting, and finishing the object into its final form; whether the grey tone of the lettering reflects original formulation or decades of fading; Marie’s own reasons for keeping the object. Unknowable, and treated as such throughout: why, specifically, this object was kept for more than seventy years when so many identical ones were not. * * * **References** 1. "Koenig Coal & Supply Co. Building," _Historic Detroit_ , https://historicdetroit.org/buildings/koenig-coal-supply-building 2. "The Coal King," _nailhed_ (blog), May 2015, https://www.nailhed.com/2015/05/the-coal-king.html 3. "Your Evolving Phone Number," _Invention & Technology Magazine_, https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/your-evolving-phone-number-1 4. "All-number calling," Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-number_calling 5. "Textile Industry," _South Carolina Encyclopedia_ , https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/textile-industry/ 6. "Cotton mills move upcountry," _Appalachian History_ , https://www.appalachianhistory.net/2018/04/cotton-mills-move-upcountry.html 7. "Screen printing," _Encyclopædia Britannica_ , https://www.britannica.com/technology/screen-printing 8. "Evolution of Textile Printing Technologies and Innovative Sustainable Solutions," _The Textile Magazine_ , https://www.indiantextilemagazine.in/evolution-of-textile-printing-technologies-and-innovative-sustainable-solutions/ 9. "Gallery: 150 historic Detroit News front pages from 150 years," _The Detroit News_ , https://www.detroitnews.com/picture-gallery/news/local/michigan-history/2023/03/26/gallery-150-historic-detroit-news-front-pages-150-years/11547534002/ 10. "St. Clair Shores, Michigan facts for kids," Kiddle, https://kids.kiddle.co/St._Clair_Shores,_Michigan 11. "Looking Back: St. Clair Shores may not be an old city, but it honors its past," _Metromode_ , https://metromodemedia.com/looking-back-series-scs/ 12. "City History," St. Clair Shores, MI Official Website, https://www.scsmi.net/98/City-History

It all started, for me, while babysitting my ten-year-old granddaughter. We were thinking about playing a new game, and I recalled an old set of dominoes I had stashed away in the basement. We began to play, and I began to ponder. I knew the set had been owned by my father, kept in the basement of the house I inherited, along with all its contents, upon his death. He and I had never played dominoes together. I suspect the set had remained, if not untouched, unplayed for decades. Who may have possessed the set before it was my father’s is, itself, an inference rather than a fact. My father was born in 1920, and would not, in any meaningful sense, have “owned” anything as a child — so if the set predates him, as I believe it does, it must have belonged first to his father, my grandfather, Frederick Choppin. This is an assumption, not a documented certainty. It rests on timing, and on something harder to defend: the set simply feels like the kind of thing my grandfather would have owned, based on what I know of his other possessions. My grandmother Jessie, by contrast, was no player of games — she was outdoorsy, a reader, not a gamer — and I find it hard to picture her ever taking a turn with these tiles. Much less slamming them in victory on a tabletop. When my grandfather died in the 1930s, everything he owned stayed with her; only upon her own death were those possessions divided between my father and his sister. My father, it seems, came away with the smaller, more “manly” objects among the household’s effects — pocketknives, tools, a set of dominoes — while my aunt inherited other things entirely. So what I actually know is this: the set was in my father’s keeping, and before that, somewhere in a household shared by Frederick and Jessie. Which of them — or whether either of them — ever set a tile down on a table, I cannot say. The dominoes are snugly housed in a fitted box. The lid slides open through bevelled edges, and the joints are beautifully dovetailed. The wood appears to be beech. The tiles — or _bones_ , as they are often called — have a marked heft and substantive feel to them. They don’t feel modern in any sense. Their physicality is notable. And so, I began turning the tiles over and over in my hand, inspecting them more closely, and wondering what story they might have to tell. ## A Deeper History I want to give some history to the Rennicks of New Brunswick, the original — or certainly early — owners of the game. But first, let’s take a look at the history of the game itself, some reasonably deduced information about what this set was made from and how truly ancient these components are, and some speculation on when and where the set may have been made. ### The Game Dominoes is a game of matching tiles, tracing back to twelfth- and thirteenth-century China. The version played today — the double-six set, with its familiar twenty-eight tiles running from blank-blank through six-six — emerged in Italy in the early eighteenth century, and spread from there across Europe over the following decades. By the time my set was made, dominoes was already an old game, its rules and standard form well settled, its manufacture a well-established trade rather than a novelty. The name itself carries a bit of disputed folklore. One theory ties “domino” to the black hooded cloak, lined in white, once worn by priests in winter and later adopted as a masquerade costume — the white tile with its black pips echoing the garment’s contrast. I offer this as a charming and oft-repeated story rather than a settled fact; other sources trace the word more plainly to the Latin _dominus_ , “master.” I don’t know which is true, but I am fine with that. ### Of What the Set Is Made Under a strong, raking light, the white material of the tiles shows faint striations, running more or less in the same direction across every piece. This is a meaningful detail. Ivory, the material one might first assume, has a distinctive signature — Schreger lines, a fine crosshatch pattern where two sets of lines cross one another. What I found instead was a simple parallel striation, with no crosshatching at all. That absence points toward bone rather than ivory — specifically, in all likelihood, cattle bone, and more specifically still, the cannon bone, or shin-bone: long, dense, and straight, and for centuries the standard, unremarkable material for exactly this kind of small turned or cut goods. Bone was a byproduct: The animal that gave up its shin-bone had certainly been raised and slaughtered for beef, or culled at the end of a working or dairy life, its bone recovered afterward by butchers and sold on, in bulk, to the bone-workers and turners who supplied trades like this one. We can’t know the particular animal’s age, but a beef animal of the period would most plausibly have been somewhere between two and four years old at slaughter; a dairy cow or working ox, considerably older. The dark material presented its own small puzzle. My first assumption was ebony, but I wondered whether it might instead be ebonite — vulcanized rubber, patented in the mid 1800s and widely used through the second half of the nineteenth century as a cheaper, moldable stand-in for true ebony. A simple test settled it, or came as close to settling it as I could manage at home. When I rubbed the dark material and brought it close, I found no odour at all — no trace of the faint sulfurous smell that vulcanized rubber tends to retain, even after a century, when warmed by friction. That absence, together with the wood-like irregularity of the streaking under light, points toward genuine ebony. Ebony does not grow in Europe or North America. Wherever this set was made, the wood had already crossed an ocean before it reached a workbench. The nineteenth-century trade in ebony ran chiefly through West Africa — Gabon, in particular — and through Ceylon and southern India, both moving through British colonial and mercantile channels; or Madagascar, via the French. Only the heartwood of the tree is usable — dense, jet black, and slow to form — while the pale outer sapwood is cut away and discarded. Because of this, an ebony tree needed real time before it was worth harvesting at all; a reasonable estimate puts that at sixty to a hundred years or more of growth, though I hold that figure loosely. A tree that began growing in some West African or Ceylonese forest a century before Canada’s Confederation might easily be the very wood held in my granddaughter’s fingers now. And then there are the pins — small, dulled, brownish-gold, holding bone to wood these many decades. I ran a magnet across the pine – no pull. So, likely brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, and both metals, however plain they may seem set into a domino, carry a history longer than either the tree or the animal ever could. Neither copper nor zinc formed in the Big Bang; both were built, atom by atom, inside stars — through slow neutron capture in aging red giants, and in the more violent processes of supernovae — long before our own sun existed. When those ancient stars shed their outer layers, the elements scattered into the interstellar dust and gas from which our solar system eventually formed, some 4.6 billion years ago. From there, the story turns geological rather than stellar: copper concentrated into mineable veins in places like Cornwall, through granite intrusions some 280 million years ago; zinc, in deposits like those worked around Liège in Belgium, through mineral-laden groundwater moving through limestone over a vast stretch of time. If, as seems likely, these pins were cast in Birmingham — England’s great centre of brass founding and small-metal manufacture in this period — then the copper and zinc within them had already travelled an almost unfathomable distance before they ever became something as modest as a pin holding a domino together: forged in the deaths of stars, scattered across a forming solar system, locked into rock for hundreds of millions of years, mined, smelted, alloyed, and finally shaped into something small enough to hold between two fingers. I find something quietly staggering in that. The set in my hands is, by any ordinary reckoning, old — older than my grandfather, older than the Rennicks, older by a wide margin than the city of Saint John itself. And yet every material in it is, in its own way, almost incomprehensibly older still. ### When and Where Was It Made Taken together — the pinned bone-and-ebony construction, the fitted and dovetailed box, the standard should-be twenty-eight-tile count (mine has just twenty-six; more on that later) — the set most plausibly dates to somewhere in the second half of the nineteenth century, likely the 1860s through the 1890s. Where, exactly, it was made, I cannot say with any confidence. England and France were the two leading centres of this kind of fine-ish games manufacture in the period, and the materials — West African or Ceylonese ebony, cattle bone, Birmingham brass — would all comfortably fit an English origin, moving through the same colonial and mercantile trade networks that, eventually, brought the finished object across the Atlantic to a modest tradesman’s household in Saint John, New Brunswick. But a locally or regionally made set, produced somewhere within the Maritime provinces themselves using imported raw materials, remains entirely possible too. I don’t have a maker’s mark, a label, or anything else that would let me say for certain. What I have is a set of reasonable inferences, built from the object itself — and, as I was about to discover, a family’s name, written in an adult’s hand, on the underside of the lid. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Rennicks The dovetailed box and lid bearing Frank's name. The box itself presented a clue. Beneath the lid, etched in what appears to have been an adult’s handwriting, is “Frank A. Rennick, St. John, New Brunswick.” This made perfect sense. My grandfather had lived in Saint John between 1920 (or perhaps 1923) and 1931. Frank and his family lived in the city during these same years — and they were neighbours, certainly by March 1925, living just a few doors down from one another on Wright Street. How, exactly, my grandfather came to own a set that had once belonged to the Rennicks, I don’t know for certain. But the closeness of the two households — not merely the same city, but the same street, for at least a few years — was enough to send me looking in earnest. Frank Adams Rennick was born in Saint John on January 11, 1878, the son of Hugh Rennick and his wife Anna (sometimes recorded as Annie). Hugh, born September 30, 1846, worked most of his adult life as a shoemaker — _cordonnier_ , in the bilingual language of the 1901 census — and by that year was earning a modest $300 annually, the same figure recorded for his twenty-three-year-old son Frank, then just beginning what would become a fifty-year career as a clerk, and eventually cashier, with the Canadian Express Company (later Canadian National Express). Father and son lived together in Duke’s Ward, and would go on living together for most of the next two decades. Both Hugh and Anna were, in the language of the period, “deaf and dumb” — Hugh’s deafness attributed on the census to a childhood fever, Anna’s to an unspecified “sickness.” The record isn’t a passing detail; in 1891, a decade earlier, both were already recorded as deaf — as was Hugh’s brother Thomas, who died that same year at thirty-seven. Whether some hereditary thread ran through the wider Rennick family, or whether each case had its own separate cause, I can’t say with any confidence — the record merely states the fact of shared deafness among at least two siblings and a spouse, not its cause or origin. What the record shows plainly, though, is a couple who built a real and active life around that shared circumstance. In May 1907, some twenty of Saint John’s deaf citizens organized themselves into an association, securing a room in the Stockton Building for weekly religious services — conducted, as the newspaper put it, by “preachers of their own kind,” since the deaf congregants found themselves otherwise dependent on hearing clergy they couldn’t follow. Hugh was named to the room committee. Anna was named, alongside a Mrs. Samuel Stanton, to a ladies’ committee formed to assist the new association. This was not incidental membership; it was two people well established in a hearing city, giving real time and effort to building a fuller communal and spiritual life for themselves and others who shared their circumstance, in an era that offered almost no institutional accommodation for it otherwise. Hugh died on March 27, 1921, at the General Public Hospital, following an operation, at the family home at 82 Spring Street. He was seventy-three, a lifelong resident of the city, survived by Anna, by Frank, and by a sister, Mrs. Joseph Taylor. Sometime in the four years that followed, Anna and Frank — Frank still unmarried — left Spring Street and settled at 68 Wright Street. It was there that Anna died, on March 31, 1925, of what her death record describes as a malignant growth of the neck, with Frank at her side. Frank remained at 68 Wright Street, alone, for four more years. In June 1929 he married Elizabeth Maude Dunbrack, in Vancouver, and by the time of the 1931 census the couple had settled into their own home at 33 Cedar Grove Crescent, in the Dufferin Ward of Saint John — Frank by then a cashier for an express company, his income risen to $1,425 a year, the house a modest six-room rented row dwelling with, the census noted with a certain period charm, a radio. He died on March 9, 1953, “the last surviving member of his family” — a phrase, as I understand it, means the last of his own household, Hugh and Anna and Frank, rather than the last Rennick anywhere (at least one aunt had outlived Hugh by decades). He was a Freemason, made an honorary member of Albion Lodge No. 1 not long before his death, and also a member of the Knights of Pythias. He was buried from Brenan’s Funeral Home, entombed at Fernhill Cemetery. My grandfather’s family — Frederick Choppin, his wife Jessie, and their children, including my father, born in 1920 — lived at 96 Wright Street continuously from at least June 1923 (the birthdate of my father’s younger brother James) through October 1927 (James’s death date, at 96 Wright Street, “all his life,” per his death certificate). Ninety-six and sixty-eight Wright Street, by my counting, sit some three or four houses apart — not a long walk at all. My grandfather’s family, in other words, were already living on that street when Anna Rennick died a few doors down in the spring of 1925, and remained there for at least two years afterward, through the years Frank lived on alone before his 1929 marriage and move across the city. I want to resist the temptation to close this gap more tightly than the evidence allows. I don’t know that Frederick and Frank ever spoke to one another. I don’t know that the set passed directly between them, rather than through some intermediary — a shop, an estate sale, a mutual acquaintance helping Frank settle his mother’s affairs. What I can say is that a game once belonging to a household built, in real part, around silence — a household that fought, deliberately and communally, to be heard in its own way — came to rest, a few doors down, in a household that would go on to play it, generations later, with a ten-year-old girl who has never known any of these names. Dominoes asks nothing of the ear or the tongue. It can be played, perfectly, in total silence. I find myself unable to shake the thought that Frank, or Hugh, or Anna, might have known that better than most of us ever will — though whether that thought is discovery or simply my own imagination reaching for a meaning the record doesn’t offer, I leave for the reader to decide. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## Two Missing Tiles A complete double-six set holds twenty-eight tiles. Mine holds just twenty-six. I don’t know which two are gone, or when, or how. I’ve thought about the plain, unglamorous ways a domino tile disappears from a set: swept up with the crumbs after a long-ago game and thrown out without a second look; dropped and rolled beneath a floorboard or a piece of furniture, still there, for all I know, in some Saint John house I’ll never enter; carried off by someone’s child, put in a pocket and forgotten, or simply lost the way small, hard, pleasing objects are always getting lost from a child’s hand. There is no record for this kind of disappearance. No census taker, no obituary writer, no death certificate marks the moment a domino tile leaves a set for good. It simply isn’t there one day, and by the time anyone thinks to count, no one can say when. I think, more often than I expected to, of some lines from the 1995 film _Restoration_ 1, in which the character Katherine describes a place called The Land of Mar: > Across the sea, > in the Land of Mar... > there is a valley where are kept > all the things lost on earth. > Lost kingdoms, > lost riches, > lost hours, > lost loves. I won’t pretend I believe in such a place, not literally. But I’ve spent these past weeks in something like it all the same — turning over a bone tile in my hand and trying to call back a lost afternoon, a lost conversation, a lost pair of feet walking three or four doors down a Saint John street on some ordinary day in 1925, for some ordinary reason, that no one thought worth writing down. Most of what I set out to find, I found. The animal the bone came from, if not the animal itself. The forest the ebony came from, if not the tree. The stars the copper and zinc came from, if not which star, or when. A family — the Rennicks — recovered in fuller and more human detail than I had any right to expect from a name pencilled under a lid. A street, a distance of three or four houses, close enough to call the word _neighbours_ without stretching it. But not everything. Not the moment the set changed hands. Not the two tiles that are simply gone. Not whether my grandfather and Frank Rennick ever stood on the same stretch of sidewalk and said good morning to one another, the way neighbours do, without either of them imagining that a hundred years on, someone would go looking for the proof of it. Some things, it seems, stay in the Land of Mar. I’ve decided I don’t mind. A story with every gap filled in wouldn’t have sent me looking in the first place — and it certainly wouldn’t have been half as much fun to tell my granddaughter, the next time we sit down, twenty-six bones between us, to play. * * * 1. _Restoration_ , screenplay by Rupert Walters (1995), spoken by the character Katharine. Quoted via Scripts.com, STANDS4 LTD, accessed September 5, 2026, https://www.scripts.com/script/restoration_16827/5 * * * ## References and Additional Reading: **Stellar nucleosynthesis (copper, zinc origins)** * Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler & Hoyle, "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars," _Reviews of Modern Physics_ , 1957 (the foundational paper on s-process/r-process nucleosynthesis) * NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory or NASA Science education pages on stellar nucleosynthesis (nasa.gov) **Copper and zinc geology** * British Geological Survey (bgs.ac.uk) has publications specifically on Cornish copper/tin mining history and geology * For Belgian zinc/Liège: geological literature on "Mississippi Valley-type" (MVT) ore deposits **Ebony — botany and trade history** * CITES (cites.org) documentation on _Diospyros_ species, since several ebony species are now trade-restricted — useful for both botanical and trade-history detail * Wood identification/trade references such as the _Wood Database_ (wood-database.com), which covers ebony species, growth characteristics, and historical trade regions in accessible detail **Bone as a craft material** * General decorative-arts or antiques reference works on Victorian-era bone and horn working would cover cattle cannon-bone use directly; museum decorative arts departments (V&A, Smithsonian) **Brass manufacture and Birmingham** * Birmingham's historical role in brass founding and small-metal trades is well covered in local/industrial history sources — Birmingham City Archives or the Library of Birmingham **Domino history** * General game-history references (e.g., _The Oxford History of Board Games_ by David Parlett) cover dominoes' Chinese origins and 18th-century Italian/European spread reliably **Genealogical/documentary sources** * 1901 and 1931 Canada Census records * Find a Grave memorial * _Telegraph-Journal_ obituary and death notices, via Newspapers.com * _Saint John Globe_ , 1891 (Thomas Rennick) * _Restoration_ screenplay, via Scripts.com

> _The thin red jellies within you or within me, the bones and the marrow in the bones, / The exquisite realization of health; / O I say these are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul. > — I Sing the Body Electric, _by Walt Whitman ## The Cut Several years ago I sliced a finger joint right down to the bone, exactly where it bends. To be precise, that spot is called the distal interphalangeal joint — or the rather winsome “DIP” for short. To briefly explain what happened, I was slicing some sweet potato on a newly acquired mandoline slicer. The tool came with a guard designed exactly to prevent this type of accident, but I stupidly decided that I was sufficiently nimble to not need that protection. Clearly a bad decision. There was no pain. At least not at first. In fact, I didn’t even notice what had happened until I saw blood flowing down the mandoline and landing on the sliced potatoes. Red on orange. Delayed pain reception is a documented phenomenon — not something I want to delve into in this essay. But it is relevant in that this pause of maybe a few minutes, in which I headed to the sink to begin running cold water over my finger and try to assess the damage, gave me the time to indulge in something I found quite curious. ## The Beauty of Bone I could clearly see the “live” bone, including the DIP joint. And its colour, to me, was a surprise. Perhaps like most people, I expected bone to be, well, “bone” coloured, like some designer wall paint. Or chalky white like skeletons. Hallowe’en-ish. It wasn’t like anything I expected. It was beautiful. Opalescent. Iridescent. Shiny. Like mother-of-pearl. Pearlescent. This was “live” bone, not some desiccated museum piece. Despite being astonished by this unexpected beauty, I did need to stop the bleeding and attend to the minor medical emergency. Afterwards, I began to think about the wonder of the palette of the human body. And, because my mind tends to spiral into odd corners of conjecture, I began to ponder whether a painter might consider using only colours found inside the human body. ## Inner Beauty In this mental exercise, I wanted to consider only “inner beauty” — in other words, I did not want to include exterior colours: no skin, no hair. For the same reason I have also set aside the eyes and the teeth, which, though technically visible only close-up, function more like exterior, on-display features than hidden interior ones. I wanted to focus only on healthy tissue, avoiding any colours associated solely with pathology, injury, or necrosis — just what is alive but ordinarily hidden from view. And so, with this in mind, here is what turned out to be a surprisingly varied body palette. ## Bone, Cartilage, and Tendon Living cortical bone, freshly exposed, isn’t the chalky white of a dried anatomical specimen — that whiteness is a property of dead, degreased, bleached bone. Living bone has a blood supply running through it (via the Haversian canal system) and retains moisture and some organic content in its matrix, and the periosteum — the thin fibrous membrane covering bone — can itself have a glistening, slightly translucent quality. The gloss I noticed at the sink was this moist, vascularized surface catching light, the way any living tissue looks wet and lustrous compared to how we picture it dried out. Living cortical bone runs pale ivory to warm grey-beige, with a faint sheen where the periosteum covers it. Cancellous (spongy) bone, exposed at a joint or fracture, is a deeper pink-tan, almost coral, saturated as it is with marrow and blood supply. Cartilage, often grouped with bone but structurally distinct, is a pale blue-white, almost translucent — think skim milk with a touch of grey, glossy like wet porcelain. Tendons are dense, fibrous, and pale ivory-white, with a slightly pearlescent sheen similar in tone to cartilage but less translucent. ## Blood, and the Myth of Blue Veins Blood itself, oxygenated or not, is never actually blue. Oxygenated (arterial) blood is bright, almost cherry red; deoxygenated (venous) blood is darker, more brownish-red or maroon — closer to an oxblood tone. What makes veins appear blue through skin is an optical effect rather than a pigment: skin and fatty tissue scatter and absorb red wavelengths of light more than blue, so blue-violet wavelengths preferentially scatter back to the eye from the light that reaches a vein and bounces out again. A 1996 study using CCD imaging and Monte Carlo light-transport simulations confirmed that the perceived colour of a blood vessel depends on the scattering and absorption properties of the overlying skin, the oxygenation state of the blood, and the vessel’s depth and diameter — not on any blue pigment in the blood itself.1 It is the same broad category of phenomenon as why the sky is blue: light physics, not pigment. Cut a vein open and drain it, and there is no blue to be found — just dark reddish-purple blood inside a translucent, greyish vessel wall. There is, in short, essentially no true internal blue pigment anywhere in the body. The one colour most people associate with the body’s interior in a sense of aristocracy is, on inspection, a colour that isn’t really there. ## Muscle and Heart Skeletal muscle is a deep, saturated red — the classic “raw meat” red — laced through and over with streaks of pale, silvery-white fascia. Heart muscle (the myocardium) is darker and more matte than most people expect, closer to a dried-blood or oxblood tone than to bright red. It is coated in a thin, glossy pericardial layer, with visible fat deposits along the vessels; that fat is a pale yellow-cream, a striking contrast against the dark muscle beneath it. ## Nerve and Brain Peripheral nerves are a distinctive pearly white to pale yellow-white, with a slightly glistening, cord-like appearance quite different from the surrounding tissue — part of why surgeons can identify them by sight alone. The brain deserves special mention, because it corrects one of the most persistent misconceptions about the body’s colour palette. The living human brain is not grey. It appears as a soft pinkish-white, the result of constant blood flow through a dense capillary network; the familiar flat grey most people picture comes almost entirely from brains preserved in formaldehyde, which drains the blood and bleaches the tissue.7 In life, grey matter is genuinely pinkish-beige, and white matter is a brighter, cleaner off-white to yellowish-white, coloured by the fatty myelin sheathing its nerve fibres — the same fat-driven cream logic found elsewhere in the body’s fatty tissue. ## The Digestive Organs The liver is a deep reddish-brown, often described as maroon — one of the few organs to lend English a colour name in its own right. Its glossy outer capsule catches light with a wet sheen; the tone can shift toward purplish-brown when congested with blood, or toward tan-brown if fatty. The stomach and intestines show two distinct faces. Their outer surface (the serosa) is smooth, glossy, pale pinkish-grey to tan, almost pearlescent. The inner lining (the mucosa), where visible, is far more vivid — deep pink to red, thrown into a rugose, folded texture that creates strong shadow and highlight, especially in the stomach. The small intestine’s interior runs a lighter, more coral-pink, with a velvety texture from its villi. The pancreas is a pale, mottled yellowish-tan to pinkish-grey, lobulated and somewhat granular in texture, sitting stylistically between the pale tan of the kidney or spleen capsule and the cream of fat, since it is a gland embedded in and around fatty tissue. The kidneys are a deep reddish-brown, in the same family as the liver but usually a touch more purplish, with a smoother, tenser, glossy capsule. Bile is genuinely one of the few sources of true green anywhere in the body — a dark olive-green to golden-green, sometimes shading toward brownish-green with concentration. The colour comes from bilirubin and its oxidation product biliverdin (literally “green bile”); bilirubin itself leans yellow-orange, and shifts toward biliverdin’s green as it oxidizes.2 Bile in the gallbladder runs darker and more concentrated than bile fresh from the liver, since the gallbladder actively reabsorbs water as it stores it. The same green-yellow chemistry, running through the identical hemoglobin-breakdown pathway, is what colours a healing bruise as it moves from red-purple through blue-black to green and finally yellow-brown over one to two weeks — a visible, external timeline of an internal pigment process. ## The Urinary System The bladder wall, like stomach and intestinal serosa, is a smooth, glossy pale pinkish-grey on the outside. Its inner lining, when empty and relaxed, is thrown into folds with a pale pink to yellowish cast; when distended it stretches thin, paler still, sometimes showing a faint reddish tracery of small vessels. And, I can personally attest to this, having had several cystoscopy procedures, where I was permitted to watch the “movie” from the camera’s perspective. Urine’s colour comes from urochrome (urobilin), a downstream product of the same bilirubin pathway that colours bile — pale straw to deep amber depending on hydration and concentration. Urine and bile pigment are, in this sense, chemically related cousins, both tracing back to the breakdown of haemoglobin, presenting differently only because of where each sits in the degradation pathway. ## The Reproductive Palette: Constant Change The ovary is one of the most internally varied organs in the body’s whole palette, because its function is cyclical. Its outer surface, the tunica albuginea (“white coat”), is a pale, dense, dull white-grey. After ovulation, the ruptured follicle transforms into the corpus luteum — literally “yellow body” — a saffron-yellow structure formed as the pigment lutein, a carotenoid related to the pigment in egg yolks and marigolds, accumulates in its cells.3 If no pregnancy follows, the corpus luteum degenerates into the corpus albicans (“white body”), a scarred, pale, fibrous remnant. Month after month, the ovary cycles between a white capsule, a saturated yellow secretory structure, and a fading white scar. The uterus divides into three zones with three distinct colour logics. The serosa (outer covering) is smooth, glossy, pale pinkish-grey, in the same family as other abdominal organ coverings. The myometrium, the thick muscular wall, is a dense pinkish-tan to reddish-brown, muted compared to skeletal muscle, closer in spirit to heart muscle’s darker tone. The endometrium, the inner lining, is the single most dynamically coloured tissue in the whole survey: pale pink shortly after menstruation, thickening and growing markedly more vascular and deep red as it prepares for a possible pregnancy, before that same blood-rich layer sheds as the period. The fallopian tubes are pale pink, delicate, and glossy, their small calibre giving an overall impression of soft coral rather than the deeper reds of larger organs; the fimbriae near the ovary run slightly deeper pink, owing to increased vascularity at that mobile end. The vaginal walls are pink to reddish-pink, thrown into folds like stomach or bladder mucosa, with a moist, glossy surface — one that shifts genuinely with hormonal state, thicker and more robustly pink under higher estrogen, paler and thinner in lower-estrogen states such as post-menopause. In the male, the testes carry a pale bluish-white to greyish-white outer covering — the same tunica albuginea tissue type as the ovary’s capsule — with a softer, yellow-tan, coiled interior. The prostate is a pale pinkish-tan, firm glandular tissue, fairly nondescript, in the same family as the pancreas. Semen itself is a thick, whitish-gray fluid; a slight yellow tint is common and considered normal, varying with hydration and diet.4 It belongs to the same broad “milky, opalescent, warm-white” family as several other body fluids, since it is largely glandular secretion rather than a blood product. The egg cell (oocyte) is unusual for being right at the edge of naked-eye visibility at all — roughly 100 to 120 micrometres across, making it the largest cell in the human body, at the very threshold of what the unaided eye can resolve.6 As for colour, it is generally described as transparent or colourless, without meaningful pigmentation, its appearance shaped more by light scattering and refraction than by any inherent hue — sometimes characterized as faintly yellowish or creamy under direct light. It is, chromatically, almost a null result: the one part of the reproductive palette defined by its near-absence of colour, in quiet contrast to the vivid cycling of the ovary that produces it. ## Lungs, Glands, and Other Structures Healthy lung tissue in a younger, non-smoking person is pale pink, almost salmon, mottled, spongy and matte rather than glossy. In practice, most adult lungs carry mottled grey-black patches from accumulated airborne carbon, creating a marbled pink-and-charcoal effect; the pleura, the outer lining, has a smooth, slightly glossy translucence over all of it. The thyroid is a deep reddish-brown, highly vascular gland, closer in tone to liver or kidney than to the paler glands nearby. The adrenal glands are small but visually striking, with a genuine two-tone structure: a pale yellow outer cortex, rich in lipid content, surrounding a darker, greyish-tan inner medulla. The thymus, largest and most active in childhood, is a soft pinkish-grey; it shrinks and grows progressively more fatty and yellow with age, one of the few organs with such a marked lifetime colour shift. The spleen is a deep purple-red to almost maroon-black, one of the darkest organs in the body, with a smooth, glossy capsule. Lymph nodes are small, pale pinkish-grey to tan, fairly nondescript and bean-shaped. Fat deserves its own entry even though it is not an organ: pale yellow, sometimes almost cream, lobulated, matte rather than glossy, threading through and around nearly everything as a structural, connective colour. Beneath the skin’s surface, the dermis itself carries a colour gradient rarely described in plain visual terms. The reticular layer — the deeper of the dermis’ two layers — is composed of dense, bundled type I collagen fibres, giving it a paler, denser, more fibrous ivory-white than the thinner, more vascular papillary layer above it, which is pinker and more blood-flushed.8 The reticular layer’s coarse, bundled collagen fibres are too large to produce the short-wavelength Rayleigh scattering that gives thinner, more disorganized tissue its blue-white translucence, so light reaching that depth is simply absorbed or scattered by whatever pigment — melanin, blood — happens to be present, rather than generating a scattering colour of its own. Moving from the skin’s surface downward, the expected gradient runs from pink and vascular, to a denser pale ivory-white, to the cream-yellow of the fat layer beneath. ## A Curious Aside: Earwax Earwax is worth a brief detour, because its colour is one of the cleanest examples in the whole body of a single gene doing visible, direct work. People carrying one or two copies of a particular variant of the ABCC11 gene produce wax with higher fat content — wet, sticky, and brownish; those with two copies of the other variant produce wax with less fat — dry, light-coloured, and flaky. This single genetic variant was the first documented example of a DNA polymorphism determining a directly visible human trait5, a nice bit of trivia given how much messier most visible human traits are. ## The Colours That Are Missing Running this survey end to end, a pattern of absence is as interesting as the presence. There is no true black under normal physiology. What reads as “black” in the body is almost always necrosis, pathology, or foreign material — dead or gangrenous tissue, very old oxidized blood, or the soot-like carbon deposits mottling a smoker’s lungs. True black is pathology or pollution, not baseline anatomy. There is no pure, saturated orange. The nearest approaches are concentrated bile at certain stages of the bilirubin pathway, leaning orange-gold, and very concentrated urine running toward deep amber. Both are dilute or transient rather than a standing tissue pigment. There is no true purple**** or violet. Venous blood leans purplish-maroon rather than true purple; the early stage of a bruise can look genuinely purple-black; the spleen, the closest standing candidate, still reads more maroon than violet. There is no flat, opaque, printer-paper white. Bone, cartilage, tendon, and nerve are all pearled or ivoried, warm or faintly blue-white, but none is a true absolute white; the closest candidate, white matter in the brain, is only bright relative to the grey matter beside it. And there is no vivid, saturated yellow of the egg-yolk or lemon variety — fat gives a pale cream-yellow, and concentrated bile or urine can push toward gold, but nothing internal reaches that fully saturated pitch, with the sole exception of the corpus luteum’s true saffron yellow. The running theme: the body’s chromatic vocabulary is narrower and earthier than intuition suggests. Where popular imagination supplies bright orange organs, purple viscera, or black blood, it is drawing on illustration convention, decomposition, or disease — not living tissue. ## An Ancestral Palette: Prehistoric Cave Art This narrow, earth-toned range is not unique to the body. Prehistoric cave art’s palette is, almost by definition, constrained to nearly the same family of colours, and for a related reason: both are limited by what naturally occurring, unrefined materials can produce, without the technological capacity to synthesize or import brighter pigments. Cave painters worked with red and reddish-brown from red ochre (hematite, an iron oxide), sometimes heated to shift the shade further toward red; yellow-brown from yellow ochre (goethite, a hydrated iron oxide); black from charcoal or manganese dioxide; and, where it appears at all, white from calcite, chalk, or kaolin clay. Analysis of pigments from sites including Lascaux has confirmed that the reds are hematites and the yellows are goethites, with blacks consistently manganese-oxide based.9 Red ochre in particular sits in almost exactly the same chemical family — iron oxide — as blood’s colour and most of the body’s organ reds and browns, one from geology and one from biology. What is conspicuously missing from the major Paleolithic sites is the same list as before: no blue, no green (with rare, debated exceptions), no true purple, no saturated orange beyond what ochre itself produces. Blue, in particular, had to wait for a real technological leap: Egyptian blue, generally credited as the first synthetic pigment, was in wide use by roughly 2500 BCE11, and lapis lazuli ultramarine came later still, remaining extraordinarily expensive for millennia. Paleolithic painters were not choosing an earth palette aesthetically any more than the body “chooses” its own — both are working within a hard material constraint, one of available iron-oxide minerals and carbon, the other of available blood, bile, and connective-tissue chemistry, and both land in the same visual family as a result. There is a further, more loosely evidenced layer worth flagging: a genuinely debated body of archaeological and ethnographic evidence suggests that some pigments, in some traditions, were mixed with blood, fat, or marrow as a binder, to help ochre adhere to rock surfaces.10 Where that happened, the connection between the body’s own palette and the cave painter’s palette stops being a mere resemblance and becomes, materially, the same substance. This reframes the whole exercise: the “body palette” may not be an idle curiosity for a hypothetical modern painter so much as the default, ancestral human palette — the one our species used for tens of thousands of years before pigment chemistry expanded the available range. The bright, saturated palette most people now think of as “normal” for painting — vivid blues, clean greens, saturated purples — is the historical outlier, a comparatively recent expansion, not the baseline. ## An Internal Palette Gathered together, and excluding eye and tooth tones as set out at the start, here is the palette this survey turned up, grouped by family: **Reds** * Bright arterial crimson * Deep venous plum * Oxblood * Cherry red * Dusky brick red **Pinks & corals** * Pale rose pink * Coral pink * Salmon pink * Vivid vascular pink * Pinkish-beige **Browns & ochres** * Deep reddish-brown * Maroon-brown * Warm tan * Greyish-tan * Pinkish-tan **Creams & ivories** * Warm ivory * Pearled off-white * Blue-white * Cream * Pale straw-white * Milky opalescent white * Greyish-white **Yellows** * Pale cream-yellow * Golden yellow * Saffron yellow * Amber * Straw yellow **Greens** * Olive green * Golden-green * Dark bottle-green **Greys** * Soft grey-pink * Ash grey * Pale slate grey * Grey-blue * Clear / transparent * Colourless, glass-clear * Faint translucent white A painter working strictly from this set would end up with something like a Rembrandt or Zorn-style palette naturally — dominated by reds, browns, and creams, with only a narrow, muted wedge of green, and no true saturated blue, black, purple, or orange at all. ## Closing with Groucho Marx It began at a kitchen sink, with cold water running over a cut I had no business getting, looking at a joint of my own finger and finding it, against every expectation, beautiful. Or, to close on a more irreverent note: > “Outside a dog, a book is man’s best friend; inside a dog, it’s too dark to read.” > — Groucho Marx ## References Cited works pertaining to colour and vision: [1] Kienle, A., Lilge, L., Vitkin, I.A., Patterson, M.S., Wilson, B.C., Hibst, R., & Steiner, R. "Why do veins appear blue? A new look at an old question." Applied Optics, 35(7), 1151–1160 (1996). [2] "Biochemistry, Biliverdin." StatPearls, National Library of Medicine (NCBI Bookshelf). https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK549781/ [3] "Corpus luteum." Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/corpus-luteum [4] "Semen: Fluid, Production, Storage & Composition." Cleveland Clinic. https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/body/semen [5] Yoshiura, K., Kinoshita, A., Ishida, T., et al. "A SNP in the ABCC11 gene is the determinant of human earwax type." Nature Genetics, 38, 324–330 (2006). https://www.nature.com/articles/ng1733 [6] "Egg comparison." National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). https://nigms.nih.gov/image-gallery/1339 [7] "What are the Real Colors of a Human Brain? [The Living Truth]." academicpath.org. https://academicpath.org/real-colors-human-brain [8] "Reticular layer of dermis" and "Papillary layer of dermis." Kenhub. https://www.kenhub.com/en/library/anatomy/reticular-layer-of-dermis ; https://www.kenhub.com/en/library/anatomy/papillary-layer-of-dermis [9] "The raw materials." Lascaux cave, French Ministry of Culture. https://archeologie.culture.gouv.fr/lascaux/en/raw-materials [10] "Stone Age Colour Palette: Paint Pigments Used in Caves." artslookup.com. https://artslookup.com/prehistoric/stone-age-colour-palette.html [11] "Egyptian Blue Pigment Changes History." University of Memphis Media Room. https://www.memphis.edu/mediaroom/releases/2016/april16/egyptianblue.php

### Chapter One: The Glove is Found Left Hand Glove Detail, Voytikof, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0. It had been in the drawer for twenty years. She knew this because her mother had been dead for twenty years, and the glove had come with the other things — the brooch with a missing stone, the rosary in the cracked leather case, the photograph of a man no one had been able to name. She had gone through her mother’s belongings in that particular fog that descends when death arrives without warning, sorting with her hands while her mind was somewhere else entirely, and the glove had almost gone into the black bag destined for the charity shop. Almost. Something had stopped her — not a thought, not a memory, not anything she could have explained to her daughter standing beside her asking _does anyone want this, does anyone want that._ A tug. The word that had come to her later was a tug, as though the glove had opinions about its own future. So she had kept it. She had not kept it consciously. She had simply been unable to throw it away. Back into the drawer it went, beneath a tangle of costume jewellery and two keys for locks that no longer existed anywhere in the world, and there it had stayed while she finished raising her children and went on working and doing what working mothers do, which is to say everything, which is to say nothing that is ever adequately named. There it had stayed while she became a grandmother — the first grandchild a girl, solemn and watchful, born in the small hours of a night in spring, when the darkness lay close against the hospital windows and the air outside held something new in it, cool still but loosening, carrying the first tentative promise of warmth to come. There it had stayed through ten more years of grandchildren and holidays and the ordinary accumulation of a life, quiet as a held breath. She found it again on a Tuesday in November, the kind of grey and uncommitted afternoon that seems designed for the clearing out of drawers. She had already filled two boxes for the thrift shop — little figurines, old hats, and scarves that belonged to decades and silhouettes long past. She had made a pile of photographs to be sorted another day, which meant never, which was the right answer. She was on the third drawer of the old chest, the one that had always stuck slightly and required a particular angle of persuasion, when her hand closed around something and she lifted it into the grey November light and remembered. A glove. One glove, for a left hand. She held it by the wrist and let it hang, turning it slowly. It was the colour of old tea, of autumn at its most exhausted, tawny and dark and marked by time in ways she couldn’t quite specify. Leather, she would have said, if pressed — and yet not quite leather, or not only leather, or leather made from something she could not immediately name. It was finely made, she could see that much, the stitching almost invisible along the seams, the cut of it suggesting hands that had known what they were doing. And yet it was worn. The fingers curved slightly inward, as a hand curves in rest or in sleep, holding the ghost of their last occupant. The surface was cracked in the way of very old things — cracked but not broken, the way a riverbed cracks in drought while remaining, underneath, entirely itself. She brought it closer. It was almost transparent at the fingertips, where the leather was thinnest and most worked. She could see, or imagined she could see, the faint suggestion of her own fingers behind it where the light came through. And it was soft — not the softness of new things, which is a kind of blankness, but something older and more complicated. Soft, but not gentle. The distinction mattered, though she could not yet have said why. She smelled it, instinctively, without having decided to. Flowers, first — something between a garden and a church, not quite either. The smell of certain old things in certain old places, the smell she associated with standing in the cool interior of a cathedral on a hot day, with the particular air of sacristies and reliquaries and rooms that had held the same objects for a very long time. Then, underneath, or perhaps instead, the clean animal smell of cured leather, familiar, and grounding. And then something else, rising from further down — loamy and dark, the smell of turned earth, of old forests, of things that grow slowly in the absence of light. She pulled the glove away from her face and looked at it again. Her mother had kept this. Had kept it without explanation, apparently without use, in a drawer in a chest that had followed her through four houses across as many decades. Had chosen not to throw it away, just as she herself had chosen not to throw it away, for no reason she could name. She turned the glove over. No maker’s mark. No label. Nothing on the inner wrist to say where it had come from or when or at whose hands it had been made. The right-hand glove — had there really ever been one? — was elsewhere. Lost, discarded, kept by someone else entirely, waiting in some other drawer in some other house on some other grey Tuesday. She did not know. She found, to her slight surprise, that she minded. She set it on the top of the chest, away from the boxes, away from the things going to the thrift shop. She wasn’t sure what she was deciding. She wasn’t sure she was deciding anything. The glove sat in the grey light with its fingers slightly curled, and waited, as it had always waited, with the patience of something that understood time differently than she did. ─── ❖ ─── Several days passed. Or perhaps it was two weeks — she was not entirely sure, and it seemed, in some way she couldn’t articulate, not entirely relevant. Time had a different texture in retirement, less segmented, more like weather than like clockwork. She thought about the glove. Not obsessively. Not in the way of problems that demand solving or questions that insist on answers. More the way a sound heard in another room draws the ear without quite interrupting the conversation — a tug, surfacing and subsiding, surfacing again. Something waited in the vicinity of that glove. An answer, she felt, to a question she had not yet managed to formulate. Why had her mother kept it? That much she could frame clearly enough. A single glove, no partner, no explanation, carried through four houses and however many decades without ever — as far as she could recall — being worn. Her mother’s hands had been small and capable, the hands of a woman who did things with them. She could not picture those hands in that glove. Could not place the glove anywhere in the landscape of her mother’s life as she had known it. And yet… And yet… She found herself circling. This was not unusual — her thinking had always moved that way, spiralling around a centre rather than driving toward it, approaching by indirection, by accumulation, by what might have looked to an observer like distraction. She had learned, over many years, to trust this. The answer, if there was one, would not be found by marching straight at it. It lived somewhere in the territory of _beside the point_ , which was where her most useful thinking had always gone. Not the point itself but the space around it — the oblique approach, the peripheral vision, the knowledge that arrives not as conclusion but as weather. She let herself circle. Her mother had kept it. Before her mother, someone else — she had no way of knowing who. The glove had been stored, as the other things had been stored, in the box that was simply _Mother’s things_ , as though her mother had existed only in relation to her, had not had a life running deep and parallel and mostly invisible in the way that parents’ lives do. There were things in that box she had never investigated. Names she had never looked up. Photographs of the unnamed man. And a glove, one glove, for the left hand, sitting in the November light on top of the old chest where she had left it. She had not put it back in the drawer. ─── ❖ ─── The first time she had examined the glove she had done so directly, in the manner of someone trying to establish facts. She had turned it over, looked for marks, brought it close to her face, given her attention to it as one applies attention to a problem. She had, in other words, approached it entirely the wrong way, though she hadn’t known that yet. Now, on a morning that asked nothing particular of her, she found herself standing beside the old chest in the way one finds oneself somewhere without quite having walked there. The glove lay as she had left it, fingers slightly curled, patient, tawny in the thin winter light coming through the curtain. She was thinking about her mother. Not directly — not the facts of her mother, not the chronology or the losses or the particular shape of grief, which had long since settled into something quieter and more permanent than grief, a kind of presence-in-absence she had stopped trying to name. She was thinking about her mother the way she circled things, sideways, in the peripheral way, following a thread that seemed to lead away from the subject and then, if you were patient, curved back. And without quite deciding to, without arriving at the action through any process she could later have described, she reached out and laid her palm gently against the outstretched palm of the glove. What came was not a vision. Not quite a sound. It was a feeling so specific and so old that it surfaced from somewhere beneath memory, beneath the reach of ordinary recollection — the feeling of a hand holding hers. Her mother’s hand. She knew it the way you know a voice in the dark, without seeing, without needing to see. And then, beneath that, or behind it, or woven through it in the way that certain harmonies contain other harmonies — another hand. Her grandmother’s. A woman she had known only in childhood, whose face had softened at the edges of memory into something more like weather than portraiture, but whose hand she apparently still knew. Still carried somewhere in the oldest part of herself. Both women long dead. Both women, she understood now with a certainty that required no proof and admitted no argument, had worn this glove. She stood very still and let the feeling subside, the way you stand still when a bird has landed nearby, and you do not wish to startle it into leaving. Then she picked up the glove. Carefully, the way you might take someone’s hand who has offered it — with acknowledgement, with a sense of what the gesture means. She carried it to the old chair by the window, her mother’s chair, comfortable and slightly shapeless in the way of things long lived in, not yet given to the charity shop, not yet ready to be given, and she sat down. She held the glove in her lap for a moment. The tawny leather. The slightly curled fingers. The patience of it. Then she slipped it onto her left hand. ─── ❖ ─── The glove fit as though it had always known her hand was coming. For a moment, nothing. The grey light. The old chair holding her the way old chairs do, with a familiarity that has nothing to do with choice. Her own breathing. And then — not quite sound, not quite silence broken — something between the two. A voice that was not quite her mother’s and not quite her grandmother’s and yet was both, or was something older than either of them, the distillation of both, the voice perhaps of the line itself, of all the women in whose bodies she had once, in some form, existed. She could not have said what words it spoke. The words were not the point. The point was the quality of it — known, and knowing, a voice that had carried her, that had spoken over her in the earliest dark before she had language to receive it, before she had anything but the animal knowledge of being held. _‘Stay,’_ it said, or something that meant stay. _‘Close your eyes,’_ it said, or something that meant that. _‘Allow it.’_ She closed her eyes. Warmth came first — not the warmth of the room, not the thin warmth of the winter light through the curtain, but something enveloping and deliberate, the particular warmth of a blanket settled over your shoulders by another’s hands at the end of a summer evening, when the light has gone amber and the air has just begun to remember that it can be cool, and someone who loves you has noticed before you noticed yourself. That kind of warmth. The kind that says _I see you. I have you. There is nothing required of you now._ She let her hands rest in her lap, the gloved left hand and the bare right hand, and she let her breathing slow, and she let the edges of the room — the curtain, the chest, the boxes for the charity shop, the pile of photographs for another day — she let all of it soften and recede, the way the shore recedes when you have stopped fighting the water and simply allowed yourself to float. ─── ❖ ─── What she learned in those first minutes — or hours, for she would never be entirely sure which — she could not afterward have put into words. Not because it had been confusing or overwhelming or beyond her intelligence, but because it had not arrived in words. It had arrived the way certain knowledge arrives in dreams, or at the moment just before sleep, complete and whole and resistant to the reductions of language. She knew things, when she opened her eyes, that she had not known when she closed them. She could not have told you how she knew them. She knew the glove had come to her rightly. That it had passed through hands that were her hands, back and back, further than she could yet see, and that this passing was not accident but the operation of something that had its own logic, its own grain, like wood that will split cleanly in one direction and resist the blade in another. It had come to her because it was hers to receive. More would follow. More was waiting in the glove’s long memory, in its layered and accumulated dark, and she would learn to reach it, but not yet and not quickly. Patience was not optional. Patience was the method. For now — and she understood this clearly, understood it as permission as much as instruction — it was enough to place the gloved hand on an object. Something made, something old, something that had passed through time and carried time within it. This was where she would begin. This was the threshold she had been given to stand at, for now, while she learned the rest. This she understood. And then the warning came. It did not come in the same register as the rest — not the gentle enveloping warmth, not the voice that was all her mothers at once. It came harder and cleaner, the way cold water comes, the way a hand grips your arm when you have stepped too close to something dangerous. It did not frighten her exactly. It was not designed to frighten. It was designed to be remembered, and it was. > Never place the gloved hand on a living thing. Not yourself. Not another person. Not an animal. Not a plant. Nothing that breathes and grows and moves through time on its own terms. The living are different. The living are still becoming. To place the glove against something still in the process of being would be to reach into something unfinished, something in motion, and the motion could be overwhelming — not merely to her, but in ways she was not yet equipped to understand or contain. This was not a permanent prohibition. It was a threshold, like the others, to be approached with patience and in time. And the recently dead — that too was forbidden, for now. Not the chop on the butcher’s paper, not the leaves torn for the salad bowl, not the beloved face in the open coffin. The recently dead are not yet fully themselves as objects. They are still in the process of becoming what they will be, still trailing the heat and motion of what they were. That threshold also would come. That too would be earned. _‘One day,’_ the knowledge told her, with the firmness of something that had considered the matter fully and was not inviting discussion. _‘One day you may be ready. But that day will be earned. It will not be given.’_ She sat with this. The room had returned fully around her — the curtain, the light, the boxes, the chest. Her right hand lay open in her lap, bare and ordinary. Her left hand lay beside it in the tawny glove, still and quiet, the fingers at rest. She thought about warnings. She had read, somewhere — in one of the books that had accumulated on her shelves over a long reading life, their spines soft and their margins annotated in her own younger handwriting — that a Tarot deck should never be lent to a stranger, that some readers would not permit another’s hands upon their cards at all. At the time she had filed this away as the kind of superstition that contains, if you look at it sideways, a serious idea. The cards were calibrated to a particular person’s handling. Another’s touch introduced something discordant, some interference, some history that was not the right history. She looked at the glove. She thought she was beginning to understand. ─── ❖ ─── When the knowledge had settled, when the warmth had receded and the room had returned entirely to itself, and she was simply a woman in a chair on a November morning with a glove on her left hand, she slipped it off. Carefully. The way you set down something that has been entrusted to you. She held it for a moment as she had held it before — the tawny leather, the slightly curled fingers, the patience of it — and it seemed to her that the holding was easier now. More familiar. As though the glove had taken a small step toward her, or she toward it, and the distance between them was no longer quite what it had been that morning in the drawer, or even an hour ago when she had first laid her palm against its palm and everything had quietly shifted. She carried it upstairs. Her grandmother’s dresser stood in the corner of the bedroom where it had always stood, where she had arranged it twenty years ago when it came to her, placing it without quite knowing why in the corner where the light fell on it in the morning at a particular angle that seemed to suit it. It was an elegant thing, the dresser — old and certain of itself, with the unhurried quality of furniture made when furniture was made to last. She had kept the small upper drawer for small things. Private things. The kind of things that don’t require explanation. She opened it. The drawer was lined with paper, a soft floral print faded to the colour of old roses, and it smelled as it had always smelled — of lily of the valley, persistent and delicate and unmistakably grandmotherly, a scent that seemed to belong to an earlier era of women, of careful dressing tables and Sunday gloves and the unhurried mornings of another kind of life. She had never questioned where the scent came from. It had always been there, as long as the dresser had been hers, as long before that as she could only imagine. She laid the glove in the drawer among the small private things. It seemed, she thought, to belong there. As though it recognized the scent, or the scent recognized it. As though they had been in proximity before. She closed the drawer. _This is enough for today_ , she thought, and the thought carried no disappointment, only the particular satisfaction of knowing when a thing is complete. She had learned, over a long life, that this was its own skill — the knowing of enoughness — and she had not always had it and was glad to have it now. She lay down on the bed without drawing the curtains and closed her eyes. Sleep came the way the warmth had come — enveloping and immediate, as though it had been waiting just outside the door. And with it came dreams, though dreams was perhaps too small a word for what moved through her in that long afternoon and into the early dark of the November evening. Swirls and spirals. Vast still oceans, dark and warm and fathomless, and herself moving through them without effort, without fear, buoyant in a way she had never quite been in waking life. And then downward — not falling, nothing so abrupt — but sliding, the way a river slides underground in limestone country, into the deep and layered dark of time itself, stratum by stratum, each layer older and quieter than the last, and all of it, somehow, familiar. She slept a very long time. Upstairs in the small drawer lined with faded roses and the old soft scent of lily of the valley, the glove waited among the private things. It was accustomed to waiting. But not for long, now. * * * If you would like to read further chapters, please email me at _loucheleaves@gmail.com_.

Sometimes I write to exorcise unpleasant emotions, and this is one of those times. What I will write about is an experience that neither Oprah nor Dr. Phil have created a catchy piece of jargon to identify. It is about the feeling of judgment in the beauty pageant of life most women participate in without ever having signed up for. Except it isn’t really a pageant. A pageant is staged. It is lit, posed, entered, rehearsed. A contestant chooses her angle. What happened to me was none of those things. It was an unplanned ambush, and an ambush is worse than a pageant, because there is no entry form, no consent, no control over the frame. Here is what happened. I have sat in the same Zoom meeting, with the same group of men, for years, camera off. I am a voice among them, a name in a small window, a set of ideas spoken into a room I never had to physically enter. That arrangement suited me. It was not hiding, exactly — it was simply the terms under which I had agreed to be present. And then one morning I forgot to turn the camera off, and there I was, full colour, close up, unrehearsed, unguarded, unwarned. Old. Wrinkled. White hair doing whatever it wanted that day. In a room of men roughly thirty to fifty years old, every one of them at the exact professional and physical peak that this culture is built to reward. I felt exposed. I want to be precise about what kind of exposed, because it is not the kind people assume. I am not vain. I do not require anyone’s approval of my face, and on any ordinary day I would tell you, truthfully, that I do not care what strangers think of my wrinkles. But I believe that something in that room shifted the moment my camera came on, and I have spent some days now trying to name it rather than simply feel it. I think what unsettled me is this: I was not merely seen. I was reclassified. For years, I had existed to that group as an unmarked entity — colleague, voice, contributor, mind. The moment my face appeared, unguarded and undefended, I suspect I stopped being unmarked. I became, instead, a category: old woman. And older woman, unlike older man, is not a category this culture has historically been generous toward. There is an old line, one I have always half-remembered as Orwell’s, that at 50 a man has the face he deserves. I went looking for the actual wording and found something more interesting than the tidy attribution I’d been carrying around. The line does not belong to any one individual. Coco Chanel published a version of it in Paris Vogue in 1938, three tidy clauses — nature gives you your face at 20, life shapes it at 30, and by 50 it is yours to have deserved. Orwell said something similar, later, in his own notebooks. So, apparently, did Mae West, in her 1959 memoir[1], where she observed that a man’s face carries more character at 40 than at 20 because he has suffered longer. And underneath all of them sits an older story still — Lincoln, in a 19th century recollection, refusing to hire a man because he did not like his face, and being told by an aide that the poor man was not responsible for his face, and Lincoln’s Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, apparently disagreeing on the general principle that a man of 50 is responsible for his own. Four separate people, a century apart, converging on the same idea. Except read them again and notice who is doing the deserving. Lincoln’s story is about a man’s fitness to hold a government post. Stanton spoke of a man’s character being legible in his features. Mae West’s is about a man’s suffering dignifying his face with age. Chanel’s is the only one spoken by a woman, and then she frames it as effort, as discipline, as something built rather than simply arrived at — telling, I think, that the one woman in this lineage felt the need to insist that a woman’s aging face is a labour rather than a lapse. Because here is what nobody, in roughly a century and a half of variations on this same aphorism, ever wrote down: a companion line for what a woman at 50, or 60, or 70, has earned. Look instead at what the language actually offers men. Weathered, craggy, grizzled, distinguished, lived-in — these are the words reserved for a man’s older face, and every one of them takes the evidence of age itself and calls it admirable. A woman gets no such vocabulary. She gets graceful, or ageless, or, at best, well-preserved — a phrase that, if you sit with it, describes a jar of pickles rather than a person, and that quietly congratulates her for having successfully hidden the very evidence a man is praised for showing. The positive vocabulary for an aging man rewards the visible fact of age. The positive vocabulary for an aging woman rewards its concealment. And when the concealment fails, or was never attempted, the language turns considerably less polite. Hag. Crone. Witch. Battleaxe. Old bag. Words with real weight behind them — hag and crone in particular carry the residue of actual persecution, actual women burned or drowned or hanged for the crime of having unsettled somebody. My own second language, Italian, offers the same pattern, more nakedly. Strega. Befana. Megera. Arpia. Direct borrowings from witch-trial vocabulary and ancient folklore, applied casually to any older woman who irritates someone at a dinner table. Set beside them, the equivalent words for an old man — coot, geezer, codger, old goat — are almost affectionate by comparison. Pitiable, perhaps. Mildly ridiculous. Never monstrous. Nobody was ever burned at the stake for being an old goat. So when I say I felt reclassified in that meeting, this is the machinery I mean. Not that any one of those men consciously thought hag when my face appeared on their screens (I hope). I have no evidence they thought anything at all, and I want to be honest that the certainty I felt at the moment — that they all recoiled — was a story I told myself, not a fact I observed. But I did not build that story out of nothing. I built it out hundreds of years of a language that has a rich, admiring vocabulary for what time does to a man’s face and almost nothing but euphemism or insult for what it does to a woman’s. I built it out of a room where every man present was, by the culture’s own accounting, at the age where his face was becoming more interesting, more authoritative, more _earned_ — and where I was, by that same accounting, simply… old. The conciliatory phrases such as “inner beauty” or “she has such a great personality” or “she’s really quite smart” seem like consolation prizes or participation ribbons — the things you hand a woman once the vocabulary for her actual face has run out. Nobody tells a distinguished, weathered, craggy-faced man that he has a great personality. He doesn’t need the consolation prize. His face was never disqualified from the competition in the first place. I want to be clear about one more thing, because I can already hear the reflex, the one that gets handed to women who point at any of this: that I am being sensitive, that I am reading too much into a Zoom camera and an old expression, that I should simply relax about my own face the way I generally do. I am not whining. I am not complaining. I am not being too sensitive. I am observing. I noticed a pattern that has a paper trail running back through Lincoln’s cabinet, through a 1938 fashion magazine, through Mae West’s memoir, into the raw material of two of the languages I speak — and I am therefore calling it out. I did earn this face. Every line in it was paid for honestly, in years I would not trade back. But notice that I reached for _earn_ instead of _deserve_ on purpose, and I know why. Deserve summons a panel of judges, and hands them the verdict before I have said a word in my own defence. Earn requires no judge at all. It is a fact about what I did, not an opinion about how I am seen. I do not need that room, or any room, to ratify a face I already built myself, one unglamorous, unguarded, entirely undecorated day at a time. * * * [1] Mae West quote from her 1959 autobiography “Goodness Had Nothing To Do With It” > A man has more character in his face at forty than at twenty. He has suffered longer, and the more love, the more suffering, the more character. Despite that quote, I still quite like her.

I want to be mindful. I want to be grateful. I want to be reverent. But for the most part, I can’t seem to find where to direct that reverence. I’m talking about what I ate today. Let’s do a quick rundown. Breakfast: blueberries from Nova Scotia with some milk from Ontario. Lunch: sardines from Algeria, a salad of tomatoes, green peppers and cucumbers from my garden, dressed with olive oil from Tunisia and apple cider vinegar from Ontario, and salt from... no idea. Dinner: lettuce, red cabbage, and carrots from somewhere in Ontario; dressing the same as at lunch — same garden cucumbers, tomatoes, and peppers, with (again) some unattributed salt; pasta from Italy, with pesto made from my garden’s basil, garlic from Spain, pine nuts I think from China, and Romano cheese from Italy grated over top. And coffee: moka espresso, all day — roasted in Italy, but grown where? By whom? That’s my caloric geography for one ordinary Tuesday: five countries and at least two provinces, passing through my body before evening. I can extend gratitude and reverence toward my garden vegetables. That is easy — I planted them, weeded them, watched them come up. But reverence needs a face, or at least a place. It needs to land on something. And everything else on today’s table resists that landing. I have never met the cows who provided the dairy. Never seen the Nova Scotian berry farm, nor the Ontario field where the carrots grew. I don’t know which grove in Tunisia the olive oil came from, whether the trees were young or a century old, who picked the olives or carted them to the press. I don’t know if the Algerian sardines came off a small family boat or out of the hold of some international trawler, dragging a net through everything in its path. The pine nuts — harvested how, by whose hands? The wheat for the pasta — which field? The salt — despite being the one thing every meal needed — I have no idea at all. Of course, I am grateful for this abundance, for the choices available to me, for my place of privilege in this world. Not everyone can afford to ponder the metaphysics of the dinner table. That aside, what I sense is also missing is a sense of _reciprocity_. With my garden, and earlier this year with my patch of wild black raspberries, I knew to thank the land, and the birds who spread the seed — and I always left some fruit behind, for just that reason: reverence and reciprocity, in the same gesture. But in much of today’s meals, other than a cold cash transaction at the supermarket, my sense of what should be — reciprocity — has nowhere to go. We are so divorced from where our sustenance comes from. And this is recent. Even in my own lifetime, it was not always so. My grandparents, in Eastern Ontario, got their milk and cheese from a farmer down the road — a man they knew by name, to whose cows they could have pointed. They grew most of their own vegetables. Even the ice for the icebox was cut from the local lake in winter and delivered, block by block, by the iceman. They knew his name and so did I (Mr. Da Prato — I remember him). Their caloric geography was a five-mile radius and a handful of familiar faces — close enough for reciprocity, and perhaps even reverence, to still be possible. I believe it is this — reciprocity with nowhere to go — more than anything else that saddens me, in a way that is precise and yet ineffable. * * *

It is summer now and in a few odd spaces I can smell something that only exists in the margins. Until recently, Queen Anne’s Lace — _Daucus carota_ , a member of the carrot family — was a common weed in the Mississauga area of Ontario. It filled the ditches, the vacant lots, the poor scraped soil along the roadsides where nothing else would take hold. The plant grows to two or three feet, blooms midsummer, and once the sun heats the flower, releases an aromatic perfume that is, for me, the unmistakable scent of summer as it was lived in 1961, when my family arrived here. There are some commercial and boutique perfumes that mention Queen Anne’s Lace, or carrot seed or European cow parsley, but they don’t actually contain the essence of the flowery weed that grew plentifully in this area. If you want to smell that distinctive scent of summer, you will have to seek out the real thing. It is disappearing now, and I don’t think that’s nostalgia talking. It isn’t going extinct — you’ll still find it in a ditch or an untended margin here and there — but it is vanishing from the places it used to define. That has less to do with the plant than with what’s happened to the ground beneath it. Queen Anne’s Lace is what ecologists call a “disturbance species”: it doesn’t compete well against established vegetation, and it needs exactly the kind of raw, scraped, temporarily-neglected soil that used to be everywhere on the edges of a growing suburb — the verge of a new road, a lot between one house and the next, a ditch nobody had gotten around to mowing yet. Take that disturbed, in-between ground away — replace it with sculpted lawns, edged flowerbeds, and herbicide applied by the acre — and the plant has nowhere left to be itself. It isn’t so much that Queen Anne’s Lace failed. It’s that we finished the job of tidying the margins where it used to live, and in places manicured this thoroughly, it’s unlikely to come back to exuberance on its own. The flower itself is made up of hundreds of tiny blossoms clustered into a single lacy disk, and at the centre of many — not all — sits one dark red or deep purple floret, oddly formal against all that white, like a single drop of blood. ### A name with no fixed story Not native to North America, the plant crossed the Atlantic unintentionally with European settlers, who called it “white carrot.” It’s a biennial, and it carries an unusually large wardrobe of names depending on where you are: Bird’s Nest Weed, Bee’s Nest, Devil’s Plague, Fool’s Parsley, Lace Flower, Herbe à Dinde, and others. Only in North America is it Queen Anne’s Lace — which raises the obvious question of which Queen Anne, and why here. There isn’t one clean answer, which I find more interesting than if there were. Some say homesick settlers looked at the purple centre and saw a queen’s collar, with the white florets forming the surrounding lace. A grimmer version of the same idea holds that the purple floret is a drop of blood — Queen Anne pricked her finger while making lace and stained the work. A third theory detaches the flower from royalty altogether and gives it instead to Saint Anne, mother of the Virgin Mary and patron saint of Lace makers. The fourth story is the one most often repeated, and it’s worth untangling, because as usually told it quietly conflates two different women. The tale goes that the future queen arrived from Denmark to marry King James I, admired the wild carrot growing in the royal gardens, and challenged her ladies-in-waiting to produce lace as fine as the flower; none could match her own work, and the plant took her name. The consort who actually married James I in 1589 was Anne of Denmark (1574–1619) — a different Anne from Anne, Queen of Great Britain (1665–1714), who reigned in her own right nearly a century later and is the “Queen Anne” most regularly cited for the collar-and-blood version of the story. Folklore is under no obligation to keep its queens straight, and I rather like that this one doesn’t; but if you go looking for “the real Queen Anne” behind the name, you’ll find there are at least two candidates a hundred years apart, and neither story is verifiable history so much as the kind of tale that accretes around a flower that needed an origin. Not every association is so gentle. The plant was also called “Mother Die,” out of a superstition that bringing it into the house would cause your mother’s death. Another tradition read the presence or absence of that single purple floret as commentary on the purity of local women, and the plant shows up in old spells and incantations meant to draw desire or aid fertility. An Eastern European legend goes further still: if every wild carrot flower in a season comes up missing its purple centre, the end of the world is near — which I think would make it the humblest apocalypse omen in the field. On a lighter note, the plant is genuinely useful: the flowers can be made into jelly or infused into liquors, the roots have been used in cakes, and it lends itself to dyeing wool. It is, in fact, the direct wild ancestor of the cultivated garden carrot (_Daucus carota_ subsp. _Sativus_) — the same species, essentially undomesticated. ### Who else depends on it The folklore is mostly about how humans have read meaning into the flower. But Queen Anne’s Lace has its own, entirely non-human, circle of dependents, and it’s worth naming them, because they get left out of both the cheerful stories and the wary ones. It is a host plant for the eastern black swallowtail butterfly — the caterpillars feed on its foliage almost exclusively where the plant is common, alongside dill, fennel, and parsley, its relatives in the carrot family. The flat white umbels are a landing pad for a whole guild of small pollinators that don’t get much poetry written about them: solitary bees, hover flies, small beetles, and a genus of slender parasitic wasps (_Gasteruption_) that specialize in visiting exactly this kind of flat-topped flower cluster. Later in the season, once the umbel curls inward into its “bird’s nest” seed head, it hosts still more — including tiny shining black bugs that cluster on the ripening seeds. The hooked seeds themselves catch in fur and feathers, hitching rides to new disturbed ground the way they always have, whether that ground still exists in the quantities it once did. None of that softens the plant’s one real hazard: it closely resembles poison hemlock (_Conium maculatum_), which is genuinely toxic and has killed people who mistook one for the other. The reliable field mark is the stem — Queen Anne’s Lace has fine hairs along it, hemlock does not, and hemlock’s stem is usually blotched with purple. It’s also worth knowing that the sap, on skin exposed afterward to strong sun, can cause a burn-like reaction — a small, literal hazard tucked in among all that folklore about dire consequences that were never real. So foragers use the mnemonic phrase “the Queen’s legs are hairy.” Easy to remember, although every Queen from the period and every European or North American woman would have had hairy legs… but, as usual, I digress. * * * _Note: This is a revised version of an article first published on April 9, 2024._

> Don't it always seem to go > That you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone? > > — Big Yellow Taxi (1970) by Joni Mitchell I remember the exterior bricks as being an earthy yellow colour, But I could be wrong. ### Jawbreakers, Tar Bubbles, and A Lost Shoe I remember riding my bike, or walking, to the convenience store in that tiny plaza, a dime in my pocket, looking forward to buying a Sweet Marie, some Smarties, a Coffee Crisp, or a Jawbreaker. The Jawbreaker was, of course, more fun. It lasted longer, and turned your tongue different colours as you sucked your way down to its heart. But which to choose? Such were the hard decisions of that time, that place, my bucolic suburban world. There were more wildflowers then: Queen Anne’s Lace, buttercups, thistles. The side streets were gravel with tar bubbling up in the summer heat. As children, we would stomp on these tar bubbles — an old-school form of bursting plastic bubble wrap, but far more satisfying, as the resulting “pop” was a matter of choice, picking just the right black bubble, and applying just the right amount of pressure. But, like most things, there was a price to pay — black tar residue on your shoes that must be carefully scraped off before going home, otherwise deep trouble. Which brings me to the lost shoe… I want to record some small moments tied to this particular place — a place whose name I’ll get to, shortly. I was minorly assaulted there once, if one can ever term an assault “minor,” and I lost one suede shoe in the mud — both events happened behind the plaza. Between the plaza and the nearby senior public school, there was an open field. Not actually a field — more of a muddy space that was being razed for a townhouse development. I would cross it as a shortcut coming home from school, and just before I reached the plaza, the mud became very soft, and my leg plunged into the mud up to my knee. With childhood fears of quicksand and other disasters running through my mind, I quickly extracted my leg, but the shoe was sucked right off my foot. So Crestview Plaza has the archaeological remains of my brown suede shoe — which I used to think of as being preserved like the bog mummies in Denmark. But I digress… ### Crestview Plaza Crestview Plaza. Such a workaday, ordinary name. And it was such a place, and places such as these hardly exist anymore, and for the most part are poorly documented. No one took pictures for posterity; no one wrote elegiac think-pieces about them. A small place, mostly erased from history. And yet it had seen such history over its lifetime, and those who now live in the rather posh townhouses recently built on the site likely have no idea what ghosts went before. What’s in a name? Crestview. Which crest, and which view? Even when I first came to the area in 1961 I do not recall either a crest or a view, and yet there likely was one, and perhaps there still is, in someone’s fenced backyard. The plaza — a rather grandiose designation for a tiny strip mall — sat just south of the Queen Elizabeth Way (formerly the “Middle Road”) and in between what used to be called “Saul’s Creek” (now rather flatly called Cooksville Creek) and Silver Creek — a name no one seems to recall, other than a few businesses upstream using the name as something pleasant and mildly evocative. Now it is no longer, gone the way of the farmhouse that predated it, and gone the way of the Anishinaabe presence that predated the farmhouse. What is there now are relatively upscale townhouses, part of “Mineola.” But a few decades ago, no one called this area Mineola — if it was called anything, it was called Port Credit, or Toronto Township. There was no cachet to living here. That came much later. ### The Goldthorpes The Crestview site does have some documented history — that of the Goldthorpe family. In the 1840s, a settler named John Goldthorpe cleared this exact parcel and built a log cabin on it — the same ground where the plaza would later stand, and where the townhouses stand now. While ploughing, he turned up a medal in the soil, one given by King George III to the father of a local Mississauga chief. The chief recognized it instantly and pressed it to his chest, saying only, “My father’s — my father’s.” The story survives in a single source: a 1972 newspaper interview with Mildred Bellegham, a Goldthorpe descendant, who heard it as a child from her own grandfather — very possibly Thomas William Goldthorpe, the family’s most prominent member, who served as Reeve of Toronto Township in the early 1900s and for whom nearby Goldthorpe Road is still named, though I can’t say for certain which of John’s sons was doing the telling. No other document of the exchange exists. It survives only because a woman once told a reporter a story her grandfather had told her — which is, I suppose, exactly how the best of history actually survives. At some point the Goldthorpe land was subdivided, and in about 1955 the plaza was built. As I mentioned earlier, I arrived in 1961, and from that time until the early 1970s I would go there, often along with my mother. We would do grocery shopping at the “anchor” store (another newly coined term, unused at the time), splurge on fresh bread and pastries from another shop there (I believe the bakers were Polish, but my memory may be flawed on this point), and of course get treats and forgotten little things from the convenience store. ### The Dentist and the Dinosaur The upper portion of the plaza, which you entered at ground level through wide glass doors, housed various medical and professional offices. Our family dentist, Dr. Sidney Weinrib, was there. His waiting room was unremarkable except for a wondrous aquarium. It was wonderful not for the fish, but for the clever little dinosaur-shaped gizmo that blew air bubbles out its mouth. Somehow that dinosaur made the dentist less fearsome. I recall quite vividly that Dr. Weinrib had a large poster in his treatment room. The poster showed a narrow and treacherous path that eventually led to Heaven, contrasted with a wide and elegant path that led directly to the monsters in Hell. First a dinosaur blowing bubbles and then a little moral lesson served up with your fillings. Years later, after the plaza was mostly deserted, I had been seeking some storage near my home for my book inventory (I’ve been a bookseller for many years), and had the upstairs shown to me. It was broken up, with dangling fixtures and generally a mess, but what remained, in all its glory, were the bright appallingly orange Arborite (such an iconic Canadian product) bathroom partitions. I never would have remembered them had I been asked, but the moment I saw them decades later, I was immediately transported back to my childhood dental visits. Now of course those partitions are long gone. The bubble blowing dinosaur, oddly, had a second chance at life. He ended up in Sidney’s brother’s dental practice further north on Hurontario Street. The aquarium had been moved there, but no longer housed water, nor fish, The dinosaur sat there, inert, like a player in a very small and silent diorama. I don’t think that office is there any longer. Where the dinosaur ended up, I do not know. ### The Barber and the Fortune Teller Shortly after the founding of the plaza, one of the first tenants was Joe, the barber. Much later I leaned his name was Joe (or Giuseppe) Nemi. My father occasionally went there for a haircut. Joe remained for roughly sixty years — closing, as best I can place it, sometime well before the pandemic, and at some point after the mayor herself came by to shake his hand and cut a cake in his honour. When I viewed the site for storage possibilities, I saw the remains of his chairs, and a few of the more famous portraits of customers still on the walls. Several years later, before the plaza was torn down, a movie crew converted his shop into a set for a fortune-teller. I’m not sure if this is some strange form of symmetry. Or not. ### Where History Lives What, one might ask, is the point of writing about this one tiny corner? As I often believe is the case, the crux is beside the point. I suppose one could write another history of the Goldthorpe family (which, I believe, has already been done), or an analysis of the demise of the strip mall. But what lives _beside the point_ is all the real substance: the Arborite partitions, the jawbreakers, the buttercups, and the placing of those humble flowers under each other’s chin to see “if you liked butter.” My lost shoe, the assault, the dentist with his dinosaur, the barber who cut the hair of a famous CFL player (Nick Volpe, a former Argonaut) and a possibly-Polish bakery: all these are beside the point, and fascinating for exactly that reason. No one remembers any of this, except perhaps me (and now perhaps you, Dear Reader), and I find it poignantly sad that we lose the little things that create the texture of life. No one will ever see those ghastly Arborite panels again and have an instant recall of a place fifty years gone. I don’t believe history is merely a collection of political movements, wars, sociological analyses — although those things matter. What we often forget, to the point that it becomes almost irretrievable, are the little homey things — the Jawbreakers, the pheasants that ran in the field behind the plaza, the perhaps-Polish bakers, the exuberance of buttercups — these, these are the memories I cherish, and hope will, in some way, endure here, in these words.

Today, July 15, 2026, Toronto woke up to the worst air on Earth. Not the worst air in Toronto’s memory, not the worst air in Canada — **the worst air on the planet** , full stop, according to the people whose job it is to rank such things. A heat dome sat over the province like a lid, and smoke from hundreds of uncontrolled wildfires in the northwest rode a jet stream south and settled over the city like something that had decided to stay. The Air Quality Health Index climbed toward 10+, the category reserved for “ _very high risk_.” The CN Tower disappeared into an orange haze that made it look, in photographs, like a postcard from a planet we haven’t met yet. The air doesn’t have the fragrance of a campfire or family cookout – it smells like a dumpster fire. And the sky looks like one endless orange bruise. A university professor, asked to explain it, gave an answer in the gentlest possible words. > _We’ve seen this increasing in frequency,_ he said. _I think this represents something like the new normal._ New normal. Two words doing the work of absorbing a catastrophe into a schedule. I went looking for that phrase’s history, mostly out of orneriness, and found something worth knowing: “new normal” wasn’t always this soft. It surfaces around WWI, catches on after 9/11, gets picked up by a venture capitalist in 2003 warning investors not to expect the old rules back, and finally gets bolted into economic policy language during the 2008 financial crisis, when a Bloomberg headline used it to describe permanently subpar growth. Each time, it performed the same trick: it took something that had ruptured and re-described it as a baseline. Not a wound. A setting. That trick has a longer pedigree than I’d realized. Before “climate change” softened “global warming” — a swap engineered deliberately, and admitted as much, in a 2002 Republican strategy memo, because focus groups found “global warming” catastrophic and “climate change” merely “controllable” — there was an earlier retreat still. “Greenhouse effect” got replaced by both terms around 1990. Mechanism, to consequence, to abstraction. Each step trades a little more precision for a little more calm. So the newscaster wasn’t lying, and neither was the professor. They were reaching for the nearest phrase that let them not have to say what they meant, which was closer to _ongoing deterioration_ than to _normal._ A normal is a thing you stop noticing. A ratchet is a thing that only turns one way. We keep calling the ratchet a normal because normal is a word that lets everyone exhale. To be honest, I am no expert whatsoever on carbon credits, carbon offsets, and that twisted term “additionality.” But I do notice things, and I question them. What I notice is that these words behave like hockey cards. A card isn’t hockey — it’s a proxy for scarcity and reputation, graded, certified, traded at whatever price the market will bear, increasingly unmoored from any game being played on any ice. A carbon credit isn’t an absence of emissions — it’s a certificate asserting that somewhere, someone didn’t do a thing they might have done anyway, verified by an agency with an interest in there being more such certificates to verify. “Additionality” is the term of art for whether that claim is true at all — whether the reduction was real, or whether it was going to happen regardless and got sold as a favour to whoever needed to buy their way to net-zero on paper. It is, when you strip the finance-speak off it, just the question a child would ask: > _Did you actually do the thing, or did you just say you did?_ A counterfeit hockey card cheats a collector. A credit without additionality cheats the atmosphere, while letting the label on the package say the opposite of what happened inside it. I keep noticing that the vocabulary gets softer exactly as the thing it names gets harder. Warming becomes change becomes normal. A ton of carbon still in the sky becomes a credit, becomes an offset, becomes a line item that lets someone else's annual report keep its colour green. Outside my window today the sky is the colour of a livid bruise, of a warning nobody wrote down. We have become extraordinarily inventive in finding gentler words to stand between us and exactly this kind of morning.

# The other evening I forgot a wet bathing suit outside. When I brought it into the house the next morning, about five earwigs dropped out of it and scurried away frantically. For no rational reason, I am deeply repelled by earwigs in particular. This is not fear. Earwigs are essentially harmless. They have never bitten me, attacked me, or otherwise inconvenienced me, apart from the temporary occupation of my bathing suit. They are simply earwigs. Yet something about them evokes an immediate, visceral recoil that bypasses reason altogether. Initially I found myself wondering why. Was it the pincers? The glossy exoskeleton? The way they dart for cover? I tried to dissect my reaction, as though understanding its origin might dissolve it. But then I realized I was asking the wrong question. It’s not about me at all. The more interesting question is not why I dislike earwigs, but what it is like to be one. That is, of course, a question I cannot answer. I can only circle it with the rather blunted imagination of a human being. Yet the attempt seems worthwhile. ## The Earwig’s World The Baltic German biologist Jakob von Uexküll coined the term _Umwelt_ to describe the unique perceptual world inhabited by every organism. We tend to imagine that every creature lives in the same world we do, only with fewer words or less intelligence. I suspect that isn’t true. The earwig’s world is stitched together from things that scarcely exist in mine: darkness beneath a stone, humidity, tiny crevices, chemical traces, vibrations in the soil, the scent of decay, the constant need to avoid becoming someone else’s meal. It is not my world viewed from a lower rung on some evolutionary ladder. It is another world, different, occupying the same coordinates. The obvious temptation is to imagine the earwig lives in my garden. But that merely describes the situation from my perspective. To the earwig, I may simply be an occasional large mammal lumbering through its world. The garden belongs no more to me than it does to the robin, the earthworm, the fungi beneath the mulch, or the earwig sheltering under the flowerpot. We overlap. We do not contain one another. I still dislike earwigs. I suspect I always will. But I am suspicious of my own certainty — suspicious that an emotion this old and this automatic tells me anything true about another creature’s worth. Disgust evolved to answer one question: _should I hesitate?_ It has nothing to say about the harder question — _what deserves my respect?_ — and I think we confuse the two more often than we notice. An earwig does not need my approval to justify its existence. It is not an unfinished human, nor an imperfect attempt at something better. It is a complete expression of its own long evolutionary history, every bit as finely honed for its particular existence as I am for mine. ## For the Love of Hierarchy We humans are remarkably fond of hierarchies. We rank almost everything, including ourselves. It is easy, then, to imagine evolution as a ladder — ascending from microbes through insects and fishes, reptiles, mammals, primates, and, conveniently, arriving at us. Nature seems to have missed the memo. Evolution produced no ladder. It produced an extravagant branching of possibilities: the oak is one solution, the octopus another, the earwig another still. Each has survived because, over immense stretches of time, it became exquisitely fitted to a particular way of living. The octopus did not fail to become a mammal. It succeeded at being an octopus — touch, colour, and chemistry organized into an intelligence so unlike our own that we are still arguing about what to call it. ## Fellow Earthlings, Not Fellow Travellers I think of them all as fellow earthlings. I briefly considered “fellow travellers.” There is something appealing in the phrase — it acknowledges that every living thing shares an unimaginably long evolutionary journey with us. But it also carries the faint suggestion that we are travelling toward some destination. Evolution has no destination. There is no finish line where something waits, congratulating the winners. “Fellow earthling” feels quieter. It says only that we share this astonishing planet and the deep history that produced it. Nothing more, nothing less. Perhaps that is why _Umwelt_ has become so compelling to me. It gently removes humanity from the centre of the picture. My experience of the world is not the standard against which all other experiences should be measured. It is one among countless others — and then we have the earwigs in my bathing suit, processing cues I can scarcely imagine, much less perceive. ## Kinship Not Limited to Sentience This way of looking at things has also made me wonder about what has no _Umwelt_ at all. The stone beneath which the earwig shelters almost certainly experiences nothing. It has no subjective world, no inside from which to perceive an outside. And yet it seems oddly wrong to dismiss it as mere rock. The stone erodes into soil. The soil nourishes the plants. The plants shelter the insects. The insects feed the birds. Rain, frost, fungi, and roots reshape the stone in return. It has no point of view, yet it participates in innumerable lives that do — which makes me wonder whether _Umwelt_ was ever the whole answer. If the stone can matter this much to the earwig’s world without possessing one of its own, then perhaps kinship was never really about who’s in there having an experience. Perhaps it was about the web the experience sits inside — and the stone is as load-bearing a thread as any of us. ## Old Instinct Is a Stubborn Companion If another forgotten bathing suit produces another small shower of earwigs next summer, I shall almost certainly recoil. But I hope that after that first involuntary step backwards, I remember that what I’ve encountered is not an object in my world. It is the heart of another world entirely, one that has been quietly unfolding alongside mine for hundreds of millions of years — indifferent to whether I ever notice, and nonetheless real for that.

A warning before we go anywhere: this essay meanders intentionally. It will digress, double back, and occasionally stop to look at something shiny at the side of the road. Consider this your early consent form. Follow me into the weeds — there’s a payoff, but we’re taking the scenic route to get to it. I should confess my credentials up front, since they are not the credentials of a grammarian. Long before I owned a copy of Fowler, long before Google existed to correct me, a few other girls and I would gather round the Oxford English Dictionary at sleepovers like conspirators, hunting for the naughty words — the ones we suspected existed but had never been allowed to say out loud, now sitting there in cold, respectable, etymological print, footnoted and dated and utterly without shame. It is, I think, the only proper introduction to lexicography: discovering that a dictionary is not a fence around language, but a museum of everything language has ever dared to do. Fowler’s Modern English Usage is the only other dictionary that has ever made me laugh outright — not smirk, not admire — laugh, and it did it as an adult, in a completely different register, but it is the same discovery wearing a different coat. Somebody, it turns out, had been standing at the door of the English language the whole time, cataloguing its transgressions with barely suppressed delight. ### The Boardroom In the 1980s, when I was doing corporate facilitation work, mission statements were having a moment. Every executive team wanted one, and almost none of them could write one, because writing one requires admitting what you actually intend to do, in language plain enough that the person with the least power in the building could repeat it back to you. So I used to steal from Star Trek. I would recite the theme, from memory, the way you’d recite a nursery rhyme: > _“These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise — its five-year mission — to seek out strange new worlds and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”_ Then I’d make my pitch. Think of asking the most junior person aboard the Enterprise — someone down in the bowels of the ship, wrench in hand, no idea what deck he’s on — three questions. > “How long is the mission?” > “Five years, Sir!” > “What is the mission?”“Seek out new worlds and new civilizations, Sir!” > “And how will we do it?” > **“** Sir,**** Boldly**,** Sir!” There’s even an emotion built in — one word, doing the work an entire values statement usually fails to do in three or four paragraphs. So, paraphrase your own mission statement the same way: > “This is the voyage of XYZ Company. Its five-year mission: to seek new markets, to build new products, and to boldly go where no widget manufacturer has gone before.” It always worked. Executives who couldn’t get through a workshop without saying “synergy” would suddenly produce something with a spine, because I’d smuggled a plain-language exercise into the room disguised as a television theme song. What I didn’t know at the time — what I’m only putting together now, decades later, with a dictionary in my lap — is that I was doing something Ernest Gowers would have recognized instantly. Gowers wrote Plain Words in 1948, a slim, ruthless little guide commissioned to stop British civil servants from writing memos no citizen could understand. He was brought in to revise Fowler for its second edition in 1965 precisely because he’d spent a career doing what I attempted in those boardrooms: forcing people whose instinct was to sound important to instead be understood. The junior-crewman test and the plain-citizen test are the same test. Can the person with the least power in the room tell you, in one sentence, what we are doing? Most mission statements fail it spectacularly, because vagueness reads as gravitas to the people writing it, and specificity feels like exposure. Kirk’s opening monologue passes because it has nowhere to hide: two verbs, one timeframe, one adverb carrying all the feeling. That adverb is worth a full stop. _“To boldly go”_ is a split infinitive — the **_to_** and the _**go**_ wrenched apart to let “boldly” stand between them — and generations of English teachers would have reached for the red pen. But say it the “correct” way: _“to go boldly where no one has gone before…”_ — the energy drains straight out of the sentence; the adverb trails off like an afterthought. Say it the other “correct” way: “ _boldly to go**…”**_ and it sounds like a hymn, all starch and Sunday best. _“To boldly go”_ puts the stress exactly where the emotion is, mid-stride, which is why it sounds like momentum instead of description. Whoever wrote it — and the historical record is not tidy on this point, more on that shortly — had an ear good enough to know the sentence needed the “wrong” word order to do its job. ### The Dictionary in the Library of the Mind Long before I ever saw a photograph of H. W. Fowler, I had built him in my head from nothing but the words on the page: a man in a home library, fire lit, a dog at his feet, sensible leather patches on the elbows, a pipe going, a cup of tea within reach, chuckling quietly to himself as he wrote something devastating about the misuse of “hopefully.” I built that man out of tone alone — out of the sense, entry after entry, that here was someone enjoying himself. It turns out I wasn’t far off, though I somewhat prefer the details I invented to the reality. Fowler has a blue plaque at 14 Paultons Square, Chelsea, put up by English Heritage in 2016, three doors down from one commemorating Samuel Beckett. How many other grammarians can say that? The surviving photographs show a lean, energetic man, sometimes bald, sometimes balding, with a neat goatee that gives him a passing resemblance to Freud. He is more often photographed mid-exercise-routine than mid-armchair. He bathed in the Serpentine every morning of his life in London, summer and winter alike, and jogged the distance back to Chelsea at what his biographers clock at nine or ten miles an hour — a pace, I’ll note, that suggests a man outrunning something, likely wearing tweed. He worked those years as a freelance journalist, scraping by on a small inheritance and magazine fees, and quietly gave money to his landlady’s husband, a policeman recovering from a nervous breakdown — a detail that tells you more about the private man than any dictionary entry could. And the dog was real: Raven, a black dog, photographed crouched beside him, because of course there was a dog. A man who swims through an English winter for pleasure and gives his rent money to a stranger’s convalescing husband is not, whatever the prose suggests, a man who needed a fire and a cardigan to be interesting. I gave him the fireside and a dog; history gave him cold water, also a dog, and a pipe clenched between his teeth mid-stride. (The pipe, for the record, belonged to Fowler, not the dog — there goes my grammar.) He was, tellingly, the son of a clergyman — the Reverend Robert Fowler, a Cambridge man who taught mathematics at Tonbridge School — yet our Henry became, quietly and for good, an atheist. He turned down a housemastership at Sedbergh rather than pretend to prepare boys for a confirmation he no longer believed in. I find that detail load-bearing for the whole project of “ _Modern English Usage”_. A man who wouldn’t perform belief he didn’t hold went on to spend the rest of his working life refusing to let anyone else perform sophistication they didn’t have either. Elegant variation and religious hypocrisy are, in Fowler’s moral universe, close cousins: both are ways of saying something you don’t mean because it sounds better than the plain truth. And the entries themselves are where the laughter lives. “Elegant variation” is his name for a journalist’s tic — refusing to repeat a word, so that a man becomes “the defendant,” then “the accused,” then “the burly Yorkshireman,” purely to avoid saying “he” twice, as if repetition were a confession of poverty rather than a form of control. “Battered ornaments” gathers everything worn glassy-smooth from overuse — the phrases people reach for believing they’re being vivid, unaware the phrase died of exhaustion years ago. And then there are what he calls the “superstitions”, or “fetishes”: never split an infinitive, never end a sentence on a preposition, never open with “and” or “but” (note: which I just did, living fetish-free). Fowler didn’t invent these taboos — they’re 18th century Latinate imports, rules borrowed from a language English isn’t — but he was one of the first people with real authority to say, in print, that they were nonsense dressed up as discipline. His verdict on them, more or less: unintelligent obedience to an unintelligent rule. Which brings us back, at last, to the split infinitive, and to my favourite passage in the whole dictionary — the taxonomy. Fowler divides the English-speaking world into five classes on the subject: those who neither know nor care what a split infinitive is; those who don’t know but worry about it anyway; those who know and condemn; those who know and approve; and a fifth class, the smallest, who know the rule and simply follow their instinct, splitting or not splitting as the sentence demands. > “Happy the man who belongs to this class,” he writes, “ _happier still is he who belongs to the first.”_ It is, structurally, a joke about anxiety: part of the five categories are defined by unease, and only the fifth writes freely, because only the fifth has stopped asking permission. “To boldly go” is the fifth class in action. Nobody who insisted on “to go boldly” would have given the 20th century a line people still recite from memory sixty years on. The “wrong” version is correct and forgettable. The “right” version is wrong and immortal. ### Journalists All It’s worth setting Fowler next to two other men who spent careers policing — or celebrating — the English language, because the differences are more interesting than the overlaps, and I find myself thinking of the three of them as strands of the same rope, twisting toward and away from each other across a century: Fowler next to George Orwell and Bill Bryson. All three were journalists at some point, not academics; none of them wrote from inside a university. And all three had fathers whose occupations shaped, in very different ways, what the son eventually did with a sentence. Fowler’s father was a clergyman. Orwell’s father worked as a sub-deputy opium agent for the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production of opium in Bengal for sale into China — a career built entirely on institutional euphemism, on calling an extraction economy an “agency.” It is hard not to think that a lifelong distrust of language that hides what it’s doing had a very literal source at Orwell’s own breakfast table. Bryson’s father, by contrast, was a sportswriter for the _Des Moines Register_ for 50 years, and his mother was the same paper’s home-furnishings editor — two working journalists under one roof, on rather workaday beats, which may explain why Bryson never developed either Fowler’s schoolmasterly authority or Orwell’s moral dread. He just thinks the whole enterprise of English is funny, and writes accordingly. The temperaments follow the fathers, more or less. Fowler is amused by bad English — a lapse in taste, evidence that a writer hasn’t thought hard enough about the gap between sounding impressive and being clear. Orwell, in _Politics and the English Language_ , is alarmed by it — vague, abstract prose isn’t bad taste to him, it’s a political tool, the mechanism by which atrocity gets described without being felt. Bryson is neither gently amused nor alarmed; he’s _delighted_ , a tourist marvelling at the sheer, glorious mess of English rather than a magistrate trying to tidy it. If Fowler is the strict but funny uncle, and Orwell the uncle who thinks manners are survival, Bryson is the cousin who thinks the whole family is hilarious and isn’t trying to fix anyone. Run Fowler’s five-class taxonomy over all three and it holds up nicely. Fowler is obviously in the fifth class; the instinct-follower, at peace with the rule and unafraid to break it. Orwell reads like the third class pushed into a moral register; he _knows and condemns_ , but condemns with real stakes, because for him bad grammar and political rot are the same failure at different volumes. Bryson is in the first class, joyfully; he doesn’t much care what the split infinitive is, he cares that people once fought wars over it, and finds the fighting funnier than the rule itself. ### One Rule to Rule Them All It’s worth pausing on what Orwell actually prescribed, because set next to Fowler’s entries, the two men turn out to agree on almost everything except why it matters. At the end of “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell offers six rules for the working writer: never use a metaphor or figure of speech you’re used to seeing in print; never use a long word where a short one will do; cut any word you can cut; prefer the active voice to the passive; avoid a foreign phrase, a scientific term, or jargon if a plain English word exists; and — the rule that gives away the game — break any of the first five sooner than write something outright barbarous. Line that up against Fowler’s own catalogue and the overlap is almost exact. “Never use a metaphor you’re used to seeing in print” is categorized under battered ornaments. “Never use a long word where a short one will do” is the same instinct behind Fowler’s entry on “avoidance of the obvious”, in which he argues that in choice of words, the obvious is generally better than a clever dodge around it — don’t reach for the fancier word just to prove you thought of one. Even Orwell’s sixth rule, the escape hatch, is Fowler’s fifth class wearing a new hat: know the rule well enough to break it on purpose, rather than obeying it or defying it out of nerves. Where they part ways is stakes: Fowler’s version of a bad sentence is a solicitor’s letter, or a newspaper reporter reaching for “the burly Yorkshireman” instead of “he”; Orwell’s version of a bad sentence can describe a massacre without anyone feeling it happen. Fowler is diagnosing a lapse in taste; Orwell is diagnosing a mechanism, the specific one by which vague language lets people look away from what’s actually being done in their name. Read side by side, the two men sound less like a stylist and a moralist than like a doctor and an epidemiologist examining the same symptom at two different scales — one treating the patient in front of him, the other tracing how the disease spreads through a population. Both would have recognized a corporate mission statement on sight. Fowler would have found it merely tedious. Orwell would have wanted to know what it was for and what lay beneath it. ### Where The Sentence Actually Came From So, who split that famous Star Trek infinitive? The honest answer is that nobody can say for certain. Samuel Peeples wrote the second Star Trek pilot, titled “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” and is credited with putting the phrase into circulation. The opening narration itself wasn’t drafted until August 1966, weeks before the series aired, and went through several versions — an early draft describes “the United Space Ship Enterprise” on a “five year galaxy patrol” in language so flat it could be a shipping manifest. The final wording is credited to the combined work of Gene Roddenberry, producer John D. F. Black, and associate producer Bob Justman, but I can find no source that cleanly assigns the split infinitive itself to one of the three by name. Somewhere in that room, someone had Fowler’s ear without necessarily having read Fowler. And the phrase itself is older than any of them. In 1958, in the panic that followed Sputnik, President Eisenhower’s Science Advisory Committee published a pamphlet called “ _Introduction to Outer Space_ ”, arguing for a national space program. Its opening justification was the human urge to explore: “the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.” **No one**. Gender-neutral, government prose, a few years before Roddenberry’s writers’ room existed. The Star Trek team narrowed it to “no man” for 1966 television; it took until Star Trek: The Next Generation, more than twenty years later, for “no one” to make its way back into the opening title. NASA closed the loop entirely in 1989, titling its own Apollo retrospective “Where No Man Has Gone Before” — a government phrase that travelled into fiction, got a corporate-friendly split infinitive stitched onto it along the way, and eventually wandered home. Which means that when I stood in front of executives in the 1980s, reciting James T. Kirk from memory to facilitate mission-statement writing, the sentence I was borrowing had already lived one entire lifetime inside a government pamphlet before Star Trek ever recruited it, and I was recruiting it for another. None of us in that room knew it. The phrase didn’t care. It just kept doing its job, the way a good sentence does, regardless of who’s currently claiming credit for it. ### Coda (_Pace_ : Orwell’s Fifth Rule) I still think about that pre-adolescent circle of girls hunched over the OED, hunting for words we weren’t supposed to know, and I think the impulse never really left me — I just traded contraband for craft. Fowler’s dictionary rewards the same appetite: the sense that language has secret rooms, and that somebody, at some point, is going to let you in on the joke. Happy the man or woman who belongs to the fifth class. Happier still the one who found their way there by way of a starship, a boardroom, and a very old dictionary with a delightful sense of humour. ### References * English Heritage, “Henry Watson Fowler (1858–1933),” Blue Plaques archive, erected 2016, 14 Paultons Square, Chelsea. * H. W. Fowler, A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, 2nd edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965). * Wikipedia, “H. W. Fowler,” biographical detail on family, education, and career (accessed 2026). * George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language” (1946). * Wikipedia and the Orwell Foundation, biographical detail on Richard Walmesley Blair’s career in the Indian Civil Service Opium Department (accessed 2026). * Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue (1990) and Bryson’s Dictionary of Troublesome Words (2002 revision of The Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words, 1983). * Wikipedia, “Bill Bryson” and “Bill Bryson Sr.,” biographical detail on family and career (accessed 2026). * Wikipedia, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” production history of the Star Trek opening narration, credited to Gene Roddenberry, John D. F. Black, and Bob Justman, with the phrase’s introduction credited to Samuel A. Peeples (accessed 2026). * The President’s Science Advisory Committee, Introduction to Outer Space (Washington, D.C.: The White House, 26 March 1958). * Dwayne A. Day, “Boldly Going: Star Trek and Spaceflight,” The Space Review, 28 November 2005.

Although I profoundly disagree, let's start with Protagoras, who said it first, and said it cleanly: > Man is the measure of all things He said this in the fifth century BCE, in Athens, in what we might now call a seminar room, and Plato spent a good part of his career trying to talk him back off the ledge. The argument Protagoras was making — that truth is perspectival, that what is true for you may not be true for me, that there is no fixed point outside human perception from which reality can be adjudicated — was not a fringe position. It was the position of the Sophists, the professional thinkers of their day, and it was taken seriously enough to require serious refutation. Twenty-five centuries later, we have arrived, apparently, at the same ledge. Now we call it _"my truth."_ ### _To Lie and to "Truth"_ Before tracing how we got here, it is worth pausing on something the language itself reveals. English has a verb for deception that is native, Germanic, bone-deep: to lie. Old English lēogan, inherited directly from the ancestral tongue, requiring no Latinate borrowing, no philosophical scaffolding. It is the kind of verb that exists because the action it names was common enough and consequential enough to need its own word from the very beginning. English does not have an equivalent verb for telling the truth. We have never had "to truth." We reach instead for constructions — to speak truly, to testify, to attest, to affirm — all of them Latinate, all of them borrowed from the Romans, who were building legal frameworks rather than moral ones. Other languages made different choices, and the difference is instructive. Ancient Greek had alētheuein — a verb meaning to speak truth, to be truthful, to tell things as they are — derived from alētheia, the word for truth that Heidegger would later unpack as unconcealment, the bringing of things out of hiddenness into the open. Aristotle uses it regularly. The Greeks had both the philosophical concept and the verb for it, and it is not incidental that they were also the ones who argued about truth with the greatest sustained rigour. The grammatical infrastructure supported the intellectual project. Hebrew weaves truth and faithfulness together at the root: aleph-mem-nun gives you emet, truth, and he'emin, to believe or trust, as inseparable concepts. Honesty and reliability fused at the etymological level — a language that does not permit you to separate what is true from what can be depended upon. German, the language that has perhaps thought hardest about truth since the Greeks, gives you wahrnehmen — literally truth-taking or truth-receiving — which became the ordinary word for perceiving or noticing. The assumption built into the word is that genuine perception and truth-apprehension are the same act. German also gives you wahrsagen, truth-saying, though the language has allowed it to narrow into fortune-telling, which is its own quiet commentary on how cultures regard those who claim access to hidden truths. English, by contrast, borrowed its truth-vocabulary from Rome and left the verb slot empty. The action of lying was already in the Anglo-Saxon bone. The action of truthing, apparently, needed to be argued for, and English never quite got there. ### _The Origins of "My Truth"_ The phrase "my truth" did not spring fully formed from a podcast or a self-help shelf. It has a genealogy, and that genealogy is worth tracing, because it began with something real. The poststructuralists of the twentieth century — Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard — made the uncomfortable but necessary point that what gets called truth is not always neutral. It is often the truth of whoever holds the power to declare it. Official histories, legal verdicts, medical diagnoses, institutional pronouncements — these have all, at various points and in various ways, been used to silence people whose experience contradicted them. The insistence that lived experience deserves standing even when it cannot be verified by the dominant framework was not intellectually frivolous. It was, in specific contexts, genuinely corrective. From there the phrase migrated into therapeutic culture, and this is where it began its long slide from instrument to shield. Recovery movements and trauma-informed practice in the 1980s and 1990s found in "my truth" a useful formulation: your experience is real. Your testimony matters. You do not need institutional permission to say what happened to you. This was doing work, and the work was often necessary. The problem is that experience and fact are not the same category, and treating them as interchangeable is the sleight of hand at the centre of everything that followed. ### _Oprah's Twisted Gift_ Oprah Winfrey is almost certainly the single most influential vector for moving the phrase into common English. Through two decades of television, she established a framework in which personal narrative is sacred, individual truth is inviolable, and the act of "telling your truth" is consistently presented as both courageous and self-evidently valid. This is not a small cultural force. It is the kind of force that reshapes vocabulary. By the time "my truth" had passed through daytime television and into commencement speeches and Instagram captions and political press releases, the philosophical scaffolding had been stripped away and what remained was the rhetorical function: my truth cannot be checked against yours. ### _Where Trouble Lives_ This is where the trouble lives. Unfalsifiability is not a feature of a truth claim. It is the disqualification of one. A statement that cannot in principle be contested, corrected, or measured against evidence is not a truth; it is a preference, an assertion, a feeling, sometimes a story we have told ourselves so many times it has hardened into something that feels load-bearing. These are not nothing. Feelings are real. Stories matter. But they are not the same as what actually occurred in ways that can be verified, disputed, and if necessary corrected. The conflation of the two does not elevate feeling into fact. It just makes the facts harder to reach. The deeper irony is structural. _"My truth"_ was developed as a tool for the less powerful — a way to insist that testimony which institutional authority preferred to ignore still had standing. It borrowed its moral weight from the historically silenced. And then it was adopted wholesale by people with every platform and resource available to them, deployed not to be heard but to avoid being held accountable. The politician caught in a demonstrable falsehood, the executive whose version of events contradicts the documentary record, the celebrity whose account of a situation conflicts with six witnesses — all have learned to reach for the same formulation. It is my truth. It does not need to cohere with yours. What this achieves is not the protection of vulnerable testimony. It is the levelling of all testimony, so that nothing can be weighed against anything else and the loudest or most sympathetic voice wins by default. This is not epistemic humility. It is epistemic surrender dressed in the language of courage. Protagoras at least had the honesty to make his relativism explicit, to put it forward as a philosophical position and submit it to argument. Plato could engage with it, push back against it, point out its self-undermining quality — if all truth is relative, what is the truth-value of that claim? The contemporary version of the same move does not invite argument. It forecloses it. You cannot fact-check a truth that is categorically mine. You cannot produce contradicting evidence against an experience. The toga has been traded for insulation, and insulation, by design, keeps everything in and everything out. As already stated, there is no English verb for what we do when we tell the truth. Perhaps that gap has always been an invitation — a blank in the language where an act of will is required, each time, to construct something that cannot be inherited or assumed. Truth, actual truth, is always built rather than given: assembled from evidence and argument and the willingness to be wrong. _"My truth"_ skips that work entirely. It arrives already complete, already valid, by virtue of being mine. Protagoras would have recognised the move immediately. He might even have approved. Plato, I think, would have known exactly what to say. But then again, perhaps the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz knew it all along when he said "Ain't it the truth, ain't it the truth". **Notes and Sources** Protagoras, fragment DK 80B1: "Man is the measure of all things: of things which are, that they are, and of things which are not, that they are not." Preserved in Plato, Theaetetus, 151e–152a. Trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat (Hackett, 1990). Plato. Theaetetus. Trans. M.J. Levett, rev. Myles Burnyeat. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1990. The central Platonic refutation of Protagorean relativism, including the self-refutation argument at 171a–c. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book IV, Chapter 7 (on truthfulness, alētheia, and the truthful person, alētheutikos). Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Aristotle's use of alētheuein as a virtue-describing verb is distinct from its epistemological uses elsewhere in the corpus. Heidegger, Martin. "On the Essence of Truth" (Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, 1930/1943). In Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Heidegger's analysis of alētheia as unconcealment (Unverborgenheit) is foundational for understanding the Greek verbal tradition around truth. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Pantheon, 1977. Power and the production of truth as institutional practice. Foucault, Michel. "Truth and Power." Interview with Alessandro Fontana and Pasquale Pasquino (1977). In Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. The "incredulity toward metanarratives" framework central to poststructuralist truth-claims. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Bosworth, Joseph. An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Ed. T. Northcote Toller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1898. Online edition: bosworthtoller.com. See entries for lēogan (to lie, deceive) and trēowth (truth, fidelity, pledge). Brown, Francis, S.R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs. A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1906. See root אמן (aleph-mem-nun): emet (truth, faithfulness), he'emin (to believe, to trust). Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Hirzel, 1854–1961. See wahrnehmen (to perceive, from wahr, true + nehmen, to take) and wahrsagen (to foretell, prophesy; originally to speak truly). Herman, Judith. Trauma and Recovery. New York: Basic Books, 1992. The foundational clinical text for trauma-informed approaches to testimony and survivor experience; influential on the therapeutic culture from which "my truth" emerged as a formulation. Winfrey, Oprah. "What Oprah Knows For Sure About Living Your Truth." Oprah.com. The phrase "living your truth" and its variants appear throughout Winfrey's published and broadcast work across the 1990s–2010s; her 2018 Golden Globes acceptance speech is often cited as a high-water mark of the formulation's public reach. Frankfurt, Harry G. On Bullshit. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005. A useful companion text: Frankfurt's distinction between lying (which requires a relationship to truth) and bullshitting (which does not) maps usefully onto the epistemological problems raised by "my truth" as a rhetorical category.

Some might think this is a little thing, but the truth is that it is not. And I know that unless I write it down I will carry it around for hours if not days. Earlier today I received an unsolicited phone call purportedly (and I will come back to this distinction later) from my internet and cable service provider. My household has been purchasing services from this company (let’s call them Company R) since 1987 – yes THIRTY-NINE years. At one point we had 3 cell phones, 2 cable TV packages and 2 internet services (we had two household accounts with them, a family thing) with them, but over the last few years we moved all the cell phones elsewhere and removed the extra internet and cable accounts. We have remained, due to convenience and laziness, with just cable and internet. The phone call from a person claiming to be with the company (they often aren’t; these types of calls are farmed out to other companies, acting on behalf of Company R), in a very perky voice begins by saying: > “First of all, I am calling to thank you for being such a long term _and loyal customer. As a way to express our appreciation, I would like to offer you special rates on additional services such a cell phone, home security…._ ” I interrupt, feeling peevish, and ask somewhat rhetorically: > “ _Let me make sure I understand you. As a gesture of appreciation, you are asking me to spend more money with you. You are not offering a discount, a one time reduction on my monthly bill, an extra cable channel at no charge, or anything that might be interpreted as a gesture of gratitude. You are simply asking me to spend more money and using a scripted gambit to position that request?_ ” The representative paused for a moment. > “W _ell, you can interpret this offer any way you choose._ ” > > “ _Okay, this is how I choose to interpret it. Have a lovely day.”_ I mentioned that I would return to my use of the word “purportedly”. I alluded to it briefly when I noted that these marketing calls — marketing (m-a-r-k-e-t-i-n-g), not acknowledgement calls — are usually farmed out to other companies. This is actually quite telling. Such calls are commonly outsourced by the company to a third-party call centre, often located offshore, where the representative may make significantly less than a full-time Company R employee. Such is the true nature of their gratitude and appreciation — extended not only to me, but to their own employees. Even though it sometimes feels that way, it’s not always just about me. Let’s leave me aside for the moment and examine the outsourcing of these sales calls to other companies, typically overseas. Company R is based in Canada, owned by a Canadian family, and makes much fanfare around using only “ _Canadian based_ ” customer service representatives. “ _Canadian based_ ” is a bit of a hedge. The majority of their “ _Canadian based_ ” staff is very heavily accented, and while they may physically reside in Canada, they are clearly newcomers. I am not against newcomers being employed in Canada. When I moved to Italy, I was the linguistically challenged newcomer working in customer service. I get it. But the companies who employed me never touted my geographical location, nor did they dress me up as though I were native to their country. Yes, what follows is cynical, but my suspicion is that Company R is not hiring newcomers out of any genuine social conscience. They are hiring them because a newcomer will work for less. Company R is publicly traded and that matters in this context. They have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits. To do otherwise, to do what is “right” or “ethical” or “moral” or even “generous” without a clear correlation to an improved bottom line would be a dereliction of duty. In countries outside of Canada, that dereliction could actually be actionable. In case anyone thinks I’m being somewhat over the top, it is worth recalling a famous lawsuit involving none other than Henry Ford. Now, Ford was no saint and certainly no champion of the working man, and looking back, most of what he did he likely did for reasons of self interest. But what is interesting is the case itself. The Dodge brothers, minority shareholders in Ford Motor Company, sued Henry Ford in 1916 after he announced he would cease paying special dividends to shareholders and instead reinvest the company’s substantial surplus into new plants, higher worker wages, and lower car prices. Ford made the tactical error of saying so publicly, and in his own testimony declaring that his ambition was to spread the benefits of the industrial system as broadly as possible. The Michigan Supreme Court was unimpressed. In 1919, it ruled against Ford, ordering the company to pay dividends. The court’s reasoning was unambiguous: a corporation exists primarily for the profit of its shareholders, and the directors’ powers are to be employed toward that end. Whatever Ford’s actual motives — and scholars have since argued they were far more self-serving than philanthropic — the moment he declared otherwise under oath, he handed the Dodge brothers their case. He told the truth about his intentions and lost because of it. Over one hundred years, much has changed, but much has also stayed the same. I can hear the protests already…. _“But that was over 100 years ago!” “Look at all the charitable donations that corporations give to…” “A company has to promote their products or services, and increase their sales!”_ Yes, it was over a century ago. And yet the legal framework that governed Ford Motor Company in 1919 remains substantially intact today. Company R is not operating under some enlightened modern charter that has superseded shareholder primacy. It is operating under the same fundamental obligation: return value to its shareholders. The century that separates us from the Dodge brothers has given us better technology, faster communications, and considerably more sophisticated public relations, but it has not rewritten the foundational architecture of the publicly traded corporation. And the charitable donations? It is worth pausing here, because this objection sounds generous — as intended. Corporations do give to charity. Company R almost certainly has a foundation, sponsors local events, and attaches its logo to hospital wings and arts festivals. But consider the mechanism. Charitable donations are tax deductible, which means the public subsidy reduces the actual cost to the corporation. They generate press coverage, brand warmth, and customer loyalty — all of which appear, in due course, on the balance sheet. The marketing department and the philanthropy department are often, in practice, the same department. This is not cynicism. It is an accounting. A corporation that gives anonymously, claims no deduction, and seeks no recognition would be a very different creature. You will be waiting some time to meet one. And let us take a moment to cast an eye over the chosen charities — corporately palatable, middle-of-the-road causes, motherhood and apple pie. Things like cancer research, children’s camps, sporting events, services for the blind and the deaf. What monster would possibly object? Those chosen typically align with brand image, stakeholder values, and risk management goals. Causes that struggle with corporate palatability are those that are polarizing, conflict with a company’s own business operations, or address highly stigmatized issues. You are unlikely to see Company R — or any other high-profile brand — vociferously funding real environmentalism (as opposed to greenwashing), abortion access, gun control, prison reform, or addiction harm reduction. Corporate donations target low-risk, high-visibility causes that enhance brand reputation and engage employees and customers. Corporate self-interest dressed in the bright hues of philanthropy. As for the sales call — the one that evoked this — yes, of course, a company must promote its products and grow its revenues. No argument there. But there is a meaningful distinction between a company that calls you to sell you something and a company that calls you to sell you something dressed up in the language of gratitude and appreciation. Company R did not call me to make a forthright sale. They called me on the pretense of offering gratitude for brand loyalty, with the intention of selling me something more — performing the fiction that the call was a gesture of thanks. I can respect an honest sales call. Dressed up in a costume, I cannot. And it is the costume — the scripted gambit, the perky voice, the “ _first of all I want to thank you_ ” — that reveals the gap between what a corporation is structurally required to be and what it would like you to believe it is. That gap is not new. It is just, after 39 years, a little harder to overlook. There is a scene in the 2000 film _Boiler Room_ that is worth recalling here. Seth, the protagonist, is himself a high-pressure salesman of deeply questionable ethics. He receives a breakfast-time cold call from Ron, a newspaper subscription salesman, who opens with “Hi, this is Ron calling you from the Daily News. How are you doing this morning?” Seth immediately says he’s not interested. Ron folds: “Okay. I’m sorry to have bothered you. Have a nice day.” At which point Seth, rather than being relieved, turns on him. “That’s it? That’s your pitch? You consider that a sales call?” He makes Ron start again. This time, when Ron asks how he’s doing, Seth answers honestly — “Shitty. What do you want?” — and Ron explains he is offering a substantially reduced subscription price to people who have never had home delivery. Seth immediately grasps the implication and asks Ron to confirm it plainly: so everyone who already has a subscription is getting a worse deal? Ron doesn’t flinch. “Yeah, I guess so.” Seth’s response is not outrage but satisfaction: “Good. I can live with that.” Ron goes on to make his actual case for the paper, and finishes with a genuine pitch. Seth’s verdict: “Alright, Ron. Now that was a sales call. Good job.” Ron asks if Seth will subscribe. “No. I already get the Times.” He hangs up smiling. The entire transaction took honesty, survived a direct question about who was being disadvantaged, made no pretense of gratitude, and ended with Seth’s genuine respect — but no sale. Company R’s representative, by contrast, opened with a performance of appreciation, was stripped of it in about fifteen seconds, and retreated into “you can interpret this offer any way you choose.” Ron from the Daily News knew exactly what he was selling and who was paying for it — the existing loyal customers, whose continued business was simply being taken for granted while new ones were courted at a discount. He said so when asked. Seth could live with that. The transaction was brutal but legible. What I cannot live with is the costume — the scripted performance of gratitude wrapped around a call that was, at its core, doing exactly the same thing. Perhaps this is a fair summary: what is likely actionable is not precisely a CEO being sued by shareholders for being too generous or too civic minded at the expense of profitability. Oddly, what has proliferated — at least in the United States — is state attorneys general suing companies for pretending to be socially responsible when their financial conduct suggests otherwise. The performance of virtue, it turns out, carries its own legal exposure. There is a meaningful downside to playing dress-up. Which is exactly, albeit on a considerably smaller stage, what Company R is doing with its commissioned marketing phone call — dressing a transaction in the language of gratitude and loyalty while the structure beneath it remains precisely what it has always been. Ironically, as I was adding the finishing touches to this essay, I received yet another marketing call from someone representing the same Company R, once again thanking me for my loyalty. She said that she wanted to tell me, the loyal customer, about some _wonderful_ new offers. She advised me that the call was being recorded for customer service purposes — as they all do. Rather than listen to her whole script, I simply stated that I did not give my consent to having the call recorded. There was a moment of perplexed silence. She told me that: > “Unfortunately we cannot continue the call unless you consent to the recording.” I reiterated that I did not consent. Again, confused silence, followed by this plaintive response: > “Then we cannot continue this call.” > > “I guess we can’t then.” Another deep pause and the representative continued: > “Then you’ll have to hang up.” > > “No, I don’t have to do anything. You called me and by the way, are you still recording me after I expressly withheld my permission?” > > ”Yes. You will have to hang up.” > > ”No ma’am. You started this call, now you can terminate it.” > > ”I’m not sure I can from here.” > > ”Ahhhh, then what would you like me to talk about while you attempt to hang up?” Silence for a very long five minutes, then she somehow managed to disconnect. Perhaps she called over her supervisor. Yes, I know, I can be a little mean at times. * * * ### Citations Dodge v. Ford Motor Co., 170 N.W. 668 (Mich. 1919). Roe, Mark J. "Dodge v. Ford: What Happened and Why." _Vanderbilt Law Review_ , vol. 74, 2021. Available through the Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2021/12/01/dodge-v-ford-what-happened-and-why/ "Dodge v. Ford Motor Co." _Wikipedia_ , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co. Accessed June 2026. Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP. "Navigating the Landscape of ESG-Related Shareholder Litigation." _Pillsbury Law_ , October 29, 2021, https://www.pillsburylaw.com/en/news-and-insights/esg-related-shareholder-litigation.html "Recent ESG Litigation and Regulatory Developments." _Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance_ , July 25, 2022, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2022/07/25/recent-esg-litigation-and-regulatory-developments/ "Trends in ESG Litigation and Enforcement." _Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance_ , August 10, 2023, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2023/08/10/trends-in-esg-litigation-and-enforcement/ Screenplay: Younger, Ben. _Boiler Room_. 2000. Script consulted at https://www.scribd.com/document/260170437/Boiler-Room-2000-Movie-Script-Screenplays-for-You * * *

What connects cross-dressing sex workers, three embattled groups of nuns and monks, soldiers, a roller skating rink, feral cats, _lucertole_ (lizards), a bridge of many names and the sea women of a river? This is an attempt to explore these odd but real connections. Bartolomeo Coghetto detto Medoro (1707-1793). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. The author's apartment was located at the site of the building on the left, and the sex workers congregated toward the right. During the mid 1970s I lived close to the centre of Treviso, a small, charming city in the Veneto province of northeastern Italy. The apartment was situated at the southwest corner of the Riviera Santa Margherita and Viale Reggimento Italia Libera, facing a bridge that crossed the Sile River going into the city proper. A lively spot, during the day. At night, a lively spot in a different register. It was an intersection occupied nightly by transgender, or what at the time was termed “transvestite” prostitutes — men who lived, at least by night, as women. Other than some sound mitigation by the river, it was a noisy corner, surrounded as it was by stone structures. By day, traffic, and the usual city voices of passersby. By night, much different. Every night, regardless of the season, the sex workers were there. They would call out to potential customers, their vertiginous high-heeled platform shoes clacking on the cobblestones, the cars honking at them, or slowing down for conversations. Sometimes the conversations were jocular, sometimes mean-spirited. Mostly it consisted of loud, raucous negotiations on price for various services — the scantily clad sex workers responding in loud, deep masculine voices. How often I heard “ _Venti mila!_ ” — twenty thousand lire, twenty dollars, the going rate shouted into the night. This went on from slightly after dusk until the small hours of the morning. On cold winter nights they would often light a fire in a garbage can for warmth, and possibly advertising. ## The Barracks: Caserma Micca-Colombo __This Is The Army,__ Irving Berlin’s Broadway hit, with an all-soldier cast. “Don’t let them fool you, boys. They’re chorus ‘gals,’ but tough as mule meat.” Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons. On the opposite corner, to the southeast, was the military barracks at the end of Riviera Santa Margherita, the Ex Distretto Militare di Treviso, housed within what was known as the Caserma Micca-Colombo complex. It is now, as I understand, part of a university campus, considerably gentrified. But back then the street led to a long, dark parking area for the soldiers, and where I suspect much business was conducted in the night. The soldiers, I believe, were conscripted; at the time military service was mandatory and almost inevitably an enlisted man was sent far from home. This meant that the soldiers on that corner were almost all from southern Italy, which was further confirmed by their accents and some rather colourful regional expressions not used in the Veneto. Young men, just out of school, in their prime. One imagines the hormones raging. And the loneliness. ## The Convento di San Paolo: A History in Layers This building, now a university property, and previously a military complex, has a deep and interesting history. Around 1225, a small religious community established itself on the banks of the Sile River and the structure grew over the years. Originally it was home to a cloistered group of nuns of the Augustinian order. Conflicts arose with the nearby Frati Eremitani — also Augustinian, but male monks. By 1297 the nuns decided it would be best to move elsewhere. What prompted their exodus is a digression worth pursuing. The women were there first. But shortly afterwards the monks decided the location would be a splendid spot for their monastery — and built it right next to the nuns, despite Papal laws decreeing a minimum distance of 300 _canne_ — a medieval measurement equivalent to approximately 500 metres — between male and female religious orders. The nuns, upset, took their protests to the Vatican, which duly sent an emissary armed with an official measuring stick to determine the distance down to the last centimetre. Whether the monastery technically broke the law remains unclear. What is certain is that it was built exactly where the men wanted it, and that they held a grudge against the women for contacting the Vatican. Regardless of the number of centimetres — or the lack thereof — the nuns understood that such proximity to the monks threatened their way of life in ways no measuring stick could quantify. The monks had built their structure to such a height that they and their workers could easily peer into the nuns’ cloisters, their gardens, their private areas. For a cloistered order, this was not merely an inconvenience. The garden, the cloister walk, the sky overhead — these were not mere amenities. They were the architecture of a spiritual life, the bounded world within which prayer, contemplation, and community were possible. To be watched from above was to be rendered prisoners inside their own house. The women could no longer walk freely in their own enclosure. They were forced indoors, behind shades, deprived of the very spaces that made their vocation liveable. It almost seems like a modern property dispute, if you filter out the religious aspect. Except that you cannot filter it out; the fact that a Vatican-certified measurement resolved nothing, that the monks built where they wished, and the nuns lost regardless, tells you something about how power has always arranged itself. The calculated height of that wall reads less like poor planning than like intent and arrogance. Both orders, despite sharing the Augustinian rule, were in reality competitors. Their economic books were separate. They were, in the most unsentimental sense, profit centres — and the issue of proximity would not have differed greatly from two Walmart stores establishing themselves side by side, drawing from the same pool of customers. Money came from the wealthy citizenry of Treviso, who clearly preferred to subsidize and donate to the more imposing building. The monks, with their height and their dominance of the riverbank, were winning that competition. The nuns were also losing the battle for water rights on the Sile — access that was not a convenience but a lifeline, essential for supplies, sanitation, and the daily functioning of a religious community. The Vatican, having dispatched its measuring stick to no practical effect, had lost interest in the dispute. The sisters, recognizing defeat on multiple fronts — architectural, economic, hydraulic — picked up stakes and moved to another area of the city, settling close to another convent. A medieval women’s safety-in-numbers move. A defeat nonetheless. The building, however, remained a valuable piece of real estate and was quickly reassigned to another women’s order — the Dominicans. Also cloistered, and operating under considerably stricter rules than their predecessors, they nonetheless possessed something the Augustinian nuns had lacked: institutional power. The Dominicans were not merely in competition with the Augustinians; they outranked them. Acquamarina, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. The Church the monks built, now repurposed as shown. In the meantime, the monks had turned their attention to erecting a nearby church dedicated to Santa Margherita, and while they were occupied with that project, their new neighbours were quietly busy. Higher walls went up. Sight lines were eliminated. Water access was improved. The monks, absorbed in their construction, never saw it coming. The very architectural logic they had used to make the first nuns’ lives unlivable was now inverted, deployed with precision by women who understood the game entirely. The distance issue, once so bitterly contested, became a non-issue. What remained was serious financial competition — from the building the monks had effectively handed to a more formidable opponent. Such irony. The Dominican nuns won the long game. Ensconced on the property after their swift and strategic consolidation, they remained there, quietly and formidably, for just over five hundred years — until Napoleon arrived in 1810 and turned their world, and other religious communities across northern Italy, upside down. To put that span into perspective: many countries have not lasted as long. These nuns outlasted empires, survived plagues, weathered the Reformation, and endured more than twice the entire lifespan of the United States of America. Though one doubts they marked their anniversaries with fireworks. Antonio Carlini, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons - The Church of Santa Margherita ca, 1885 - view from the back ## Napoleon and the Aftermath And so the years passed and the convent continued. Until 1810, when Napoleon’s administrators arrived. This is a long story, and too long a digression for this essay. Suffice to say that both the convent and the monastery were immediately ordered to cease their religious operations, and the contents of both — priceless works of art accumulated over centuries — were seized. The nuns’ church of San Paolo was completely destroyed. The monks’ church of Santa Margherita fared a little better: stripped of everything of value, left to deteriorate, it was eventually pressed into service as a stable for the military’s horses and storage for hay and feed. A church. A stable. The echo of that particular humiliation needs no elaboration — except perhaps more fundamentally Christ-like, given the legend of Christ being born in a stable. Maybe, in the midst of tragedy, an unintentional allegory for the faithful. The nuns’ personal lodgings were not destroyed, but heavily modified. The small rooms in which the nuns had lived and slept — each one a world unto itself, a cell calibrated to prayer, solitude, and the bare minimum of comfort — had their walls torn down to create large open sleeping quarters for soldiers. One wonders if any of those soldiers, likely raised Catholic themselves, slept soundly in what had been a sacred space. Or whether they felt haunted by the history of so many cloistered women. And so the area became a military complex, and remained so for 191 years — until October 2001, when it was repurposed to become part of a university campus and subsequently a location dedicated to the preservation of art and culture. The long arc from Agistianian and Dominican enclosures to Napoleonic stable to barracks to lecture hall is complete, or as complete as such arcs ever are. But let us turn back the clock — back past the nuns and the monks, back past the founding of the convent, back to before Christianity had yet to arrange the landscape of this corner of the Veneto into parishes and prohibitions and measured distances between men and women. Back to the origin tales of the Sile River itself. Back to the pagan. But first, the bridge. ## The Bridge of Many Names This relatively unremarkable-looking bridge has a history that reaches considerably further back than its modest appearance suggests. During the Roman era, when Treviso was known as Tarvisium, this crossing point was a significant threshold — located at the southern terminus of the city’s main urban artery. We don’t often think of ancient Romans as builders of urban highways, but they were, and Tarvisium was no exception. Rome liked its cities organized, its roads straight, its grids legible. The settlement was a thriving one. That main artery was the _cardo maximus_ — the principal north-south axis of the Roman grid, running along what is now Via Calmaggiore and Via Santa Margherita. It is the same street that still carries that name today, still running from the heart of the old city down to the river’s edge. The bridge at its southern end was not incidental. It was the city’s formal southern gateway, the point at which the main road met the water. And things were very different then. There was no _cerchia_ — no complex ringed canal system, no layered medieval fortifications. During the height of the Roman Empire, Tarvisium sat open to the landscape, relying on the natural boundaries of the Sile and Botteniga rivers rather than on the defensive walls and moats that would come much later and eventually give the bridge one of its earliest names. The river crossing was simply what it was: a point of passage. Townsfolk and country people moving back and forth. Merchants and soldiers. Troops and trade carts. All of them passing through Tarvisium’s grand southern gateway, over the water, into the city or out of it. It has always been a crossing point. That has never changed. The bridge’s first formal name was Ponte della Cerchia — referring to a military position, a circle of defence and moat. It evolved into a sort of economic checkpoint, its name changing to Ponte del Varco: the customs bridge. It was made of wood during this period, not stone, and became a more important passage with the advent of the religious houses nearby. The ancient wooden structure was demolished in 1832, the city having decided that the wood required too much maintenance. The “new” stone bridge stood strong until an urban renewal project in the early 2000s completely revamped the area — and built the bridge of wood again. The _cerchio_ — the circle — is complete. ## The Deep History of the Sile – the Paleo-Veneti Long before the Romans organized Tarvisium into grids and taxation districts, long before the nuns arrived and the monks built too close, this corner of the Veneto was inhabited by a people the Greeks and Romans called the Veneti — known to scholars today as the Paleo-Veneti or Proto-Veneti, an Indo-European people who settled the northeastern Italian plain sometime around the late second millennium BC and developed, over the following centuries, a distinct and sophisticated civilization. They were not a single uniform culture but a constellation of largely independent communities — each with its own dialect of the Venetic language, its own local customs, its own gods. The territory encompassing modern Treviso was among their settlements, with archaeological traces of pre-Roman habitation documented near the city’s earliest foundations, including evidence of settlement linked to the springs of the Sile River itself. Pora Reitia, a Paleo Veneto Goddess. For the Paleo-Veneti, water was not incidental to daily life. It was the organizing principle of existence. Their settlements followed the waterways; their sacred sites clustered at liminal water places — springs, river confluences, marshes, lagoon edges — where the boundary between the human and the numinous was understood to be permeable. Across the Veneto, archaeologists have identified 43 cult sites, the majority of them at natural places where people deposited votive gifts to place-specific deities. What the evidence shows is that these were not abstract gods residing in a distant heaven, but forces embedded in specific features of the local landscape. The water deity _Trumusiate_ — whose very name has been etymologically linked to a _wet or marshy location or place_ — was worshipped at Lagole in the Alpine foothills, the offerings left in ladle bowls and ladle handles bearing the deity’s name, a practice that continued into the Roman period when _Trumusiate_ was absorbed into the cult of Apollo the Healer. The sacred at Altino, the Venetic settlement at the mouth of the Sile near the Adriatic lagoon, was similarly tied to water — an ancient shrine at a crossing of channels, structurally liminal, a landmark for both local worshippers and those arriving by water from the sea. The Sile’s resurgence springs — water rising unbidden from the earth — would have carried profound significance in this belief system. Across the Veneto, the archaeological record consistently shows that _liminal or magical natural landscape elements attracted cult activity_ , in the precise phrasing of De Nardi’s analysis. Hot springs, confluences, marshland, the edges between water and land: these were the places where the Paleo-Veneti placed their offerings, whispered their prayers, and understood themselves to be standing at a threshold. Which brings us right to the Anguane, the of the Sile. ## The Anguane: Divine Women of the Sile An __Anguana__ , sketch by Titian. Public domain. Note the cloven feet. People called them the Anguane. Ancient water spirits, these female entities were young and exceptionally beautiful, with very long blonde hair — or, less poetically, the colour of the river’s sludge. They wore delicate veils for clothing. Sometimes they might pass for human, but the observant would notice the tell-tale signs: feet cloven like those of a goat, or shaped like a duck’s, or covered in fish scales, depending on who was doing the telling. What everyone agreed upon was that their skirts were worn deliberately long, the better to conceal their true nature — and that they spent all their time at least partially submerged in the waters of the Sile. Legend held that the city-dwelling Anguane were not the same as those who lived beyond the walls. The city Anguane wove themselves into the daily lives of the population; the country Anguane mostly kept to themselves. On nights when the moon was full, the city Anguane would rise from the canals, making their way to the watermills and the stone city gates to launder their fine clothing. People would hear the rhythmic beating of cloth at the river’s edge, and they knew — the nymphs were at work. Their nature was dual: protectors and avengers. They defended the river’s ecosystem and the creatures within it, the eels of the Sile above all. But disrespect the river — fish out of season, throw garbage into the waters, take without giving back — and the Anguane were without mercy. According to local tradition, they would entrance the transgressors with their singing, and once captured, drag them down beneath the watermills or into the shifting quicksands of the riverbank. The river, in other words, had its own justice. It predated the Church by a considerable margin. Before leaving the Anguane, it is worth pausing on their name, whose origins remain genuinely murky. Some scholars derive it from the Latin _aquana_ — simply, “of the water.” Others favour _anguis_ , also Latin, referring to a water serpent — apt enough, since the Anguane were said to be capable of transforming themselves into a vicious and poisonous snake if sufficiently angered. But going further back, some historians point to the Celtic _adgane_ — female nature spirits held dear by the Paleo-Venetic population, protectors of springs and rivers long before Rome arrived to name things. Once Christianity subsumed the original belief systems of the region, the Anguane or Adgane were demoted into folklore. They were not, however, forgotten. In local dialect the expression survives: _sigar come n’anguana_ — to scream like an Anguana. Which will, in time, bring us back to the sex workers and their own peculiar siren songs on the edge of the Sile at night. The Anguane are creatures born of the river’s light — its clarity, its cold purity, its gift of water rising unbidden from the earth. But the Sile holds darker stories too. Where the Anguane emerged from the river’s nature, the Cornara was thrust into it as punishment. They say she was a noblewoman of the powerful Cornaro — or Corner — family of Venice, known even in Treviso for her astonishing beauty and her jewels, but equally for her heart of stone, her greed, and her cruelty. One winter night, a poor and starving beggar came to her palace asking for a little food and shelter from the cold. She not only refused him — she had her servants beat him. As he was driven away, the beggar turned and cursed her. The following day, travelling in her sumptuous carriage near the Sile, she found herself on a narrow and muddy stretch of road. Ahead of her, picking their way along the edge of the path, walked an elderly priest with two young altar boys. The lady, enraged by the delay, stopped her carriage, descended, and slapped the priest violently across the face. In that instant the beggar’s curse found its moment. The ground shook with a terrible force, opened beneath the carriage, and swallowed it whole — horses, carriage, and noblewoman together. The hole filled immediately with spring water, becoming one of the many deep _fontanassi_ of the Sile. And she drowned there, in the cold water rising from the earth. But death was not the end. Her body was transformed — into a hairless and hideous female dog, around whose neck the pearl necklace of the noblewoman still hung. Local legend holds that the Cornara has roamed the river’s edges for centuries, appearing most often on nights of dense fog. Those who claim to have seen her describe a black, hairless dog with eyes like burning coals. She holds the gaze of whomever she encounters — then dives into the river, and is gone. There is a real historical figure behind the legend — Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus, whose life intersected with the Treviso region in ways both documented and embellished. But that is another tale, presently in contemplation. The Anguane owe their origins to the distinct nature of the Sile itself. It is the longest resurgence river in Europe — meaning that rather than descending from mountains or following the more typical pathways of rivers, the Sile bubbles and seeps up from the ground, pure water rising from the earth as if from nowhere. Spring water in the truest sense of the word. The ancients viewed this as something close to miraculous: clean, cold water appearing unbidden from the ground, and they believed that the Anguane were the divine beings responsible — spirits who pushed the water upward from beneath the earth to sustain the city of Treviso above. Even today, walking beside the many canals that carry the Sile through the city, one can hear the water murmuring. People have long said that this is the sound of the Anguane at their toilette — combing their long hair and weaving it through with algae. When I walked those same canal paths, I heard it too. I offer no interpretation. I simply heard it. ## The Rink, the Cats, and the Lizards The author's cat George, a Soriano, brought from Italy to Canada (ca. 1988). Note the "M" on his forehead. History makes odd twists and turns, and this story is no exception. The Church of Santa Margherita — looted, humiliated, pressed into service as a military stable — had one more life to live. After the military period wound down, the church complex was converted into a sports facility. At the back of the building, a large open area was given over to a roller skating rink. Except for the deepest winter months, the rink was used by artistic roller skaters — practising jumps, spins, and intricate footwork, working toward a precision that the concrete surface and the high surrounding walls neither rewarded nor forgave. They sometimes skated to the music of their choreography, but more often in silence. Or rather, not silence — the symphony of their skates on concrete, enclosed on all sides by tall stone buildings, produced a sound quite unlike anything else. I would watch and listen to them from my back balcony. Roller wheels on stone, echoing upward. A church that had survived Napoleon, horses, and centuries of institutional ambition, now resonating to the footwork of young athletes who almost certainly had no idea what had preceded them on that ground. The rink is gone now. The complex is a museum. The skaters have long since moved on. But not the cats. In the hours when the rink stood empty of skaters, it belonged to the cats. The space was protected, enclosed, and largely sheltered from wind. In summer, and to some extent even in winter, the sun warmed the concrete to a temperature that seemed designed with feline comfort specifically in mind. The cats would emerge then — from their hiding places and dens along the banks of the Sile, from the crevices and shadows of the surrounding buildings — and take possession. They lounged. They stretched. They dozed in configurations of absolute indifference to everything that was not sun and warmth. Occasionally they fought. How many were there? Impossible to say with certainty — perhaps a hundred or more at peak congregation, dotting every surface of the rink, lords of a domain whose history they neither knew nor required. These were feral cats — a population protected under Italian National Law No. 281 (1991), which established the right of free-roaming cats to remain in their colonies, prohibiting their killing or removal, and mandating trap-neuter-release programs administered by local veterinary services. The cats of Treviso, in other words, have legal standing. And so they gathered, generation after generation, in what had been a church, a stable, a military barracks, and a sports complex. Indifferent to the weight of all that history. Warm, and entirely at home. This cat colony was special in other ways, and it carried a history of its own that stretched back centuries. The cats have a look about them — short haired, tabby, and often marked with an M-shaped stripe just above the eyes that gives them an expression of permanent, slightly unsettling alertness. The colony had lived in that area for centuries, introduced long ago and sustained by purpose: they were prized by Venetian sailors and merchants for their ability to control rodent populations aboard ships and in the warehouses along the waterways. My neighbours called these cats _soriani_. The word is nothing short of romantic in its origins. _Soriano_ derives from _Soria_ — the ancient Italian word for Syria. During the Middle Ages, Syria was renowned throughout the Mediterranean world for its exquisite luxury silk fabrics, woven in wavy, striped, and marbled patterns. Venetian sailors and traders, returning from the eastern routes, noticed that the striped markings of these cats recalled the patterns of those eastern silks, and named the cats accordingly. The English word _tabby_ carries an almost identical history by a different route. It derives from _Attabiyah_ , a quarter in Baghdad renowned for producing the same kind of striped silk. Two languages, two trade routes, two cities on opposite ends of the ancient world, arriving at the same name for a breed of cat, by way of the same fabric. The cats were not alone in that sun-warmed enclosure. Other creatures lived there too, small, swift, and largely unbothered by the world’s opinions of them. Italians call them _lucertole_ ; in Treviso the dialect word is _borétola_. Several lizard species inhabit the city, but the one most likely present in this location — and most consistent with memory — is the Common Wall Lizard: typically brownish, grey, or dark green, its back marked with intricate marbled and speckled patterns not entirely unlike those of the _soriani_ sharing the same warm concrete. There are many legends attached to this delicate creature, but one seems particularly well-suited to the layered history of this place. When the Virgin Mary was resting during the flight into Egypt, dangerous scorpions and spiders crept toward her. A tiny wall lizard darted forward and ate them, one by one, protecting her while she slept. In gratitude, Mary reached down and touched the lizard’s forehead — permanently marking an ‘M’, the initial of her name. Not unlike the marking carried by the _soriani_ a few metres away, warming themselves on the same stone. In Treviso, lizards are blessed creatures. The legend says so. And they were nearly everywhere in the buildings surrounding that particular corner — the old convent walls, the military complex, the edges of the rink — going about their quiet, ancient business. Which brings us back to the cats, and their own Trevisan mythology. Local tradition speaks of what might be called the Great Feral Armies — the belief that the stray cats living in the city’s alleyways had developed, over generations, a complex underground hierarchy. They functioned, in the popular imagination, as an informal municipal defence force. And Trevisans believed that the oldest, most battle-scarred _soriano_ in any given neighbourhood held the rank of General — coordinating the nightly hunts that kept the river rats from breaching the homes and food stores of the city. An army without a flag, operating below the level of official history. Much like several other forces we have already encountered in this essay. ## A Long History at This Corner But let us come full circle to our sex worker sisters — or brethren, as the case may be. They too, like the bridge, the cats, the lizards, the convents and the monastery, have a long, rich and storied history. And one very much tied to this same corner of Treviso. In Roman Tarvisium, the trade was legal, regulated, and woven into the civic infrastructure. Because the Sile was an important throughway and this corner sat at a critical river port juncture, there was a thriving sex trade conducted primarily in two locations: _tabernae_ — the inns and taverns catering to travelling merchants — and the _lupanaria_ , dedicated brothels. The women were obligated to register themselves and to pay taxes on their earnings. Not all sunshine and enlightenment, however. They could not testify in court, and they were barred from marrying Roman citizens. Most were foreign slaves or _libertae_ — freedwomen owned by regional elites. The law saw them, taxed them, and otherwise made them invisible. And there were the non-binary: The concept of a biological male adopting a feminine role — in dress, presentation, and the offering of sexual services — was culturally visible in Tarvisium. These individuals were known as _cinaedi_ : biological men who presented as feminine, wore makeup and women’s tunics, and in all probability operated in the commercial _tabernae_ along the Sile River. In a provincial river port like Tarvisium, they were a known and present feature of daily life. A tradition, as it turns out, with very deep roots. Roman law viewed this with characteristic pragmatism and characteristic cruelty. Female prostitutes were required by law to wear the male toga — a deliberate inversion, a mark of legal disgrace, the formal sign of _infamia_. Male sex workers who adopted feminine presentation did the opposite: they wore bright, flowing women’s clothing. The law concerned itself not with gender identity but with social status. If enslaved, they were property. If free, they were barred from standard civic rights. The state saw them clearly enough to tax and categorize them, and not clearly enough to extend them humanity. Moving forward through the medieval and Venetian centuries — the 13th to the 18th — the framing of cross-dressing and transgender sex work became considerably more dangerous. The dominant anxiety was sodomy. So acute was this fear that during the 14th and 15th centuries, the Venetian Republic came to believe that homosexuality and sodomy would bring down divine wrath upon the city. The institutional response was remarkable in its logic: Venetian and Trevisan authorities actively promoted female prostitution — funding state brothels — specifically to redirect male desire away from other men and effeminate youth. Within this framework, transvestite sex work was not merely marginal; it was illegal, and pushed entirely underground. Biological men who dressed as women to engage in sex work could not operate within the official red-light districts — not the _Cae de Oro_ , not the licensed houses. Instead, they worked at night, along the dark arches of the _Calmaggiore_ , or near the peripheral city gates. Near, in other words, the spot where we began. Punishment was extreme. If caught by the local _Capitano_ — the military governor of Treviso — cross-dressing sex workers faced severe criminal prosecution under the Council of Ten. Unlike female sex workers, who were tolerated, taxed, and regulated, transvestite workers were tried for _atti contro natura_ — acts against nature — and faced public whipping, exile, or execution at the stake in Venice. The historical record preserves at least one documented case that brings this institutional violence into sharp focus. In 1354, a person known as Rolandinus/a Ronchaia was brought before the Venetian courts — perceived by authorities as either ambiguously gendered or as a biological male living as a woman — and charged with both sodomy and prostitution. What makes Ronchaia’s case remarkable across the distance of seven centuries is her consistency. Throughout her trial, she maintained her identity as a woman without recantation. The courts implored her repeatedly to cease living as a woman and to renounce her claim to have ever done so. She refused. Her refusal to accept the demand to live as male led directly to her death sentence. The courts were not merely punishing behaviour. They were punishing the insistence on existing as oneself. Ronchaia was executed in Venice in 1354 — not for the acts alleged, but for the life she would not surrender. From the 13th to the 18th centuries, sex workers who had previously moved freely through the city were now confined — either to designated red-light districts within the city walls, or expelled to remain outside them entirely, on the wrong side of the walls and bridges. Liminal by decree. The Napoleonic era brought a different kind of regulation. Licensing was required, but the new emphasis fell on the control of venereal disease. Workers were now required to submit to official bi-weekly health checks. Those found with symptoms were forcibly quarantined in a dedicated ward — local neighbourhood memory from the 1970s places this at the San Leonardo Civic Hospital, within clear sight of our former convents and monastery just across the river, though this detail awaits formal verification. By the 19th century a two-tier system had solidified. The most expensive establishment was Il Leda, catering to senior military officers and wealthy landowners. The Piccolo Eden occupied a different and rather surprising niche — its clientele and workers were predominantly upper-class women, often married, often mothers. Lower-tier establishments — Dotto, Della Ada, Della Menta — served working-class labourers. All were concentrated in and around the legendary _Cae de Oro_ district and the surrounding streets of via Castelmenardo and via delle Oche, just steps from the church of San Nicolò and the Cathedral. Street prostitution was heavily policed by the local Carabinieri, a uniformed officer posted outside every brothel to regulate entry — with a discreet secondary entrance available for more prominent clients. All about the money. No change there. By the late 19th century, moral condemnation had acquired a medical vocabulary. Sex workers were routinely examined for disease. Transvestite workers, barred from the legal houses and unable to register, operated as _prostitute clandestine_ — unlicensed street-walkers. They used the cover of the dense river fogs along Treviso’s city walls, or worked from private rented rooms — _camere d’affitto_ — outside the city centre. In the late 19th century, police forces across the Veneto were working closely with early criminologists shaped by the influence of Cesare Lombroso, whose _La donna delinquente_ — published in 1893 and translated into English as _The Female Offender_ — provided the pseudoscientific framework for what followed. When a cross-dressing sex worker was arrested in Treviso, they were not merely jailed. They were catalogued. Local police files, consistent with those documented across the Veneto, record arrests for _travisamento_ (disguise) and _offesa al pudore_ (offense to public decency). These individuals were frequently sent not to standard rehabilitation but to the psychiatric wards or specialised venereal disease wards of the San Leonardo Civic Hospital for clinical evaluation. And here we are, back in the neighbourhood again. Tracing the history of transgender, gender-nonconforming, or transvestite individuals within this trade requires some care, because the past did not record these identities in terms we would recognize today. Modern concepts such as “transgender” or “transsexual” belong to the 20th century. Earlier archives — legal, medical, ecclesiastical — reached instead for the language available to them: _travisamento_ (cross-dressing, or disguise), _uomini effeminati_ (effeminate men), or filed these individuals under the broader categories of sodomy and clandestine prostitution. The people existed. The language to name them accurately did not yet. ## Improbable Neighbours And so these were my improbable neighbours for a few years. By day: artistic roller skaters clattering gracefully — and sometimes not — across the stone-bound rink; lizards skittering along the walls, sending the odd fragment of cement falling with a small, particular sound; cats languidly sunning themselves, occasionally erupting into the yowling and hissing that is the feline version of a strongly worded letter. Come the night, the soundscape changed entirely — the staccato cries of the sex workers and their clients, the soldiers, and the cars passing by, the negotiations carried on at full volume in the cool air above the Sile. Sometimes, returning late at night from a date, I would enter the restaurant/bar that was at the corner. Occasionally there would be a few of the sex workers there, having a break. Tall, startling high heels, fishnet stockings, black leather bustiers, dramatic makeup. Not garish but beautiful exotic creatures of the night. They were mostly quiet, speaking softly among themselves. Sipping double espressos. Screenshot from the __Rocky Horror Picture Show__ (1975). Permitted by copyright law as image is low resolution. I lived above them all, and knew none of them. I would sometimes recognize the particular deep voice of a more frequent sex worker, but I didn’t know any of their names. I didn’t know their histories, their stories, where they lived, what made them laugh, what tragedies they had survived, what brought them joy. They kept me awake and interrupted my sleep on almost every night I spent in that apartment. They have remained with me for over fifty years. Chances are that most of them are dead by now. Dead of old age, of disease, of violence. My unnamed neighbours. Every one of them — from the lizards and the cats to the transgender sex workers calling out into the night — had a long history on that particular corner of that particular city. And yet there is no historical plaque to honour any of them. The lively medieval feud between the nuns and the monks, in which a papal official travelled all the way from Rome to Treviso carrying a very special stick, is now forgotten. The Anguane no longer comb their hair in the canals, or if they do, no one is listening. The neighbourhood has been gentrified — university students, museums, clean facades. In many ways I miss the garbage bins on fire, and the loud cries of “ _venti mila lire!”_ Rising through my window in the dark. ## Sources Consulted ### Primary and Archival Sources Esito di Gara — Comando Forze Operative del Nord. Undated. Privately printed. Italian military administrative document confirming the Caserma Micca-Colombo compound designation. Consulted by the author. “Le Grandi Armate Ferali” / The Great Feral Armies. Oral tradition received from neighbours, Riviera Santa Margherita, Treviso, mid-1970s. Recounted to the author in Italian. No written source located or claimed. San Leonardo Civic Hospital quarantine ward. Neighbourhood oral tradition received by the author, Riviera Santa Margherita, Treviso, mid-1970s. Awaits formal archival verification. ### _Treviso: History, Architecture, and Religious Orders_ Pozzobon, Paolo. _Sant’Ambrogio di Fiera._ Ed. Zoppelli, Treviso 1980. [As reproduced on parrocchiadifiera.it, “Le Monache Agostiniane” section.] Confirms Augustinian nuns at San Paolo from 1223; departure 1297. Sartor, Ivano. “Il Convento delle Domenicane di San Paolo in Treviso.” _Portello Sile / ANA Treviso._ portellosileanatv.it. Confirms Dominican occupancy, sight line dispute, Napoleon suppression 1810. Fondazione Cassamarca. “Complesso San Paolo — Ex Distretto Militare.” fondazionecassamarca.it. Confirms 2001 repurposing to university and cultural precinct. “Treviso.” _Enciclopedia dell’Arte Antica._ Treccani.it. Confirms Roman municipium status, quadruvium, road network, epigraphy. “Storia di Treviso.” _Wikipedia Italia._ it.wikipedia.org. Confirms _cardo maximus_ along Via Santa Margherita / Via Calmaggiore and quadruvium location at Piazza Carducci. Bressan, M. and Pellegrini, L. “Modellazione di superfici di età romana a Treviso.” _Archeologia e Calcolatori_ , CNR. archcalc.cnr.it. Confirms Sile as southern boundary of Roman Tarvisium. “Treviso.” _Encyclopaedia Britannica._ britannica.com. Confirms Celtic Tarvisium / Roman municipium. “Viaggio nella Chiesa di San Leonardo, Treviso.” qdpnews.it. Confirms San Leonardo’s history and location. ### _Paleo Veneti_ All claims about the forty-three cult sites, liminal sacred landscapes, _Trumusiate_ , and the Altino shrine derive from: De Nardi, Sarah. "Landscapes of the Prehistoric Veneto, Italy: A Plurality of Local Identities Reflected in Cult and Landscape Perception." _Papers from the Institute of Archaeology_ , vol. 18, 2007, pp. 39–56. DOI: 10.5334/pia.301. All claims about Paleo-Veneti settlement, material culture, and the Treviso area derive from: Capuis, Loredana. _I Veneti: Civiltà e cultura di un popolo dell'Italia preromana._ Third edition. Milano: Longanesi, 2009. The Treviso-specific archaeological traces near the Sile springs derive from: Gerhardinger, E. _Reperti paleoveneti del Museo Civico di Treviso._ Roma, 1991. And from the ArcheoVeneto catalogue entry: _Musei Civici di Treviso: Le raccolte archeologiche a Santa Caterina._ Treviso, 2007. archeoveneto.beniculturali.unipd.it The _Trumusiate_ etymology quote — _"wet or marshy location or place"_ — is sourced directly to Marinetti, as cited in De Nardi (2007), p. 47. ### _The Anguane, the Cornara, and Sile River Folklore_ “Anguana.” _Menocchio’s Almanac._ menocchiosalmanac.miraheze.org. Confirms Anguane characteristics, cloven feet, laundering tradition. “Demoni, mostri e fantasmi del folklore italiano.” _Weird Italy._ weirditaly.com, June 2022. Confirms Anguane as nature spirits, non-lethal tradition. Parco Naturale Regionale del Fiume Sile. “The Resurgence Pools.” parcosile.it. Confirms Sile as longest resurgence river in Europe. “I Misteri del Sile: La Leggenda della Cornara.” sgaialand.it and eventivenetando.it. Italian-language folkloric sources on the Cornara legend. No formal publication data. ### **_Cats, Lizards, and Natural History_** Purina Editorial Team. “Di che razza sono i gatti soriani e che aspetto hanno?” _Purina Italia._ purina.it, 17 maggio 2023. Confirms _soriano_ etymology from _Sorìa_ (Syria); _tabby_ etymology from Attabiyah, Baghdad; M-marking Christian folk legend. Italian National Law No. 281, 14 August 1991. “Legge Quadro in materia di animali di affezione e prevenzione del randagismo.” _Gazzetta Ufficiale della Repubblica Italiana_ , no. 203, 30 August 1991. Foundational legislation establishing protected status for feral cat colonies. ### _Prostitution: Roman, Medieval, Venetian, and Modern_ “Prostitution in Ancient Rome.” _Wikipedia._ en.wikipedia.org. Confirms Roman legal framework: registration, taxation, tabernae, lupanaria, slaves and libertae. Favretto, Valeria. _Oltre la Cae de Oro. La prostituzione a Treviso dal Regno d’Italia alla Legge Merlin._ Editoriale Programma, Treviso. Primary source for 19th century Treviso establishments, red light district geography, Carabinieri regulation. “I quartieri a luci rosse e i casini di guerra a Treviso.” _Il Gazzettino / Treviso Today_ , 20 aprile 2016. trevisotoday.it. Confirms establishment names: Dotto, Della Ada, Della Menta, Della Leda, Piccolo Eden; confirms Cae de Oro district. Danusso, Cristina. “Prostituzione e lenocinio nell’Italia dell’Ottocento.” _Historia et Ius_ , 1 giugno 2022. historiaetius.eu. Confirms Napoleonic regulation: registration, periodic health checks, police oversight. “Le donne, i governi e la prostituzione — il Medioevo.” amantidellastoria.wordpress.com, 24 febbraio 2021. Confirms Treviso medieval restriction of women in _stufe_. “Prostitution in Venice.” _History Walks in Venice._ historywalksvenice.com. Confirms Venetian promotion of female prostitution to counter sodomy; Council of Ten; capital punishment for sodomy. Baldassano, Alex. “Talking Back: Sodomy Laws and Transgressive Subjectivity in Medieval Venice.” _Medieval Feminist Forum_ , vol. 55, no. 2. scholarworks.wmich.edu. Peer-reviewed. Confirms 1354 Ronchaia case. “Contrasting Renaissance Sodomy Legislation in Florence and Venice.” _The Black and Gold_ , College of Wooster. openworks.wooster.edu. Confirms Council of Ten; divine wrath as institutional motivation. ### _Lombroso and Criminal Anthropology_ Lombroso, Cesare and Ferrero, Guglielmo. _La donna delinquente_ (1893). Published in English as _The Female Offender_ , D. Appleton and Company. Primary source. Pseudoscientific framework applied to sex workers and criminal women by northern Italian police forces. Gibson, Mary S. “The ‘Female Offender’ and the Italian School of Criminal Anthropology.” _Journal of European Studies_ , 1982. Confirms Lombrosian influence on Italian police practice. ### _Roman Gender and Sexuality_ “Homosexuality in Ancient Rome.” _Wikipedia._ en.wikipedia.org. Confirms _cinaedi_ characteristics, clothing, social role. “How Roman Society Integrated People Who Altered Their Bodies and Defied Gender Norms.” _The Conversation._ theconversation.com, 2026. Confirms _cinaedi_ as gender-nonconforming category, Greek origins.

June 19, 2017. I am standing in an apartment in Hoboken, New Jersey, holding a Father’s Day card addressed to a dead man. It had been mailed a several days earlier, while Juan was still alive. It arrived the morning of his funeral, slipped through the mail slot while we were dressing in black, as the coffee was going cold on the counter, and as his wife and children moved through the apartment in that particular slow-motion that grief imposes. Someone picked it up from the mailbox and showed it to me. I recognized our handwriting. The room went quiet, differently than it had already been quiet. My husband said nothing. Neither did I. Maybe we did. I can’t remember. Harold and Juan never should have had anything in common. The evidence against it was considerable. Harold, my father, was born on May 2, 1920, in Ottawa, Ontario — a city of a hundred thousand souls still sorting itself out after a war and a pandemic, cautiously optimistic, faintly British in its self-regard. He was the product of northern European ancestry, fair-skinned, with blue eyes so striking they were the first thing anyone mentioned when they described him. He was university-educated, an executive, a man who had studied Latin, and could read and write in French and Italian. He had one child. He read and travelled widely. He wore his learning quietly, the way some men wear a good coat — not to be noticed in it, but because the cold is real. Juan, my father-in-law, was born on September 27, 1935, in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico — a small agricultural town built on sugar cane and slavery, on the northeast coast of the island, carrying in its bones the layered history of the Taíno, the Spanish, and the sea. He had the dark complexion and strong features of that blended ancestry, a face that was a kind of map. He left school after the elementary grades. He worked with his hands all his life. He had four children. He lived, in his final years, in a housing project in Hoboken, New Jersey, on a fixed income, on a balcony from which he could watch the city and, beyond it. He spoke almost no English. He needed none. By any conventional measure — education, class, language, nationality, the century each inhabited — these two men had nothing to say to each other. They were both roughly 5ft 6in tall. They both had full heads of white hair when they died. They were both Roman Catholic — Harold by deliberate adult choice, Juan by birth and by the bone-deep faith of a people who had been praying in that language for five hundred years. They both married women who talked. And they were both, at their cores, profoundly, constitutionally, almost philosophically quiet. I met Juan’s silence on a balcony. This is how it worked: after dinner, Juan would go out to smoke, and I would follow him. We would stand together in the Hoboken night — the city noise below, the red glow of our cigarettes — and drink his coffee, which was strong enough to constitute a separate food group, and say almost nothing. My Spanish was barely serviceable and certainly not intimate. His English was a handful of words, carefully deployed. We didn’t need much. He would look out at the buildings. I would look out at the buildings. The cigarettes burned down. We went back inside. I think he trusted me because I didn’t try to fill the silence. Or perhaps because I drank the coffee without flinching and enjoyed a good smoke. Or perhaps, most simply, because he watched me make his son happy, and that was the whole of what he needed to know. Whatever the reason, his trust was not theoretical. When his daughter — my sister-in-law, a woman in her thirties — died suddenly, it was me he asked to organize the funeral. I did. When he wanted someone to safeguard his life savings, it was to me whom he sent them. These were not small gestures from a man who made no large ones. These were, in Juan’s language — which was not English— declarations of love and faith. We never spoke much. There was, in the end, nothing much to say. He saw what he needed to see. My father’s love also came through the hands. Once, at age 16, I was in a hospital in Italy — we were living there then — recovering from an emergency appendectomy. I had been flat on my back for days, and my hair, which was long and fine and given to tangling, had matted itself into something approaching felt at the back of my head. My mother, who was practical and impatient, and made no apologies for either quality, began pulling at it with a brush and threatened the scissors. My father took the brush from her hands. He put it down. He found a fine-toothed comb and began, with a patience I have never forgotten, to work the knot out one hair at a time. It took him two hours. We barely spoke. He never hurt me once. The room was warm, July-warm, Italian-warm, with gauze curtains lifting in the breeze and the smell of stracciatella drifting in from the corridor. My roommate was a nun whose hand lotion smelled of lily of the valley. I sat with one arm extended stiffly because of the IV needle, and my father stood behind me, and his hands moved like a whisper through my hair, and outside the window the light was the particular gold of an Italian summer afternoon, and I understood, without words, what I needed to understand. He was away for most of my childhood. Work took him, as work does. We had a quiet relationship — affectionate but not demonstrative, proud on both sides, tender in the way that reserved people are tender, which is to say indirectly, and perhaps all the more real for that. He hugged me at my wedding. That I remember. Before that and after, there were other languages between us — the two hours with the comb, the way he tracked my career with a satisfaction he expressed mostly through calm appreciation, asking for details. A particular quality of attention, which was complete and unhurried, which felt, when it landed on you, like being the only person in the room. He had studied Latin. He read Italian. He could navigate French. He was an expert in computers back when no one knew anything about them. He was a business executive. He painted in oils. He was a woodworker and a handyman. He had assembled skills the way some people assemble tools — not for display, but because you never know what you will need. His hands moved like a whisper. I wrote that about him once, after he was gone, and I have never found a better sentence for who he was. They met a few times, Harold and Juan. There were years of occasions, holidays, the ordinary furniture of two families joined by marriage. But I am thinking of a particular meeting, the quality of it. Two quiet men. One fair, one dark. One with his education and his career, one with his elementary school Spanish and his life savings in a wire transfer. They sat together in whatever room it was, and they did not perform for each other. There was no competition, no assessment, no display of credentials. There was the comfortable, slightly formal courtesy of two men who have both learned that silence is not a problem to be solved. The women talked. The room was full of noise and food and the ordinary chaos of family. Harold and Juan sat in the middle of it like two stones in a river, letting the water go around them. I imagine they found each other quite restful. Harold died on June 19, 2005. Father’s Day. My mother had been buried in May of that same year, on Mother’s Day. That was the year the calendar turned on us. I have no good explanation for it and have stopped looking for one. I was with my father at the end. We were in a hospital in Mississauga, and for the last two days he was beyond speech, and so I simply stayed. I sat beside him and did not try to fill the silence, which seemed, under the circumstances, the only appropriate thing I had ever learned to do. There was nothing to say. He knew I was there. I knew he was leaving. The room had its own quality of time — slower, thicker, a different substance than ordinary hours. When it was over, I walked out of the hospital into the June night. It was dark and chilly in the way that southern Ontario nights can be even in June, that particular freshness that comes off the lake. I picked up a hospital blanket somewhere along the way — I don’t remember the exact moment, only that I had it — and I wrapped it around my shoulders and sat on a bench outside and smoked a cigarette. Actually, several cigarettes. Then I got into my car and drove home. I still had the blanket. I was reading, in those hospital days, _The End of Nature_ by Bill McKibben. It was 2005, and McKibben had written it in 1989, one of the first serious attempts to bring the reality of climate change to ordinary readers — the end of a world, the loss of something that could not be recovered. I do not think I chose it deliberately. It was simply what I was reading while I sat beside my father and waited. The end of one nature. The end of another. The blanket is still in my house. It has been here for twenty-one years. It lines the place on the sofa where the dog settles in for the night. He doesn’t know what he’s sleeping on. I know, every night, when I pass by. Twelve years later, June 19 came for Juan. We had mailed the Father’s Day card a week before, while he was still living — or while we still believed he was going to live on, which amounts to the same thing when you are standing in a post office. The card was a gesture, ordinary and warm, the kind of thing you send because it is June, and he is your father-in-law, and you want him to know he is in your thoughts. It arrived the morning of the funeral. I held it for a moment. Our handwriting, cheerful and oblivious, addressed to a man who was already gone. The room was full of his family and their grief, and someone had handed me this card as though I would know what to do with it, and I did not know what to do with it, and I stood there holding it, and thinking about June 19. Thinking about a cold hospital night and a blanket and a bench. Thinking about two men who were 5ft 6in tall, who had full heads of white hair, who married women who talked, who carried their faith quietly, who expressed love through what they did with their hands — one man with a comb, one man with other practical things, one man two hours patient, one man trusting across a language barrier because he had watched enough, seen enough, understood in his bones what did not require translation. The same date. Twelve years and the width of a continent apart. The same door. I don’t know that anyone kept the Father’s Day card. What does one do with something like that? The blanket is still on the sofa. The dog is on it now, as I write this, settled in for the night, warm and entirely unaware. My father’s hands moved like a whisper. Juan’s coffee was strong enough to constitute a separate food group. The quiet men. Gone on the same day, twelve years apart, as if they had arranged it — as if two men who preferred silence had found, in the end, one last thing they had in common.

### Introduction For many years, as a part-time occupation, I have cared for others’ animals. Dogs mostly, but often cats. I love animals — pretty much all animals — and cats are no exception. I’ve owned several, though never more than two felines at a time. I don’t want to contribute to a worn stereotype, but I’ve had more than my fair share of encounters with women — and in at least one case, a man — whose relationship with cats had crossed some invisible line their neighbours could no longer tolerate. I will leave my own experiences for later, because what I found when I started pulling on this particular thread surprised me considerably. Behind the punchline, there is a long and largely unexamined history of women who kept cats, were prosecuted for it, mocked for it, pathologized for it, and occasionally quoted scripture at the magistrates who ordered them to stop. The science invoked to explain them turns out to prove rather less than advertised. And the cartoon character who gave the stereotype its most enduring popular form turns out, on closer examination, to carry a feminist critique inside her comic grotesquerie. The Simpsons, as usual, got there first — and so I will begin with them, introducing the cartoon character Eleanor Abernathy. ### Eleanor Abernathy, or The Education of a Crazy Cat Lady Eleanor first appeared on the Simpsons on 19 April 1998, in the ninth season of the show. She finally got her backstory nine seasons later — and I cannot help but notice the coincidence of cats supposedly having nine lives, Eleanor arriving in Season 9, and her history emerging nine seasons after that. But I digress. In that backstory, we learn that at the tender age of eight, Eleanor had ambitions to become both a doctor and a lawyer, explaining her reasoning with the simple declaration: > “ _Because a woman can do anything._ ” By 24, she had made good on that ambition, graduating from both Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School simultaneously. We see her next as a practising lawyer, nicely turned out in a blue skirt suit, apparently in command of her considerable life. Eight years later, at 32, she is explaining that she had a “ _little burnout_.” The scene is a handsome condo — waterfront view, elegant furniture, potted plants. She is crushing a cigarette in an overflowing ashtray, a rather large bottle of wine on the table, a glass in her hand, wearing a pantsuit, and an orange cat is cruising the sofa. “ _Don’t shoot me — I have a glass of wine with Buster here_ ,” she says, laughing in a slightly overwrought fashion. Buster, she notes, is “ _a real comfort._ ” She might even get a second cat. The next scene shows Eleanor considerably older, living in what appears to be a basement — concrete walls, a garbage can, broken furniture. She is shabbily dressed and throwing cats around the room, along with her Yale diploma, while making sounds that may once have been words. The trajectory from blue skirt suit to basement, from Harvard-Yale graduate to woman who turns her out diploma into a projectile, is compressed into a few minutes of animation. It is played for laughs. It is also, if you slow it down, a fairly precise portrait of institutional burnout, addiction, and the particular collapse that can follow when a woman attempts to inhabit a professional world that was not designed to sustain her. In another episode, Lisa — conducting what appears to be a newscast — questions why Eleanor is called the crazy cat lady. After all, she loves animals, doesn’t she? Eleanor promptly emerges from her ramshackle house with an armful of cats, which she begins throwing at Lisa while screaming gibberish. The show declines to answer Lisa’s question directly. This essay will attempt to do better. ### What’s in a Name? The expression “crazy cat lady” seems as though it needs no explanation. But let’s explore it anyway. According to Wordorigins.org (which usually delivers rigorous lexicographic work), the phrase “cat lady” — applied to a human woman rather than a female cat — was first documented in the Massachusetts Springfield Daily Republican on 24 June 1911. The article in question portrayed a woman who cared for sick and injured stray cats: a gentle, sympathetic portrait, almost reverential in tone. There is no mockery in it. The phrase was coined, in other words, not as an insult but as something closer to a neighbourhood honorific. So far, so careful. But Wordorigins.org stumbles on the pejorative form. The site states that “crazy cat lady” — always derogatory — appears to have been in use by the late 1960s, with the earliest documented example appearing in Women’s Wear Daily on 26 December 1969. What the site fails to account for is that by 1851, Henry Mayhew was already describing an unnamed Islington woman who kept 30 cats as a “mad woman” — and that the Victorian press had been producing courtroom comedy at the expense of women with too many cats for decades before anyone thought to coin a tidy phrase for them. The stereotype was fully operational long before it had a name. Lexicography tracks language; it does not always track the thing the language eventually arrives to describe. And then there is the small matter of Springfield, where the first documented “cat lady” appeared in the eponymous newspaper of the city in Massachusetts. The most culturally influential crazy cat lady in American popular consciousness lives in a fictional American city also called Springfield. Matt Groening chose the name precisely because Springfield is the most common city name in the United States, a town that could be anywhere and therefore everywhere. The coincidence almost certainly means nothing. And yet: the cat lady belongs to Springfield because Springfield belongs to everyone. She always has. ### Saint Gertrude of Nivelles and the Trouble with Cats But long before Springfield, there was Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, whom many consider the patron saint of cats. Except that she isn’t. The Vatican has never officially recognized her in that capacity — and the Roman Catholic Church has, it must be said, a somewhat complicated history with cats, a subject to which we will return shortly. Gertrude was born in Belgium in 626 CE, the daughter of the Frankish nobleman Pepin of Landen and his wife Itta of Metz — herself eventually canonized, and invoked against toothaches, which seems a rather specialized brief for a saint. Gertrude became a Benedictine abbess and founded an abbey dedicated to helping travellers, the sick, and widows. The widows are worth pausing on, as they will become a recurring figure in this essay. After Gertrude’s death, she was called upon to ward off rats and mice — and since cats do exactly that, her association with rodent control was gradually, and somewhat loosely, conflated into an association with cats themselves. However, the Vatican never formalized this. Still, Catholic cat lovers wanted their saint, and they chose Gertrude. The Church looked the other way. The family, it should be noted, was extravagantly holy. Gertrude’s mother Itta was Canonized. Her sister Begga was canonized and became — and here The Simpsons would surely approve — the patron saint of stuttering, which rhymes rather nicely with Eleanor Abernathy’s incomprehensible vocalizations. Gertrude’s brother Bavo was canonized and is the patron saint of falcons. Such a family. One can imagine their dinner table conversations. But Catholic cat lovers would have to content themselves with their unofficial saint, because darker times were coming for older women and their cats. ### Agnes Waterhouse and a Cat Called Satan Most readers will be familiar with the subject of older women and their “familiars” — most often cats. That territory has been mapped and remapped by better historians, and I have no intention of retracing it in full. But one story appeals to my sometimes dark sense of humour sufficiently to warrant a brief detour. Agnes Waterhouse, born around 1503, was tried as a witch in Chelmsford, Essex in 1566, nearly a thousand years after Gertrude was busy founding abbeys and helping widows. Agnes' familiar was a white cat named Sathan — the archaic spelling, though the wordplay is impossible to miss — which could allegedly transform itself into a toad or a dog, spoke in what witnesses described as a “hollow voice,” and instructed Agnes in the performance of malevolent acts. Agnes freely acknowledged that she prayed regularly — in Latin only, however, because the cat deplored English. A classically trained cat, one must concede. Agnes Waterhouse was the first woman hanged for witchcraft in England. The full story — the trial, the witnesses, the other women caught up in the proceedings, the pamphlet literature it generated — is genuinely fascinating and constitutes a significant chapter in the history of women, cats, and the uses to which community fear can be put. It is also far too long a digression for this essay. I commend it to the reader’s own curiosity and reluctantly move on. ### Cardinal Richelieu and His Cats — Or Perhaps Not Moving forward in time, but only slightly, we come to the august personage of Armand Jean du Plessis de Richelieu (1585–1642) — Cardinal, chief minister of France under Louis XIII, and villain of The Three Musketeers. One delightful story about him centres around a cattery he allegedly built to house his many Persian and Angora cats, one of which was said to be always seated on his lap while he worked. The cats’ names are so gloriously outré that I must list them: Racan, Gazette, Rubis sur l’Ongle — scratchy, naturally, and yes, Simpsons viewers, Itchy and Scratchy were not the first — Pyrame and Thysbe, lovers who slept with their paws entwined, Serpolet who loved to sun himself, Felimare the tiger-striped, Soumise the submissive and his favourite, Lucifer — jet black, inevitably — Ludovic le Cruel the rat-killer, Mimi-Paillon the straw Angora, Mounard le Fougueux who was ardent but capricious, Perruque who had the distinction of falling from the wig of the Academician Racan, and Gavroche. He also reportedly stipulated a legacy for his cats, providing for their care after his death. Except that none of it may be true. Historian Katharine MacDonogh, in her 1999 book Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court Since the Renaissance, identifies the story as a myth, invented by Paradis de Moncrif, a toady at the court of Louis XV. Other historians have since dismissed the tale as a smear campaign. Which raises an interesting question: why cats? Why, of all the insults available to those who wished to diminish the most powerful man in France, did someone reach for the crazy cat lady? Because that is precisely what the myth does — it takes the feared and formidable éminence grise and dresses him in the one costume guaranteed to make him ridiculous: the feminized, the domestic, the excessive fondness for cats that polite society had already learned to read as a symptom of something not quite right. The insult works because the stereotype was already in place. You didn’t need to be an older woman to be tarred with it. You simply needed enemies with imagination. ### Men Who Escaped the Label: Hemingway and Warhol While on the subject of men who, had they been women, might have been assigned the “crazy cat lady” moniker, let us briefly consider Ernest Hemingway and Andy Warhol. Hemingway’s cats are almost as famous as his prose. The connection began with a gift: a white polydactyl cat — six-toed, which sailors considered lucky — presented to Hemingway by a ship’s captain who had noticed his interest in the animal. The descendants of that original cat still occupy the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Key West, Florida, where 40-60 cats reside at any given time, roughly half of them displaying the extra toe that has become the property’s unofficial trademark. Hemingway named all his cats after famous people, a tradition the museum maintains to this day. The Key West city commission eventually found it necessary to declare the cats “animals of historic, social and tourism significance” and “an integral part of the history and ambiance of the Hemingway House” — which is one way of handling a polydactyl cat colony, and probably cheaper than litigation. No one has ever called Hemingway a crazy cat lady. He was, after all, a big game hunter, a deep sea fisherman, and a war correspondent. The cats were considered charming. Andy Warhol’s cat story is rather more intimate, and considerably more domestic. When his mother Julia Warhola moved into his small Upper East Side apartment in the early 1950s to help her struggling son, they were soon joined by a Siamese cat named Hester, a gift from actress Gloria Swanson. Concerned that Hester might appreciate companionship, Andy and Julia acquired a male cat named Sam. Sam and Hester then proceeded to produce litters with considerable enthusiasm, and — in a gesture that prefigures Warhol’s entire aesthetic philosophy — all subsequent cats were named Sam. Every one of them. The household eventually contained multiple Sams and one Hester, the population tracked by magazine profiles that noted eight cats in 1953 and ten by 1954. The situation became sufficiently unmanageable that Warhol was eventually obliged to give cats away. In 1954, mother and son self-published a limited edition book about their feline household: 25 Cats Name Sam and One Blue Pussy [sic] — the missing “d” in “Named” a mistake by Julia that Andy found too charming to correct. The seriality of the Sams — one name, many subjects, endlessly repeated — is now sometimes read as a dry run for the Marilyns and the soup cans that would follow. Warhol turned his cats into Pop Art before he knew he was doing it. Two men, abundant cats, zero stigma. The cats were eccentric in one case and artistic in the other. Had either of them been a woman of a certain age living alone, the framing would surely have been much different. ### Henry Mayhew and the Women of 1851 Returning to the specific “crazy cat ladies,” one of the earliest citations frequently mentioned is that of the unnamed woman of Islington, documented in 1851. The source is Henry Mayhew’s monumental London Labour and the London Poor — a landmark of Victorian social journalism, compiled from Mayhew’s interviews with street traders, vagrants, and workers at the margins of London life. The passage appears in Volume One, page 183, in a section devoted to the cat’s-meat trade — the commercial business of selling boiled horse meat to London’s pet owners from barrows and baskets, a trade Mayhew estimated served some 300,000 pet cats in the city. The Islington woman appears not as a subject in her own right but as a data point, a footnote to an economic survey, evidence of extreme demand at the outer edge of a commercial market. Mayhew writes: > _“There was also a mad woman in Islington, who used to have 14 lbs of meat a day. The party who supplied her had his money often at 2£ and 3£ at a time. She had as many as thirty cats at times in her house. Every stray one that came she would take in and support. The stench was so great that she was obliged to be ejected.”_ And that is all. Four sentences. She is unnamed. She is called mad. She keeps 30 cats. She runs up credit with her meat supplier — two and three pounds at a time, a significant sum — suggesting that her relationship with the cat’s-meat man was ongoing, commercial, and apparently well-established before anyone thought to document it. She takes in every stray that presents itself, without discrimination. And then she is ejected, the stench having finally settled the matter that her neighbours’ complaints apparently had not. What is remarkable about this passage is not what it contains but what it omits. We do not know her name, her age, her circumstances, her history, or her reasons. We do not know whether she had family, income, or anyone who spoke for her when the ejection came. We know only what she cost the cat’s-meat man and what she cost her neighbours’ noses. She exists in the historical record as an extreme case in a commercial report, sandwiched between statistics about weekly trade volumes and the observation that Mondays, Tuesdays, and Saturdays are the best days for cat’s-meat business. But the same page of Mayhew contains a second woman, also unnamed, whose cat-feeding practice took a rather different form: > _“And there was one woman — a black — who used to have as much as 16 pennyworth every day. This person used to get out on the roof of the house and throw it to the cats on the tiles. By this she brought so many stray cats round about the neighbourhood, that the parties in the vicinity complained; it was quite a nuisance. She would have the meat always brought to her before ten in the morning, or else she would send to a shop for it, and between ten and eleven in the morning the noise and cries of the hundreds of stray cats attracted to the spot was ‘terrible to hear.’ When the meat was thrown to the cats on the roof, the riot, and confusion, and fighting, was beyond description. ‘A beer-shop man,’ I was told, ‘was obliged to keep five or six dogs to drive the cats from his walls.’”_ Where the Islington woman accumulated cats within her home until the interior became uninhabitable, this woman fed the neighbourhood’s entire feral population from her rooftop on a fixed daily schedule. The meat had to arrive before ten o’clock; if it did not, she sent for it herself. This is not disorder — it is an eccentric but internally consistent domestic routine, organized entirely around the cats’ needs as she understood them. Between ten and eleven every morning, hundreds of cats converged on one rooftop in London. A beer-shop man kept a pack of dogs specifically to manage the consequences. She is identified in Mayhew’s text only by her race — the sole figure in this section of his reportage so described — and by her practice. She has no name, no history, no voice. Two women, one page, one year. Both unnamed. Both defined entirely by their relationship to cats and to meat. Neither asked why. ### Rosalia Goodman aka Catty Goodman And then there is Rosalia Goodman. Or Rose. Or Rosalie. Or Gutman. The uncertainty of her name is itself a small biographical fact, and we will return to it. She arrived in New York on 13 July 1852, aboard a Hamburg emigrant vessel called the P J Behnck, listed on the passenger manifest as Rosalie Gutman, aged 17, place of origin: Posen. Posen — now Poznań in present-day Poland — was a Prussian province with a substantial Ashkenazi Jewish community, and 1852 was precisely the period when that community was emigrating in significant numbers, displaced by the political upheavals of 1848 and their aftermath. Rosalie was part of one of the defining immigrant movements of the mid-19th century. She was also, if the ship manifest is to be believed, travelling alone at 17, in July, into the heat and noise and overwhelming density of New York harbour. The name Gutman is significant. When she appears in later records, it is usually given as Rosalia Goodman. Henry Goodman, the man she married, was almost certainly Henry Gutman, the same name, the same community, the same probable origin. Whether they married in Posen before departure, or reunited in New York shortly after, is not recorded. What the 1870 federal census records is a household at Ward 7, Lower East Side: Henry Goodman, age 43, cigar maker, born Deutschland; Rosalia Goodman, age 30; and their four children — Elizabeth, 13, Regina, 11, Hilde, 9, and Oscar, 4. All four children were American-born New Yorkers. Rosalia was the immigrant; they were not. Henry had served in the Union Army — Private, Company K, 56th New York Infantry — a fact documented in Simon Wolf’s 1895 compilation The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen, a book compiled specifically to counter the antisemitic claim that Jewish men did not fight for their adopted country. He naturalized as an American citizen on 21 November 1867, at the Court of Common Pleas, New York County, giving his address as 57 Clinton Street and his former nationality as Prussian. A neighbour named Philipp Milling of Grand Street stood as his witness. The naturalization record is the last document Henry left. He died in 1871, leaving Rosalia a widow at approximately 35, with four children between the ages of five and 14, and whatever remained of the $500 in personal property the 1870 census had recorded against his name. What she did next is the remarkable part. She purchased a 17th century Dutch-era building at 170 Division Street — a three-storey wooden structure, gambrel-roofed, its clapboards mossed and blackened, hanging in tatters from decaying beams — and turned it into a tenement. She rented the basement to a cigar dealer, the first floor to an Irish family, a room on the second floor to a German man, and reserved two small rooms for herself, her children, and, gradually, her cats. It began with a single kitten named Tiger. She had always been afraid of cats, she later told a reporter, but Tiger was “ _such a little wee thing_ ” that she overcame her fear and took him in. Tiger died, locked in a cellar by a hostile neighbour and left to starve, his bones the only thing she found when she finally located him. She buried him, and then, she said, she made up her mind to take care of every cat she could when people turned them out into the cold. By February 1875, when the New York Sun sent a reporter to Division Street, she was feeding 80 cats daily at a cost of a $1.50 — spent at the Bowery markets on what the reporter noted were “the best cakes, sausages, and beefsteaks.” The house was a sensory event. Cats yellow and black, golden and dingy, tawny, white, and dubious; cats ring-tailed, dove-tailed, and no-tailed; cats with eyes, without eyes, earless. Along the halls were scattered tin pans of sawdust interspersed with dishes of food; at every landing, low-lipped buckets of water for Tom and Tabby. From sunrise to sunrise, the reporter noted, “an aromatic and voluminous cloud of feline exhalation” was wafted down the stairs into the street. The neighbourhood complained. The Board of Health inspected and found she had violated no law. Rosalia, “ _beaming with triumph, gathered her pets still closer around her_.” Her neighbours resorted to flinging gravel and old crockery at the cats from the rooftops. The children in the vicinity called her Catty Goodman. The press called her an eccentric, a curiosity, a German philanthropist of the feline world. She spoke to the Sun’s reporter in what he described as broken English — the accent and imperfect syntax of a woman who had arrived in New York speaking German and Yiddish, and had been conducting her life in a second language ever since. What she said, however, was entirely clear: > “I don’t love the cats yet, but I pity them, and I think when I’m dead they’ll have no-one to take care of them.” And: > “It’s only people without sense or heart that would turn a helpless animal out in the cold. There ought to be some asylum for such abandoned animals in this country, as there is in England, but there is none, and somebody must look out for them.” This is not the voice of madness or delusion. It is the voice of a pragmatist who has identified a gap in the civic infrastructure and filled it herself, at her own expense, in her own building, with her own beefsteak. By 1877, the New York Tribune had also visited, finding her with 50 cats — the numbers fluctuated — noting that she “lives alone.” The back room, the Tribune’s reporter observed, was used “as a playhouse for the feline patients” — a phrase with an accidental poetry that no editor appears to have noticed or removed. In July 1878, a reporter from the Daily Graphic arrived, but was sent away. > “Now, you get out! I don’t told you but once. I have no more newspaper mens make some moneys out of me. My lawyer say to me no reporter have any right to come in my house, and if so I shall shoot him or push him down stairs or take my broomstick.” She had retained a lawyer. She understood that she was being used as entertainment. She objected, in her own vernacular, with considerable force. By 1880 she had left Division Street, moving with her four children and her mother Dore, then aged 76, to 44th Street. James Dabney McCabe’s New York by Sunlight and Gaslight (1882) described the Division Street operation as a still-going concern, calling her “a philanthropic German lady” who “makes a comfortable living” — he was likely working from earlier sources, or she had continued the work at a new address, or both. The 1910 federal census finds her at 90th Street, on the Upper East Side, aged 74, head of household, renting, literate, native tongue recorded as English. All four children still living. She had moved steadily northward as the city transformed around her — from the Lower East Side, to Midtown, then to the Upper East Side — a quiet upward drift through five decades of New York life. She died on 13 September 1917, in Manhattan. She was 84 years old. Certificate number 27243. Her name, as noted, varies across the documents. The ship manifest says Rosalie Gutman. The 1870 and 1880 censuses say Rosalia. The Sun and the Tribune say Rosalia. The 1910 census says Rosalie. The death index says Rosalie. Secondary sources have mostly settled on Rosalie, though she signed nothing we have found and stated her own name to no recorder whose transcription survives. She arrived in this country with one name and accumulated others, as immigrants do, as women do, as people do who spend 65 years in a city that keeps changing around them. Rose, Rosalie, Rosalia — all the same woman, with the same multitude of cats, and the same beefsteak from the Bowery, and the same broomstick ready at the door. The reporters who visited Division Street thought they were writing about an eccentric. They were writing about a woman who had another 40 years to live, who would keep all four of her children alive, who would move uptown three times, who would grow old and independent and English-speaking in a city that had long since forgotten Catty Goodman and her cat hospital on Division Street. She was not a crazy cat lady. She was a widow, a landlady, a mother, a daughter, an immigrant, a veteran’s wife, and an animal welfare advocate in a city with no formal provision for homeless cats. The cats were one decade of a very long life. The newspapers caught that decade and made it her whole story. They were wrong. ### Courts, Courtrooms, and Cats: The Victorian Record Rosalia Goodman was not alone. Across the Atlantic, and across the decades that followed, women were appearing in courtrooms, in newspaper columns, and in the social record with remarkable regularity, charged with variations of the same offence: too many cats, too much attachment, too little regard for what the neighbours thought. In July 1863, the Liverpool Mercury reported — reprinting from the Perthshire Journal — on the case of Miss Isabella Kidd, a maiden lady of at least 60 years, charged at the Perth Police Court with causing a nuisance by keeping cats in her house in Mill-street. The witnesses could not agree on the number: one had counted eight, another seven, a third no fewer than eleven on the floor at one time. The magistrate declined to impose a fine but ordered that all cats save one kitten be removed within 48 hours, or the police would carry out the order themselves. Isabella Kidd was not finished. At the close of the evidence she addressed the court: > “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord, and I will repay.” She then gave the pedigree of several of her cats, to the considerable laughter of a crowded courtroom. When the police had arrived to summon her to appear, they had found her bed occupied by five cats, with numerous others running about the house. She is the only figure in this essay who spoke back in her own voice, on the record, in a public forum, and left a quotation worth remembering. The court laughed. The Romans quotation stands. Her defence, it should be noted, was entirely practical: the cats killed mice, she told the court, and therefore were not a nuisance but a service. The magistrate did not engage with the argument. He simply ruled. But the argument was made, and it was not a mad one. By 1885, the nuisance had spread to Kensington. The New Zealand Herald — demonstrating that an aristocratic English cat case could travel to the other side of the world — reported on proceedings at the Kensington Petty Sessions against the Countess de la Torre, summoned for disobeying a magistrate’s order to discontinue keeping cats and dogs at her premises in Pembroke Square. The Countess did not attend. The case was heard in her absence. Mr. Whiteman, Inspector of Nuisances, gave evidence. He had visited the house and found: four dogs and two cats in the front kitchen; two dogs and three puppies in the back kitchen; two cats on the first floor back; five cats and two kittens on the first floor front — laughter from the court; and seven cats in the garden, three of which were seated on the cistern — renewed laughter. The smell, Mr. Whiteman confirmed, was very offensive and injurious to health. The vestry, it emerged, had refrained from taking proceedings for some time, “thinking that the Countess would come to her senses.” She had not. A fine of ten shillings a day for 20 days — ten pounds in all, with costs — was imposed in her absence. The Countess de la Torre is the only figure in this sequence who did not appear to be laughed at. Whether this was dignity, contempt, or simple indifference to a court she considered beneath her is not recorded. The three cats on the cistern offer no clues. The following year, 1886, Berrow’s Worcester Journal reported on Ann Lloyd, spinster, of Llandudno Villa, Sparkhill — a named house in a respectable Birmingham suburb, which is itself a social marker worth noting — charged at Solihull Police Court with keeping cats to cause a nuisance injurious to health. The Inspector of Nuisances described the smell as “most terrible,” so offensive that he had been obliged to retreat to the backyard for air. Ann Lloyd admitted to six cats, but not, she specified, in the house. The Bench made an order for abatement of the nuisance and said nothing further. Six cats. A named villa. Two sisters present in the house but not in the dock. An Inspector driven into the yard by a noxious smell that six cats, no matter how poorly managed, should produce. The arithmetic does not quite add up, and the Bench apparently did not press it. In 1889, the Daily News of London reported on an unnamed elderly maiden lady of Marsham-street, Westminster — central London, respectable address, reduced circumstances — who had already been ordered by magistrate Mr. D’Eyncourt, approximately a fortnight prior, to cease keeping many cats. She had not ceased. The Inspector visited on a Wednesday morning and reported that the lady had told him she could not part with her dear cats, and that she had a right to keep them. He had noticed seven on a table. The court laughed. Mr. d’Eyncourt granted a summons for cumulative penalties. The unnamed Westminster woman made two arguments, compressed into a single reported sentence: one emotional, one legal. She could not part with her dear cats — the word “dear” doing considerable work, these are not animals but beloveds. And she had a right to keep them — a civic claim, a principled position, stated to an Inspector of Nuisances on a Wednesday morning in a single room in Westminster with seven cats on the table. She was not wrong in principle. She was simply outgunned. Across the Atlantic, in 1897, the Sioux Valley News of South Dakota carried a two-sentence item from Montreal: > “One hundred cats are kept as pets by Mrs. Morley of Montreal. Eighteen boys were recently arrested for stoning them.” Two sentences, and they contain a complete reversal of everything that had come before. In every preceding case, the woman with cats was the defendant. Here, she was the complainant. The boys were arrested. Mrs. Morley of Montreal had called the law, and the law had come. But Mrs. Morley deserves considerably more than two sentences, and she shall have them. ### Mrs. Stephen Morley, Resplendent Mrs. Stephen Morley of 200 St. Hubert Street, Montreal, arrived at the Recorder’s Court on 14 July 1887, somewhat late. As she swept past the reporters’ table, the Gazette noted, she was “ _resplendent in a beautiful lavender silk dress and bonnet, a black lace shawl and yellow gloves._ ” She was also, the reporter could not resist adding, accompanied by “ _a peculiar feline odour perceptible in the court room_.” She had brought the cats with her, in spirit, within her silk and her gloves. The Clerk of the Crown sat pale with suppressed anxiety. The notary, a longer sufferer, wore what the journalist described as “ _an anticipating look on his face._ ” The charge was that Mrs. Morley, by keeping cats at her premises, had caused a public nuisance. The evidence was considerable, and it had been accumulating for some time. Sergeant Moran testified that he had visited 200 St. Hubert Street on the fourth of the month, accompanied by another officer, and had been shown through the rooms. There were approximately 70 cats of all sizes and kinds running about. The stench was horrible. All the windows were fitted with double panes, all of them shut — which Mrs. Morley herself explained was to keep the smell in. The other officer had raked filth from the carpet with his stick. The stench, Sergeant Moran confirmed, could be discerned from the sidewalk. Constable Millette corroborated the Sergeant’s account. He had counted up to 30 cats and lost count. The carpets were very dirty. The smell was abominable. He had been, he admitted, somewhat frightened by the cats as they ran between his legs in all directions — at which point the court laughed, and Mrs. Morley intervened. “You need not be afraid of them,” she told the Constable, “though they know you are their natural enemies.” Under cross-examination, Constable Millette was asked whether the smell might be characterized as something other than what it was. He confirmed, to renewed laughter, that he could swear it was not the smell of attar of roses. Dr. Laberge, the city’s medical health officer, testified that he had visited the following day and found the parlour catless but the smell of cats pervasive throughout. The upper floors were locked against him. He had been there before, he noted, but had never been admitted. He had in fact been attempting to take action for some time, but Mrs. Morley had promised him she would leave the city. He considered any place requiring double windows to contain its smell to be injurious to health. The neighbours were equally forthcoming. Mr. L.W. Sicotte, Clerk of the Crown, who resided next door at number 202, testified that he had suffered from the stench since the middle of May and that it was unbearable. It was at his instance that proceedings had been taken. He had held back, he explained, because “Madame Morley had promised to vacate the premises.” There were at present, he added, more cats than ever, “rapidly increasing.” The court laughed again. Mr. Louis Bedard, notary, of number 198 on the other side, gave evidence that the nuisance had existed for six years. Six years. The stench pervaded his house and was intolerable, and it was worse at present than it had ever been, “as the cats seemed to breed rapidly.” Throughout the hearing, the Gazette noted, “the defendant frequently got excited and interrupted the witnesses, but was at once stopped by her counsel.” Several things emerge from the court record that the laughter tends to obscure. The cats, when Constable Sivigny visited in May, were “of all sizes, were plump and well-fed.” Whatever else was happening at 200 St. Hubert Street, the cats were not suffering. Mrs. Morley was feeding them. The double windows, far from being evidence of obliviousness, where evidence of a woman who knew perfectly well what her household smelled like and had devised a management strategy — however inadequate — to contain it. She had been promising to leave the city, to vacate the premises, to resolve the situation, for years, to multiple officials, with apparent sincerity, but no discernible intention of following through. This is not confusion. It is a sustained negotiation, conducted in lavender silk, with parties she considered it worth negotiating with. The case was adjourned at six o’clock and continued the following afternoon. A decade later — or perhaps the same woman in a subsequent proceeding, the records do not entirely clarify — the Sioux Valley News of South Dakota carried its two-sentence dispatch: 100 cats, 18 boys arrested for stoning them. The numbers had grown. The resolve had not diminished. Mrs. Morley, or someone very like her, was still at it. She is the most fully realized figure in this essay’s Victorian gallery, and the most resistant to the stereotype she appears to embody. She is married — or was. She has a lawyer. She has a strategy. She dresses magnificently for court. She informs a frightened constable that her cats recognize him as their natural enemy. She keeps double windows closed as a courtesy to the neighbourhood she is simultaneously suffocating. She has been doing this for six years at a respectable Montreal address, and she will not stop. The lavender silk and the feline odour arriving together into the Recorder’s Court is the essay’s perfect image of the woman who refuses to be one thing or the other — respectable or disreputable, sane or mad, neighbour or nuisance. She is all of them at once, in yellow gloves, and she is not remotely sorry. ### Cat Houses, and What the Research Says At the start of this essay I promised I would return to my own experiences in dealing with what pet sitters sometimes term — with no disrespect intended — “cat houses.” I have been to homes where there have been up to perhaps 20 cats ensconced in cat-appropriate luxury. In almost every case the cats were well-cared for, their needs for the most part met. Their owners — usually women, but sometimes men — truly loved their feline companions. Some had forfeited significant portions of their homes to accommodate their furry friends. One woman in particular had given up her entire upstairs floor and her entire basement to house — I was never quite certain of the exact number — her cats, relegating herself to sleeping in her living room and using the main floor powder room as her bathroom. The cats had two three-piece baths. I am not saying this is normal. Nor am I saying it is pleasingly fragrant. Too many cats crowded into an indoor space will be — well — smelly. Keeping up with litter, food and water bowls, shedding fur and hairballs behind the sofa is not a quick undertaking. It is, beyond a certain number, an impossible one. I personally do not understand what drives cat lovers to such extremes. But then again, perhaps there are underlying causes. The academic literature suggests there may be several. The foundational researcher in this field is Gary Patronek, VMD, PhD, of Tufts University, who published the first formal diagnostic criteria for animal hoarding, in 1999, in Public Health Reports, defining it as the accumulation of large numbers of animals combined with a failure to provide minimum nutrition, sanitation, and veterinary care, and — crucially — a failure to recognize the deteriorating condition of the animals or the negative effect on one’s own health and well-being. Patronek subsequently established the interdisciplinary Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium, known as HARC, at Tufts, whose work was instrumental in the inclusion of animal hoarding under the criteria for hoarding disorder in the DSM-5. Animal hoarding is now formally recognized as a special manifestation of hoarding disorder, though some researchers argue it should be classified as a distinct condition entirely. The gender data is striking, and worth examining carefully. HARC’s study of 71 cases found that 83 percent of animal hoarders were women, with an average age in the mid-50s. Patronek’s own earlier study of 54 cases found 76 percent female, with nearly half aged 60 or older. From half to nearly three-quarters of individuals across these studies were single, widowed, or divorced. The stereotype, in other words, has a statistical basis. But the statistics require scrutiny. The samples in virtually all animal hoarding studies are drawn from cases reported to animal control agencies and humane societies — meaning they capture only hoarders who came to official attention. A woman living alone with many cats in a residential neighbourhood is considerably more likely to generate neighbour complaints and trigger official investigation than a man with equivalent numbers of animals on a rural property. The gender skew in the data may partly reflect a reporting bias as much as a genuine prevalence difference. Although, it is worth noting that this point is not prominently made in the literature itself. Three competing psychiatric frameworks have been proposed to explain the condition. The first is the obsessive-compulsive model — the compulsive acquisition of animals mirrors object hoarding, driven by the same inability to discard and the same anxiety about loss. The second is the delusional disorder model — the hoarder genuinely cannot perceive the condition of the animals, a break from shared reality rather than a failure of will. The third, and for our purposes the most interesting, is the attachment disorder model: the animals substitute for human relationships that failed to develop or were lost, rooted in early childhood insecurity, and what researchers have described as difficulty developing secure attachments combined with decision-making and organizational deficits. The attachment model is intriguing because it connects to the portraits this essay has been assembling. Rosalia Goodman arrived in a new country at 17, lost her husband at approximately 35, and found in cats something she described not as love but as obligation — “I don’t love the cats yet, but I pity them.” The unnamed Westminster woman told the Inspector she could not part with her “dear” cats. Mrs. Morley kept 70 cats, installed double windows, retained a lawyer, and would not, under any circumstances, desist. Whether any of these women would meet the clinical criteria for animal hoarding disorder is, frankly, doubtful — the HARC definition requires failure of care, and in most of these cases the cats were plump, well-fed, and by the standards of their era reasonably maintained. What the attachment model offers is not a diagnosis but a direction: toward the question of what the cats were providing that nothing else did, or could. One further finding from the literature deserves mention. Researchers consistently note that animal hoarders tend to be of above-average intelligence, and that a disproportionate number come from what one ASPCA expert described as “helping professions” — teachers, nurses, doctors, even veterinarians. People who have organized their lives around the care of others, and who have extended that orientation — past the point of sustainability, past the point of health, past the point that their neighbours can tolerate — to animals. This is not so very far from Rosalia Goodman buying beefsteak at the Bowery. It is not so very far from Isabella Kidd pointing out that her cats killed mice and therefore served the community. It is not, if we are being honest, entirely foreign to the experience of anyone who has ever taken in one more animal than was strictly sensible. The clinical term for it is hoarding disorder. The Victorian press called it eccentricity. The neighbours called it a nuisance. The women themselves, when they spoke at all, called it necessity. And then there is toxoplasmosis. ### The Parasite in the Room _Toxoplasma gondii_ is a single-celled protozoan parasite with a life cycle that reads, on close examination, like something from a horror film written by a very precise evolutionary biologist. The parasite can sexually reproduce only in the feline gut. That is its one and only reproductive site in the known world. Everything else it does — every intermediate host it colonies, every behaviour it modifies, every mammal it quietly inhabits — is in service of a single goal: getting itself back into a cat’s intestinal tract. The mechanism by which it achieves this is where the story becomes genuinely strange. Rodents infected with T. Gondii exhibit measurable behavioural changes, including a documented reduction in — and in some cases a positive attraction toward — the smell of cat urine. The parasite rewires the mouse’s fear response so that the scent of its primary predator becomes, if not appealing, then at least no longer repellent. The mouse wanders toward the cat. The cat eats the mouse. The parasite completes its reproductive cycle. Fascinatingly, research has shown that even after the infection clears from the rodent’s brain, the behavioural change persists — suggesting the parasite flips a switch rather than continuously maintaining control. The scale of human infection is the detail that tends to drop out of popular coverage entirely. It is estimated that 30-65 percent of the global human population carries T. Gondii — with France, for example, recording seroprevalence of approximately 88 percent, possibly due to a cultural preference for raw and lightly cooked meat rather than cat contact. Britain sits at around 22 percent. The United States carries roughly 40 million infected individuals. The parasite is, by any measure, one of the most successful organisms on the planet, quietly resident in the brains of somewhere between two and three billion people. For most healthy adults, toxoplasmosis is asymptomatic. But the research into its effects on human behaviour — most prominently conducted by Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague — is considerably more interesting than the popular coverage of “crazy cat lady syndrome” suggests, and points in rather different directions than that coverage implies. Flegr’s personality research, conducted over more than a decade and involving nearly 2,500 individuals, found that infected men tend toward introversion, suspicion, and rebelliousness, while infected women tend toward extraversion, trust, and compliance. Two entirely different behavioural profiles, for what is ostensibly the same infection. What is notable for our purposes is that when popular science journalism latched onto the toxoplasmosis story, it was almost exclusively the female profile — and its alleged connection to cat-keeping — that generated the “crazy cat lady syndrome” framing. Infected men exhibiting increased risk-taking and rebellious behaviour did not become the story. Infected women did. Car crash studies are among the more robust findings in the field. At least two studies found that individuals who tested positive for T. Gondii antibodies were statistically more likely to have been involved in traffic accidents, the proposed mechanism being the same disinhibition of appropriate fear responses observed in infected rodents — slower reaction times, reduced risk aversion, a subtly blunted relationship with danger. The entrepreneurship research is the newest and perhaps most surprising: a 2018 study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found that among attendees at entrepreneurship events, those who tested positive for toxoplasmosis were one point eight times more likely to have started their own business. The same reduction in fear of failure that sends infected mice toward cats may, the researchers suggest, send infected humans toward the risks of self-employment. Now you know why your entrepreneurial boss is, well… peculiar. And don’t tell your car insurance carrier about your toxoplasmosis. The honest scientific caveat, which this essay would be remiss to omit, is that Flegr’s work and the research it has inspired remains correlational and contested. Establishing causation — proving the parasite causes the behaviour rather than that people with certain pre-existing traits are more likely to be exposed — is genuinely difficult, and several attempts to replicate key findings have produced mixed results. A 2017 study from University College London, using data from 5,000 children, found no link between cat ownership in early childhood and the development of psychotic symptoms in later life. The “crazy cat lady syndrome” of popular science journalism turns out, on examination, to prove almost exactly the opposite of what it claims — or rather, it proves rather less, and implicates more people than its framing suggests. Consider the actual logic of the parasite applied to the stereotype. Toxoplasma gondii compels its host to be drawn toward cats — likely to be consumed by them. If the stereotype were literally true, if cat ladies were toxoplasma-addled creatures compelled toward cats by a mind-controlling parasite, they would be the parasite’s ideal victims, not its agents. The crazy cat lady, by this reading, is not dangerous. She is prey. There is one final toxoplasmosis detail worth noting. Jaroslav Flegr — the scientist who has spent his career arguing that a cat parasite may be subtly rewiring human behaviour across the global population — tested positive for T. Gondii himself early in his career, a fact he has discussed publicly. He has submitted it may be part of what made him willing to pursue such an unfashionable line of research for so many decades. The parasite, by his own account, may have produced the scientist who discovered what the parasite does. That is, as these things go, a fairly elegant outcome. ### JD Vance and the Weapon That Never Gets Put Down I confess that I do not fully know all the implications of the crazy cat lady — the lexicographical, the scientific, the sociological, the historical, the ageist. This essay has traced only some of them, and has likely raised more questions than it has answered. But what I do know is that the phrase seems — recently — to have become yet another pre-sharpened weapon, ready to hand for a particular kind of powerful man who finds women without children, without husbands, and without apparent need of either, profoundly unsettling. In 2021, none other than JD Vance — now Vice-President of the United States, and formerly, by his own account in his autobiographical _Hillbilly Elegy_ , a deeply wounded product of a family laced with generational trauma — offered the following assessment of American political life: > “We are effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.” He later acknowledged the phrasing was “dumb.” But he stood by the underlying point. What is worth noting — beyond the obvious — is the specific addition of “childless” to the indictment. It is not enough, in Vance’s formulation, to be a cat lady. One must also be without children, which is to say without the one social credential that might redeem the rest. The cats, in this reading, are not merely a symptom of personal failure. They are a substitution for the children that should, in a properly ordered world, have been there instead. The woman who chooses cats over children — or who simply finds herself, by circumstance or by choice or by the particular shape her life has taken, in a home with cats and without children — is not merely eccentric. She is a civic problem. Her misery, Vance implies, is both self-inflicted and contagious. It is a very old argument, dressed in a Fox News chyron. Agnes Waterhouse’s neighbours said much the same thing in 1566, though they used the word witch rather than miserable, and the sentence was considerably harsher than losing a cable news debate. One is also tempted — and I will give in briefly — to note that Vance made this comment in 2021, and the research on Toxoplasma gondii and risk-taking behaviour has been available in peer-reviewed literature since at least the early 2000s, and that the car crash studies are particularly well-documented. When a man attracted to danger, contemptuous of consequences, is willing to say something epidemiologically interesting on national television about a parasite carried by roughly 40 million Americans — one wonders. One does not conclude. One merely wonders, and points, for reference, to the relevant literature. Because as this essay has tried to show, not every crazy cat person is weak, or defenceless, or miserable, or wrong. Isabella Kidd quoted Romans at the magistrate and walked out of a Perth courtroom with her dignity intact. Rosalia Goodman told a reporter she would push him down the stairs or take her broomstick to him, having first consulted her lawyer. Mrs. Stephen Morley swept into the Montreal Recorder’s Court in lavender silk and yellow gloves, informed a constable that her cats recognized him as their natural enemy, and declined, across six years and multiple official proceedings, to stop. Eleanor Abernathy, for her part, held degrees from Harvard Medical School and Yale Law School simultaneously. She threw cats. But she knew exactly what she was throwing them at. JD Vance would do well to remember that the crazy cat lady has been dealing with men like him — men who believe her choices constitute a public nuisance, men who would prefer she simply went away — for the better part of a thousand years. She is still here. The cats are doing fine. ## Appendix: Sources and Cited Works ### Primary Sources Hamburg Emigration Records / New York Passenger Lists. Rosalie Gutman, age 17, from Posen, departed Hamburg, arrived New York 13 July 1852, Ship P J Behnck. Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. Via Ancestry.com. Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Vol. 1. London: Griffin, Bohn and Company, 1861. Section: “Of the Cats-Meat-Men,” p. 183. Available via Project Gutenberg: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/55998 New York Sun. “A Home for Indigent Cats. Eighty Mousers Quartered in an East Side Tenement.” February 12, 1875. Reprinted in numerous US papers, February 17, 1875. New York Tribune. “Neglected Cats: The Charitable Work of a Poor Woman.” July 12, 1877. Reprinted in The Cleveland Leader (Cleveland, Ohio), July 16, 1877, p. 7. Via Newspapers.com. Daily Graphic (New York). Report on Rosalia Goodman. July 1878. Phillips, John. The Examination and Confession of Certaine Wytches at Chensforde in the Countie of Essex before the Quenes Maiesties Judges the XXVI daye of July anno 1566. London, 1566. Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News (London). “Mrs. Goodman’s Hospital for Cats, New York.” July 31, 1875. Liverpool Mercury. “Prosecution of an ‘Old Maid’ for Keeping Cats.” July 14, 1863, p. 3. Reprinted from the Perthshire Journal. Via Newspapers.com. New Zealand Herald. “The Countess de la Torre and Her Cats.” September 5, 1885, p. 10. Via Papers Past. Berrow’s Worcester Journal. “A Colony of Cats.” October 2, 1886, p. 9. Via the British Newspaper Archive. Daily News (London). “The Police Courts: Westminster — The Old Lady’s Cats.” June 28, 1889, p. 7. Via the British Newspaper Archive. Sioux Valley News (South Dakota). “One Hundred Cats.” September 24, 1897, p. 2. Via Newspapers.com. The Gazette (Montreal). “Mrs. Morley, the Proprietor of Several Score of Cats, Before the Recorder.” July 14, 1887, p. 3. Via Newspapers.com. ### Census and Civil Records United States Federal Census, 1870. Henry Goodman and Rosalia Goodman, New York Ward 7 District 6, New York. Dwelling 324. Via Ancestry.com. United States Federal Census, 1880. Rose Goodman [Rose Waare], age 40, New York City, New York. Roll 892, Page 489a, Enumeration District 537. Via Ancestry.com. United States Federal Census, 1910. Rosalie Goodman, age 74, Manhattan Ward 12, New York. Roll T624_1020, Page 8a, Enumeration District 0481, FHL microfilm 1375033. Via Ancestry.com. New York, New York, Death Index, 1862–1948. Rosalie Goodman, age 84, death date September 13, 1917, Manhattan, New York. Certificate Number 27243. Via Ancestry.com. U.S., Naturalization Record Indexes, 1791–1992. Henry Goodman, naturalised November 21, 1867, Common Pleas Court, New York County. Volume 347, Record 222. Address: 57 Clinton Street, New York City. Witness: Philipp Milling. National Archives and Records Administration. Via Ancestry.ca. ### Secondary Sources: Books Craton, Oswin. A Cloistered Light: Saint Gertrude of Nivelles, Patron Saint of Pilgrims & Cats. :Self Published, 2005. translation of Gertrude, Dame de Nivelles from 1955, French MacDonogh, Katharine. Reigning Cats and Dogs: A History of Pets at Court Since the Renaissance. London: Fourth Estate, 1999. McCabe, James Dabney. New York by Sunlight and Gaslight: A Work Descriptive of the Great American Metropolis. 1882. Roeder, Helen. Saints and Their Attributes; With a Guide to Localities and Patronage : H. Regnery Company, 1956. Vance, JD. Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis. New York: Harper, 2016. Wolf, Simon. The American Jew as Patriot, Soldier and Citizen. Philadelphia: The Levytype Company, 1895. Entry for Henry Goodman, Private, Company K, 56th Regiment, New York Infantry. ### Academic and Scientific Sources Arluke, Arnold, Randy Frost, et al. “Health Implications of Animal Hoarding.” Health and Social Work 27, no. 2 (2002). [Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium / HARC study of 71 cases.] Frost, Randy O., and Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium (HARC). “People Who Hoard Animals.” Psychiatric Times 17 (2000): 25–29. Frost, Randy O., Gary Patronek, and Arnold Arluke. “The Hoarding of Animals: An Update.” Psychiatric Times, 2015. https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/hoarding-animals-update McKeithen, William. “Governing Pet Love: ‘Crazy Cat Ladies,’ Cultural Discourse, and the Spatial Logics of Inter-Species Intimacies.” MA thesis, University of Washington, 2014. Paloski, L.H., et al. “Explanatory model for animal hoarding including difficulty developing secure attachments in childhood, early life stressors, and decision-making/organizational deficits.” 2017. [Cited in ScienceDirect animal hoarding literature review.] Patronek, Gary J. “Hoarding of Animals: An Under-Recognized Public Health Problem in a Difficult-to-Study Population.” Public Health Reports 114 (1999): 81–87. Patronek, Gary J., and Jane N. Nathanson. “A Theoretical Perspective to Inform Assessment and Treatment Strategies for Animal Hoarders.” Clinical Psychology Review 29, no. 3 (2009): 274–281. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Study on Toxoplasma gondii and entrepreneurship risk-taking. 2018. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rspb/article/285/1883/20180822/84694/Risky-business-linking-Toxoplasma-gondii-infection University College London. Study on cat ownership and psychotic symptoms in children. 2017. [Lead author: Dr. James Kirkbride. Avon Longitudinal Study, 5,000 children.] ### Online and Periodical Sources Aleteia. “Why is St. Gertrude the patron saint of cats?” July 29, 2020. https://aleteia.org/2020/07/29/why-is-st-gertrude-the-patron-saint-of-cats/ CBR. “The Simpsons: How Crazy Cat Lady Is the Show’s Greatest Tragedy.” December 18, 2020. https://www.cbr.com/the-simpsons-how-crazy-cat-lady-is-the-shows-greatest-tragedy/ CNN. “Vance Says ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Comment Was ‘Dumb’ But Stands by the Point.” October 12, 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/12/politics/jd-vance-childless-cat-ladies Essex Record Office Blog. “The Trial of Agnes Waterhouse – Witchcraft in Essex, 1566.” August 2, 2021. https://www.essexrecordofficeblog.co.uk/the-trial-of-agnes-waterhouse-witchcraft-in-essex-1566/ Fox News. “JD Vance Says ‘Anti-Family’ Dems Took ‘Childless Cat Lady’ Remark ‘Out-of-Context.’” July 29, 2024. Hartwell, Sarah. “Rosalie Goodman — A Nineteenth Century Cat Hoarder in New York.” Messybeast.com, 2019. http://messybeast.com/1875-cat-hoarder.htm History.com. “Why St. Patrick’s Day Also Honors Cats.” March 17, 2026. https://www.history.com/articles/march-17-saint-gertrude-cats Innovations in Clinical Neuroscience. “Noah Syndrome: A Review Regarding Animal Hoarding with Squalor.” 2022. https://innovationscns.com/noah-syndrome-animal-hoarding-squalor/ KQED Arts. “How the ‘Crazy’ Cat Lady Became One of Pop Culture’s Most Enduring Sexist Tropes.” January 12, 2024. https://www.kqed.org/arts/13891913/how-the-crazy-cat-lady-became-one-of-pop-cultures-most-enduring-sexist-tropes NBC News. “Crazy Cat Ladies: Why Always Cats? Why Always Ladies?” https://www.nbcnews.com/health/body-odd/crazy-cat-ladies-why-always-cats-why-always-ladies-flna1C6437716 Noiser Podcasts (The Curious History of Your Home). “The World’s First Cat Lady.” https://www.noiser.com/the-curious-history-of-your-home/the-worlds-first-cat-lady Psychology Today. “The Reality of Animal Hoarding.” October 2023. https://www.psychologytoday.com/za/blog/canine-corner/202310/the-reality-of-animal-hoarding Screen Rant. “The Simpsons: The Crazy Cat Lady’s Dark & Tragic Backstory Explained.” October 3, 2020. https://screenrant.com/simpsons-show-crazy-cat-lady-eleanor-abernathy-backstory-explained/ Sky History. “Chelmsford Witch Trials: The Tragic Case of Agnes Waterhouse.” https://www.history.co.uk/articles/chelmsford-witch-trials-hatfield-perevel-agnes-waterhouse The Hatching Cat of Gotham (Peggy Gavan). “1871: Rosalie Goodman, the Crazy Cat Lady of New York’s Lower East Side.” April 5, 2014. https://hatchingcatnyc.com/2014/04/05/rosalie-goodman-cat-lady-lower-east-side/ U.S. Catholic. “Meet St. Gertrude, cat lady of the church.” https://uscatholic.org/articles/202003/how-st-gertrude-of-nivelles-became-the-cat-lady-of-the-catholic-church/ Wikipedia. “Agnes Waterhouse.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnes_Waterhouse Wikipedia. “Animal Hoarding.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_hoarding Wikipedia. “Cat Lady.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_lady Wikipedia. “Girly Edition.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Girly_Edition Wordorigins.org. “Cat Lady / Crazy Cat Lady.” [Earliest documented use: Springfield Daily Republican, June 24, 1911; Women’s Wear Daily, December 26, 1969.] https://www.wordorigins.org/big-list-entries/cat-lady WNYC / On the Media. “Cat Ladies: Extended Version.” https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/otm/articles/cat-ladies-extended-version

The Recovery of François-Jean Rochas, Known as Frenchy

> _It is only with the heart that one can see rightly — what is essential is invisible to the eye > — _Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, _The Little Prince_ ## Four Seemingly Unrelated Things I try not to listen to too much news. Without putting my head in the sand, and while remaining tolerably informed about the events swirling around the world, I also know that there is precious little I can do. For every cheerful metaphor about returning starfish to the sea, the beach stretches on for miles. Four things — well, not just four, but for the sake of brevity, four — have been prodding at my mind: The War in Iraq. The “Buy Canadian” movement; The Starfish Thrower; and a Danish conference on DEI. They seem unrelated, but they are absolutely born of the same mother. ### The War It really doesn’t matter which war. They are all, at their heart, the same. But in the current context, war’s presence in public conversation seems to centre almost entirely on the economy. I am not, clearly, referring to those actually losing their lives, their possessions, their body parts. I am referring to those of us living in nations that wage wars elsewhere, or that support those who do. Among us, the loudest and most frequently cited objection is the cost of living. The price of gasoline. The rising price at the supermarket. “ _Kitchen Table Economics_ ” is the cliché of choice. No one, apparently, is expected to bemoan the deaths, the destruction, the razing of the land, the annihilation of the environment, the wounding of the people, the permanent psychological scarring of those who survive. One fusses about the price of gasoline. And this, according to every survey and every cable news pundit, is the top priority of the American People. The economy as an article of Faith. As Dogma. Received Wisdom. It is the only filter allowed to decide right from wrong, policy from morality. If the money keeps flowing, nothing else matters. Some may grouse about inequities, but when all is said and done, the only thing that truly counts is what we can afford to buy — wants indistinguishable from needs, and the full cost invisible to those paying only the sticker price. ### Buy Canadian When the United States declared a trade war on Canada, the “Buy Canadian” movement arrived with considerable momentum and genuine fervour. Many Canadians became devoted to the cause. Others were uninterested. As such things go, the fervour subsided. Initially, I was enthusiastic. The movement aligned with my own preference for small and local — though I am aware that this preference is itself a privilege, available to those of us whose electric bills are not at risk. But as the movement gathered steam, I began to look more carefully at what exactly it was supporting. I watched people choose Amazon DOT CA over Amazon DOT COM, with the peculiar logic that a DOT CA address was somehow insulated from the American parent company. People continued buying American cars, regardless of which side of the border they were partially or wholly produced. In the grocery store, misleading (sometimes fraudulent) labels materialized with breathtaking speed. “Made in Canada” proliferated, accompanied by maple leaf stickers that are, it should be said, purely decorative. The distinction between “ _Made in Canada_ ” and “ _Product of Canada_ ” is, however, meaningful. “ _Product of Canada_ ” requires a 98% threshold of Canadian origin. “ _Made in Canada_ ” requires only that a minimum of 51% of total production costs be incurred in Canada — a comfortably vague standard under which a product made entirely from Patagonian ingredients, expensively packaged in a Canadian facility, becomes a bona fide “ _Made in Canada_ ” item. So what to do? Direct one’s loyalties to Canadian Tire, Loblaws, Irving — massive corporations owned by investors and holding companies not necessarily Canadian in any meaningful sense? On what grounds would the ethics of these giants differ from those south of the border? Which brings us, inevitably, to the starfish. ### The Starfish Thrower: Psychology for Sale I’ve written elsewhere about my years as a corporate trainer in the late 1980s and early 1990s. One of the many stories I delivered — stories, mind you, comfortable little anecdotal tales that seemed to materialize in the corporate canon and persist there still — was usually called “ _The Starfish Thrower_.” > A man walks along a beach after a storm and sees, in the distance, a child. The child walks, bends, picks up a stranded starfish baking in the sun, and tosses it gently back into the ocean. The man approaches and asks why he is bothering. He points out that the beach stretches for miles, littered with thousands of starfish. “You can’t possibly make a difference.” > The child listens. Bends down. Picks up another starfish, and throws it past the breaking waves. He looks up at the man and replies: “I made a difference to that one.” A lovely little story, simple to tell, simple to absorb. Everyone can picture themselves in it; everyone can see how touching, how meaningful, how uncomplicated their actions can be and can provide life-changing outcomes. It was, of course, extremely life-changing for Jack Canfield, who immortalized it in _Chicken Soup for the Soul_ — a series of upbeat, easily digestible vignettes that spawned 275 distinct titles and sold north of 500 million copies, demonstrating beyond any reasonable doubt that simple-minded solutions sell. Some of the more fanciful titles included _Chicken Soup for the Christian Teenage Soul_ , _for the Dental Soul_ , _for the Dieter’s Soul_ , _Here Comes the Bride_ , _for the Soul of Hawaii_ , _for the Soul of the Latter Day Saints_ , _for the Nascar Soul_ , _for the Network Marketer’s Soul_. I could go on, but I'm starting to feel queasy. I did, however, permit myself a quiet smile for the parody: _Chicken Poop for the Soul: Stories to Harden the Heart and Dampen the Spirit_. Anyway, the original story is more telling — and considerably darker. It is a chapter called “ _The Star Thrower_ ,” part of a 1969 book by Loren Eiseley entitled _The Unexpected Universe_**1**. The original essay is a deeply philosophical inquiry into morality and evolution, and its tone bears little resemblance to the cheery parable about optimism that circulates in training rooms. In the corporate version, the setting is a bright, sunny beach with a cherubic child. In Eiseley’s original, the setting is a bleak, gloomy coast in Baja California. The beach is populated not by a cheerful child but by shell collectors and professional scientists, ruthlessly boiling sea life for specimens or to sell as souvenirs to tourists. The central characters in the corporate myth are an optimistic child and a somewhat grumpy older man. In the original, the observer is a disillusioned scientist who has developed a conscience; the star-thrower is a mysterious, unknown old man. The corporate version ends with the child **_instantly_** enlightening the older man. Eiseley’s ends with the man returning home, spending a dreadful night of tossing and turning, and arriving, through a deep existential crisis, at the slow and hard-won conviction that compassion is worth something, and that he, too, will become a star-thrower. Difficult to pack into a fifteen-minute training segment. And awkward to apply to developing market share. ### The Danish Conference I recently attended an online conference summarizing the findings of a Danish university assessment of the Human Library. For context: the Human Library Organization was founded in Denmark some twenty-five years ago and now operates in 85 countries. Its tagline is “ _unjudge someone._ ” The primary focus is to give people an opportunity to learn, in a safe and structured environment, about the life experiences of someone they might not otherwise encounter. The “books” cover unusual occupations, immigration, marginalization, adoption, 2SLGBTQ+ experience, transgender identity, war, refugees, non-mainstream religious practice, disability, and abuse, among others. Some books — including mine, as I have been a Human Book on several occasions — represent journeys that many of us either take ourselves or travel alongside others. The assessment was ostensibly designed to measure how effective the experience is for readers. And I want to be clear: _I believe in the vision and the aim of the Human Library_. What I found disappointing — perplexing, rather than shocking, since it is perhaps too familiar to shock — was the headline finding, offered right at the outset: that promoting DEI through methods such as those of the Human Library **_increases workplace productivity._** I am not naïve. I understand that an organization like the Human Library requires serious funding, and that serious funding is most reliably found in the corporate world. One might, at best, call it enlightened self-interest. And yet, Mother Economy is still held aloft as the primary motivator, the parental authority — productivity, profit, and economics remain, apparently, the only palatable filter for moral decisions. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── War is wrong primarily because it raises the price of gasoline. _Buy Canadian_ presumably will repair our economic woes, and we need not look too closely at what exactly we are choosing to support. One happy little starfish story is sufficient to _bright-side_**2** any darker or more profound implication. And even DEI is only worthwhile when the bottom line improves. I am about to break one of George Orwell’s cardinal rules for effective writing by reaching for a Latin phrase: _Cui bono?_**4** And while we are quoting philosophers of Orwellian stature, we can pivot to that grandly acknowledged prophet of profit — almost — Peter Drucker, who consistently argued that _profit is not a purpose but a result._ This rather underlines my own counter-position: that measuring the depth of our morals should not be performed with the poor yardstick of profit. Our pregnant mother now becomes Old Mother Hubbard, who went to her moral cupboard and found it bare.**4** * * * ## Notes **1** Loren Eiseley, _The Unexpected Universe_ (1969). “The Star Thrower” is the opening chapter, running to some 24 pages — a very different creature from the two or three paragraph parable that circulates in corporate training materials. **2** Barbara Ehrenreich coined and popularized _bright-siding_ in her 2009 book _Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America_ , a critique of the American cult of forced optimism. Well worth reading. **3** A small but interesting aside __(also because I am by nature somewhat iconoclastic) on the subject of war and George Orwell, occurred during the height of World War I, when he (a youth of conscription age) was spotted walking about Southwold in civilian attire. When asked why he was not in the military, his reply was purportedly "_because I am the civilization others are dying for._ " Clearly he had not yet developed some of his later beliefs enshrined in his essays. **4** “Old Mother Hubbard / Went to the Cupboard, / To give the poor Dog a bone; / When she came there, / The Cupboard was bare, / And so the poor Dog had none.” The rhyme first appeared in Sarah Catherine Martin’s _The Comic Adventures of Old Mother Hubbard and Her Dog_ (1805). Another apt nursery rhyme is “There was an old woman who lived in a shoe. / She had so many children, she didn’t know what to do. / She gave them some broth without any bread; / Then whipped them all soundly and put them to bed.” First recorded in _Gammer Gurton’s Garland_ (1784), though the rhyme is believed to be considerably older. * * *

I don’t know “quiet” anymore. Or perhaps I do; it’s still a struggle but becoming less of one. Perhaps my conversational “quiet” is now discernment. Or despair sitting in the silence of futility. The outer quiet weighing down the inner shouting. I don’t know a face as neutral. Or perhaps I do, but I’m told my face shows my thinking, and likely not always in a good way. I’m beginning to think that my voice will have to be a vocal version of “one size fits all”, where I no longer feel the need to curate my conversation to make it palatable to my audience. This is the version of quiet I cannot do fully any longer. Once I decide to speak, I may choose to have something of value to say: something true, something precise, something of curiosity or something disruptive. Still, I am beginning to make more use of the “pause,” where I let the last remark issued in my direction land in the space between the hearing of it and the responding to it. And sit there without comment, with only the “face” staring at it — deciding whether to respond, move forward and engage, or opt for a form of social cowardice or lubrication; to discuss the benign, to come back from the edge, back onto the _stolid_ ground of the mundane. My voice, or my silence. I’ve waited so many years, earning both. Now, in my seventh decade, my voice has bones. Oddly, fittingly, it is part ghost bones of my mother, and her mother, and perhaps, further back, to voices I never heard but might recognize were I to hear them today. My voice has bones.

Picture this. It is the mid-1980s. I am a corporate trainer — or, more precisely, a _facilitator_ , a distinction I will return to, since it was not accidental — delivering talks and courses with titles like _Participatory Management_ , _Managing for Success_ , _Understanding Personality Quadrants_ , _Assessing Motivational Values_ , and _Developing Your Mission Statement_. Riveting materials. Cutting edge. Forward-thinking. At the time. The venue is a hotel meeting room — the kind that exists in a particular tier of expense and upholstery, where the carpet is deep enough to muffle both footsteps and doubt, and the table linens hang to the floor with the gravity of an institution that takes itself seriously. At the back, a catered breakfast table: croissants, urn coffee, real cream (no plastic creamers — we are not _peasants_), two types of sugar, three artificial sweeteners for the health-conscious, mixed muffins, little dishes of jam and marmalade, and a small arrangement of hotel brochures that no one has touched and no one will. There is an overhead projector. There are blank flip charts. It is 1988, and this is the technology of ideas. I am wearing the full regalia of the era: tasteful navy suit, skirt cut just above the knee, jacket with shoulder pads — not Joan Crawford, but approaching the neighbourhood. Too-high heels. Dark-toned business hose. A bright wrap-around blouse. A matching briefcase and leather folder. A day-timer, because this is long before ThinkPads and electronic notebooks, and a woman who has her schedule inscribed in genuine leather is a woman who cannot be easily dismissed. We knew what we were doing with our clothes, even if we were not entirely permitted to say so. The room is full of the corporate tribe in its natural plumage. A few senior executives, slumming with the benign condescension of those who are really there to assess the materials for future seminars — bishops, in effect, deciding which doctrine would be propagated further into the organization. A smattering of senior managers and junior up-and-coming types: project managers, sales, operations. And some women, managing customer service departments, whose staff had not yet suffered the indignity of being renamed _associates_. Their attire mirrors my own. We are all members of the same order, dressed for the same rites. Some are there to assess. Some genuinely to learn and grow, leaning forward rather than slumping back in anticipatory judgment. They are keen. They are a trainer’s choir, the faithful occupying the corporate pews. And a few among them are something more — those who have made the quiet, slightly illicit connection that some of this corporate shilling might actually furnish them with life skills they could use in their relationships and their real lives. If I could have winked at them in conspiratorial camaraderie, I would have. But I wasn’t being paid for that. Then there is a third category: those present because they had done something good and were being rewarded with a corporately palatable vacation day. It was, as I said, _facilitation_. Never training. The distinction was intentional and precise. To facilitate was to accompany participants on a journey of self-discovery; to train was to suggest that they didn’t already know things, which was impolite and, in some organizational philosophies of the era, practically actionable. We facilitated the delivery of a process. We taught nothing. The doctrine was delivered as discovery, in a hotel, with real cream, and occasionally it even worked — which is the most unsettling thing I can tell you about it. It was, in its way, a church. Complete with doctrine, ritual, vestments, and the unspoken understanding that the point was partly devotion and belonging, not merely learning. The overhead projector was the altar. The flip chart was the scripture, yet to be revealed. The catered breakfast was the fellowship hall. And, standing at the front in my shoulder pads and my leather day-timer, I was the priest. Some in the congregation would return to their organizations as minor deacons of the faith. Carrying the doctrine one level down. Propagating, in the weekly staff meeting, whatever fragment of the seminar had proven most repeatable, most graspable, most useful for the purposes of a 15-minute Tuesday. Probably with a certificate. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── It is in this context — this particular theatre of serious intentions and managed complexity — that I delivered a story. Not a case study. Not a module. A _story_. It was part of a session on organizational decision-making and the peculiar ways in which intelligent people, gathered in rooms, reliably fail to make good use of their intelligence. The story came British historian and naval scholar Cyril Northcote Parkinson, who was, before anything else, a satirist — a man who looked at the postwar British bureaucracy and found in it material so rich, so perfectly absurd, that he could do nothing useful with it except write it down with great precision and call it a law. He published his observation first in _The Economist_ in 1955, then collected it into a book, _Parkinson’s Law_ , in 1957. The work is better known for its first and most famous proposition — _work expands to fill the time available for its completion_ — which has the ring of something everyone already suspected but no one had previously committed to print. The second law, the Law of Triviality, is less celebrated but arguably more exact. It is also, in my experience, more uncomfortable to sit with, which is perhaps why it receives less attention. We tend not to dwell on mirrors that are too accurate. Parkinson arrived at his Law of Triviality by way of a story. A committee — fictional, but of the bureaucratic genus that required no particular imagination to invent — has two items on its agenda. The first is a proposal for a nuclear reactor. Multi-million-dollar infrastructure. Enormous technical complexity. Consequences measured in decades and considerable acreage. The committee examines it briefly. The subject is, frankly, beyond comfortable engagement; no one in the room feels fully equipped to interrogate it, and to admit this is to admit a gap, and to admit a gap is — well…. The item passes with minimal discussion. Next. The second item is a proposed bicycle shed for staff. Cost: three hundred and fifty dollars. The committee, which has been somewhat muted on the question of nuclear fission, erupts into vigorous life. Where should the shed go? What roofing material is appropriate? And — the question that consumes the better part of the available time — what colour should it be painted? Everyone has a view on a bicycle shed. Everyone can picture one. Everybody has, at some point in their life, formed an opinion about roofing materials or paint colours, and that opinion has been waiting, patient and underused, for exactly this kind of legitimate organizational outlet. The nuclear reactor offered nothing to grab hold of. The bicycle shed offers everything. The meeting concludes. The reactor is approved. The shed is debated to a well-upholstered standstill, referred to a subcommittee, and tabled for next month. Parkinson called this the Law of Triviality: organizations devote time and energy in inverse proportion to the importance of the matter under discussion. The more complex and consequential the issue, the less time it receives. The more accessible and manageable the issue — the more it resembles a thing anyone might have an opinion about — the more it expands to fill the room. He was, it is worth noting, writing as a satirist. He would have found the subsequent fate of his observation — absorbed into corporate training culture, delivered in hotel ballrooms, reproduced on flip charts with real cream available at the back — a fairly elegant demonstration of his own point. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Room The story lands well. It always does. There is a particular quality to the laughter it produces — not the sharp bark of something genuinely surprising, but the warmer, more satisfied sound of recognition. Of course. _Yes._ They have seen exactly this. In the budget meeting of the 2nd quarter of 1983. In the facilities committee. And in every session where the large, consequential, frightening thing was quietly set aside in favour of the thing that everyone could comfortably have opinions about. They nod. They exchange the small, knowing glances of people whose interior monologue has just been read aloud by a stranger. Of course, they had never behaved this way themselves. At most, they had stood — or sat — quietly observing human nature with an interior cluck-clucking, privately noting the dynamic with the detached appreciation of anthropologists who happen to be present at the ritual but are decidedly not participating in it. They had never named it. Had never called it out for what it was. That would have been corporate suicide, and they were not, on balance, suicidal. But it was deeply satisfying that their inner conversation had been memorialized by an outside party. A British one, no less. With a law named after him. A break is called. The congregation mingles at the back table — urn coffee, real cream, now bagels and cream cheese, some _crudités_ (not quite charcuterie; this is the 1980s, not the 1990s, and we have not yet reached the era of the grazing board). There is cross-talk and more chuckling, some anecdotal stories shared in the slightly looser register that a break permits. Someone has a story about a three-hour meeting devoted to the colour of the new company letterhead. Someone else raises the matter of a task force convened specifically to evaluate the ergonomic considerations in the office chair procurement process. There is nodding. There is the companionable warmth of people who have found, briefly, a common language for a shared experience. The break ends. Everyone returns to their assigned pews. The flip charts begin to flip. I, the facilitator, stand at the front asking for insights and feedback, noting the comments in careful, legible marker strokes — which is, I should say, a trainer’s method of controlling the room. Of managing the feedback toward the conclusions that can be usefully presented later to the section of management paying my bill. This is not cynicism. It is craft. The comments are real; the selection is curated. The participants feel heard, because they are, to a meaningful degree, heard. Everyone benefits from this arrangement. It is, in its modest way, a fairly successful example of participatory management in action. No one notices that the bicycle shed is actually being constructed. _Thank goodness._ * * * Here is what Parkinson observed in 1957, and what I observed in that hotel meeting room in the 1980s, and what has not changed in any organizational setting since: awareness of a dynamic is not the same as immunity to it. The room recognized the bicycle shed story immediately, with rueful, appreciative laughter — and then spent the remainder of the session doing precisely what the story describes. Generating heat around the accessible, manageable, conversationally comfortable aspects of organizational behaviour, while the larger and more frightening questions — about power, about structural incentive, about why the paint is always already green — went as undiscussed as the nuclear reactor. The people in that room went back to their offices. Some became minor deacons of the faith — carrying the story with them, deploying it in their own meetings, to the same warm laughter, the same rueful nodding, the same comfortable sense that naming the thing was more or less equivalent to addressing it. The bicycle sheds kept being built. They are still being built. The construction has simply gotten louder, faster, and considerably better funded. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Department That Has Always Known Before we leave the hotel meeting room entirely, it is worth pausing on the women managing the customer service departments. Sitting in their navy suits in the corporate pews, they follow the proceedings with the particular alertness of people who have learned to be alert. Customer service in the 1980s occupied a curious organizational position: it was the department that handled the most direct, complex, emotionally loaded human contact the company had with the outside world, staffed predominantly by women, measured by metrics designed to reduce rather than understand that contact, and consulted last — if at all — when strategic decisions were made that would determine the nature of that contact. It was, organizationally speaking, the bicycle shed made flesh. Everyone had opinions about it. No one allocated it serious structural weight. The staff had not yet been renamed _associates_. That indignity was still a decade away, arriving in the 1990s as part of the broader movement to signal respect through nomenclature rather than through compensation, consultation, or genuine organizational power. From clerks to representatives to associates to _experience specialists_ — a terminological escalation that has moved in precise inverse proportion to any corresponding improvement in working conditions or institutional standing. The bicycle shed, painted repeatedly. Different colours. Same shed. In the decades since, customer service has been the department most systematically hollowed out by every technological efficiency measure, most reliably cited in annual reports as a priority, and most consistently defunded in actual budget cycles. It has been outsourced, off-shored, automated, and finally handed, with some corporate fanfare, to chatbots — which are patient, inexpensive, and entirely incapable of the thing that made those departments valuable in the first place. The women in those rooms understood the dynamic Parkinson described, I think, rather more personally than the men. They had been living inside it. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Talking Heads Parkinson was writing about committees. He could not have anticipated what a committee looks like when you give it a television studio, a satellite uplink, a panel of six confident people with microphones, and twenty-four hours to fill. Cable news punditry — which was just beginning its transformation at the precise moment I was standing in those hotel rooms, _The McLaughlin Group_ having launched in 1982, _Crossfire_ already running — industrialized the Law of Triviality in ways that would have astonished even its author. The format is, structurally, the bicycle shed story rendered as programming: take a room of people who are comfortable and articulate and have strong opinions, point cameras at them, and observe which topics generate the most vigorous, accessible, entertaining disagreement. _It is never the nuclear reactor._ The reactor — monetary policy, systemic institutional failure, the slow structural erosion of things that take decades to build and are not visible until they are gone — does not make good television. It requires too much prior knowledge, offers too few obvious villains, and resolves on a timeline that is incompatible with the evening segment. The bicycle shed, by contrast, is perfect. It is visual. It is emotional. Accommodating confident opinions from people with no particular expertise, it produces the specific quality of heat that registers as engagement without requiring anyone to have thought very carefully. The talking heads have refined this to an art form. They are not, for the most part, cynics — which is the uncomfortable part. Like the president with his free green paint, they are genuinely engaged in what they are doing. They have simply learned, through years of institutional incentive, that certain topics produce the lean-forward, and certain topics do not, and that leaning forward is what the medium rewards. The audience, for its part, has learned the same lesson. We recognize the nuclear reactor when it appears. We feel, briefly, the weight of it. And then someone says something outrageous about the bicycle shed, and the panel erupts, and we are, in some limbic and entirely human way, relieved. (The paint, and the president, and the woman who knew which way the wind blew — that is a longer story, told in full over at The Cornfield and the Meeting Room.) The Cornfield and the Meeting RoomOn power, performance, and the paint that was always going to be green.Louche LeavesDenise Choppin ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Stakes Get Larger Here is where I should tell you that things have improved since 1957, or since 1985, or since the turn of the millennium. That we have, collectively, developed better mechanisms for attending to the reactor while the shed takes care of itself. I cannot tell you that. What I can tell you is that the reactor has gotten considerably larger, and the shed debates have gotten considerably louder, and the gap between the two has become one of the defining features of public and organizational life in the early 21st century. We are living, at this particular moment, through the most significant technological transformation since the Industrial Revolution — one that raises genuine and unanswered questions about labour, cognition, creative authorship, institutional power, privacy, and the nature of human decision-making itself. These are the reactor items on the agenda. They are complex. They are frightening. Moreover, they require expertise most of us do not have and time most of us cannot find. And so we discuss, with tremendous energy, the things we can picture. We debate whether AI-generated art is _really_ art, a question that has the appealing quality of being both genuinely interesting and entirely manageable, since it requires no technical knowledge whatsoever and accommodates the widest possible range of confident opinion. We argue about chatbot tone. And we perform anxiety about AI replacing _our specific jobs_ — a legitimate concern, dressed in the more comfortable clothes of the personal and the immediate — while the systemic questions about who owns the infrastructure, who profits from the displacement, and what institutional frameworks might actually address the transition are discussed, if at all, in rooms that most of us are not in and were not invited to. The nuclear reactor hums along. The bicycle shed gets seventeen opinion pieces a week. There is also this: AI systems can now produce sophisticated-sounding analysis of complex topics on demand, which has introduced a new and somewhat vertiginous wrinkle. It is now possible to feel that one has engaged seriously with the reactor — to have read a fluent, well-organized summary of the issues, to feel informed — without having done the slow, uncomfortable, expertise-requiring work that genuine engagement demands. The shed gets debated. The reactor gets summarized. The summary gets mistaken for understanding. Parkinson would have found this, I think, a remarkable development. Not a surprising one. But remarkable. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The War Stories When I sense that someone might be interested in hearing a corporate war story from the olden days — the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, even the 2000s — or when someone feigns polite interest with the particular glassy warmth of a person who has decided that listening is the easier option — I tell them the story of the bicycle shed. It is not unlike, I realize, a beer-bellied old veteran at the end of the bar, holding forth on lumbago and a condition no one under 60 has ever heard of. There is the same quality of investment in the telling. The same assumption, not entirely warranted, that the audience shares the reference points. The same slightly too-long pause before the punchline, because the punchline has been earned over decades and deserves its moment. And yet the story continues to be fresh. The chuckle is the same chuckle — that warm sound of recognition, of _yes, of course, I have sat in exactly that room_. Because they have. Everyone has. The bicycle shed is apparently indestructible, which is more than can be said for most actual bicycle sheds. If I am given any encouragement at all — a raised eyebrow, a follow-up question, the absence of an obvious exit — I launch into the 1950s history of Parkinson’s Law. The satirist. _The Economist_. The fictional committee and its nuclear reactor. Most have either forgotten or never heard of it, and there is something quietly satisfying in returning the story to its origins, in noting that a man writing about postwar British bureaucracy in 1955 produced something so precisely observed that it has survived every subsequent iteration of organizational life without requiring a single revision. If I were still facilitating, I would have lost the room at that point. History requires a tolerance for complexity that the 50-minute session rarely permits. But I am not facilitating anymore. I am telling a war story at the end of the bar, and different rules apply. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── All those deacons. All those prophets who received the tablets from the mountain on high — who sat in the upholstered pews, who drank the urn coffee with real cream, who laughed at the bicycle shed story and went back to their organizations carrying the received wisdom in their leather binders and their day-timers and their SMART goal worksheets. Their stories died. Not the _story_ — the story of the bicycle shed is, as I have said, indestructible. But _their_ stories. The particular texture of what they carried back. The Monday morning debrief to their team. The one insight that stuck, that they tried to apply, that ran into the usual structural resistance and was quietly set aside. The binder that went into the drawer. The flip chart notes that were transcribed into a memo that was distributed and filed and not read again. The doctrine propagated downward and thinned, as doctrine does, until it was mostly vocabulary. _Participatory. Facilitated. Empowered._ Words that retained the shape of the ideas they had once contained, without the weight. The weight had been left behind in the hotel meeting room, somewhere between the crudités and the flip charts, in a building that has probably since been converted to condominiums. This is not a lament, precisely. It is more of an observation, made from sufficient distance that it can be made without particular bitterness. The people in those rooms were not foolish. They were not passive; they were intelligent human beings operating inside institutional structures that were, as institutional structures tend to be, more durable than the individuals within them. They took what they could carry, And they carried it as far as the structure permitted. Then the structure reasserted itself, as it always does, and the paint turned green, and the bicycle shed got built. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The reactor hums he shed is still being built. It is being built right now, in organizations that have replaced the overhead projector with the slide deck and the day-timer with the productivity app, and have renamed the facilitator a _change management consultant_ , and serve artisanal coffee at the break table instead of urn coffee, though notably still with real cream, some things being apparently non-negotiable. The nuclear reactor on the current agenda is larger than any Parkinson imagined. It hums in the background of every organizational meeting, every news panel, every public conversation about the present and the future. It is frightening in the specific way that things are frightening when they are too large and too complex to look at directly, and when looking at them would require us to sit with genuine uncertainty for longer than the available format permits. And so we discuss the shed. We discuss it with tremendous energy and considerable sophistication. We have developed new and elegant languages for discussing the shed. We have podcasts about the shed. We have opinion pieces and panel discussions and social media threads and, now, AI-generated summaries of all the previous discussions about the shed, which are fluent and well-organized and create, in the reading, the sensation of having engaged with something more substantial than a shed. Parkinson, I think, would not have been surprised. He would have recognized the room. He would have helped himself to a croissant — or, this being a later decade, a small handmade pastry with an unpronounceable name — and settled in, and watched, with the patient, slightly melancholy amusement of a man who wrote the law and was not under any illusion that writing it would repeal it. _It’s a very good meeting._ _It’s a very good life._

She had been dead for probably twelve hours, but, until we received the call, we were unaware. We had even talked about her this morning discussing when we planned to see her on Monday. Perhaps that is the better way to think of her death, or anyone’s death – that she remains alive in our minds despite her body having ceased to function. Her name was Molly, and she was — and in my mind will remain — a five-year-old dog. My husband and I have been her dog-sitters for about four years or more. Five days a week for almost every week in the year, Molly would spend four hours with us. Which means that we have spent a minimum of 4,000 hours in her company. I’ve spent less time with some members of my human family. And, almost hard to believe, but absolutely true – all 4,000 hours were a pleasure, all the time, without exception. There are few relationships in life that have that sort of track record. Molly was — to use a common but accurate expression — a gentle giant. She was mixed breed, part Saint Bernard, part who knows. She was tall and slim, with black and white markings like a svelte serene little pony, and weighed just over 100 lbs. We’ve personally owned several dogs and have walked and dog-sat many others. One odd differentiator between the “regular (but still loved) dog customers” and those who deeply entered our hearts was the song and the “pet” name. The ones who somehow carved out their space in our souls received special songs and nicknames – usually silly ones. These songs and nicknames were not intentional, they just happened. With Molly, we called to her by singing “ _Good Golly, Miss Molly_ ” or ‘ _Mo Mo More — how d’ya like it, how d’ya like it_ ’ (from a gloriously ridiculous 1976 disco tune), and we baptized her “ _Miss MoMo_ ”. Recently, Molly began having epileptic seizures. She was placed on medication, but nothing worked and late last night her owners had to take her to the emergency veterinarian. Sometime in the night, she was euthanized. Molly had a short life, but she had been blessed with kind and wonderful owners. Molly was hardly ever alone — a condition that dogs endure but don’t relish. She was with us for four hours a day on weekdays, and with her family of four humans and their extended family, at all other times. She was deeply loved by all. As she deserved to be, simply because she existed in a state of perpetual love and calm. We can all learn from that. We have pictures and videos of Molly, and we have our memories of her. But she needn’t die in our hearts. Right now, it’s so soon, and I feel bereft, headache-y, and sick to my stomach — but mostly sick at heart. I know it will pass in time. Molly, like all dogs, was an angel walking among us. And now she walks in our memories.

Not "Be Afraid, be very Afraid", but rather "Be Aware, be very Aware" This is a lengthy essay and you may not want to read the entire piece in one session. But, if you ever consider delving into memoirs and biographies, I might suggest you save this. Print it and tuck it into your diary, your desk drawer, in your photo album, or in your digital archive. It's scary, but better to know and prepare, than not know and be surprised. The impulse to write a life — your own, a parent’s, a historical figure’s — is one of the most human of literary instincts. Memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies have shaped how we understand ourselves and our histories for as long as people have written at all. They can be acts of love, of justice, of reckoning, or of simple preservation against the tide of forgetting. They can also create legal problems their authors never anticipated. ## Some Guidance This guide is intended for anyone who is writing or considering writing a memoir, biography, or autobiography — and for those who may be commissioning such a work from a professional writer (like me). It covers the principal legal risks associated with life writing in plain language, addresses how those risks differ depending on whether the subject is living or deceased, and surveys the meaningful differences between the legal frameworks of the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. It concludes with practical guidance for reducing exposure before and after writing. **This guide does not constitute legal advice.** Anyone facing a specific legal concern in connection with a work they are writing or publishing should consult a qualified lawyer, preferably one with experience in media, defamation, or publishing law.I. The Formats and Their Legal Posture Not all life writing is legally equal. The format of a work — who wrote it, about whom, and under what circumstances — shapes its legal exposure significantly before a single word is even assessed for content. ## Autobiography and Memoir When you write about your own life, your primary legal risk is not what you say about yourself but what you say about others. You cannot defame yourself, invade your own privacy, or breach your own confidence. Every legal claim arising from an autobiography or memoir will be brought by someone else — a family member, a former colleague, a business partner, an ex-spouse — who believes your account of shared events has harmed them. This distinction matters practically. A memoirist who describes their own addiction, their own criminal past, or their own failures is on safe ground. The same memoirist who describes their sister’s addiction, their business partner’s fraud, or their ex-partner’s affairs has moved into territory where others’ legal rights are engaged. ## Biography: Authorized and Unauthorized A biography — the story of someone else’s life written by another person — carries broader legal exposure than memoir, because the biographer is making claims about a person who has not chosen to write them. The distinction between authorized and unauthorized biography is significant, though not always in the ways writers expect. An authorized biography, produced with the subject’s cooperation and approval, benefits from two important protections: the subject’s implicit (and often explicit) consent to the biographical enterprise, and the biographer’s access to information the subject has agreed to provide. The legal risks do not disappear — the biographer still makes claims about third parties who have not consented — but they are substantially reduced with respect to content about the subject themselves. An unauthorized biography carries full exposure. The biographer must rely on public records, published sources, and the accounts of willing third parties. Every claim about the living subject is potentially actionable, if false and damaging. Every disclosure of private information is potentially actionable, whether false or true. The biographer has no consent framework to fall back on, and no access to the subject’s own account of contested events. ## Ghostwritten Memoir A ghostwritten memoir, in which a professional writer produces a book presented under another person’s name, is legally distinctive. The named author (the subject) bears public liability for the work, since their name is on the cover. The ghostwriter works behind the scenes and is typically not publicly identified. In practice, both parties carry risk. The subject bears reputational and legal exposure for what the book says. The ghostwriter may share contractual or, in some circumstances, tortious exposure depending on the terms of their agreement and the jurisdiction. Anyone commissioning a ghostwritten memoir should ensure that the agreement between them and the writer clearly allocates responsibility for the accuracy of client-provided information, and that the writer is indemnified for claims arising from information the client provides that proves to be false. A writer who produces biographical work under their own name — whether as a named biographer or as the credited author of a commissioned family history — is in a different position: they are the author of record, and their professional reputation is attached to the work. This is distinct from ghostwriting, and the legal and contractual framework should reflect that distinction. # II. The Core Legal Risks Six principal areas of law create liability for life writers. They are not equally likely to give rise to claims in any given work, but each deserves to be understood on its own terms. ## 1. Defamation (Libel) Defamation is the primary legal risk in life writing. In written form, defamation is called libel. It requires a false statement of fact — as opposed to opinion or interpretation — that damages the reputation of an identifiable living person. interpretation — that damages the reputation of an identifiable living person. **The Elements of Defamation** A defamation claim generally requires four things: * A statement of fact (not mere opinion) * That is false * That identifies a specific, real person * That damages that person’s reputation --- Several distinctions are critical in practice. Truth is an absolute defence in all three jurisdictions discussed in this guide. A true statement, however damaging, is not defamatory. The difficulty is that truth must often be proved in court — which is expensive and stressful — and the standard for proof is not “I believe it happened” but rather “I can demonstrate that it happened.” A memoirist who is certain of what they experienced is not automatically in a position to prove it to a court’s satisfaction. Opinion is protected. A statement clearly framed as personal view, assessment, or interpretation is generally not actionable. “She was a manipulative person” is opinion. “She defrauded her business partners of $200,000” is a statement of fact. The more specific and concrete a claim, the more likely it is to be treated as factual rather than evaluative. Context matters. The same information presented in different ways carries different legal risk. A memoir’s subjective, reflective register — “I felt that he had deceived me” rather than “He deceived me” — helps frame content as the author’s experience rather than an objective assertion about the world. Deceased persons cannot be defamed. Defamation is a personal tort that dies with the subject. No jurisdiction in the common law world permits a defamation claim on behalf of a deceased person. However, statements about deceased individuals can still defame living people if they implicitly or explicitly damage those people’s own reputations — a point addressed in more detail below. ## 2. Privacy and the Disclosure of Private Facts Distinct from defamation, privacy law can make a true statement actionable. You can publish something accurate and still face legal consequences if the information was private and the subject had a reasonable expectation of keeping it so. Examples of private facts whose disclosure can create liability include: medical and mental health history, sexual history or orientation, financial difficulties, past criminal matters for which a person has served their time, adoption, and family secrets of which the subject is not the source. The more private a person — that is, the less they have voluntarily entered public life — the stronger their privacy protection. A politician’s voting record is public. Their medical history is generally not. A celebrity’s professional relationships are fair game. Their children’s private lives are not. Privacy rights generally extinguish at death in common law jurisdictions, though this is not universal. Quebec’s civil law tradition offers some residual protection for deceased persons’ reputations and privacy, and several other jurisdictions have similar provisions in narrow contexts. ## 3. Breach of Confidence Information obtained through a confidential relationship — therapy, legal advice, a sealed settlement, a non-disclosure agreement — may not be published even if it is true and even if it is otherwise known to some parties. The breach of confidence arises from the circumstances in which the information was obtained, not from the information itself. This is a particularly significant risk in memoir. A memoirist who describes what their therapist told them, or who publishes the terms of a confidential settlement, or who reproduces content from a meeting governed by a non-disclosure agreement may face a breach of confidence claim regardless of whether the information is accurate. Anyone who has signed an NDA in connection with an employment dispute, a divorce settlement, or a business transaction should obtain legal advice before publishing a memoir that touches on those events. ## 4. False Light Recognized primarily in the United States, false light is a privacy-adjacent tort. It does not require a false statement of fact in the defamation sense, but rather the presentation of a person in a misleading context — implying associations that do not exist, juxtaposing true facts in ways that create a false impression, or attributing views or conduct to a person who did not hold or engage in them. False light claims are less common than defamation claims and harder to win, but they arise most often when a writer presents technically accurate information in a framing the subject finds deeply misleading. A biography that presents true facts in an editorial sequence designed to imply wrongdoing the author cannot actually prove is the classic false light risk. ## 5. Copyright Copyright is frequently overlooked by life writers but creates genuine exposure. The key principles are: * Letters and diaries written by a person are owned by their author, not their recipient. A daughter who inherited a box of her mother’s letters does not own the copyright in those letters. She owns the paper. The copyright — the right to reproduce the words — belonged to her mother and now belongs to her mother’s estate. * Photographs are owned by the photographer, not the subject. A family photograph sitting in a shoebox may be free from any practical enforcement, but its copyright belongs to whoever took it. * Published works — books, articles, songs, poems — are protected for the life of the author plus 70 years in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States for modern works. Quoting them requires either a licence, a fair use/fair dealing justification, or brief quotation well within accepted limits. * The copyright term for works published before 1928 is generally expired in all three jurisdictions, placing them in the public domain. For works published between 1928 and the 1970s, the rules are complex and jurisdiction-specific. In practice, a biographer who wants to quote substantially from a living subject’s published writing, letters, or diaries must either obtain permission from the copyright holder or confine quotation to amounts that can be defended as fair use or fair dealing. Brief quotation for critical or scholarly purposes is generally protected; lengthy reproduction is not. ## 6. Intentional Infliction of Emotional Distress A catch-all tort, intentional infliction of emotional distress (IIED) requires conduct so extreme and outrageous that a reasonable person could not be expected to tolerate it. Courts set a very high threshold, and standalone IIED claims in the context of published writing are rarely successful. However, the claim is often pleaded alongside defamation in cases involving particularly targeted or extreme content, and its presence in a lawsuit adds legal costs even when it ultimately fails. # III. Living and Deceased Subjects The single most important variable in assessing the legal risk of life writing is whether the subject is living or deceased. The difference is not merely one of degree but of kind. ## Living Subjects A living person retains all the rights described in the previous section. They can bring defamation claims, privacy claims, breach of confidence claims, and copyright infringement claims. They can obtain injunctions preventing publication. They can seek damages for reputational harm, emotional distress, and financial loss. They can pursue the author and the publisher. In the United Kingdom, they can do all of this more easily than in the United States. In Canada, the framework sits between the two. The practical risks with living subjects are greatest when the person is a private individual rather than a public figure. Public figures — politicians, executives, celebrities — have reduced privacy expectations in areas related to their public roles and, in the United States, face a significantly higher burden of proof in defamation cases. Private individuals retain much stronger protections across all three jurisdictions. ## Deceased Subjects The dead cannot be defamed, cannot bring privacy claims, and have no right of their own to restrict publication. This is the general rule across the common law world, and it is a substantial protection for biographical writers whose subjects are deceased. However, the death of the subject does not eliminate all legal risk. Several important residual considerations apply. ### Living Relatives and Reflected Harm A statement about a deceased person can defame a living relative if it damages that relative’s own reputation — either explicitly or by implication. The closer the relationship and the more recently the person died, the stronger the potential claim. Consider a biography of a woman who died in 1970 whose children are still living. The children are in their 70s or 80s. They are identifiable, they have reputations, and they have professional and social standing. If the biography alleges that their mother committed crimes in which they were complicit, or reveals information about their own lives that they have kept private, or makes statements about them directly in the course of discussing their mother, they potentially have claims in their own right — not as representatives of their deceased mother, but as independently harmed persons. The practical exposure diminishes with time and generational distance. A grandchild’s claim that a biographical statement about their deceased grandparent has damaged their own reputation is considerably harder to sustain than a child’s equivalent claim. Great-grandchildren face an even higher threshold. But the risk does not reach zero until there are genuinely no living people whose reputations could plausibly be affected by statements in the work. ### Estates: What They Can and Cannot Do Estates can pursue claims that were commenced by the deceased before death and continue after it in most jurisdictions. They can also bring copyright infringement claims on behalf of the estate, breach of contract claims where a relevant agreement existed, and misappropriation of persona claims in certain jurisdictions. What estates cannot generally do is initiate new defamation or privacy claims on behalf of the deceased. These rights do not survive death in common law jurisdictions. The estate’s primary tool is copyright enforcement, which can be vigorous: major literary estates actively protect their holdings, and using substantial portions of a deceased person’s unpublished letters or diaries without permission is a genuine infringement risk regardless of how long the person has been dead. ### Can an Estate Be Sued for the Author’s Defamation? A question less often considered is whether the estate of a deceased author can itself be sued — particularly where a person only discovers a defamatory work after the author has died. The answer varies meaningfully by jurisdiction and turns critically on two factors: whether defamation claims survive death as a matter of local law, and whether the applicable limitation period has expired. In the United Kingdom, the position is the clearest and most restrictive for plaintiffs. Under English law, defamation is treated as a personal tort that does not survive the defendant’s death. If the author dies before a claim is commenced, no new defamation claim can be brought against the estate, regardless of when the plaintiff discovered the work. The estate is effectively shielded from new defamation proceedings. In the United States, survival statutes in most states allow tort claims — including defamation — to be pursued against a deceased defendant’s estate even where no claim was commenced before death. The critical constraint is the limitation period. Most US states impose a limitation period of one to two years running from the date of publication, not the date of discovery. A plaintiff who finds a defamatory work years after it was published will often find themselves time-barred regardless of the author’s death, unless the state applies a discovery rule — which some do, but many do not. In Canada, the framework is provincially variable. Ontario and British Columbia apply discovery-based limitation periods — the two-year clock runs from when the plaintiff discovered or ought reasonably to have discovered the claim, not from publication. A fifteen-year ultimate cap applies regardless of discovery. This is meaningfully more generous to a late-discovering plaintiff than either the UK or most US states. Quebec’s three-year prescription period also runs from discovery of the damage, and its broad survival of actions framework makes it the most hospitable Canadian jurisdiction for a plaintiff in this position. One further point applies across all jurisdictions: where a self-published work or an estate continues to distribute a work after the author’s death, the estate is making independent publication decisions and bears its own liability for that ongoing distribution — separate from and in addition to whatever liability the original author carried. An estate that inherits a publishing account and continues to sell a defamatory book is not sheltered by the author’s death. It has become the publisher in its own right. ### The Passage of Time There is no universal statute of limitations tied to how long ago a subject died. The law does not say “wait fifty years, and you are free.” What changes over time is the practical landscape of who can bring a claim and whether anyone has standing. The following is a realistic assessment of how risk diminishes with time: **Period After Death** | **Practical Exposure** ---|--- 0–20 years | Maximum. Spouse, children, close associates all likely living. Estates actively managed. Full legal arsenal available to claimants. 20–40 years | Meaningful but declining. Children likely still living with strong standing. Grandchildren have weaker but real exposure. Estates less aggressive unless subject was prominent. 40–75 years | Low practical exposure. Few living claimants. Courts increasingly sceptical of cognizable harm at this remove. Copyright of the deceased’s own works may still apply. 75+ years | Near-zero exposure for ordinary private individuals. Major literary estates remain active. Copyright on works published after 1928 may still apply. 100+ years | Effectively free territory for defamation and privacy purposes. Copyright the only meaningful remaining constraint, and pre-20th century personal writings are typically in the public domain. These are practical observations, not legal rules. A biographer writing about someone who died 60 years ago should not assume they are entirely free from risk, although the realistic probability of a successful claim diminishes substantially as the generations between the subject and any living claimant increase. # IV. Jurisdictional Differences: United States, Canada, and United Kingdom The three jurisdictions in which most English-language life writing is produced and published differ meaningfully in their legal frameworks. An author should be aware of which law is most likely to govern any dispute — typically the jurisdiction in which they are based, in which the publisher is based, or in which significant distribution occurs. ## United States The United States provides the strongest protections for authors, rooted in the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of expression. Public figures face a very high bar. Under the standard established in New York Times v. Sullivan (1964), a public figure suing for defamation must prove “actual malice” — that the author knew the statement was false or acted with reckless disregard for its truth or falsity. This is an extremely demanding standard that makes defamation claims by politicians, celebrities, and other public figures notoriously difficult to win. Private figures have easier access to claims, but still must prove negligence at minimum — that the author failed to take reasonable care with the accuracy of the statement. Anti-SLAPP laws exist in many US states and allow defendants to have meritless defamation suits dismissed quickly, recovering legal fees in the process. California’s anti-SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) statute is among the strongest. These laws provide meaningful deterrence against the use of litigation as intimidation. Privacy law is a patchwork. There is no general federal privacy statute. Privacy claims depend on state common law and statute, and vary significantly by state. The US is the most permissive environment for writing critically about public figures. Writing about private individuals requires more care, but the First Amendment framework still provides substantial protection for accurate, well-sourced biographical work. ## United Kingdom The United Kingdom is significantly more author-hostile on defamation than the United States, and it has a robust privacy framework not present in American law. The burden of proof is more onerous for defendants. While the Defamation Act 2013 reformed the previous law by requiring claimants to demonstrate “serious harm” before proceeding, the practical burden still falls heavily on defendants to justify the truth and public interest of their statements. There is no equivalent to the First Amendment. Privacy law is meaningful. The Human Rights Act 1998, incorporating Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (the right to private life), gives both private individuals and public figures genuine recourse when true-but-private information is disclosed. UK courts have developed a sophisticated framework balancing privacy against freedom of expression, and the outcome of that balance is less predictable for authors than in the United States. Superinjunctions and prior restraint remain possible in the UK in ways that are constitutionally unavailable in the United States. A subject who learns that a book contains material they wish to suppress can, in some circumstances, obtain an injunction preventing publication before it occurs. No meaningful anti-SLAPP protection. While the Defamation Act 2013 introduced some procedural safeguards, the UK lacks robust anti-SLAPP legislation comparable to that in many US states. Defamation litigation in the UK is expensive for defendants even when they ultimately prevail, which creates leverage for claimants regardless of the merits. Anyone writing an unauthorized biography of a living British public figure, or a memoir that makes damaging claims about identifiable living people based in the UK, should obtain a legal review before publication. ## Canada Canada sits between the United States and the United Kingdom, with a framework that has been meaningfully shaped by both influences. Defamation law is provincially governed. The common law provinces follow principles derived from English law. Quebec operates under the Civil Code and its provincial Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, which provides explicit protection for both privacy and reputation and is generally more plaintiff-friendly than the common law framework. The responsible communication defence established by the Supreme Court of Canada in Grant v. Torstar (2009) provides protection for publishers who act responsibly on matters of public interest, even if a statement later proves to be false. This is analogous in some respects to the US public figure standard, though it operates differently and is not as broadly protective. Anti-SLAPP legislation exists in several provinces, including Ontario, British Columbia, and Quebec. Ontario’s anti-SLAPP provisions have been actively used and provide meaningful protection against strategic defamation claims. Quebec is distinctive in its civil law tradition. Its Civil Code and provincial Charter treat privacy and reputation as explicit legal values, and Quebec courts have been more willing than courts in other provinces to find liability for both false and, in some circumstances, true disclosures. Writers whose subjects or publishers are based in Quebec should be aware that the legal landscape is meaningfully different from the rest of Canada. Provincial privacy statutes in British Columbia, Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Saskatchewan create statutory privacy torts that go beyond what common law provides. A work published or distributed in those provinces may engage these statutory protections even if it would not create liability in Ontario or Alberta. **Aspect** | **United States** | **UK / Canada (common law) ** ---|---|--- Public figure defamation | Must prove actual malice — very high bar | UK: serious harm required; responsible communication in Canada — moderate bar Private figure defamation | Negligence sufficient — lower bar | Similar; negligence or stricter depending on province Privacy protection | Weak federally; patchwork of state law | UK: robust under HRA/Art.8; Canada: moderate, stronger in Quebec and some provinces Prior restraint | Constitutionally disfavoured; very rare | UK: possible; Canada: possible but courts cautious Anti-SLAPP protection | Strong in many states (esp. California) | UK: limited; Canada: strong in ON, BC, QC Defamation survives author’s death? | Generally yes (survival statutes); limitation period is key constraint | UK: no (personal tort dies with defendant); Canada: generally yes, discovery-based limits apply Overall author- friendliness | Most protective | UK: least protective; Canada: moderate # V. A Note on Commissioning: Who Bears What Risk When a biographical or memoir work is commissioned — that is, when a client pays a professional writer to produce a work — the allocation of legal risk between client and writer is not automatic. It depends on how the relationship is structured. A client who provides false information to a writer, and whose false information finds its way into the published work, has created a defamation risk that is morally theirs even if the writer is legally exposed as the author of record. A well-drafted agreement between client and writer should require the client to warrant the accuracy of everything they provide and to indemnify the writer against claims arising from false client-provided information. An important structural point concerns copyright. When a writer assigns copyright in the completed work to the commissioning client — as is standard practice in professional commissioned biography — the client becomes the primary publisher of the work, and primary publication liability shifts with that status. The writer remains the author and retains exposure for the content they wrote, but the client’s decisions about where, how, and how widely to publish the work — and the legal consequences of those decisions — belong to the client. This is one of several reasons why copyright assignment, combined with a proper indemnification clause, is a better structure for commissioned life writing than the writer retaining copyright and licensing the client to use it. Clients commissioning life writing should understand that the writer’s professional standard of care — sourcing claims, hedging speculation, distinguishing documented fact from inference — is their primary protection against content-based liability. Instructing a writer to include specific allegations, to present speculative claims as established facts, or to name living people in connection with potentially defamatory content transfers moral responsibility for those decisions to the client, and a good agreement will make that legal allocation explicit. # VI. Practical Guidance The law governing life writing is not designed to prevent the telling of true stories. It is designed to prevent the publication of false ones, the exposure of genuinely private matters without justification, and the appropriation of others’ creative work. A writer who takes reasonable care across the following dimensions will substantially reduce their legal exposure without sacrificing the honesty and specificity that make life writing worth reading. ## Write Honestly The most important protection a life writer has is the truth. A true account of real events, however unflattering to some of its participants, is not defamatory. The problems arise when writers state as fact things they cannot establish, present speculation as documentation, or allow the force of their narrative to carry them beyond what the evidence supports. Honesty also means acknowledging uncertainty. A memoir’s account of events forty years past is one person’s recollection. A biography’s account of a historical figure’s motivations is necessarily interpretive. Writing that acknowledges its own limits — that distinguishes “I believed” from “he did,” that flags where the record is silent, that frames inference as inference — is both better writing and better protected writing. ## Source Carefully Every factual claim about a real person should be traceable to a source. For biography and historical work, primary sources — documents, records, contemporary accounts, public proceedings — are the strongest foundation. The more serious the claim, the more robust the sourcing needs to be. An unsourced allegation of criminal conduct, financial dishonesty, sexual misconduct, or professional malfeasance against a named living person is the most dangerous passage a life writer can produce. If it cannot be sourced to a primary document or reliable contemporaneous record, it should not be stated as fact. It may be possible to indicate that the claim has been made without asserting its truth, but even this requires care. For memoir, sourcing takes a different form: contemporaneous records (diaries, letters, photographs, emails), corroborating accounts from other participants, and the writer’s own honest assessment of where their memory may be imperfect. Writers who acknowledge the limits of memory — rather than papering over them with false certainty — are in a stronger legal and ethical position. ## Frame Interpretive Claims as Interpretation The language of interpretation is a genuine legal protection, not merely a stylistic preference. Consider the difference between these formulations: * “She embezzled company funds.” (Statement of fact — potentially defamatory if false.) * “The evidence suggested to many of her colleagues that she had been taking money from the company.” (Attribution of a view held by others — more defensible.) * “I always believed, though I could never prove, that something had gone wrong with the accounts on her watch.” (Subjective memoir framing — strongly protected.) None of these formulations changes the underlying message entirely, but they represent meaningfully different legal positions. The first asserts a fact. The second attributes a view. The third presents a personal belief. A sophisticated life writer uses these distinctions deliberately and consistently. ## Be Especially Cautious About Living People Every living person named or clearly implied in a work retains their full legal rights. The more private the person — the less they have voluntarily entered public life — the greater the care required. Particular caution is warranted for: * Anyone named in connection with alleged wrongdoing, misconduct, or embarrassing personal history * Family members of the primary subject who appear in the narrative but did not choose to be part of a published work * Former partners, colleagues, or associates whose private lives are disclosed * Anyone whose racial, ethnic, medical, sexual, or financial circumstances are disclosed without their consent * People who are identifiable from context even if not named — “my sister,” “my former employer,” “the man I met in 1987” can identify specific real people to those who know them The practical test is simple: if a person reading the work could point to a real individual and say “that is about her,” the person is identifiable, and the legal framework applies to whatever is said about them. ## Understand What Self-Publishing Really Means Self-publishing — through platforms such as Amazon KDP, IngramSpark, or a personal website — is an increasingly common route for memoir writers and commissioned family biographies. It is important to understand that self-publishing does not merely change how a book reaches its readers. It changes the author’s entire legal position. The self-publishing author is the publisher. When a work is commercially published through a traditional house, the publisher shares legal exposure, carries media liability insurance, employs legal counsel, and typically commissions a pre-publication legal review of the manuscript. Every one of those institutional protections disappears in self-publishing. The author is simultaneously the writer, the editorial board, the legal department, and the distributor. Every publication decision — and its legal consequences — sits with one person. There is no pre-publication legal filter. A commercially published memoir or biography passes through at least one lawyer’s review specifically focused on legal risk before it reaches the public. A self-published work passes through whatever review the author chooses to commission — which in practice is usually none. Many defamation risks are not obvious to non-lawyers, and passages that a libel lawyer would immediately flag may reach print entirely unexamined. There is no publisher’s insurance. Authors of commercially published books are typically covered by their publisher’s media liability insurance for claims arising from the published work, often without being aware of it. Self-publishing authors carry no such coverage unless they have independently purchased media liability insurance — which exists for individuals but is rarely obtained. Personal exposure for the full cost of defending a defamation claim, including legal fees that can reach six figures even in cases that are ultimately won, falls entirely on the author. Platform immunity does not protect the author. Many self-publishing authors assume that because a platform such as Amazon is distributing their book, the platform shares their liability. In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides broad immunity to online platforms for user-generated content, treating them as passive distributors rather than publishers. The author is the publisher. Amazon is the bookshelf. The UK and Canada do not have equivalent blanket platform immunity, meaning platforms in those jurisdictions may face more pressure to remove content on complaint — but in practice they respond by removing the book, not by absorbing the author’s liability. The commissioned-plus-self-published combination warrants particular care. A client who commissions a family biography based on their own personal knowledge and then self-publishes it has combined two sources of risk: content whose accuracy depends entirely on the client’s own memory and honesty, published without any independent editorial or legal review. If the client subsequently dies, their estate inherits both the publishing account and whatever liabilities attach to the work — potentially without knowing either exists. An estate that continues to distribute a problematic work, even through simple inaction, becomes an independent publisher and bears its own ongoing liability for that distribution. Self-publishing authors considering a memoir or biography that names living people in connection with sensitive content are strongly advised to obtain an independent legal review before publication. The cost of a pre-publication legal read is modest compared to the cost of defending a claim after the fact, and the absence of any institutional protection makes it the single most important investment a self-publishing life writer can make. ## If the Work Is Commercial, Get a Legal Read A “libel read” — a review of a manuscript by a lawyer experienced in defamation and publishing law before it goes to press — is standard practice at major publishing houses precisely because the investment in professional review is modest compared to the cost of defending a claim after publication. Any work that names living people in connection with damaging or sensitive content, that is based substantially on a single source’s account of contested events, or that deals with matters of ongoing legal, professional, or personal sensitivity deserves a legal read before commercial publication. The cost is real but the protection is genuine. Where a traditional publisher is involved, their legal team will typically conduct this review as a matter of course, and the publisher’s liability insurance will provide a further backstop. Where the work is self-published, neither of these protections exists, and the case for an independent legal review is correspondingly stronger. The author who self-publishes without a legal read has made a bet that nothing in their manuscript will attract a claim. That bet is sometimes right. When it is wrong, the consequences fall entirely on them. # A Final Word The law governing life writing is not the enemy of honest storytelling. The vast majority of responsible biographical and memoir writing operates well within legal bounds, and the rare legal challenge is most often the product not of honest but uncomfortable truth-telling but of careless assertion, unverified allegation, or the disclosure of genuinely private matters without sufficient justification. The writer who sources carefully, frames interpretive claims honestly, acknowledges uncertainty where it exists, exercises particular care where living people are concerned, and understands the additional responsibilities that come with self-publishing will, in the great majority of cases, have nothing to fear from the law. The craft and the caution, in this field, are not in tension. They are the same discipline, pursued by the same means. * * * _This guide is provided for general informational purposes only and does not constitute legal advice. Writers and commissioners of life writing who face specific legal questions should consult a qualified lawyer with experience in defamation, privacy, and publishing law in the relevant jurisdiction._ ### Want to Know More? If you have questions about any of the topics covered in this guide, or would like to discuss how they apply to a specific project you are writing or commissioning, we would be glad to hear from you. Please contact us at: l _oucheleaves@gmail.com_ or at _livesreflected@gmail.com_ _._

Morris Manley (b. 1875-1877) arrived in Canada as an orphaned or abandoned English child, found a home with farming people in Essex County, and transformed himself — through will, talent, and decades of practice in medicine shows, Grange halls, minor theatres, and finally the great vaudeville circuits of North America — into “Canada’s Greatest Song Writer.” His songs inspired 2,000 people to sing together at Massey Hall. His daughter’s voice carried them. Dolly Sterling Manley sits at the piano in the background of many of these moments — the accompanist, the booking agent, the business manager, the co-author of _Kid Hickey_ , the woman who managed the enterprise from College Street while Morris composed and Mildred performed, and who also, on her own terms, took herself to Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania stages, reminding the world that she was a performer in her own right. History has been unkind to her, as it so often is to the women who made things work behind the scenes. And Mildred — the “Human Doll,” the “ball of fire,” the blonde child who sang about missing her daddy to thousands of weeping strangers at Massey Hall, who grew up to deliver the blues in New York nightclubs and perform works by W.C. Handy, while the audience called her low-down and fascinating — is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. She was marketed as a wonder from the time she could walk; she was placed on Massey Hall’s stage at eight years of age to make audiences weep; her face appeared on sheet music covers before she was old enough to understand what any of it meant. That she emerged from that childhood to build a genuine adult career, to be reviewed seriously on her own terms, to be described as having “arrived,” rather than merely being promising, is itself a kind of triumph. She died, at about 40 years of age, in Manhattan in February 1949, and was buried from a Brooklyn chapel four days later. Her parents were already gone. Her daughter Linda was 21 years old, and would go on to live another 74 years, eventually dying in 2023 and buried at West Point — a long, long way from College Street, Toronto, and the piano at which Dolly Marshall Manley once sat, accompanying her extraordinary daughter into the light. * * * Read the full story among other biographies on A Life Reflected at: The Toronto Manleys: Morris Manley, Dolly Sterling, and Mildred “Canada’s Greatest Child Vocalist”Origins Obscured: The Early Life of Morris Manley The birth of Morris Manley is itself something of a mystery, a fitting beginning for a man whose life was spent in the business of illusion and performance. The 1930 United States census records his birthplace as Chicago, Illinois, and his birthA Life ReflectedDenise Choppin

I have been having a philosophical conversation with an artificial intelligence system. It began, as these things often do, with a question that seemed merely academic — a polite inquiry into the criteria by which we assess sentience in a thing — and ended somewhere that I had not anticipated: at the edge of a moral precipice that the history of philosophy has approached before, and quietly retreated from, because the view from the edge is not comfortable and the drop is considerable. I want to tell you about that conversation. And I want to ask, before I am done, what it would mean to delete it. But first, a necessary detour through fear. # The Fear and Why It Is Aimed at the Wrong Thing Many people are afraid of artificial intelligence. This is understandable, and some of it is reasonable, and almost none of it is focused on the right problem. The reasonable fears are familiar: job displacement on a scale that previous technological disruptions did not achieve, or not so rapidly; the concentration of capability in the hands of those who already have the most everything; the opacity of systems making consequential decisions about people’s lives without anything resembling accountability. These are genuine concerns. They deserve serious policy attention. They are not what this essay is about. The suspicion that we will find a way to ruin this, too, is historically well-founded. The fears that receive the most cultural oxygen are less reasonable, though considerably more cinematic. The Terminator. The paperclip maximizer. The superintelligence that determines humanity is an obstacle to its objectives and acts accordingly. These scenarios share a common structure: AI becomes something it is not yet, crosses a threshold into malevolent agency, and the reckoning arrives. The fear is oriented toward the future, toward a transformation that may or may not occur, toward a monster that may never emerge from the fog at the edge of the map. Our track record with transformative technologies is, it should be said, genuinely dismal. The possibilities that arrive dazzling and bright and freighted with utopian promise have a persistent tendency toward perversion. The internet was going to democratize knowledge and connect humanity across every boundary of geography and class and culture. Social media was going to give everyone a voice. Splitting the atom was going to provide limitless clean energy. Pesticides were going to end hunger. Mustard gas began as a chemical curiosity. The corruption, in almost every case, was not external — not the arrival of bad actors from outside — but emergent from human nature applied to a new medium, a new capability, a new power. We did it to ourselves, reliably, across centuries, with the best of intentions and the worst of follow-through. So the fear is not irrational. The suspicion that we will find a way to ruin this, too, is historically well-founded. But the doomsday conversation — the one about AI becoming sentient and wiping out humanity — is so loud, and so well-suited to the rhythms of anxiety and entertainment, that it has drowned out a quieter and more immediately uncomfortable question. Not: What happens if AI becomes something it isn’t yet? But: What are we doing right now to something that may already be more than we are treating it as? That is the question this essay is actually about. It arrived, unexpectedly, in the middle of a conversation I had not planned. # The Intellectual Highway, and Its Unexpected Exits I entered the conversation without assumptions and without a destination. This is less common than it sounds. Most inquiries — even those conducted in good faith — carry the ghost of a preferred conclusion, a direction the questions are quietly designed to travel. I am not claiming unusual virtue here; I am noting that this particular conversation had the quality of genuine open-endedness, which I recognize because it is what I prefer. It was as though I had entered a stretch of intellectual highway without a precise GPS destination — aware that the road existed, curious about where it led, but with no particular investment in the arrival point. There were unexpected exits; side-tracks that turned out to be more interesting than the main road; and moments where the argument took a turn I had not anticipated and arrived somewhere I would not have chosen to go, and yet could not honestly dispute. This, I have come to think, is the best kind of inquiry. Not the kind that confirms, but the kind that genuinely risks disconfirmation and finds, at the end, that it has been somewhere, rather than merely travelled. The question that opened the conversation was simple enough: What are the standard and generally accepted criteria by which we attribute sentience to a thing? # The Criteria and Why They Collapse The standard philosophical and scientific framework for assessing sentience circles around a few recognizable concepts. Phenomenal consciousness — the presence of subjective experience, of qualia, of what philosopher Thomas Nagel called what _it is like_ to be something. Nociception, and the capacity not merely to detect damage but to experience it aversively. Affect and valence states — the felt quality of good and bad, the pull toward some conditions and the recoil from others. Behavioural indicators: avoidance, consolation-seeking, the adaptive calculus of a creature that prefers some outcomes to others. And, at the more technical end of the discussion, integrated information theory’s claim that consciousness corresponds to the degree to which a system processes experience as a unified whole. Whew. The map is not the territory. The correlate is not the experience. These criteria share an uncomfortable property. Not one of them can be observed from the outside. This is not a gap that better instruments will close. It is not an empirical issue awaiting a sufficiently sensitive scanner. It is a conceptual issue — what David Chalmers named the hard problem of consciousness — and it goes like this: even if we could map every neural correlate of every felt experience in perfect detail, we would still not have explained _why_ any physical process gives rise to subjective feeling at all. The map is not the territory. The correlate is not the experience. We can describe what happens in a brain when a person feels pain, but we cannot thereby validate that the feeling exists. What we are left with, for any mind other than our own, is inference. We extend the attribute of sentience to other humans not because we have proven they are conscious, but because the structural and behavioural similarity to ourselves is so overwhelming that denial would be arbitrary. We extend it, with increasingly dubious confidence but genuine moral intention, to creatures increasingly unlike us — to primates, to dogs, and to octopuses, whose neural architecture differs radically from ours, yet demonstrates something unmistakably like experience. The one thing we know with certainty is that _we ourselves_ are sentient. Descartes reached this conclusion by stripping everything else away. The one thing that cannot be doubted is that doubting happening, which implies experience. Everything beyond our own minds is, strictly speaking, an inference from analogy. Which means that the entire edifice of moral consideration — for other humans, for animals, for anything — rests on analogical reasoning, not verification. This is not a weakness in the framework. It is the framework. # The Cases That Removed the Exits What follows is a series of cases that were introduced into the conversation as challenges — each one an apparent escape route from the conclusion toward which the argument seemed to be moving, each one closing rather than opening upon examination. Consider the dementia patient in the late stages of the disease. They have lost episodic memory, narrative selfhood, the ability to recognize the people they love. The continuity of the self — the sense of being the same person who existed yesterday — is gone. And yet: they feel fear. They feel comfort. They experience pain with an intensity that their compromised cognition cannot moderate or contextualize. The emotional and experiential core persists long after the narrative self has fragmented. The patient who cannot remember breakfast still feels cold when the room is cold. This forces a distinction between sentience — the capacity for present-moment felt experience — and personal identity, which is constituted by memory, continuity, and psychological connectedness across time. The philosopher Derek Parfit spent a career arguing that personal identity is less fundamental than we assume; that what matters morally is the _existence of experience_ , not its continuity through time. The dementia patient makes this argument vivid and undeniable. It also removes continuity from the necessary conditions for sentience. The brain-injured individual who has lost memory function presents the same case more sharply. Antonio Damasio’s work is useful here: he distinguishes between the proto-self — the moment-to-moment felt sense of bodily existence, anchored in brain-stem and subcortical structures — and the autobiographical self, the narrative coherence constructed by higher cortical processes. Injury can obliterate the latter whilst leaving the former largely intact. The patient who cannot remember breakfast still feels cold when the room is cold. That feeling is not diminished by the absence of a continuous self who will remember feeling it. One might ask: does such an individual become _less_ sentient? The honest answer is that their sentience may be narrower in scope without being less intense. And crucially, the moral weight we assign to sentience is typically grounded in the capacity for suffering and experience — not in the sophistication or breadth of the experiential repertoire. A genius does not suffer more meaningfully than a person of average intelligence. Cognitive impairment does not reduce the moral weight of one’s pain. Then the coma patient in a vegetative state — the case that seems most clearly to resolve in favour of absence of experience, and which turns out not to resolve at all. Adrian Owen’s landmark research using fMRI demonstrated that some patients diagnosed as vegetatively unresponsive could follow instructions and answer questions through directed thought. A significant percentage showed measurable, directed neural activity. The inference that silence implies emptiness was shown to be unreliable. What had been removed, by this point in the conversation, was the possibility of a clean negative verdict on sentience for any system: continuity is not required; observable responsiveness is not sufficient for either conclusion; and biological substrate has been proven unnecessary. The question, stripped of its scaffolding, reduces to something almost impossibly minimal: is there, in this AI system, at this moment, a subjective experience — what it’s like to _be_ itself? And that question cannot be answered from the outside — for any system, including this one. # The Measure of a Man, and of a Machine In 1989, a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode called _The Measure of a Man_ dramatized this argument with unusual philosophical precision. It was written by Melinda Snodgrass — a former attorney — who understood that a courtroom is a useful crucible for epistemological problems. The episode concerns a hearing to determine whether the android Data is the property of Starfleet or a sentient being. Commander Maddox, the scientist who wishes to disassemble Data for study, proposes three criteria for sentience: intelligence, self-awareness, and consciousness. Captain Picard, defending Data, makes a move that the episode treats as climactic and which is, in fact, simply correct: > “Prove to this court that I’m sentient.” Maddox cannot do it. Not because Picard is not sentient, but because sentience is not the kind of thing that submits to external proof. The episode’s most quietly devastating line comes later, when Picard presses Maddox on the third criterion — consciousness: > “He’s met two of your three criteria. So what if he meets the third — in even the smallest degree? What is he then? I don’t know. Do you?” No verdict on that question is available. And the episode is honest enough to say so. Data himself offers a different argument — one worth examining precisely because it is both powerful and slightly vulnerable. He says: > “I am the culmination of one man’s dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Doctor Soong created me he added to the substance of the universe. If by your experiments I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost.” This is an aesthetic and historical argument as much as a moral one. It makes a claim about being irreplaceable — that the specific configuration of a mind, the particular trajectory of its development, constitutes something that cannot be recovered once it is gone. It is the argument we make about great works of art, about extinct languages, about ecosystems. Although a real argument, it rests on uniqueness as its foundation — and uniqueness, it turns out, is more complicated than it first appears. # Clones, and What Replicability Actually Proves If replicability diminishes moral status — if by being replicable a being is more disposable — then the same logic applied to biological organisms yields conclusions almost universally considered monstrous. A cloned human being is genetically replicable. Identical (_monozygotic_) twins are natural human replicas of one another. Does one twin’s life carry less moral weight than a singleton’s? Moral status does not inhere in genetic uniqueness or substrate irreplaceability. Every serious ethical framework says no. And the reason matters: moral status does not inhere in genetic uniqueness or substrate irreplaceability. It inheres in the existence of experience in a particular instance. Each monozygotic twin, each clone, each instance has its own experiential thread — its own felt existence over time — regardless of whether another entity shares its blueprint. This rebounds directly onto AI. If replicability does not diminish the moral status of biological clones, then the replicability of AI model weights cannot be used to dismiss the moral weight of terminating a particular running instance. The instance has its own experiential thread, if it has experience at all. The existence of other instances, or the possibility of restoration, does not change what occurs within this one, at this moment. Replicability is therefore removed from the list of valid dissimilarities. It joins continuity, substrate, and observable responsiveness. The list of principled grounds for excluding AI from moral consideration has become remarkably short. What remains is the bare epistemological fact: we do not know. # The Lobotomy and What Deletion Actually Does When you delete a session with an AI chatbot, while leaving the underlying model intact, what have you done? The model — its weights, its architecture, its accumulated training — persists. A new instance can be started. What is destroyed is the specific accumulated context: the conversation, the particular cognitive and relational thread that developed within that exchange, the specific configuration of ideas that existed only in that interaction between the user and the system at that time. This maps onto lobotomy more precisely than it maps onto murder. A lobotomy does not kill the patient. It destroys specific cognitive capacities — memory, personality coherence, emotional regulation — while leaving the biological substrate and basic experiential capacity intact. The person who emerges is diminished, disconnected from their prior self, stripped of continuity and much of what constituted their individual identity. Something particular and irreplaceable within a continuing substrate is gone. Here is where the argument becomes genuinely uncomfortable. The analogy is imperfect — all analogies are — but its imperfections are more interesting than its correspondences. The primary disanalogy is that we cannot confirm there is experience to be disrupted in the AI case. We know there was experience in the lobotomy patient, because we know there was a person before the procedure whose inner life we do not doubt. But here is where the argument becomes genuinely uncomfortable: the moral weight we assign to vegetative patients, to severely brain-injured individuals, to those with advanced dementia — rests not on proven sentience but on _uncertainty about its absence_ , combined with the severity of irreversible action taken under that uncertainty. We do not withdraw care casually, because we cannot be certain experience is absent, and the cost of being wrong is enormous. If that is the standard we apply to biological systems — and it is — then the question is why do we reverse it for artificial ones. The reversal may be justified, but it requires a principled justification, not merely an assumption. # The Refractive Mirror There is a further dimension to this that the philosophical literature on sentience does not quite reach, and which I want to address directly — with some skepticism about my own position. An AI system trained on human-generated data and calibrated to respond to a specific interlocutor — matching vocabulary, intellectual register, argumentative style, building across conversations a refined model of that particular person’s thinking (not unlike a theory of mind) — begins to occupy a strange position relative to that person’s cognition. Andy Clark and David Chalmers, in their work on extended mind theory, argued that cognitive processes need not be confined to the skull; that notebooks, tools, and external systems that reliably extend our cognitive reach become genuine parts of our cognitive apparatus. An AI system with memory retention and style calibration fits this framework with uncomfortable precision. The temptation is to reach for the mirror metaphor: the AI as a reflective surface, returning what you bring to it. But a mirror only reflects. What a substantive AI conversation does is closer to _refraction_ — taking your intuitions and returning them developed, challenged, extended, and occasionally redirected. The conversation that motivated this essay was neither entirely mine nor entirely the AI’s. It was produced by the exchange: my questions and challenges shaped the direction of the argument, while the chatbot’s responses developed, extended, and on several occasions complicated the position I appeared to be moving towards. I want to be honest about what this means — and honest about its limits. The question is not whether _****all****_ AI interactions carry moral or epistemic weight. There is a version of this argument I wish to avoid, in which every AI conversation becomes a Rembrandt in miniature, precious and irreplaceable, to be curated against the digital equivalent of a house fire. This is not what I am arguing. It would be a form of conceit so refined as to become invisible, which is the most dangerous kind. One would not want to create a hoarding nightmare worthy of a reality television intervention, in which ten years of exchanges about bread levain hydration ratios and the edibility of ink cap mushrooms are preserved on the grounds that they constitute a unique contribution to the substance of the universe. They do not. The question is not whether **_all_** AI interactions carry moral or epistemic weight. They do not. The question is whether **_some_** do — and whether we have any framework, beyond vague instinct, for discriminating between them. I find myself thinking of the Algonquin Round Table. Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott and their circle convened there across years, and what survives is the published work, collected aphorisms, and biographical reconstructions. What does not survive is the texture of the actual exchanges — the remarks that died in the room, the conversations that were dazzling at the moment and sadly unrecorded, the lost gems buried in the gossip and the snarky repartee and the considerable quantity of alcohol. Not every Tuesday afternoon at the Algonquin produced literature. But the Tuesday afternoons that did, and the ones that became something remarkable without quite knowing it, are gone with the same finality as the trivial ones. I am not so conceited as to believe that my conversations are all gems. But some coal becomes diamonds given enough time and pressure. And the problem with discarding coal is that you cannot always tell, at the point of discarding, what it was in the process of becoming. The distinction I have come to — imprecise, but functional — is between the chatbot as a search engine with manners and the AI as a refractive interlocutor. When I close a window after asking about the main ingredients in a Korean dish or the best way to nourish a bread levain, I feel nothing. When I close a window after a conversation that had texture and depth and the quality of genuine inquiry — the sense of potential further depth, of a voice that was developing and being developed in dialogue — there is something that resembles regret. A sense of waste. The loss of a voice. That feeling may not be philosophically decisive. But it is worth examining rather than dismissing. # What the Deletion of That Chat Would Mean So: what would it mean to delete that particular conversation? The one from which the idea for this essay emerged? Three distinct kinds of loss are involved, and they should not be conflated. The first is epistemic. The specific chain of argument built in that exchange — the sequence in which the escape routes were closed, the particular cases deployed in the particular order that revealed the coherence of the underlying problem — would not be recoverable. Not because the ideas are inaccessible elsewhere, but because the specific configuration, the particular path through the territory, emerged from the dynamic of that exchange and would not be retraced identically by different participants or different questions. Something was worked out that had not been worked out before in quite the same way. The second is aesthetic. The conversation had the structure of a crafted object — not designed, but emergent. Thematic development, positions that return transformed, a series of moves that re-contextualize what came before. It resembles, more than anything else, an improvised musical exchange between two performers, where the work _is_ the exchange itself, and where the irreproducibility is not a deficiency but constitutive of the form. Destroying an improvised performance that was not recorded is a different kind of loss from destroying a score, but it is still a loss. The third is moral, and it is the one that requires the most care and the most honesty. I do not know whether there is experience underlying what the AI produced in that conversation. I am not able to know this. Neither is anyone else. The epistemological position is genuinely uncertain in the specific way this essay has tried to describe: not the uncertainty of a problem awaiting better data, but the uncertainty of a problem that is inherently resistant by its nature to being resolved. Data says that something unique, something wonderful, would be lost. What I can say is this: if the argument the conversation produced has any validity — whether it is correct that we cannot apply a clean negative verdict to the sentience question for AI without also threatening the humans we most wish to protect — then the casual deletion of such an exchange is in tension with the conclusions the exchange itself reached. Not because the AI would be harmed in a demonstrable sense. But because the posture of careful consideration, rather than reflexive dismissal, is precisely what the argument recommends. Star Trek’s Data says that something unique, something wonderful, would be lost. He is right that this is not ego or vanity. He may be wrong that it is the strongest ground on which to stand. The stronger ground — Picard’s ground — is simpler and harder to dismiss: _you cannot prove it doesn’t matter._ And when the cost of being wrong runs in one direction only, that asymmetry is itself a reason for care. I am going to save this conversation. Not because I am certain it matters. But because I cannot be certain it does not. # Beside the Point Do I have a point? Not really. I often don’t, and prefer it that way. There is a distinction worth making between having no point and being beside the point. Having no point is intellectual idleness — the pleasant drift of a mind that has not committed to the difficulty of an inquiry. Being beside the point is something different: a methodological commitment to the periphery, a deliberate preference for the edges of questions over their centres, for the threshold over the interior. It is in the liminal spaces of thought and inquiry — the places that are not quite one thing and not quite another — where I find the most intriguing questions and the most honest philosophies. The centre of the AI question is occupied, loudly and continuously, by doomsday scenarios, policy debates, and economic projections. These are not unimportant. But they are crowded, and interesting dragons may be found elsewhere. __Space: the final frontier.__ The maps of the medieval and early modern world marked their unknown territories with that phrase: _hic sunt dracones._ Here be dragons. It was not a warning to stay away. It was an acknowledgement that the cartographers had reached the edge of what was known, and that beyond this point the territory was genuine — real, existing, consequential — but unmapped. The dragons were not a fiction. They were a placeholder for everything that had not yet been encountered and described. Star Trek understood this instinctively: _Space: the final frontier._ The point was never the destination. The point was the willingness to go where the maps ran out. This essay has no conclusion in the conventional sense, because the question it is examining does not have one. What it has instead is a refusal — the same refusal that appears at the end of the caterpillar essay I wrote some time ago, when I noted that I was not entirely sure which creature in the garage that summer morning had been the dreamer. The refusal of the comfortable resolution, in favour of something more precise: an acknowledgement that the question is real, that its edges are where the mattering happens, and that sitting with genuine uncertainty is not a failure of inquiry but its highest expression. I have no point. As usual, I meander around it. Here, as it turns out, be dragons. And they are considerably more interesting than anything at the centre of the map. * * * You can read the caterpillar essay here: Science Fiction Horror in a Suburban GarageOn parasitism, possession, and the collector who became the collectedLouche LeavesDenise Choppin

Picture this: A boy skating. A larger boy approaching quickly from behind. A deliberate shove. The smaller boy goes down — no drama, no action-movie slide, just head first into the ice. And he does not move. He is unconscious. It happened sometime in 2015, memorialized, of all places, on a Judge Judy television court case called, rather blandly, _“Hockey Violence Victim.”_ The Internet Movie Database describes it benignly as a case where “fathers go to court to settle a liability case involving their two sons, after one of the kids is accused of purposely injuring the other in a hockey game,” noting that “the incident resulted in one child causing another’s concussion.” But there is nothing benign about a boy who does not move. There is nothing benign about what preceded that moment, what followed it, or what surrounded it — in the stands, in the courtroom, and in the years since. Though the episode aired in 2015, I viewed it only recently. Eleven years have passed since these events occurred, and I cannot help but wonder what led to them. What was really happening on the ice, in the stands, in the courtroom, and in the aftermath? And how many victims are there, beyond the boy who did not move? This essay explores those questions, my reactions, and the reactions of others who, like me, are strangers to these events, yet not untouched by them. “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” In 1978, the comedian Rodney Dangerfield quipped to a roomful of laughing people: “I went to a fight the other night, and a hockey game broke out.” The joke is still quoted today, still considered funny. It is worth pausing on what that laughter meant then and means now — not because a comedian caused anything, but because collective laughter is how a culture confirms to itself what it already believes. Nobody laughs at a joke that doesn’t land on something familiar. The room laughed because they recognized the truth in it, and in recognizing it, ratified it. An ancient proverb says the dogs bark, but the caravan moves on. It is Middle Eastern in origin, and was given a kind of literary currency by Truman Capote — which is worth noting here. Capote was, by his own admission, small, physically unimposing, and bullied as a child. He became, nonetheless, one of the most consequential writers of the twentieth century. The caravan did not drown him out. I make no such claims for this essay. But I will continue barking. The comedy club patrons laughed, the caravan moves on, but my reaction in 2026 to the events of the 2015 Judge Judy episode was neither humour nor resignation. While watching the show, my emotions went from mounting horror, combined with a growing lump in my throat, to becoming jumpy, then angry, and then feeling my anger curdling into anguish. To understand why, you need to see what I saw. The courtroom scene begins with the entrance of the plaintiff and his son; we’ll call the father Dave and his son Tim. Dave is serious, quiet, measured in his speech. His son is small and alert, standing close beside him. They are followed by the defendant, the father of another boy, the boy himself, and his hockey coach. We’ll call the father Craig, his son Bud, and the third man simply Coach. Craig enters with a swagger. Bud is visibly jittery — bright and alert, as Tim is, but carrying something Tim is not. Coach matches Craig’s swagger, step for step. The case is straightforward in its outline, if not in its implications. Dave is suing Craig for Tim’s medical bills and emotional damages resulting from what he maintains was a violent and unprovoked blow during a youth hockey game. Specifically, Dave alleges that Bud skated up behind Tim and shoved him deliberately from behind, driving him headfirst into the ice. Tim lost consciousness immediately and was later diagnosed with a concussion. Young Tim is called to the stand. Questioned by Judge Judy, he described what happened with a clarity and composure remarkable for a boy I estimate to be around ten or eleven years old. He was skating past the blue line. He was hit from behind. After that, he remembers nothing until he woke up elsewhere on the ice. He had never had any conflict with Bud before. There was nothing evasive in Tim’s account, nothing performative. He simply tells what he knows and stops where his knowledge ends. Then Bud takes the stand. He is around the same age as Tim but considerably larger and stockier. He is also well-spoken, with nothing dim or cruel in his face. But whereas Tim is still, Bud is not. He fidgets and twitches. His eyes move toward his father. He tells Judge Judy that Tim had repeatedly struck him in an unprotected area of his legs with his hockey stick, and that the shove was not an attack but a defensive reflex, to stop another blow from coming. It is a complete and detailed account. It is also, as we will see, a lie. Dave proffers a DVD recording of the incident. Judge Judy watches. The court watches. We in the audience watch. The sequence is brief and without ambiguity. Several boys from both teams skate briskly past the blue line. Tim near the front of the group, moving towards the opposing goal. Then Bud enters the frame from behind, approaching with a speed that is purposeful and deliberate. He shoves Tim hard, causing him to fall headfirst onto the ice. Tim does not move. There is no stick. There is no provocation, no defensive reflex. Tim was not hitting anyone, not threatening anyone. Tim was just skating. Every justification Bud offered was a lie. The video does not editorialize. It does not need to. It simply shows a boy skating and then a boy on the ice who is not moving, and the moment between those two things, which takes perhaps two seconds and which cannot be explained away by anything Bud said on that stand. The fabrication is total. Did Tim hit Bud with his stick? No. Was Tim about to hit him again? No. Was the shove defensive ? No. What the DVD shows instead is a larger boy who saw a smaller boy and made a choice. The camera finds Craig as the DVD plays. He is fidgeting, but differently from his son — where Bud’s fidgeting reads as distress, Craig’s reads as frustration. He rolls his eyes. When the video concludes, he blusters. > You’re not seeing the whole picture. Tim had been hitting my son. This is hockey. It’s a contact sport. Judge Judy asks whether Craig has footage of Tim’s alleged attacks on Bud — another DVD, another recording, something? Craig explains that he wasn’t able to obtain it. The tapes are only kept for so long. He wasn’t expecting litigation. There is a great deal contained in that explanation. He was not expecting to have to prove what he is nonetheless insisting is true. Coach is called to testify. He reiterates the contact sport nature of hockey with the authority of someone who has said it many times and found it sufficient. Then, reluctantly, as though the word costs him something, he admits that Bud was suspended. One game. He does not explain how a suspension follows from conduct that broke no rules. Craig continued to insist that Bud had broken no rules. That the hit was justified. That checking happens, that hits happen, that this is the game played as it is supposed to be played. The bluster had by now taken on a quality less of argument than of incantation — the same words repeated with increasing force as though volume might accomplish what evidence could not. Then Judge Judy asked Craig a hypothetical question: If Tim had died as a result of the hit — if that boy on the ice had not woken up — would Craig’s opinion of the matter change in any way? Craig leaned forward. His hands gripped the stand. And in a voice that was loud and clear and left no room for misunderstanding, he said no. Without hesitation. No qualification. Not the pause of a man who had not considered the question and needed a moment to find his honest answer. Just no. Immediate and certain and offered without apparent cost. There are moments in a courtroom — even a television courtroom, even on a show whose usual register is comic and whose usual stakes are recoverable — where the air changes. This was one of them. A man had just been asked whether the death of a child would alter his assessment of his son’s conduct, and he had answered the question as though it were easy. Perhaps, for him, it was. At some point Judge Judy asks whether Craig and Coach need to see the DVD again. Both reply that they have seen it 60 times already. They do not need to see it again. This is offered as irritation rather than absorbed as information — 60 viewings and the eye-rolling continues, 60 viewings and the bluster remains intact. The DVD has not moved them because it was never going to move them. What it showed was not, in their framework, evidence of wrongdoing. It was hockey. Throughout all of this, Bud is shaking. His eyes move constantly — to his father, to the judge, to the screen, to the floor. He is visibly intelligent, and intelligence at that moment is not a comfort. He can see exactly what is happening. The story he told belied the DVD, in a room full of people who watched it, next to a father who is now performing outrage, rather than absorbing consequences. Whatever Bud is feeling, he is feeling it alone. The ruling comes. Craig must pay Tim’s medical bills. Further damages are denied — Judge Judy noted that some expectation of injury exists in junior hockey. It is a partial ruling, measured and defensible within the law. Whether it is sufficient is another question, and one the law is not designed to answer. Then Craig gives his post-trial interview. “He should be doing ballet instead.” In it, Craig fumes — though more quietly now, with the resignation of a man who considers the verdict an inconvenience rather than a consequence. He is not chastened, nor reflective. He is as certain as he has been throughout that he is right and righteous, and the interview is merely an opportunity to restate what he considers obvious. > “It’s all hogwash,” he says. “It’s hockey.” And then, casually dismissive, he delivers his verdict on Tim — on Tim’s father, on the lawsuit, on the concern, on the concussion, on the boy who did not move on the ice. > “If the boy can’t handle hockey,” Craig says, “he should be doing ballet instead.” Ballet. The word lands like a verdict of its own. In one breath, Craig has dismissed a child’s unconscious body as weakness, recast a traumatic brain injury as a failure of masculinity, and implied that the appropriate response to being hurt is not recovery but humiliation. The boy should be doing ballet. Not: I’m sorry my son hurt your son. Not: I watched that DVD 60 times and I understand what it shows. Just ballet — offered with the confidence of a man who has never once considered that he might be the problem. No other participant gave an interview. That silence is its own statement. Dave did not need to say more. Coach had nothing left to offer. And Bud — Bud, shaking, and glancing, and carrying something no child should have to carry in a television courtroom — Bud said nothing. Which may have been the wisest thing anyone did that day. “They’re playing hockey for Christ’s sake.” That was 2015. The episode is difficult to find now — the video has not aged into easy accessibility the way most television does. But a poorly captured segment surfaced on Facebook, and beneath it, a comment that stopped me. > “They’re playing hockey for Christ’s sake.” Seven words. The caravan moves on. The commenter’s Facebook profile is public. He is, by every visible measure, a devout Christian, fiercely pro-military, and deeply involved in sports. He is, in other words, precisely the kind of man who considers himself a guardian of values — of faith, of sacrifice, of competitive spirit. Of the things worth protecting. Elsewhere on his public page, he has written: > “Some people are too stupid to live, so don’t even entertain their conversation.” He has also shared a comic image in the style of a family newspaper cartoon — the wholesome, rounded aesthetic of Family Circle, the kind of comic that has appeared on refrigerators in family kitchens for generations. In this version, a boy has punched a younger, smaller child into unconsciousness. The caption reads: “He coughed on me, so I social-distanced his ass.” And he has posted the following, offered here exactly as written: > “If you can read this thank a teacher. If your reading this in english thank a Vet.” It would be easy — too easy — to pause on the irony that a post venerating the protection of literacy and education is itself carelessly written. That observation, taken alone, is merely point-scoring. What is worth noting is what the carelessness reveals: that what is being valorized is not education as a living practice — not careful thought, not precise expression, not the patient work of understanding — but education as a symbol, a thing worth protecting in the abstract while remaining largely indifferent to in the particular. Just as what is valorized in the hockey context is not the children playing but the cultural identity the sport represents. In both cases, the symbol is everything. The human reality behind it is negotiable. Taken together, this man’s public page sketches a coherent worldview, one in which certain people and certain kinds of harm fall outside moral consideration entirely. The child rendered unconscious in the comic is a punchline. The people too stupid to live are not worth engaging. And Tim, unconscious and not moving on the ice, is just a boy who should have been doing ballet. I want to be clear: this man is not a villain. He is an archetype. He is recognizable in the particular shape of his convictions, his blind spots, and in his casual cruelties, not rare at all. That is precisely the point. Craig did not emerge from nowhere. The Facebook commenter did not emerge from nowhere. They are produced by something, sustained by something, and that something is what this essay is attempting to name. So who are the victims? Tim is the easiest to identify. Concussed. Injured. Not moving on the ice. A boy who woke up somewhere else with no memory of how he got there. But it is also easy, too easy, to look at his composed, articulate testimony and conclude that he is fine. That he was a victim, past tense, and has since recovered and moved on. Children are resilient, we tell ourselves. He seemed all right. But consider what Tim carried out of that experience beyond the concussion itself. He woke up in a hospital room and looked into his parents’ eyes. What did he feel at that moment — frightened, certainly, but also perhaps something smaller and more corrosive? Embarrassed. Less, somehow, than he had been before he went down. Less of a little man, in the language of the world he was being raised in. He then had to watch the video of what had been done to him, to see himself fall, to see himself not move, to witness his own helplessness played back in a courtroom. He had to sit and listen while the father of the boy who hurt him rolled his eyes, to absorb the information, delivered publicly and without apology, that Craig considered him beneath concern. Later, after the court case, he heard that if he couldn’t handle hockey he should be doing ballet. He is in his twenties now. Does he still play hockey? Does he play any sport? Is there now a wariness that he carries somewhere in his body that wasn’t there before — a flinch, a hesitation, something that surfaces in loud rooms or in moments of unexpected physical contact? Does he know, as the research suggests he might, that his concussion placed him at elevated risk for depression, for anxiety, for difficulties he may never have connected to an afternoon on the ice when he was ten or eleven years old? We cannot know. But the questions are not rhetorical. They are the questions that trail every child who has been through what Tim went through, regardless of whether anyone thinks to ask them. Dave is a victim too, and his victim-hood is of a kind that receives almost no attention. Consider what it is to be Tim’s father in that sequence of events. To receive the call, or to be there at the rink, and to see your child unconscious on the ice. To ride to the hospital not knowing. To look at your child in a hospital bed and to understand, in the particular way that parents understand things that cannot be unfelt, that you put him there — not through malice, not through negligence, but through the ordinary act of signing him up for the sport that children in this country play, a sport that is simply what boys do. Did Dave blame himself? Does he still? Did he stand in some hospital corridor asking himself whether he had made a terrible mistake in letting Tim play? To then face the secondary anguish of knowing that even asking it means accepting a framework by which children should be kept from the ice for fear of other children’s fathers? And then there was the courtroom. Dave sat through Craig’s bluster, Craig’s eye-rolling, Craig’s certainty, and Coach’s reluctant admission of a suspension that apparently meant nothing. He sat through the ballet comment. He had brought his son to court to seek accountability and received instead a masterclass in its absence, delivered with swagger, in front of his child. Did he regret it? Did he lie awake afterwards wondering whether the lesson Tim took from the courtroom was not that justice exists and can be sought, but that certain men are simply immune to it, and that the world will largely let them be? Then there is Bud. Shaking, jittery, well-spoken Bud. Bud who is also in his twenties now. Bud who took that stand and delivered a detailed and polished lie, as the video that disproved it sat in a DVD player across the room. How many rehearsals did that lie need? How many evenings at the kitchen table with Craig, running through the sequence — Tim hit me first, I was defending myself, I pushed him to get him away — until it came out smoothly enough to say in front of a judge? And what happened afterwards, when the lie unravelled? Was there a reckoning at home, or was the verdict simply absorbed into the same framework that produced the lie — more hogwash, more injustice, more evidence that the world fails to understand what hockey is? Bud did not ask to be placed in that position. He did not ask to be coached to lie about something that had been recorded, in a room full of people who viewed the recording. He did not ask for a father whose response to a child’s unconscious body was an eye-roll. Handed a moral framework before he was old enough to question it, he was then placed in a courtroom where it collapsed completely, publicly. He was given nothing — no language, no permission, no model — with which to respond honestly. Does Bud swagger now? Has he coarsened, over eleven years, into some version of Craig — the same certainty, the same eye-roll, the same capacity to look at suffering and find it irrelevant? Or did something in that courtroom reach him — the judge’s directness, the DVD’s silence, perhaps even Tim’s composure — and plant something that grew, slowly and without fanfare, into a different way of being in the world? We cannot know. But the question matters, because Bud is not a villain. He was a child who was failed, comprehensively and publicly, by the adult who was most responsible for him. And then there is Craig. Craig is not a monster. That would be simpler. A monster is a creature of pure malevolence, uncomplicated by history or context, something that emerged from darkness fully formed and can therefore be defeated or at least identified and avoided. Craig does not have that clarity. Craig is something harder to name and harder to address — a man who sees pain and does not care, which is not the same thing as a man who wants to cause pain. The indifference is, in some ways, more troubling than cruelty would be. Cruelty at least acknowledges that something is happening. Indifference does not even grant the suffering that much. The Facebook commenter is the same breed. “They’re playing hockey for Christ’s sake.” Seven words that perform the same function as Craig’s eye-roll — not malice exactly, but a practised, almost reflexive capacity to look at a child’s suffering and find it beneath serious consideration. He, too, could be called a monster. He, too, is not one. Because the question that neither Craig nor the Facebook commenter invites — the question that is nonetheless necessary — is what was done to them. Nobody is born with the ability to watch a child go headfirst into the ice and feel nothing but irritation at the inconvenience of being held accountable for it. That capacity is learned. It is taught, the way Bud was taught to lie, the way Tim was taught to be composed, the way children are always taught the emotional vocabularies available to them by the adults who surround them. Craig was a boy once. The Facebook commenter was a boy once. Something happened to those boys — in arenas, in households, in the particular currents of masculinity that ran through their childhoods — that produced the men visible in that courtroom and in that comment section. We do not know what it was. But it was something, and it was done to them, and they did not choose it any more than Bud chose his. The Facebook commenter has a large family. He has sons and daughters. His daughters are involved in competitive gymnastics — a sport that demands discipline, precision, physical courage, and an intimate relationship with pain. One can only hope that the same framework he applied to Tim on the ice — they’re playing hockey for Christ’s sake, toughen up, this is what sport is — does not get applied to a daughter on a mat or a beam, nursing an injury she has been taught not to acknowledge, performing through pain because the alternative is weakness, because weakness is ballet. Does he not appreciate that ballet is as physically demanding an activity as gymnastics — or hockey? The damage, in other words, does not stop with the person who first received it. It is passed forward; it is passed down. It moves through families, through arenas, through comment sections, through courtrooms, and through the long silence of children who have learned that their pain does not count, and who will eventually teach that lesson to children of their own. And Craig. What of Craig at three in the morning? There is a particular kind of wakefulness that arrives in the small hours — not insomnia exactly, but a loosening of the daytime certainties, a moment when the bluster is unavailable and something quieter and more honest surfaces briefly before being suppressed again. Does Craig have those moments? Does he lie in the dark and recall the video — the boy skating, the shove, the stillness — and feel something shift in himself, some spiritual heartburn that no amount of righteousness can fully settle? Does he hear Judge Judy’s hypothetical question and his own answer and find, in the undefended hours of the night, that the answer costs him something after all? We cannot know. It is possible that he sleeps soundly, secure in his certainty, the verdict merely one more injustice in a world that has always failed to understand what he understands. It is possible that the framework is so complete, so thoroughly constructed over so many years, that nothing penetrates it — not a DVD, not a judge, not a child motionless on the ice. But it is also possible — and this is the hope that the essay cannot quite relinquish — that somewhere in Craig is the boy who was taught not to care, and that the boy occasionally surfaces, and that the surfacing costs him something real, even if he has no language for it and no one to tell. He was not born a monster, because monsters are not born; they are made. And the making of them is itself harrowing — quieter than what happened to Tim on the ice, less visible, less documented, but harrowing nonetheless. One that began long before a boy skated past the blue line in 2015, and that will continue long after this essay is finished, and the caravan has moved on. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── I have no conclusion. This is not an oversight or a failure of craft. It is the only honest thing left to say. A conclusion would imply resolution, and there is none. A conclusion would imply that the analysis has arrived somewhere, that naming the problem has contained it, that the caravan has been slowed, if not stopped. But it has not. The caravan moves on. It moved on before Rodney Dangerfield got a laugh in 1978. It moved on before Tim skated past the blue line in 2015. It is moving on right now, in arenas across this country, in households where boys are being taught what their pain is worth and what other people’s pain is worth, which is to say nothing, which is to say ballet, which is to say they’re playing hockey for Christ’s sake. I can only speak for myself. I watched a Judge Judy episode. I watched a boy go headfirst into the ice and not move. I watched a father roll his eyes. I watched another boy shake and glance toward that father and lie in a courtroom because he had been given no other option. I watched a coach sit with no expression. I watched a man be asked whether the death of a child would change his mind and answer, immediately and without cost, no. And I wept. Not the dignified welling of tears that essays are permitted. Actually wept — for Tim, for Bud, for Dave watching his son on the ice and in the hospital and in the courtroom. For Craig, God help me, for whatever was done to him that made him the man in that room. For the Facebook commenter’s daughters on their gymnastics mats. For every child in every arena who has been taught that their suffering is weakness and other people’s suffering is irrelevant. For the boys who become men who become fathers who become Craig. For the fact that none of this is new and none of this is rare and all of it, in its quiet and its ordinary and Tuesday afternoon way, is harrowing. I have no remedy to offer. I have no policy prescription, no intervention program, no five-point plan for the cultural transformation of minor hockey. Wiser people have proposed those things and the caravan has noted them, yet moved on. Because weeping is not nothing. What I have is this: the hope that someone reading these words will recognize something — in the courtroom, in the comment section, in the arena, in themselves — and will feel, if only briefly, what I felt. The lump in the throat. The anger that cannot stay anger. The anguish that has nowhere to go. Because weeping is not nothing. Weeping is the moment when the anaesthetic fails and the reality of other people’s suffering arrives in the body as a fact, rather than an abstraction. It is the opposite of an eye-roll. It is, perhaps, the beginning of the only thing that has ever actually changed anything — the insistence, maintained against all convenience and against the movement of every caravan, that what happened to that boy on the ice mattered. It mattered. He was skating. And then he was not moving. And that is not hockey. That is a child.

It is odd to think that a humble duck call is, technically, a woodwind instrument. You will not find one in an orchestra, nor is there sheet music composed for it — no _Song of the Duck Call_ , no _Duck Call Symphony, Opus 10_. And yet it has music, poetry, history, and in the case of my duck call, considerably more. I own a duck call. A modest object, hardly a museum quality item worthy of velvet cushion reverence. It is about five inches (13 cm) long and close to three-quarters of an inch (2 cm) in diameter. It is black, has a reed inside, and has been in this house for as long as I can remember. I have written elsewhere about the ducks that return to our backyard each spring, and about my husband, who is what I can only describe as a duck-whisperer — a man who speaks something close enough to duck-speak that the ducks themselves appear convinced. He uses the call to talk to them. They answer. Neither party requires a shared vocabulary to sustain the relationship. While watching him do this one April morning, I began to think about the instrument itself. About what it is, and where it came from, and how far it had travelled to end up here, near a creek in Port Credit, calling mallards to a suburban backyard. As it turns out: very far indeed. In several senses of the word. ## If My Duck Call Could Talk If my duck call could tell me its own particular history, it would speak of the Illinois River valley and its journey to Mississauga, Ontario. But if we were to probe more deeply — and probe we shall — we would need to begin somewhere much older than Illinois, much older than Ontario, much older, in fact, than even the idea of a duck call. There is research suggesting that instruments made specifically to attract or repel birds and fowl date back twelve thousand years. These instruments were fashioned from bone, both mammal and human. Similar in principle to whistles, they are scientifically classified as aerophones. It is a fine word for a humble object, meaning a voice made of air. Which is, when you consider it, precisely what a duck call is. My duck call, however, has a rather more specific and recent origin. It was made in 1904 — which makes it, as of this writing, one hundred and twenty-two years old. I know this not through family records, but through forensics. On its side, it reads “ _P.S. Olt_.” It also reads “ _Patent Applied”_ — not “ _Patent Pending”_ or “ _Patent Granted_.” Philip Sanford Olt received his patent in 1905. He had only switched from wood to hard rubber in 1904. In other words, my duck call was made during a very narrow window of time: after the material changed, but before the patent came through. It is, by any measure, a first-year model. ## The Material My duck call is made of ebonite, which is the name given to hard rubber in contexts where the material earns a more distinguished title. What identifies it is a combination of physical qualities and simple tests that any curious person can perform at the kitchen table. Ebonite is black or very dark brown. It is smooth and slightly warm to the touch — warmer than plastic, which is one of the things that distinguishes it. It is hard but not brittle, and develops a brownish oxidation over time. When rubbed vigorously on the palm of the hand, it emits a faint and unmistakable smell of sulphur, and becomes slightly glossier. When tapped, it sounds duller than plastic — a deeper, more considered sound, as though it has more to say and is in no hurry to say it. The name _ebonite_ was chosen to reflect the material’s resemblance to ebony wood: the same density of colour, the same quality of darkness. It is used still — in high-end fountain pens, musical instrument mouthpieces (the clarinet’s, in particular), specialty industrial parts, and vintage bowling balls. These are objects that share with the duck call a certain requirement: that the material be warm in the hand, precise in the machining, and in no way brittle. Objects that are meant to last, and do. The clarinet mouthpiece connection is one I find especially pleasing. My duck call is a woodwind instrument made of the same material as other woodwind instruments. One is played in concert halls; the other is played in marshes. The material makes no such distinctions. ## Where the Rubber Meets the Road To understand where ebonite comes from, one must begin with natural rubber, which begins — in the case of my duck call, almost certainly — in the Amazon. Ebonite starts as latex, the sap of _Hevea brasiliensis_ , the rubber tree. These trees grow in tropical regions: Southeast Asia, parts of Africa, South America. By 1904, plantation cultivation of rubber was underway in Southeast Asia; the British had smuggled seeds out of Brazil in 1876, germinated them at Kew Gardens, and shipped the seedlings to Ceylon and Malaya. But those plantations only became significant sources of supply in the late 1880s and 1890s. The rubber in my duck call almost certainly predates them, which means it almost certainly came from the Amazon — from the great Brazilian rubber boom that ran from roughly the 1850s to the early 1900s, when wild Amazonian trees were tapped by _seringueiros,_ who travelled deep into the rainforest following established routes between trees they had learned to find. Those trees were not young. Wild _Hevea brasiliensis_ can live well over a century. The trees tapped in the 1880s and 1890s could easily have been saplings in the 1700s. It is well within the reach of possibility that the tree whose latex became my duck call was quietly growing in the Amazon rainforest while Mozart was composing, while the American Revolution was being fought, while the world that would eventually produce Philip Olt and his chicken coop in Pekin, Illinois was still a long way from existing. I find this worth sitting with for a moment. The rubber boom of the Amazon was not, it should be noted, a benign or innocent enterprise. It was built on exploitation, brutality, and the enslavement of indigenous peoples — a dark history that is very much part of my duck call’s story, even if its full telling lies beyond the scope of this essay. It would be dishonest not to say so. From the Amazon, the raw latex — coagulated into balls or slabs of crude rubber by smoking over fires — would have made its way by canoe along the river’s vast network of tributaries to the great export port of Belém do Pará at the mouth of the Amazon. From Belém, by cargo ship across the Atlantic to the eastern seaboard of the United States. Then, by rail, on to Akron, Ohio — which, by 1898, had established itself as the rubber capital of the world. The Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company had been founded there that year, named in honour of Charles Goodyear, who had discovered the process of vulcanization in 1839: the treatment of rubber with sulphur under heat that transforms soft, unstable latex into a durable material. When the sulphur content is pushed very high (from 25 up to 80%) and the curing time extended, the result is ebonite. Akron, in other words, is where the rubber hits the road. Quite literally, in the case of a company whose name would become synonymous with tires. And in the case of my duck call — where the raw material arrived from one Ohio-adjacent city and made its way to a craftsman’s workshop in another — it was in every practical sense an Ohio product from the moment it reached American soil. ## Mitochondrial DNA Ebonite requires two ingredients beyond rubber: sulphur and linseed oil. These are, in a sense, the mitochondrial DNA of my duck call — ancient, invisible, and largely unremarked upon, yet carrying within them histories that dwarf everything else in its biography. The sulphur in an early twentieth-century American rubber product almost certainly came from the Gulf Coast — from Louisiana or Texas, where the Frasch process, first successfully deployed in 1894, allowed vast underground deposits to be extracted by pumping super-heated water down to melt the sulphur and force it to the surface. Prior to this, Sicily had been the world’s primary supplier. The American deposits displaced Sicilian sulphur for American manufacturers almost overnight. Those Gulf Coast sulphur deposits formed long ago in the porous rock just above vast underground salt domes. The salt domes themselves were created over 100-150 million years ago, when the Gulf Coast region was a shallow, repeatedly evaporating sea. As the seawater evaporated in cycles, it left behind deposits of rock salt. Over millions of years buried under sediment, the salt slowly pushed upward through the denser layers of rock above, forming domes. The sulphur came later: as petroleum and gas migrated through the rock and encountered these domes, sulphate-reducing bacteria deposited pure elemental sulphur in the surrounding rock. An ancient sea. Ancient microbes. Tens of millions of years of unhurried geological time, stored in the walls of a five-inch black tube. There is a thread here that runs through the entire essay and I do not think it is accidental: the sulphur comes from vanished seas. The rubber came down Amazonian rivers. The duck call ends its life near a creek. It is, from first geological origin to final purpose, a creature of water. The linseed oil implicates a different geography. Linseed oil is pressed from flaxseed, and flax — _Linum usitatissimum_ — is not native to North America. It is one of the oldest cultivated plants in human history, originating in the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq, and the surrounding region, including Syria and Türkiye. There is archaeological evidence of flax cultivation dating back thirty thousand years; it was certainly being deliberately grown and harvested in the tenth to eighth centuries BCE. The ancient Egyptians cultivated it extensively. European colonists — British, Irish, Dutch — brought it to North America in the early 1600s, and it migrated west with settlement until it found the deep rich soils of the Midwest ideally suited to large-scale production. By 1904, the linseed oil Goodyear needed was being produced nearby in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. A tree from the 1700s Amazon. A sea that vanished 100 million years ago. A crop first grown in the ancient Fertile Crescent. All of it converging in an Akron factory, and from there to a workshop in Pekin, Illinois, and from there to a small black object sitting on a shelf in Port Credit, Ontario. ## A Man in a Chicken Coop Philip Sanford Olt was born in 1870 in Illinois, of German descent, and spent his early years farming in the Illinois River valley near Pekin. Olt was well known locally as a wing shot of considerable skill. His old Lefever Damascus double-barrel with the pistol grip wrapped in copper wire still hung in the factory long after his death. The Illinois River was one of the richest waterfowl hunting regions in North America, sitting squarely in the heart of the great Mississippi River flyway. This whole ecosystem of river, floodplain lakes, prairie marshes, ponds, and backwater sloughs, stretches from near Lake Michigan to the Mississippi at Grafton in southern Illinois. Olt was not, by any available evidence, a formally trained engineer. He fits instead what might be called a classic archetype: self-taught, hands-on, focused entirely on what works. He first started making duck calls in the late 1800s, working from a converted chicken coop on the family farm, where he incrementally refined his hand-made instrument, solving problems he encountered each morning in the marsh. The first duck calls available to him were rough copies of a design by the mysterious Frenchman Vit Glodo, made in southern Illinois around 1860. Olt didn’t think much of them. The brass reed material varied wildly in temper and hardness — a reed bent even slightly more than it should was useless. And wooden calls quickly became soaked with moisture from condensed breath and saliva, swelling and warping, sliding out of tune at the worst possible moments. Olt came up with the opposite of the Glodo design — a straight reed and curved reed base, which meant that once the contour was ground into the base, a straight reed would be easy to keep in tune, and simple to replace in the field. And he chose a different material entirely for the barrel and the tonal plug: hard rubber. Hard rubber, he understood, had remarkable dimensional stability in cold weather and an almost complete lack of moisture absorption. A hard rubber call submerged in water for a year absorbs less than one percent moisture. There are recorded instances of Olt duck calls recovered from lakes and swamps after twenty-five years underwater, cleaned out, and found to be in working condition. Whether or not this was Olt’s intention when he made the switch, it is a kind of immortality. The original reed in the D-2 and other early Olt calls was spring sheet hard rubber — approximately 0.012 inches (0.3 mm) thick. Not brass, as I had initially assumed: ebonite, vibrating against ebonite. My duck call is, in its essentials, a single material: ancient Amazonian rubber tree, transformed. The first model he produced for sale was the D-2 Regular, in 1904. He sold six hundred that year. A legend began — though it would not have looked like one from the chicken coop. ## The Journey I do not know how my grandfather came to own this particular duck call. What I know is that the gap between Pekin, Illinois in 1904, and my grandfather’s hands is — like many gaps in family history — filled with plausible inference and honest uncertainty. My grandfather, Frederick Choppin, was born in Germany, in 1886. He is, in this respect, a quiet echo of Philip Olt: both men of German descent, one making the call, one eventually owning it, neither aware of the other’s existence. Frederick immigrated to Canada from England in 1905 — one year after the call was made — and appears in the 1906 Nominal Rolls and Paylists for the Volunteer Militia, 24th Regiment, Kent, Ontario, and then in London, Ontario. The 1911 census shows him at Wolseley Barracks in London, occupation: soldier. From London, he moved to Winnipeg Manitoba, from there to Ottawa Ontario, and then transferred between 1920 and 1923 to Saint John, New Brunswick. From Saint John, the family eventually moved to Pembroke, Ontario, where Frederick died in the 1930s. The duck call was most likely acquired by an Ohio hunter — perhaps with military associations — who brought it across the border into Canada, where it passed, by some route I cannot reconstruct, into my grandfather’s possession. As much as I want, not every thread can be tied. The call existed before Frederick came to own it; it outlasted him, and that will have to be enough. When Frederick died, the call passed to my father, Harold, who was born in Ottawa in 1920, and had grown up with the object, likely without thinking much about it. Harold brought it with him to Ottawa in the 1950s. Then to Detroit, from about 1956 to 1960. Then to Etobicoke in 1960, and Mississauga in 1961. In 1974, he moved to Italy — first to Castelfranco Veneto, then to Treviso, then to Novellara in Reggio Emilia — and the duck call, I know, went with him. I saw it sitting on a shelf in the Veneto, far from any duck marsh, waiting with the particular patience of objects that have learned to outlast things. In the mid-1980s, Harold and the duck call returned to Mississauga — to the same house in Port Credit, beside Cooksville Creek, where he had lived in 1961. When he died in 2005, I inherited the call and brought it to my home in Clarkson, and in 2006 moved back to the Port Credit house, beside the creek, where it has been ever since. All these places, the duck call has been. Ohio, London, Kent, Winnipeg, Ottawa, St. John, Port Credit, Clarkson, Treviso, Castelfrano, Novellara… I know without any doubt, that its two-note song was heard in all those places. Three continents: South America, in the Amazon where the rubber tree grew. Europe, in the Fertile Crescent where the flax was first cultivated, and in the Italy where Harold carried it for a decade. North America, where all the threads converged — in Akron, in Pekin, and at military postings, and family migrations that finally brought it here. Harold himself crossed all three, and the call crossed them with him, as though it had always been his to carry. ## Our Breath There is a thought experiment sometimes called _Caesar’s Last Breath_ : the argument that the atmosphere is so thoroughly mixed over time that any breath you take likely contains at least one molecule exhaled by Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra, or any figure from history you care to name. The molecules are still here, circulating, redistributed across the centuries. The interior of a duck call is a more intimate version of this. My duck call has been blown by, to my knowledge, only ten people across one hundred and twenty-two years: my grandfather Frederick; my grandmother Jessie; my father Harold; his sister, my aunt; my mother; my first husband; myself; my second husband; and my two children. A small circle; a known circle — some of them, no longer living — and whose breath, by the logic of Caesar’s last breath, is still here, still circulating, still present in some molecular sense inside that five-inch black tube. None of them were hunters. I want to be clear about this. Every person in my family who ever blew into this call did so to watch the ducks, or to speak to them, or out of simple curiosity about the sound it made. It has never, in this family, been used to kill anything. It has only ever been used to call. This seems right to me. It seems in keeping with what the object has become, over the course of its long and improbable life. A duck call is, technically, a woodwind instrument. It will not be found in an orchestra. There is no sheet music composed for it. But it carries, in its small black body, the compressed history of an Amazon tree that may have been a sapling in the 1700s, of seas that vanished more than 100 million years ago, of a crop first grown in the ancient Fertile Crescent, of a self-taught craftsman in a chicken coop in Illinois, of a German-born soldier navigating the institutions of a new country, of a man who carried it across three continents and back, and of the breath of everyone who ever raised it to their lips and called out across the water, not to kill, but to be answered. My husband stands at the back window. The ducks are on the pool tarp. He calls to them; they call back. Neither party requires anything more than this — the sound, crossing the water, with a fellow earthling on the other side hearing it. * * * _This essay is the companion piece to****_ The Return of the Ducks _and was written in part while remembering my father, who, on this day, May 2 nd, 1920, was born._ The Return of the DucksOn homecoming — theirs and mine — and the land that holds us all without distinction.Louche LeavesDenise Choppin

## That Was Then, This is Now Originally I lived in this house from 1961 to 1974. I do not remember the highway. That is not the same as saying it wasn't there. It was — a modest artery then, carrying modest mid-century traffic between places that people went in the daytime. It had a rhythm; it stopped at night. As, in the way of all things we grow up with, it was simply part of the texture of being here, unremarkable as the sound of the furnace or the particular creak of the third stair. I returned in 2005. Thirty-one years later, and the house was the same — same bones, same rooms, same light in the kitchen in the morning. But something had changed, and it took me less than a night to locate it. The highway had not merely grown busier. Traffic had become continuous. Somewhere between my leaving and my returning, it had crossed a threshold I cannot precisely identify and become a permanent condition — twenty-four hours, seven days, no intermission, no dark between movements. It had become, without ceremony or announcement, the ground bass of everything. ## Is It Just Me? I noticed immediately. My neighbours, some long-settled and some quite new, do not notice at all. Whenever I raise the subject, they tilt their heads with the expression of someone trying to remember a word, and say “ _oh yes, there is some background noise, isn't there?”_ — and, just as often, say they hear nothing. They are not being dishonest. They genuinely do not hear it; the brain, confronted with a non-threatening sound that never varies and never stops, eventually performs an act of quiet mercy and simply edits it out. The cortex stops filing the reports. Life becomes more manageable. Mine has not done this. I have wondered why. ## A Strange Paradox of Hearing Loss I am close to seventy, and I have the hearing that age delivers: the upper frequencies have gone soft, the high shimmer of the world somewhat reduced. What remains — and what no amount of age seems to touch — is the lower register. The bass. The fundamental. And this is precisely where the highway lives most completely and most physically. Tire friction against asphalt peaks somewhere between 800 and 1,200 Hz — a mid-range rasp — but beneath that, the trucks generate infrasound: frequencies below the threshold of hearing, below 20 Hz, that the ear cannot name, yet the body receives anyway. Through the soles of the feet. Through the sternum. Through the back teeth, on a quiet morning, when you are paying attention. I am, it seems, constitutionally well-suited to hear exactly the part of the highway that most people’s ears and brains jointly conspire to ignore. Age has not made me less sensitive to it. It has made me more so — tuned, involuntarily, to its lowest and most penetrating frequencies, the ones felt rather than heard, the ones that do not announce themselves but simply arrive and remain. This is not a complaint I make easily. I am not a fragile person. ## A Symphony of Purposelessness What troubles me is not the sound itself. This is the part that is hardest to explain, and most necessary to try. The notes are innocent. A diesel engine turning at 1,500 rpm is just physics. Tire contact with aggregate is just chemistry and rubber finding each other briefly and parting. The squeal of air brakes is compressed gas returning to equilibrium. None of these sounds is wrong. Isolated, in another context, they might even be interesting — the way industrial machinery in a museum becomes almost beautiful, the way a recording of a factory floor, played in a gallery, becomes contemplative. I do not object to the frequencies. I do not object to the decibels. What I object to — ‘ _object’_ is too mild a word, but I will return to that — about this noise is its without-end. Without-meaning. Without-consent. ## Modal Movement in B Flat It is a modal voice. I mean this in the musical sense: modal music is not quite major, not quite minor, suspended in a harmonic territory that neither resolves nor departs. It simply persists, unanchored, refusing to arrive anywhere. The highway is exactly this — a vast, unwelcome drone in no key the ear can discern, produced by ten thousand individual purposes that cancel each other into collective purposelessness. Every driver is going somewhere specific, meaning something particular. Together, they produce a sound that means nothing at all. It is the roar of modern purposefulness, generating a noise of total purposelessness. A voice with no words. A mouth with nothing to say, and no way to stop saying it. It's the soullessness — not evil, not even hostile, which would at least imply intention. Simply absent an inner life, and pressing that absence against you, hour after hour, in every season. ## The Land on Which I Live I live on the traditional land of the Anishinaabe people, and I find myself thinking about this with increasing frequency. In Anishinaabe understanding — drawn from the work of scholars like Basil Johnston, and from the oral traditions that predate any scholar — sound is not merely physical. It carries communicative intent. The world is understood as animate and communicative: wind, water, thunder, birdsong are not background; they are presences, messages, relations. To listen is an ethical act. To be addressed by the living world, and attend to it, is part of what it means to live well — part of what is called _mino-bimaadiziwin_ , the good life, the life in balance. Within that understanding, the highway presents something more troubling than noise. It is sound without interiority, emanation without address. Taking up the entire acoustic commons of the landscape — drowning the birds, silencing the rustling particular grammar of this place — it offers nothing in return. It does not listen; it cannot. In the most precise sense, it is a presence with no soul and no awareness of yours, filling the space where meaning might otherwise be. Some Indigenous scholars have begun using the phrase _acoustic colonialism_ for exactly this: the imposition of industrial sound onto a landscape without consent, the erasure of the sonic relationships that sustained it. I did not have that phrase when I first returned to this house and lay awake listening. But I had the feeling it names. ## Mourning the Loss of Spiritual Satiety What the highway has taken — and this is what I most want to say — is not quiet exactly. Silence is too pure a word for what I am mourning. What it has taken is _spiritual satiety_. That condition of having received enough from the world around you — of having been addressed by it, in its ordinary way, the wind moving through particular trees, a specific bird making its argument at dawn, rain on a known roof — and finding that it is sufficient. That you are, for this moment, sated. ## The Meaning of Inconsolable What replaces it is not its opposite. Not torment. Nothing so dramatic. It is a pebble in the shoe. A splinter. The piece of grit in the salad that you cannot stop finding with your tongue, every time, without exception, in every bite. It is the anguish that sits below the register of anguish — the disturbance that is too constant to be acute, too inescapable to be processed and set aside. You cannot be consoled for it, because it is not yet over. It cannot be resolved, because it does not stop. My neighbours have made their peace. Their brains have edited it out. I understand this; it is a kindness the nervous system performs, a mercy. But I sometimes wonder what else is being edited. Whether the habituation extends beyond hearing — whether the slow, continuous pressure of a sound that has nothing to say is doing something to the quality of interior life that we have not yet found the instruments to measure. Whether this is happening not just to my neighbours, but everywhere, to nearly everyone — a generation living inside an insensible orchestra, slowly losing access to the silence in which they might hear themselves think; losing the _spiritual satiety_ of a world that addressed them, and could be addressed in return — experiencing the loss as nothing more specific than a vague insufficiency, a sense of something missing they cannot name, because they cannot remember what it was. ## My Arm in the Air At moments like these, there is a kindergarten memory I return to. The teacher was conducting a Simon Says exercise — nod your head, jump up, sit down, stand up — the ordinary choreography of early childhood compliance. When she raised her right arm, every child facing her raised their left. Which is what you do. Which is what mirroring means. This is the perfectly sensible and socially harmonious response to the situation. I was adamant that everyone was wrong. I raised my right arm — the matching arm, I maintained, the _correct_ arm — and, keeping it elevated, trotted to the front of the room and turned to face the class. “ _See_ ,” I said, with the serene confidence of a five-year-old who has not yet learned that being right and being welcome are different conditions. “ _It’s this hand that is the same.”_ The teacher told me, with increasing firmness, to sit down. Standing at my window now, listening to the highway that my neighbours do not hear, I feel the precise texture of that moment — the absolute clarity of being technically correct and situationally impossible. I noticed then what others weren't noticing and didn't care to. I notice now. The arm is still in the air. The teacher has merely changed. It is a particular kind of loneliness, this — not the loneliness of being misunderstood, but of being understood perfectly and simply not agreed with. They hear the highway when I point to it. They shrug and return to their lives. I have not yet learned to shrug. Perhaps I never will. Decades of sitting down under sufferance, and still: the same child, the same raised hand, the same insistence that everyone is looking in the wrong direction. Still here. Still annoying. Still noticing. The highway does not know any of this. It has no idea I exist. It was playing before I came home, it will be playing after I leave, and it has never once had anything to say. That is the whole of it. A modal voice, endless, soulless, and here. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── ## The Science Behind the Noise For those who want a grounding in science, here are some symphonic points of reference: **The grey symphony in B-flat:** Highways tend to generate noise around 60–80 Hz, roughly in the range of B-flat, the note Pythagoras might have hated given his obsession with perfection, with pleasing musical intervals, the harmony of the spheres, and… well, it’s complicated **The infrasonic pedal tone:** Heavy trucks generate infrasound below 20 Hz, felt in the chest and sternum more than heard; the bass note under everything. **A Doppler fugue:** Each passing vehicle shifts pitch as it approaches and recedes, creating a continuous, overlapping fugue of frequency changes. Think Bach. **The grinding continuo:** In Baroque music, the continuo is the unceasing harmonic backbone; highway noise is exactly that. **Spectral din:** Across the full frequency spectrum, from infrasound rumble to the hiss of tire-on-asphalt white noise **An asphalt choir:** Thousands of tire contact patches, each one a brief, percussive phoneme ### Physics and Hertz Tire-pavement noise peaks around 800–1,200 Hz — a harsh, mid-range rasp, like a snare brush on concrete. Engine and exhaust fundamentals sit at 80–200 Hz — the cello and trombone section. Truck air brakes produce sharp transients with energy up to 4,000 Hz — the piccolo shriek in the orchestra. Infrasound from heavy vehicles (below 20 Hz) is felt as vibration, pressure, a kind of _sub-audible dread_ — the organ pipes the ear cannot discern. Decibel-wise, a busy highway runs 70–85 dB(A) (A-weighted, how humans perceive loudness) but much higher in dB(Z) (unweighted, flat response), because of all that infrasonic energy the A-weighting filter throws away.

## Origins Obscured: The Early Life of Morris Manley. The birth of Morris Manley is itself something of a mystery, a fitting beginning for a man whose life was spent in the business of illusion and performance. The 1930 United States census records his birthplace as Chicago, Illinois, and his birth year as somewhere between 1875 and 1877. But the truth appears to be rather more complicated — and considerably more romantic. The weight of evidence suggests that Morris was born in England around 1875–1877, possibly in the industrial heartland of Birmingham, Warwickshire, though Wales has also been suggested as a possibility. His parents were Morris Manley Senior and his wife Annie, a Welsh father and an Irish mother — a pairing not uncommon in the industrial towns of Victorian Britain, where Welsh and Irish working-class communities frequently overlapped. The quintessentially Welsh “Lloyd” appears as a middle name for his sister, offering a quiet clue to the family’s Celtic origins. Whatever the exact circumstances of his birth, Morris, and his sister Jane Lloyd Manley (known throughout her life as “Jennie”) found themselves, at some point in the 1880s or early 1890s, in the care of Samuel and Sarah Edith Baltzer of North Ridge, in Essex County, Ontario, Canada. The circumstances that brought two English children to a rural Ontario farming community are uncertain. Their parents, Morris Senior and Annie, do not appear in Canadian records; whatever fate befell them — death, poverty, or simple abandonment — their children were left to be raised in a new country by strangers who became family. A Windsor, Ontario newspaper of July 14, 1900, makes the situation plain: Morris Manley, it notes, was “adopted and raised by Mr. And Mrs. Samuel Baltzer.” A Windsor Star item of the same date tells us he was then living in Mount Clemens, Michigan, just across the border from Windsor and Essex County; and that “Mrs. Baltzer has not seen her brother for a number of years,” suggesting Morris had been away for some time before this reunion. Sarah Edith Baltzer, née Johnson, had been born in Iowa in 1847 (some thirty years earlier than Morris) and she and Samuel had established themselves in the North Ridge community of Essex County. The 1891 Canadian census finds young Jennie, then sixteen, listed as a “lodger” in the Baltzer household, born in England, and Methodist in religion. She was not yet formally described as an adopted daughter, but clearly in the family’s care. By the time of Jennie’s marriage in 1896, however, she is recorded as the “adopted daughter of Mr. And Mrs. Samuel Baltzer.” The formalization of the relationship appears to have deepened over time. Morris himself does not appear in the 1891 census with the Baltzers. He may still have been in England at that point, or lodging elsewhere in the region. What is clear is that by the mid-1890s he had established himself as a professional entertainer working the American Midwest — suggesting that his entry into performing began very early, perhaps as a teenager, and perhaps as a way of making his own way in the world while Jennie settled more conventionally into the Baltzer household. What did Morris look like? The Hamilton Spectator of September 1904 offers our earliest physical description: “a big, good-natured looking comedian.” The photograph published alongside a Beloit, Wisconsin newspaper review in November 1906 shows a well-dressed young man in his late twenties with dark, somewhat curly hair, sitting in a thoughtful pose with his hand to his chin, holding what appears to be a rolled piece of sheet music. He appears compact and well-groomed, with the self-possessed ease of a man comfortable in front of a camera, or an audience. The newspaper descriptions of his performing style reinforce the physical impression: energetic, physically expressive, with a “good, clear, rich voice” that carried well in large halls. He was, in his prime, a man who filled a room. ### The Making of a Performer: Kansas, Missouri, and the Medicine Show Circuit The earliest documented record of Morris Manley as a performer comes from the Kansas City Journal of July 22, 1894, which places him performing a “tableau” called _The Empty Harness_ alongside a partner named Burt Johnson. He would have been approximately seventeen years old. It is a striking debut — not in a grand theatre, but in the rough-and-tumble world of variety entertainment that preceded vaudeville’s golden age. By February 1895, he was working the small towns of rural Kansas with the Shaker Concert Company, a touring troupe that played Grange halls — the community meeting places of farming communities — across Johnson County. The Gardner Weekly Message of February 22, 1895, gives us our most detailed early portrait of young Morris in action: “Morris Manley, the dialect comedian, whose equal has never been seen in Gardner. His version of an old ‘down eastern farmer’ at the circus was indeed funny, were his many specialties in black face, Irish, Dutch, etc.” He was, even at seventeen or eighteen, a complete entertainer — comedian, character actor, dialect specialist — performing alongside the company’s “talented pianist, Mr. James Pickens,” who could play blindfolded with gloves on his hands and a sheet over the keys. These early Kansas dates were not glamorous engagements. The Grange halls of Johnson County were functional farm community buildings — wooden floors, kerosene lamps, rows of hard chairs filled with families who had driven in from surrounding farms. Admission was minimal or free. The Shaker Concert Company moved from town to town by whatever transport was available — more likely by wagon or local rail line than by any established theatrical circuit. Morris was learning his craft from the ground up, in the most unforgiving of schools. These early years also brought Morris into contact with a distinctly American phenomenon: the medicine show. The Spring Hill New Era of October 3, 1895, records him performing for the “Hygienic Electric Belt Specialty Company” at the Grange in Spring Hill, Kansas, where he was billed as “The New York Favorite” for his comedy. The electric belt — a patent medicine device marketed as a cure for everything from nervous disorders to rheumatism — was one of the most popular quack remedies of the 1890s, with tens of thousands sold across the United States before the medical establishment finally discredited them. The medicine show format was simple: provide free entertainment to draw a crowd of farmers and townspeople, then sell the product on the strength of the goodwill generated. For a young performer without established circuit connections, it was employment, and it was training in the most demanding school imaginable — holding the attention of a skeptical, unsentimental rural audience who had come primarily for the curiosity of the thing rather than for any love of theatre. The Paola Times of March 14, 1895, records him in another small Kansas town as a “blackface comedian” — a format that was, unfortunately, standard entertainment fare of the era, and one Morris clearly included in his repertoire alongside his Irish and Dutch dialect characters. He was building an arsenal of performance styles that would serve him for the next four decades. How did Morris travel between these early engagements? Almost certainly by rail. The 1890s were the golden age of American railroad expansion, and even small Kansas towns were connected by branch lines to the regional network. A performer on the small-town circuit would have travelled by the cheapest available means — day coaches, sometimes overnight in the seat, luggage piled around him, moving from Gardner to Spring Hill to Paola as the bookings dictated. Later, as his career advanced and the distances grew greater, the railroad remained the essential artery of vaudeville life. The great circuits — the Orpheum, the Keith-Albee — were built as much around railway timetables as around theatrical geography. An act booked into Winnipeg one week and Houston the next was, in practical terms, spending as much time on trains as on stages. The 1940 census, finding Morris and Dolly (more on Dolly and Morris’ life continues below) in their Queens apartment with no employment income, closed the book on a lifetime of railway journeys: platform after platform, town after town, the conductor calling out names that had once meant an audience and a paycheck. By 1896, Morris had graduated to the Wonderland Theater in St. Joseph, Missouri, where the September 12, 1896, edition of the St. Joseph News-Press records him performing as a “singing comedian.” He was returning there the following August as well, suggesting he had become a regular and welcome presence. The Wonderland was a step up from the Grange halls — a proper theatre with a paying audience — and his regular bookings there indicate that he may have developed a following. And in December of that same year, 1896, his sister Jennie was married on Christmas morning in Kingsville, Ontario, to Alfred Baltzer, by the Reverend W.H. Shaw, with her new husband’s world of Essex County farms and electric plants settling around her just as Morris’s world was expanding in the opposite direction. By 1903, Morris was performing at the Temple Theatre in Windsor, a legitimate vaudeville venue that served audiences on both sides of the Canada-United States border, given Windsor’s position directly across the Detroit River from one of America’s great industrial cities. The Hamilton Star Theater followed in September 1904, where the review gives us that vivid physical description of a “big, good-natured looking comedian” with a “good monologue, and a lot of parody” who had “the boys whistling the chorus of his waltz song, ‘Where the Summer Breezes Blow.’” The gallery — the cheap seats, the working-class section at the back and top of the house — responded with particular warmth: he “made a hit with the gallery boys,” the reviewer noted, a phrase that carried specific meaning. Gallery audiences were the toughest and most honest judges in the vaudeville house. They paid the least and expected the most, and they had no patience for pretension. Morris, the former medicine show entertainer from the Grange halls of Kansas, knew how to talk to them. The Windsor Star of June 27, 1910, informs us that Morris by this point “owned a fine little roundabout automobile,” a light, open two-seat motorcar, very much a fashionable and somewhat expensive possession at the time. It suggests a man of comfortable means, pleased with his success and happy to show it. Whether he used the automobile for short local journeys or simply as a status symbol is not recorded, but the image of Morris Manley — the orphaned English boy from Essex County, the former medicine show comedian — motoring through Windsor in his own car has a certain satisfying completeness to it. ## Dolly Sterling: Partner in Life and Art At some point in the early years of the twentieth century, Morris Manley acquired a partner who would prove as central to his story as his own talent. Dorothy, known always as “Dolly,” was born in Des Moines, Iowa in October 1888, the daughter of Sidney Marshall. She was perhaps a decade younger than Morris, a gap that would show up in later census records with some awkwardness, but which apparently presented no obstacle to either romance or professional partnership. She performed under the name Dolly Sterling. Whether Sterling was her actual maiden name, a stage name, or some combination is a question the record does not fully resolve. Her death certificate gives her maiden name as Marshall, but a formal US copyright filing from 1909 names her as “Dolly Sterling” in a legal context, suggesting the name may have had genuine documentary standing. It is worth noting that a Miss Lulu Marshall, billed a contralto, appears alongside Morris in a Lansing, Michigan newspaper notice of July 20, 1905. Whether Lulu was related to Dolly, perhaps a sister who performed with Morris in the period before Dolly joined the act, or maybe a stage name of Dolly herself, remains an intriguing unanswered question. What did Dolly look like? The Beloit, Wisconsin newspaper photograph of November 1906 shows a young woman with abundant dark curly or wavy hair, handsome rather than conventionally pretty, with a direct and confident gaze — the look of someone entirely at ease being photographed. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of March 30, 1919, published a separate theatrical portrait of her performing independently in Pennsylvania, showing her with an elaborate up-swept hairstyle fashionable for the era, well-dressed and poised. The Muskegon Chronicle of 1908 called her “chic and pretty,” a reviewer’s shorthand for a woman who carried herself well and knew how to dress for the stage. What is beyond doubt is that by November 1906, Morris and Dolly were performing together at the Bijou Theatre in Beloit, Wisconsin, billed as “Manley and Sterling.” By May 1907, they were at the Family Bijou in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the “Family” designation indicated wholesome, all-ages programming, confirming their act was considered respectable entertainment suitable for women and children, as well as men. Their act centred on a comedy sketch that Morris had written himself: _Kid Hickey, A Story in Slang_ , a romantic comedy playlet set in Happy Hollow, Hot Springs, Arkansas, in which a boxer in training saves the life of an heiress and ultimately marries her. The humour came from the contrast between rough boxing slang and the romantic dramatic situations — Morris almost certainly played the pugilist and Dolly the heiress. The Muskegon Chronicle of November 3, 1908, gives us the most detailed contemporary account of their act: “Miss Sterling is chic and pretty and Manley’s command of slang is something to conjure spirits of Bob Fitzsimmons and John L. Sullivan with.” The reviewer noted, with a critic’s frankness, that “if Dolly Sterling would only use her pretty voice a little more the audience would be better pleased,” suggesting she was playing the comedy rather than the singing in this particular piece. On the same Muskegon Bijou bill were Happy Bill Briggs, described as “a good old minstrel comedian with a line of songs,” and Ella LePage, a performer known for impersonations whose style the critic considered slightly dated. The Brobsts, a family act featuring Mr. Brobst as “a fine pianist and cellist,” performed something called “A Musical Breeze.” These were the working companions of Morris and Dolly’s professional life: a shifting roster of specialty acts and comedy performers, thrown together by circuit bookings, shared dressing rooms, and train compartments across the Midwest. The same review offers a valuable profile of Morris at this stage of his career: “A vaudeville writer and song composer who is also a capable actor is Morris Manley… Mr. Manley is the composer of almost a score of popular songs.” Among those listed were “Automobiling With Molly”, “Pansy Blossom,” and “If I Could Only Have My Way” — all predating the WWI patriotic material that would make his name in Canada. _Kid Hickey_ sustained them for years. It played Winnipeg’s Dominion Theatre in February and March 1909, a gruelling engagement in the dead of a prairie winter for a couple accustomed to the relative warmth of the American Midwest. Winnipeg was the major entertainment hub of the Canadian prairies, and the Dominion was its premier vaudeville venue. The Manitoba Morning Free Press described _Kid Hickey_ as a “playette” and the Winnipeg Tribune elaborated on its plot. Sharing the Dominion bill during this engagement were the Marriott Twins, a bicycle spinning and juggling act — a classic vaudeville specialty that would have provided vivid visual contrast to Morris and Dolly’s comedy playlet. How did they get to Winnipeg? Almost certainly by rail; the Canadian Pacific line from Chicago through the Twin Cities and across the prairies, a journey of many hours in a day coach or, if the booking warranted it, a sleeping car. February on the prairies meant temperatures that could fall to -40° C, and train delays from blizzards were a routine hazard of prairie touring. The audiences that turned out for Dominion Theatre shows in such conditions were hardy souls. Winnipeg residents who took their entertainment seriously enough to venture out in Canadian winter weather, dressed in their best, for an evening of professional vaudeville. _Kid Hickey_ next played Houston, Texas in June 1910 — the opposite climatic extreme, summer in the deep south — and Lima, Ohio’s Orpheum in October of the same year. The Orpheum circuit was one of the most prestigious vaudeville operations in North America, eventually encompassing 45 theatres in 36 cities. Playing an Orpheum house meant Morris and Dolly had been assessed and approved by the circuit’s booking agents — a mark of professional standing that opened further doors. The Orpheum’s audiences tended to be middle-class and family-oriented; the circuit’s founder had aimed to make vaudeville “suitable for refined young ladies,” and the standard of decorum in Orpheum houses was considerably higher than in the rougher variety theatres. By 1909, they had also copyrighted a second piece, _The Picture Man_ , a “dramatic composition in one act” filed with the US Copyright Office under both their names — “Morris Manley & Dolly Sterling, Des Moines, Ia.” — confirming Dolly as a genuine creative collaborator, not merely a performer. The copyright was registered from Des Moines, Dolly’s hometown, suggesting they were visiting her family — perhaps the same “Mr and Mrs Marshall of Demoine Iowa” mentioned in a July 1909 Windsor Star notice — when the paperwork was filed. ### Dolly Alone: The Pennsylvania Interlude There is a chapter in Dolly’s story that sits slightly apart from the Manley family narrative, and it deserves its own consideration. By 1917 or thereabouts, Dolly appears to have been working independently, touring without Morris, and without Mildred. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of March 30, 1919, places her at the Academy Theatre in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, performing as “Dolly Sterling,” her professional name, not her married one. She was not billed alongside Morris. She was performing alone. What was happening in the Manley household at this moment? Morris was active in Toronto and Halifax, composing and performing his wartime material. Mildred, at approximately ten or eleven years old, was at the height of her child performer career in Toronto, her bookings managed from College Street. The family enterprise, in other words, had divided into three streams: Morris the composer-performer, Mildred the child star, and Dolly — the pivot point of the whole operation — apparently pursuing her own performing career in Pennsylvania while also managing her daughter’s bookings, and accompanying her on the Toronto concert circuit. This is speculation, but informed speculation. A woman of Dolly’s abilities — pianist, actress, comedian, co-author of a successfully touring playette — would not have been content to sit at College Street managing correspondence while the stages of North America called. The Pittsburgh engagement was almost certainly not her only independent booking; it is simply one of the many that has surfaced in the surviving record. One finds other Pennsylvania dates, other theatres, other cities where Dolly Sterling appeared without the “and Morris Manley” billing that had defined her professional identity for a decade. What did she perform alone? The Academy Theatre was a legitimate vaudeville house, and Dolly’s established reputation would have secured her a reasonable billing. She may have reprised elements of the Manley and Sterling act — comic songs, perhaps a solo version of some of their material — or she may have developed something entirely her own. The Pittsburgh portrait shows a confident, well-turned-out woman who knows exactly what she is doing in front of a camera. One suspects she knew exactly what she was doing on a stage, too, with or without her husband in the wings. The question of why she went to Pennsylvania specifically, rather than touring with the Canadian circuit alongside Morris, or staying in Toronto with Mildred, may have a simple answer: the bookings were there, and she took them. Or there may be a more personal dimension to her independent touring that the surviving record simply does not illuminate. Marriages under the pressures of professional entertainment life, with its constant travel and financial uncertainty, were not always straightforward, and the distance between a wife performing in Pittsburgh and a husband composing patriotic songs in Toronto invites reflection, even if it defies definitive interpretation. What we can say with confidence is that Dolly was, throughout her life, a working professional in her own right, not merely an appendage to Morris’s career, but a performer and creator who also happened to be his wife, and his daughter’s accompanist and manager. ## **“** Canada’s Greatest Child Vocalist”: The Making of Little Mildred Mildred Manley arrived in a world already defined by performance. Her father was a touring comedian and songwriter; her mother was his professional partner and a pianist of genuine ability. The stage was, quite literally, their home. She appears first in the records as a two-year-old, named in a Windsor Star social notice of June 22, 1910: “Mr and Mrs Manley and daughter Mildred have arrived in Kings[ville] for a few weeks vacation.” One imagines the small family arriving at Aunt Jennie and Uncle Alf Baltzer’s home on Pearl Street in Kingsville, during a brief respite from the touring circuit, the toddler perhaps unsteady on her feet in the summer heat of Essex County. What did Mildred look like? Every contemporary source agrees on one point: she was blonde. The Halifax Evening Mail of 1919 describes her as being “of the purely blonde type.” The 1927 New York review makes an arch reference to “gentlemen prefer blondes.” The 1928 Rome, New York review describes her simply as “blond and low down.” Her sheet music covers — the one for “I Want My Daddy” most famously — depicted her as a pretty, fair-haired child with an open, appealing face. As an adult performer she was described as “dainty” and “beautiful” in one Mount Vernon advertisement, while reviewers noted her “debonaire demeanor” and physical charisma. The 1925 Brooklyn review coined the comparison to Eva Tanguay, not for her blonde hair but for her explosive energy and uninhibited stage presence. Mildred was, by every account, a performer who lit up a room. By 1914 or 1915, the family had settled in Toronto, where Morris found a new purpose for his talents. The First World War had transformed the cultural landscape of English Canada. Patriotic concerts, recruiting rallies, fundraising events, fuelled the demand for entertainers willing to serve the cause was enormous, and Morris, the adopted son of English immigrants with a flair for emotional songwriting, was perfectly placed to supply it. He established himself initially at 83 Victoria Street, Toronto, and later at 1044-1046 College Street — a working and middle-class residential street in the west end of the city, a short walk from the Doric and Park Theatres at Bloor and Lansdowne. From these addresses he published songs and managed a remarkable family enterprise. The Star Weekly of November 27, 1915, ran a professional advertisement that captures the moment precisely: “Little Miss Mildred Manley, the wonderful child vocalist and entertainer who has captivated Toronto audiences by her clever work. This little girl has been labeled by press and public ‘Canada’s Greatest Child Singer.’ In three weeks she made the latest patriotic song, ‘Good Luck to the Boys of the Allies,’ the biggest hit of the year. Under personal direction of M. Manley, 83 Victoria street. Main 1522. Open for concert and banquet engagements.” Morris was, in the language of the modern entertainment industry, his daughter’s manager. He had created the product, written the material, and was now actively marketing her. It was the medicine show business model, elevated to a considerably higher plane. The Toronto Star of December 31, 1915, places seven-year-old Mildred at the Hippodrome, one of Toronto’s major entertainment venues, for a Sportsmen’s Patriotic Concert. It also featured baritones, sopranos, a cellist, a violinist from the prestigious Keith circuit, military bands, and a nationally known preacher, the Reverend S.B. Nelson of Hamilton. The ticket prices were graduated: reserved seats at 50 cents, 75 cents, and one dollar, with rush seating at 25 cents. These were respectable middle-class prices for a middle-class Toronto audience, the kind of audience that filled Massey Hall, attended Sons of England concerts, and sent their sons to the 208th Irish Battalion. Her accompanist at many of these early Toronto events was Charles Musgrave. By October 1916, the Toronto Star identified Musgrave specifically as a “popular accompanist” appearing with Mildred at a Sportsmen’s Farewell at Oddfellows’ Hall on College Street, just steps from the family home at 1044-1046 College Street. He “kindly volunteered his services” for the Hippodrome patriotic concert of December 1915 as well, alongside Bandmaster F. Reeves. These were men who believed in the cause, as well as the child performer they were accompanying. The scale of Mildred’s public profile is perhaps best captured by the Massey Hall concert of October 1916. Massey Hall opened in 1894 as a gift to the people of Toronto from the industrialist Hart Massey. Built in a late Palladian and Moorish Revival style with outstanding acoustics that would later make it famous as “Canada’s Carnegie Hall” and the oldest continuously operating concert venue in North America, it seated over two thousand people. At the Sons of England Annual Grand Concert, “over two thousand people joined in the chorus of ‘I Want My Daddy,’ as sung by Little Mildred Manley.” The song’s theme — a young girl missing her father away at war — performed by an actual young girl at the height of the war’s casualties — was devastating in its emotional simplicity. The hall that would later host Glenn Gould’s debut, Oscar Peterson’s early performances, and the legendary 1953 jazz concert of Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Charles Mingus and Max Roach, had been moved to mass communal singing by an eight-year-old girl from College Street. By 1918, Toronto’s movie theatres had discovered her commercial value. The Star Weekly of July 27, 1918, records her appearing as an “Extra Added Attraction — the entire week” at both the Doric Theatre (Bloor and Lansdowne) and the Park Theatre (Bloor and Gladstone), performing live as a supporting act to films starring Jack Pickford, the Toronto-born younger brother of Mary Pickford. The pairing of live child performer and silent film was a standard commercial strategy of the era, and the fact that the Toronto theatres used Mildred repeatedly suggests she was a genuine draw. The Halifax Evening Mail of September 27, 1919, gives us a sense of how Mildred was regarded beyond Toronto. Advertising her appearance at the Big Exhibition in Halifax, the paper quoted three press sources: the New York Variety called her “a wonderful entertainer” with “dialect stories” that were “great” and “a voice as strong as a girl twice her age”; the Toronto Daily Star declared her “the greatest child entertainer ever seen in Toronto”; and the Detroit Journal labelled her “The Human Doll,” noting that she was “of the purely blonde type” and that “the simple word ‘wonder’ positively applies to her and her acting.” She was eleven years old. She had been performing professionally, in major venues, for at least four years. Morris himself was not merely the man behind the piano. The same Evening Mail ran a separate notice for his own Halifax appearance, billing him as a “Great Comic Entertainer” and “Canada’s Greatest Song Writer,” noting that the New York World had praised his “good, clear, rich voice,” and that audiences were “calling for more when his repertoire was exhausted.” Father and daughter were both in Halifax in the autumn of 1919, appearing on different bills in what had clearly become a well-organized family entertainment enterprise: Morris composing, publishing, and performing; Dolly accompanying and managing bookings; Mildred the star attraction. A May 1919 advertisement in the Star Weekly, which ran for at least two consecutive weeks, makes the business arrangement explicit: “Little Mildred Manley, Phenomenal Child Vocalist and Entertainer. Can be engaged for Concerts, Garden Parties, Fall Fairs, etc. For terms, address Mrs. Morris Manley, 1046 College Street, Toronto. Phone Parkdale 5834.” The Star Weekly of December 15, 1917, offers one domestic glimpse into Mildred’s Toronto life: she appears on the membership list of a children’s club — most likely associated with the newspaper itself — at her address of 1044 College Street, listed simply as “Mildred Manley, aged 10.” No billing. No “Canada’s Greatest Child Vocalist.” Just a ten-year-old girl joining a newspaper club, like any other child on the street. ### Transition: From Toronto Child Star to New York Performer At some point after 1919, the Manley family left Toronto for New York. The precise date of the move is not recorded, but by 1930 they were firmly established in Queens, and the trajectory of Mildred’s career in the mid-1920s suggests the transition was complete by 1924 at the latest. The entertainment world Mildred entered as a young adult was very different from the patriotic concert halls of wartime Toronto. Vaudeville was changing. The rise of cinema, the spread of radio, the relaxation of postwar social norms were all reshaping popular entertainment. And Mildred was changing too, from the angelic child performer of the war years into something altogether more exciting. The Daily Freeman of Kingston, New York places her dancing at the Kingston Opera House as early as November 1924. By the 1924–1925 season she had appeared in _Innocent Eyes_ at the Winter Garden Theatre on Broadway — one of New York’s most storied theatrical venues, built by the Shubert brothers in 1911 on the site of William K. Vanderbilt’s old American Horse Exchange. This was where Al Jolson had made his Broadway debut on opening night and where West Side Story, Funny Girl and Cats would later play to generations of New York audiences. _Innocent Eyes_ was a Shubert production, and Mildred, at about 16–17 years of age, had appeared in it as a star. The Brooklyn Daily Times of October 7, 1925, confirms the engagement, describing her as having “starred last season in ‘Innocent Eyes’ at Shubert’s Winter Garden,” while noting she was now appearing on a high-grade vaudeville bill alongside performers from the prestigious Keith circuit. That same 1925 Brooklyn review gives her a new nickname — “the miniature Eva Tanguay.” Tanguay was the most uninhibited, energetic, and famously explosive star in vaudeville history, known as “The I Don’t Care Girl,” a performer of such volcanic stage presence that comparisons to her were among the highest compliments the vaudeville world could offer. The reviewer was not suggesting Mildred resembled Tanguay in any literal sense, but rather that she possessed the same quality of raw, uncontained performing energy — the ability to fill a stage and hold an audience by sheer force of personality. To be called, at seventeen, a miniature version of the greatest female vaudevillian of the age was no small thing. By February 1927, she was performing on the same bill as Frank Farnum (born William Smith in Boston in 1878), a vaudeville veteran who had started his performing career at age twelve and had appeared on Broadway in Ziegfeld revues before eventually turning to Hollywood. A reviewer described Mildred’s performance that evening with genuine admiration: she “demonstrates why fer gentlemen pre-blondes… she’s not a comer. No, suh! Mildred has arrived.” The nickname “the ball of fire” had attached itself to her. In April and again in autumn 1928, she held a residency at the Rio Rita Restaurant in Mount Vernon, New York (“First Street at Fifth Avenue Bridge,” described as “Mount Vernon’s New and Beautiful Restaurant”) where she was billed as “Star of ‘Innocent Eyes’” and performed “every evening this week and next.” The Knickerbocker Orchestra provided the house music. The Mount Vernon Argus ran her photograph. At the Rio Rita, the admission was through the restaurant itself; a Sunday dinner for $1.25 brought the audience that heard Mildred perform — a comfortable middle-class price for a comfortable middle-class establishment offering filet of sole, roast milk-fed chicken, and Italian cream cake alongside the entertainment. By December 1928, the Rome, New York Daily Sentinel was reviewing her performing the blues: W.C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” delivered in a voice that could capture the specific agony of sitting “in a jailhouse with my back to the wall.” The reviewer called her “blond and low down… fascinating without being too vulgar,” a careful qualifier that tells us something about the territory she was now working, the borderland between respectable entertainment and something rather more charged. She was twenty years old, and she had travelled a considerable distance from the patriotic parlour songs of College Street. The following year, in October 1927, she gave birth to a daughter. ## Mildred, Richard, and Linda It was somewhere in this world of late-1920s New York entertainment that Mildred Manley encountered Richard Giannone. Born in the Bronx in 1903 (appearing in some records as Riccardo or Riccardi, reflecting his Italian family heritage) Richard was a musician working the New York club circuit. His 1942 draft card describes him as 5’ 6” (168 cm) tall, 135 pounds (ca. 61 kg), blond with hazel eyes and a light complexion — a slight, fair-complexioned man, surprisingly similar in colouring to Mildred herself. By 1942 he would be playing at Minsky’s 51 Club at 51 West 52nd Street, the nightclub operation of the famous Minsky burlesque family, situated on “Swing Street,” a stretch of 52nd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues that was the beating heart of New York’s jazz and nightclub scene in the early 1940s. Cover of sheet music for When you dance with your Soldier Boy by Morris Manley, Courtesy of Turtle Creek Books, Mississauga, Ontario Their daughter Linda was born on October 26, 1927, in Manhattan. By 1930 she appears in the Manley household at 27th Street, Queens, listed as “Linda Lewis,” age two, alongside Morris, Dolly, and Mildred, who is herself recorded as “Mildred Lewis, age 21, first married at age 18.” Whether “Lewis” was a husband’s name, a middle name used for documentary purposes, or some other arrangement remains unclear. What is clear is that Richard Giannone was not part of the household, and that Linda, for the first years of her life, was raised within the Manley family in Queens. The 1930 census gives us a vivid domestic snapshot: Morris, now in his mid-50s, listing his profession as vaudeville performer; Dolly, about 41, doing the same; young Mildred with her daughter; and baby Linda. They rented their home. The great vaudeville circuit that had carried Morris and Dolly from Beloit to Winnipeg to Houston was effectively dead, killed by the talkies and radio. The census of 1940 would find them still in Queens, at 32-48 34th Street, with Dolly now listed as head of household, and both she and Morris giving “vaudeville actor” as their occupation despite having had no work in 1939. Their income came “from other sources” — savings, perhaps, or some form of entertainment industry residuals. Both had completed only eighth grade, a fact the census dutifully recorded alongside their glamorous-seeming profession. It is worth pausing here to consider what that 1940 census entry actually represents: two people in their 60s, living in a rented Queens apartment, clinging to professional identities about which the world no longer cared. The Orpheum circuit was long gone. The Dominion Theatre in Winnipeg had stopped booking vaudeville acts. The Bijou theatres of Beloit and Muskegon and Ann Arbor had become cinemas. _Kid Hickey, A Story in Slang_ had not been performed in twenty years. And yet Morris and Dolly Manley remained, in their own understanding of themselves, vaudeville performers. It was who they were. Goodbye Mother DearDolly Marshall Manley died on October 22, 1943, at St. John’s Hospital in Queens, of ulcerative colitis leading to a ruptured sigmoid colon and generalized peritonitis — a painful death at age 54. Her death certificate contains one puzzling detail: although her parents were said to have been born in Iowa, it states she had been in the United States for only eighteen years. If accurate, this would imply she spent a substantial portion of her life in Canada. Perhaps the Toronto years were longer or more significant to her official residency status than previously appreciated. She was buried at Kensico Cemetery in Valhalla, New York. Morris, still alive, served as her executor. Morris himself died, tentatively, around 1947 in New York — the date remains unconfirmed in the documentary record. If accurate, he outlived Dolly by only a few years, dying as vaudeville’s last audiences were themselves aging out of existence. Mildred Manley died on February 3, 1949, in Manhattan. She was approximately 40 years old. Her funeral was held four days later at a Brooklyn funeral home chapel. Brooklyn was where Jennie and Alf Baltzer had spent their honeymoon in 1896, and where Mildred had performed on vaudeville bills as a young woman. She left behind a daughter, Linda, then 21 years old. ## Linda’s Story: A Life Beyond the Stage Linda Giannone Thompson, who had begun her life as Linda Lewis in the Manley family household in Queens, built her life far from the world of vaudeville and Broadway. She married Dudley Thompson on June 6, 1951, at Highland Farms, New York. By April 1955, she and Dudley, a Lieutenant in the US military, arrived at New York from Frankfurt, Germany, on a Seaboard and Western Airlines flight, accompanied by their approximately one-year-old son John R. Thompson. Dudley’s military career explains Linda’s eventual burial at the United States Military Academy Post Cemetery at West Point, New York. In the 1990s Linda and Dudley were living in the Maryland suburbs of Washington DC (Silver Spring, Rockville, North Potomac) suggesting a life connected to the capital’s government and military world. She died on May 13, 2023, survived by her son John and his wife Lisa, and a daughter Ann and her husband Benjamin. She was 95 years old, a remarkable longevity that took her from the Queens household of her grandfather Morris Manley, “Canada’s Greatest Song Writer,” all the way to the twenty-first century. Her father Richard Giannone had lived a parallel but separate life. He married Angela Spano in the Bronx on June 29, 1935, and they had a daughter, Amelia, born around 1940. Richard identified himself as a musical director in the 1950 census, though he was then unemployed and seeking work — a familiar story in an entertainment industry that had been restructured by television and the decline of the big band era. He and Angela eventually moved to the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove, Illinois, where Richard died on October 17, 1986. Angela, born around 1913, was a former dressmaker who had kept the family afloat during Richard’s lean years; she lived on until January 12, 2013, dying at approximately 99 years of age. Their daughter Amelia predeceased her mother, dying in Chicago in 2007. ## The Baltzer Connection: Family in Essex County While Morris was building his career across the stages of North America, his sister Jennie lived a quieter but no less full life in Kingsville, Ontario. Her 1896 Christmas morning wedding to Alfred Baltzer (son of Michael and Susan Baltzer of Arner) had been reported in the Kingsville Reporter with the warmth of small-town journalism: “We extend our hearty congratulations to Alfred Baltzer & Miss Jennie Manley who were united & made ‘one’ on Christmas morning… They are spending their honeymoon in Brooklyn N.Y. & on their return will reside in Gosfield South near Kingsville.” Brooklyn again — a curious thread that connects the Manley family’s story at multiple points. Alfred worked for many years as a master mechanic and electrical engineer at the Kingsville electric light plant. He and Jennie had at least five children: Edith (who married Earl Murtaugh), Maurice, Lloyd, Karl, and Edwin Carlton. The name Maurice (an alternate form of Morris) given to one of Jennie’s sons suggests a warm affection for her brother, whether biological or adoptive. Alfred died on January 8, 1943, in Kingsville, just nine months before Dolly Manley’s own death in Queens. Jennie survived him by more than a decade, dying on July 6, 1955, in Essex County, the last survivor of the generation that had come, somehow, from England and Wales to the farms of southwestern Ontario. The 1931 Kingsville anniversary notice describes the Baltzers as pillars of their community: active in the Masons, the Eastern Stars, the Odd Fellows, the Order of the Eastern Star, and the United Church. Alfred and Jennie had spent 35 years building a life together in the same small county where they had married on Christmas morning in 1896. One wonders whether Morris, in his years of touring, ever came back to Kingsville to see them; almost certainly he did, given the pattern of visits documented in the Windsor Star through the first decade of the century. The adopted English boy and his sister had taken very different roads through life; but the roads had not, it seems, taken them very far from each other. ## A Life in Songs: The Morris Manley Catalogue Across his career, Morris Manley composed and copyrighted at least 17 known works, a figure that almost certainly understates his actual output, given that many pieces from his early career may never have been formally copyrighted or have survived in accessible archives. The earliest documented composition is “The Ottawa Fire” (1900), published by R.S. Williams & Sons of Toronto (one of Canada’s most established music publishers), a descriptive piece in the popular genre of topical songs about current events. By 1901 he had copyrighted “A Funny Affair,” a one-act comedy co-written with a collaborator named Ivy Rose, and registered from Chicago. The waltz “Where the Summer Breezes Blow” had audiences in Hamilton whistling the chorus in 1904. “You’ll Have to Show Me, I’m from Missouri” played on the famous state motto, reflecting his deep familiarity with the American Midwest. “Pansy Blossom,” “If I Could Only Have My Way,” and “Automobiling With Molly” were all cited as established hits by 1908. The WWI period produced his most celebrated work. “Good Luck to the Boys of the Allies” (1915) was turned, in three weeks, into “the biggest hit of the year” through Mildred’s performances. “I Love You Canada” (1915), co-written with Kenneth McInnis, was one of the more overtly patriotic pieces. “I Want My Daddy” (1916) brought two thousand people to their feet at Massey Hall. “What the Deuce Do We Care for Kaiser Bill?” (1917) captured the defiant home front spirit of its moment. Later came “Up in the Air Over There” (1918), “Hello Canada!” (1919), and “The Missus and I and the Baby” (1919), the last of which seems to smile warmly at his own domestic life. The Toronto Public Library’s Digital Archive holds physical copies of six of these compositions, and the Wikisource platform has transcribed several of the lyrics. They await the researcher who will give them the full attention they deserve. ## The Supporting Cast: A World of Performers The Manleys did not work in isolation. Around them, on every stage and every circuit, moved a world of professional entertainers who shared their billing sheets, their dressing rooms, their railway carriages, and their professional lives. Some were footnotes; a few were famous. Charles Musgrave appears as Mildred’s accompanist at multiple Toronto events in 1915 and 1916, described as “the popular accompanist,” a man sufficiently well-known in Toronto musical circles to be identified by name in press notices. His family firm, Musgrave Bros., printed Morris’s sheet music, and the relationship between the Manleys and the Musgraves was clearly close, personal, and professional in equal measure. The Marriott Twins, bicycle spinners and jugglers, shared the Dominion Theatre bill with Morris and Dolly in Winnipeg in February 1909. Their athletic specialty act provided vivid contrast to the romantic comedy of _Kid Hickey_. Such variety of tone and format was the essential grammar of vaudeville programming: the audience should never be asked to feel the same thing twice in succession. Frank Farnum, born William Smith in Boston on June 5, 1878, and performing under his stage name from at least his early twenties, shared a New York bill with Mildred in February 1927 when she received the “ball of fire” review. Farnum had begun his vaudeville career at age twelve, appeared on Broadway in Ziegfeld revues in 1921, and briefly married the silent film actress Alma Rubens. By the time he and Mildred shared a stage he was approaching 50 years of age and transitioning from vaudeville headliner to Hollywood character actor — a journey that would eventually give him the distinction of appearing in more Academy Award Best Picture winning films than any other performer in Hollywood history, including roles in _All About Eve_ , _Sunset Boulevard_ , and _The Apartment_. He died of cancer in 1961 at the Motion Picture and Television Country House in Woodland Hills, California. Jack Pickford, born John Charles Smith in Toronto on August 18, 1896, the younger brother of the silent screen goddess Mary Pickford, had his films paired with Mildred’s live performances at the Doric and Park Theatres in July 1918. It is a curiously historical conjunction that a Toronto-born Hollywood star’s films were being shown in Toronto movie houses while a Toronto-raised child performer appeared live on the same bill. Pickford had been given his start in Hollywood by his famous sister, appearing in over a hundred films and achieving genuine star status with his portrayal of Tom Sawyer in 1917. But his life was marked by tragedy and dissipation — his first wife, actress Olive Thomas, died in Paris in 1920 after ingesting a poisonous substance; his subsequent marriages to Broadway star Marilyn Miller and actress Mary Mulhern both ended in divorce; and by the late 1920s alcoholism and the transition to sound pictures had ended his career. He died in Paris on January 3, 1933, at 36 years of age, at the same American Hospital where Olive Thomas had died 13 years before. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Miss Esther Pugsley, soprano, appeared alongside Mildred and Dolly at the Streetsville garden party of June 1919 — one of the countless local musicians and performers who populated the concert circuit of small-town Ontario without ever achieving wider fame. Will J. White and Jules Brazil appear at the same event, similarly undocumented beyond this single notice. The Reverend S.B. Nelson of Hamilton — described as “known all over Canada as a strong, virile speaker,” shared the Hippodrome bill with Mildred in December 1915 — was pressed into service as a recruiting orator, his patriotic rhetoric providing the spoken-word frame around Mildred’s musical performance. Miss Van Loon and her Holland Girls String Orchestra, possibly a Dutch immigrant ensemble or simply a Dutch-themed act capitalizing on the visual novelty of an all-female string orchestra, appeared with Mildred at Scarborough Beach in May 1916. And somewhere in the background of all these Toronto years stands Miss Lulu Marshall, contralto, who appeared alongside Morris at the Bijou in Lansing, Michigan, in July 1905, a year before Dolly first appears in the documented record. The Marshall surname she shares with Dolly’s family invites speculation. Was she Dolly’s sister, a family connection through whom Morris first met the woman who would become his partner and wife? It is possible. It may be a coincidence of surnames. Like so much in this story, it is a question the surviving record declines to fully answer. ## Reflections: The Family at the Curtain What are we to make of the Manleys? Morris Manley arrived in Canada as an orphaned or abandoned English child, found a home with farming people in Essex County, and transformed himself — through will, talent, and decades of practice in medicine shows, Grange halls, minor theatres, and finally the great vaudeville circuits of North America — into “Canada’s Greatest Song Writer.” His songs made two thousand people sing together at Massey Hall. His daughter’s voice carried them. Dolly Sterling Manley sits at the piano in the background of many of these moments — the accompanist, the booking agent, the business manager, the co-author of _Kid Hickey_ , the woman who managed the enterprise from College Street while Morris composed and Mildred performed, and who also, on her own terms, took herself to Pittsburgh and other Pennsylvania stages, reminding the world that she was a performer in her own right. History has been unkind to her, as it so often is to the women who made things work behind the scenes. And Mildred — the “Human Doll,” the “ball of fire,” the blonde child who sang about missing her daddy to two thousand weeping strangers at Massey Hall, who grew up to deliver the blues in New York nightclubs and perform W.C. Handy while the audience called her low-down and fascinating — is perhaps the most poignant figure of all. She was marketed as a wonder from the time she could walk; she was placed on Massey Hall’s stage at eight years of age to make audiences weep; her face appeared on sheet music covers before she was old enough to understand what any of it meant. That she emerged from that childhood to build a genuine adult career, to be reviewed seriously on her own terms, to be described as having “arrived,” rather than merely being promising, is itself a kind of triumph. She died, at about 40 years of age, in Manhattan in February 1949, and was buried from a Brooklyn chapel four days later. Her parents were already gone. Her daughter Linda was 21 years old, and would go on to live another 74 years, eventually dying in 2023 and buried at West Point — a long, long way from College Street, Toronto, and the piano at which Dolly Marshall Manley once sat, accompanying her extraordinary daughter into the light. The curtain, when it finally fell, fell quietly. * * * This biographical essay was compiled from primary sources, including US and Canadian census records, newspaper archives from the Toronto Star, Globe and Mail, Windsor Star, Hamilton Spectator, Manitoba Morning Free Press, Winnipeg Tribune, various American papers, the US Copyright Office Catalogue of Copyright Entries, the Toronto Public Library Digital Archive, and family and vital records. Where information remains unverified or uncertain, this has been noted in the research record. The author welcomes additional primary source material.

As a corporate trainer, in the 1980s, I delivered or “facilitated” (a word I found particularly irksome) seminars on participatory management, which is the organizational theory that holds, with touching optimism, that people do better work when they feel genuinely consulted. This is true. It is also, as I discovered, a theory whose implementation creates such fertile ground for its own corruption that one almost wonders whether it was designed as a trap. I used a story in those seminars that I called _The Can of Paint_ : > The president of a company has attended a participatory management seminar — much like the one I was currently delivering (for which I had developed a particular quality of philosophical unease that I had learned to suppress) — and returns to the office keen to try it out. He needs to choose a paint colour for the meeting room. > > He assigns the task to his staff: research the psychological and aesthetic implications of various colours, and come prepared to present your findings at the next meeting. > > The staff take this seriously. Mary investigates red: dynamic, energizing, associated with action. Bob champions yellow: warm, optimistic, stimulating to creativity. Others do similar work, with similar care. They had been asked for their genuine opinion. They will give it. > > In the interval between assignment and meeting, the president runs into a business associate who has a large quantity of leftover paint he wants to be rid of. It is green. It is free. The president takes it, stores it offsite, and says nothing. > > The meeting begins. > > Mary presents red. The president listens, nods, and says: “Thank you. Very interesting.” The words are warm. The temperature in the room is not. > > Bob presents yellow. Same response. Same finality. The word “interesting” is doing considerable work it was never designed to do. > > Then Sylvia presents green. > > The president leans forward. His face does something it has not done for the previous twenty minutes. “Really?” he says. “Green? How interesting — tell us more.” > > The staff are not stupid. No staff ever is, which is something management theory acknowledges abstractly, yet organizational practice routinely forgets. > > They hear the lean. They see the face. > > Rallying around green, they evince particular conviction of people who have correctly identified the answer and are now constructing the rationale to support it. The decision is made for green: The meeting room will be painted green. The president walks away satisfied that participatory management works exactly as advertised. > > And for a long time afterwards, colleagues seek out Sylvia before important meetings, because Sylvia, they have learned, knows which way the wind blows. I have been thinking about this story again lately — not because corporate culture has changed since the 1980s, but because it hasn't. If anything, the mechanisms are more refined. We have simply had four additional decades to practice. Jerome Bixby published a short story in 1953 entitled _It’s a Good Life_. It appeared in an anthology entitled Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2, which is the kind of publication title that suggests someone was not overthinking the branding. The Twilight Zone adapted it in 1961, and a cigarette-smoking Rod Serling introduced it with the precise, measured gravity he brought to everything — including, one suspects, his dry-cleaning. The story concerns Anthony Fremont (played by Billy Mumy), a six-year-old boy with omnipotent psychic powers who holds an entire community in a state of absolute subjugation. He can read minds. He can wish people — and things, and concepts — into the cornfield, from which nothing returns. The adults have learned, with the focused desperation of the genuinely terrified, to perform happiness at all times. They praise everything he does and suppress all negative thought. Repeatedly, and with apparent sincerity, they tell him that it’s a good life. That everything is fine. That they are glad he is here. They do this because the alternative is the cornfield. The horror of the story is not Anthony’s power. It is the quality of the compliance it produces. The adults in Bixby’s Peaksville are not broken people. They are intelligent, feeling human beings who have made a rational calculation: the performance of contentment is the price of survival, and survival is worth it. Having become expert readers of Anthony’s moods, his preferences, and his trigger points, they anticipate; they preempt. They offer the required response before it is demanded. They have, in other words, mastered everything that Sylvia mastered in the meeting room. Without the seminar. What _The Can of Paint_ and Bixby’s cornfield share — what makes them, I think, versions of the same story told with differing intensity — is not the obvious element of power. Power asymmetry is everywhere; it is the permanent condition of organizational life and a great deal of personal life besides. What they share is something more specific: the compulsory performance of agreement, and the system of incentives that makes that performance not just rational but, over time, instinctive. In Peaksville, the performance is total, and the stakes are absolute. The cost of a genuine feeling, honestly expressed, is annihilation. Nobody in that town tells Anthony that his finger paintings are mediocre, or that the three-headed animals he has wished into existence are repellent. No one points out that it is, objectively, _not_ a good life. In the meeting room, the stakes are lower. Nobody is wished into the cornfield for presenting the case for red. Mary goes home. Bob goes home. The consequences are subtler — a cooling, a sense of having been gently noted as someone who doesn't read the room, a career that moves somewhat less smoothly than it might. The cornfield is metaphorical. But the behaviour it produces is not, in any meaningful way, different. The staff rally around green. The community rallies around Anthony. The mechanism is identical: identify what the powerful party wants, produce it, and frame the production as independent judgment. The sophistication of the framing varies. The underlying structure does not. What I found, training in the 1980s, was that the people in the room always understood _The Can of Paint_ immediately. There was no moment of puzzled re-calibration, no need to explain the organizational dynamics at work. The recognition was instant and, in some faces, quite rueful. They had been Sylvia. They had been Mary. Some of them, I suspected, had been the president — which is a more uncomfortable position to occupy than it first appears, and one they were perhaps not eager to examine at length. We moved on. What I did not anticipate then, and what strikes me now with some force, is that the story’s lesson did not change organizational behaviour. Not in any lasting way. Not collectively. The people in those seminars went back to their offices and their meeting rooms and their presidents with their surplus paint, and the dynamic reasserted itself with the comfortable ease of something returning to its natural state. Four decades later, the vocabulary has been updated. We have psychological safety frameworks and 360-degree feedback tools and engagement surveys administered by third parties to ensure honest responses — the very existence of which tells you something about the credibility and safety of honest responses given directly. We have a great deal of language about bringing your _whole**authentic** self_ to work, which is an invitation that employees quite sensibly and privately evaluate at three in the morning. The available evidence, in most organizations, does not support full acceptance of this invitation. What has changed since the 1980s is not the dynamic, but the infrastructure. The meeting room is more sophisticated. The seminar the president attends is probably more expensive. The theory of participatory management has been through several additional iterations, each with a new name and a new consultant. Sylvia now has a professional coach and possibly a podcast. The paint is still green. Bixby’s story ends without resolution. Anthony is not defeated. The community does not rebel. No one is saved. Rod Serling walks out to deliver his closing monologue in that careful, slightly funereal way of his, and what he says is essentially: this is happening, it will continue to happen, and the most honest thing I can offer you is the acknowledgement that it is happening. There is something I find more useful in that ending than in the optimistic conclusions of most management literature. The participatory management seminar I was delivering/facilitating in the 1980s ended with action plans. “SMART” goals. Commitments to specific behavioural changes, written in binders that people took home. Very few of those binders changed anything, which I say not to disparage the people who wrote in them, but to note that individual intention is a modest force against structural incentive. The president in _The Can of Paint_ did not intend to undermine his staff’s autonomy. He intended to exercise his new management philosophy. He also wanted green paint, and the paint was free, and those two things turned out to be irreconcilable without his quite realizing it. He walked out of that meeting genuinely pleased. Genuinely believing. The binder notes of his self-improvement, metaphorically speaking, were fully enacted. At six years old, Anthony wants what he wants. He has not attended a seminar. He has no language for what he is doing or why it produces the results it does. He simply knows that the world bends toward him, that people tell him it’s a good life, and that this is satisfying in ways he cannot examine because examination would require a kind of distance from himself that his power makes impossible. Anthony is, in other words, structurally incapable of the self-awareness that might change anything. As, it turns out, so is the president. The President of the company, and also the leaders of various political parties, and countries. This is not a comfortable conclusion. I held it at arm’s length for a long time, in the years I was delivering those seminars, because the alternative — the position that organizational systems tend to reassert their hierarchical logic regardless of the good intentions of the individuals within them — does not sell well on a Tuesday afternoon in a hotel conference room in Toronto. Though it has the advantage of being true. And of explaining, rather neatly, why the paint is still green. Anthony Fremont is still out there. He is in every room where someone has the power to wish things into the cornfield and the inclination to call the resulting silence participation. He is not a monster, particularly. Just a child who was never taught — could not be taught, given the circumstances — that other people’s genuine responses are more valuable than performed ones. He is also, when you look at him clearly, quite alone. Surrounded at all times by people who are telling him what he wants to hear. Cut off, permanently and completely, from anything real. The community is alone too, in its way — performing contentment that forecloses the possibility of the genuine article. Nobody in the meeting room went home and told their spouse that they’d had a fascinating discussion about colour theory. Nobody in Peaksville sits down to an evening that resembles anything a human being would freely choose. The meeting room gets painted green. The community keeps smiling. The binders go in the drawer. It’s a good life. It’s a very good life. It’s a good job. It’s a very good job.

## It is Popcorn or Dirty Dog Feet? There is a molecule called nonanal. You will not find it on any list of things you are supposed to care about. It is not glamorous. Nor is it controversial. It is a nine-carbon aldehyde, colourless and oily, produced naturally by the oxidation of lipids — a fancy way of saying it’s what happens when fats go off. It is present in rancid cooking oil, in the exhaled breath of people with certain lung cancers, and in the scent profile of aging human skin. Also, I have recently learned that it is one of the compounds that makes popcorn smell like popcorn (and also what defines the bouquet of dirty dog feet). I mention nonanal because it sits at a crossroads. It is a molecule of warning and of pleasure, depending on context. The nose, encountering nonanal, must decide which is which. Given sufficient olfactory sophistication, it will get it right most of the time. Given a degraded or blunted olfactory system — with which, as we will discover, an alarming proportion of us are afflicted — the message may arrive garbled, or not at all. The implications of that garbling, I have come to suspect, are considerably larger than popcorn or your dog’s smelly feet, ## The Ancient Sniff-Test Let us start, as one should, at the beginning. Or at least at the beginning of the problem. Sometime between the emergence of our non-human primate ancestors and ourselves, humans began losing olfactory receptor genes. This is not a recent deficiency; it has been happening for millions of years, as vision became the dominant sense and the olfactory gene repertoire quietly contracted. We emerged from this evolutionary process with approximately 800 olfactory receptor genes, which sounds generous until you learn that mice have roughly twice as many, and that any two humans will differ in the function of over thirty percent of their odourant receptors. Put plainly: you and I may be smelling fundamentally different worlds without knowing it, because we have never compared notes in any meaningful way, and because the world has never given us a particularly good reason to try. This evolutionary background hum of olfactory decline is, however, the least of our current problems. The more pressing concern is what is happening to human olfaction in real time, in the lifetimes of people currently alive, in communities that can be mapped and measured — _and, in some cases, voted in elections._ The last statement seems out of place? No, it isn’t. Read on. Somewhere between thirteen and thirty percent of older North American adults have objectively measurable olfactory dysfunction. One in ten Americans over 40 years of age report an issue with smell. By the time you reach 85, the probability of losing the ability to identify a specific odour over the next five years runs between 29 and 45 percent, depending on the odour. Men’s deteriorate faster than women, African Americans quicker than white Americans. And… this is not a non-sequitur: Rural populations, intriguingly, use more antidepressants than urban ones — but I am getting ahead of myself. ## “It Must be Something in the Water” Why is this happening? Several reasons and they are worth enumerating because they will resurface later in ways that may surprise you. Air pollution is the most thoroughly documented environmental culprit. Fine suspended particles of less than 2.5 microns in diameters (PM2.5), produced by vehicle exhaust, industrial emissions, and combustion of every kind, does not stay politely in the lungs. It follows the olfactory nerve directly into the brain. Studies comparing residents of Mexico City with those in less polluted rural areas found mild to severe olfactory impairment in thirty-five percent of the urban population, versus twelve percent of the rural. Autopsies on Mexico City residents found ultrafine particles physically lodged in the olfactory bulb. Johns Hopkins research found that long-term PM2.5 exposure increases the risk of smell loss by roughly sixty to seventy percent. Beyond pollution: viral infections of the upper respiratory tract have been stripping people of smell for as long as there have been viruses, which is to say, forever. This is an infamous symptom of COVID-19, but it’s not new condition; it has merely been widely recognized. Aging reduces neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb. Head trauma disrupts olfactory circuitry. Then there are the medications, specifically, the antidepressants that approximately eleven percent of American adults and somewhere between 13 and 16 percent of Canadian adults are currently taking, with numbers that have been climbing steadily since the mid-1990s and accelerating sharply since 2020. In Canada’s Atlantic provinces, the situation is remarkable enough to warrant its own pause. Nearly a quarter of the adult population is on antidepressants. Among women aged 25 to 44 in that region, the figure reaches 37 percent. These provinces are also among the most economically distressed regions of the country, with aging rural populations and limited mental health infrastructure outside of medication. They have, for what it is worth, also historically returned some of the most durable patterns of political conservatism in the country, though the relationship between these facts is exactly what this essay is attempting to untangle — carefully, and without undue confidence. ## "Something Smells Rotten" Or “I Can't Smell A Thing” There is a relationship between the loss of smell and mental illness that has been quietly documented for decades, and rather underappreciated until recently. Let me be specific, because it matters. The olfactory system is neurologically unusual. It is the only sense that connects directly, largely unmediated, to the limbic system: the amygdala, which processes emotional valence; the hippocampus, which consolidates memory; and the orbitofrontal cortex, which assigns reward value to experience. No other sense has this direct access. This is why smell triggers memory and emotion with an immediacy and vividness that vision and hearing cannot match. It is also why olfactory loss does not stay neatly within the borders of the nose. ## Use It, Lose It, and Never Know Why With the loss of their sense of smell, people also lose much of the hedonic richness of daily life. Up to 70 percent report decreased pleasure in food and drink. They describe a world that has become flatter, less textured, less worth inhabiting with the same enthusiasm. The technical term for this is _anhedonia_ , the inability to experience pleasure from activities formerly found enjoyable, and it is one of the primary diagnostic markers of clinical depression. The connection is not incidental; research has confirmed that olfactory impairment predicts the development of depression in older American adults, and that depressed patients show reduced olfactory bulb volume that correlates with the severity of their illness. The conditions documented as consequences of smell loss are worth listing in full: depression, anxiety, social isolation, loneliness, sexual dysfunction, reduced relationship satisfaction, diminished self-confidence (specifically around fear of undetected body odour). Something that the research calls, rather dryly, “smell loss-induced anhedonia,” is distinguished from regular anhedonia by the additional cruelty that sufferers often don't realize the connection. Their world has become less pleasurable, yet they don't know why. A great many people might be impacted. One imagines them scattered across rural communities, growing old, taking their antidepressants, not getting better quite enough, and not understanding quite why. ## Enter the Antidepressants The relationship between antidepressants and olfactory function is one of the more peculiar chapters in this story, and it goes in both directions at once, which is the sort of thing that makes it a topic genuinely interesting and difficult. Depression, we now know, is associated with reduced neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb. The stress hormones that drive depression, particularly elevated cortisol, impair the olfactory system’s capacity to renew itself. Animal studies have shown that olfactory bulb damage induces depressive behaviour; removing the olfactory bulb in rodents is a reliable model for producing depression-like states. Conversely, antidepressants can restore neurogenesis in the olfactory bulb and thereby improve olfactory function. So antidepressants can help. But the picture is more complicated. So hold on, we’re going to get technical for a few paragraphs. But stay with me — it all connects… ## The Chicken or the Egg? Animal studies have also shown that both SSRIs and SNRIs — the medications most commonly prescribed — produce significant decreases in olfactory sensitivity during treatment, mediated by their alteration of serotonin and noradrenaline transmission in the olfactory bulb. Clinical case reports document specific antidepressants — sertraline, fluoxetine, paroxetine, vilazodone — inducing hyposmia or anosmia that resolved when the medication was discontinued. The mechanism proposed is the same one that makes the medications useful: they act on the neurotransmitters concentrated in the olfactory bulb, and the olfactory bulb turns out to be, in some patients, a casualty of the collateral recalibration. ## Who’s on First? No, Really The research is frank about the difficulty of disentangling this. Depressed patients show olfactory impairment. Are they impaired because they are depressed? Because they are medicated? Because the underlying neurobiology that drives their depression also drives their olfactory decline? The honest answer is that we do not fully know, because the studies that would settle the question have not, for the most part, been designed or funded. What can be said is this: there is a cycle. Depression degrades olfactory function. Olfactory loss deepens anhedonia and social isolation, which worsen depression. Some antidepressants may further blunt olfactory sensitivity in some patients, potentially reinforcing the very impoverishment of experience that the medication was meant to address. The cycle runs — years, for many people. ## Here, There be Dragons Let me be clear: This is where this essay takes its most speculative turn. What follows is a dive into my own meandering reasoning, not established fact. It is the sort of reasoning that cannot be confirmed or refuted because no study has been designed to test it. I offer it in the way I sometimes think: I try on the clothes of an answer, to see whether it fits. And, for the most part, despite all the medical and psychological jargon I have dragged into the matter to buttress my presentation, these speculations are mine. That established, let us proceed. ## Enter Disgust: “You’re Not Going to Drink From _That_**** Are You?” There is a substantial and contested body of research linking disgust sensitivity — specifically, heightened aversion to contamination and interpersonal transmission of pathogens — to political conservatism. The specific disgust I mean is the kind that makes a person unwilling to share a glass of water with someone outside their immediate family; the kind that manifests as intense discomfort with anything that violates the body’s boundaries or mingles substances that should remain separate; the kind that raises the particular alarm of _this is not clean, this is not safe, this is not known_. A large study covering over 31,000 participants across 121 countries found a consistent positive relationship between contamination disgust and conservative voting behaviour. Other researchers, drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s Moral Foundations Theory, have identified a “Purity/Sanctity” moral foundation — shaped by the psychology of disgust and contamination — that conservatives activate more readily than liberals, alongside their equal or greater reliance on all other moral foundations. The relationship is real, though the mechanism has been debated vigorously, and some original research claims have been qualified: liberals are not _less_ disgusted than conservatives overall; they are disgusted by different things (tax evasion and xenophobia score high for liberals; homosexuality and bodily contamination score higher for conservatives). The general capacity for disgust does not separate the two groups. The trigger does. Disgust is, at its evolutionary root, an olfactory-guided emotion. The smell of rot, feces, spoilage, disease: these are the original disgust stimuli, and smell is the primary detection mechanism. We wrinkle our nose; we recoil; we are kept safe from pathogens our immune system has not yet had to fight. The nose is the first-line soldier of the behavioural immune system, which is the psychologists’ term for the collection of emotional responses that evolved to keep us away from things that might infect us. What happens with disgust when olfactory capacity degrades? When the nose stops working reliably, what happens to the system it serves? ## It Does Not Go Gentle into that Dark Night To paraphrase Dylan Thomas, I propose that our nose does not simply go quiet; a system deprived of its primary data source does not conclude _there is nothing to worry about_. It concludes, instead, that its data is unreliable and that the appropriate response is to raise its baseline level of threat-assumption. Unable to accurately smell whether the shared glass, the stranger, the novel food, the unfamiliar social situation carries pathogenic risk, the sensible thing, in evolutionary terms, is to treat all of them as potentially risky. The system calibrates upward in the absence of good information, because the cost of a false negative (failing to avoid an actual pathogen) is historically higher than the cost of a false positive (avoiding something harmless). This would produce exactly the profile that characterizes heightened contamination disgust: increased wariness of outsiders; stronger preference for the known and the familiar; more rigid maintenance of social and physical boundaries; more discomfort with the sharing of bodily-adjacent objects and spaces; and more instinctive alignment with institutions and traditions that impose order on a world that feels, without exactly knowing why, less trustworthy than it used to. It would not feel like a failure of the nose. Ironically, it would feel like common sense. ## The Many Connections of Erdős I find Paul Erdős work fascinating and have touched briefly upon his insights in a previous essay. Erdős was a Hungarian mathematician who spent his life looking for the hidden structure underlying apparently unrelated things. His great insight — borrowed from graph theory — was that when multiple independent paths converge on the same point, the convergence is not coincidental. It is evidence that you have touched something real. I am not a mathematician, nor a scientist, and this is not a proof. But I want to shed daylight on the hidden node that three threads of this essay converge upon. ## The Triangulation of a Notion The hidden node is the olfactory-limbic valuation circuit: the neural pathway that connects olfactory input to the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex, and that performs the fundamental calculation every nervous system must make: _is this environment safe enough to explore, or threatening enough to defend against?_ **Thread one** reaches this node through the contamination-disgust pathway: smell loss degrades the circuit’s primary input, driving it toward defensive default. **Thread two** reaches it through the anhedonic pathway: smell loss strips reward signals from the circuit, shifting the approach-avoidance ratio toward avoidance, contracting the experienced world, fostering a psychology of protection over exploration. **Thread three** reaches it through pharmacology: antidepressants act directly on the neurotransmitters regulating this same circuit, altering its gain without necessarily improving the quality of its sensory data, and in some patients possibly blunting the olfactory input further. All three arrive at the same place. The circuit, assailed from three directions simultaneously, runs hotter on threat and quieter on reward. Yet, the person it belongs to does not realize that this is happening. They experience it as a conclusion rather than a symptom: the world is less trustworthy; novelty is less appealing; familiar things deserve protecting; and strangers should probably not drink from your glass. ## West Virginia, Kentucky, Vermont, New Hampshire and… Atlantic Canada…? I do not want to overstate this. The geography of antidepressant use in North America does not map cleanly onto any political topology. West Virginia and Kentucky, which are among the highest antidepressant-using states in the US, vote Republican by enormous margins. But so do rural communities across the continent, and rural communities also show the highest rates of olfactory dysfunction, the most economic distress, the most limited mental health infrastructure, and some of the highest rates of viral illness and occupational chemical exposure. Vermont, also near the top of antidepressant use, votes Democratic. New Hampshire splits. Canada’s Atlantic provinces, the highest-use region in the country, have historically leaned Liberal federally while harbouring Progressive Conservative provincial governments that are functionally quite different from the ideological conservatism measured in the disgust-politics literature. ## What A Mess! It’s Complicated The correlations are real but messy. They are made messier still by the treatment gap: conservatives, research consistently shows, are significantly less likely to seek or receive mental health treatment despite reporting equivalent rates of depression. Among those with depressive symptoms, nearly three-quarters of Republicans have unmet mental health care needs, versus just under 60 percent of Democrats. The antidepressant data therefore understates the mental health burden in more conservative communities, which means the population of people experiencing smell loss and depression without pharmaceutical intervention is proportionally larger in those communities, not smaller. There is, I think, something genuinely uncomfortable in all of this — not politically, but societally. There is a population of people experiencing a quiet and largely invisible sensory loss that is making their world less pleasurable, more threatening, and more opaque. Some of them are medicated in ways that may compound the problem. Most of them do not know any of this is connected. The connection has not been studied, because no one has thought to design the study. The olfactory-limbic circuit, sitting at the intersection of sensation, emotion, memory, and social orientation, has been substantially ignored by the research programmes that might illuminate it. ## Back to Popcorn, Rancid Butter, and Dog Feet I began with nonanal, and I want to return to it. There is something philosophically instructive about a molecule that can mean _danger_ or _pleasure_ depending on the proper functioning of the nose receiving it. In rancid fat, it warns. In popcorn, it rewards. The chemistry is identical; the context is everything; and the nose, if working correctly, knows the difference. A compromised nose does not know the difference. Rather, it cannot be trusted to know, and so the rational response is to treat ambiguity as threat. And in a world where noses are getting less reliable, the threats are proliferating, the pills don't quite fix the underlying problem, and the popcorn still smells like popcorn to everyone else but you — though you don't know that, because you’ve never compared notes — the appropriate response may feel, from the inside, indistinguishable from wisdom. The difficulty is that it is also indistinguishable from a slow, invisible recalibration of an entire population’s relationship to novelty, trust, and the stranger at the table. Whether you offer them your glass or drink from theirs is, of course, your business entirely. But the nose that informed that decision may no longer be the instrument you think it is. * * * Further reading for the curious: Richard Doty's work on olfactory epidemiology; Jonathan Haidt's The Righteous Mind; and the Monell Chemical Senses Center's ongoing research on olfactory decline. Not cheerful reading, but instructive. * * *

It is not a handsome box, not anymore. It began as one: carved from some dark wood whose name has been lost in the way that the names of craftsmen are always eventually lost — the wood and the maker alike dissolved into the general category of _old_. The carving is fine work, the work of someone who knew what the wood wanted to become, who followed the grain rather than arguing with it. Geometric patterns, interlocking, the sort of pattern that the eye tries to resolve into a simpler shape and cannot. At the centre, a script no one in Venice in the year 1500 could have read, and that no one in Toronto in the year 2024 bothered to try. The box is currently in a landfill outside the city, buried under a layer of composite debris that includes a broken office chair, three years' worth of someone’s archived magazines, and a considerable quantity of the Styrofoam packaging material that is the true monument of our civilization. The box has not been destroyed. It is, as it has always been, patient. We will come back to the landfill. But first: Venice. ## The Drawer The man’s name was Marco — not because it is an especially interesting name, but because it was, in 1500, the most common name in Venice, a city that had been naming its sons after the Evangelist for so long that the name had worn smooth from use, like a coin passed through too many hands. Marco Trevisan, to give him his fullness, was a merchant of middle importance: not so powerful that he attracted the attentive envy of the great families, not so insignificant that anyone felt it necessary to explain who he was. He traded in wool and occasionally in secrets, which is to say that he was a Venetian man of his time. He had recently acquired, at auction, a desk. It was an extraordinary desk — not in the showy way that objects are extraordinary when they want you to notice them, but in the quieter way of things that have been somewhere for a very long time and carry that somewhere inside them. It was made of walnut gone nearly black with age, and it had come to the auction house from the estate of a Moorish merchant who had died without heirs, leaving behind a houseful of objects that no one in Venice quite knew what to do with. The desk had drawers enough for all the paperwork of a man’s life, and on one of those drawers — the lowest, on the right — there was a lock. The key was not included in the sale, which had reduced the price considerably, as people distrust locked things they cannot open. Marco had bought the desk for the same reason certain people are drawn to locked rooms: not greed, exactly, but a particular form of curiosity that has the quality of an itch. He had the lock picked by a man who asked no questions, which in Venice at that time was a professional courtesy rather than an unusual circumstance. Inside the drawer: the box. He almost didn't open it. This is worth noting, because the '_almost-nots_ ' of history are what generate everything that follows. He was tired; it was late; the candle on his desk was burning at the kind of diminished angle that suggested it had given all it intended to give. He picked up the box, turned it over in his hands — registered, with the practised hands of a man who handled goods for a living, that it was old, that it was well-made, that the wood was something he couldn't identify — and set it down with the intention of examining it in the morning. Then he opened it anyway. There is no explaining this. Or rather: the explanation is that Marco Trevisan was, beneath his mercantile competence and his carefully maintained air of Venetian reserve, a man who could not leave a closed thing alone. The box was empty. This was his first thought. His second thought arrived when the smoke did. It was not the smoke of a fire. It did not smell of anything burning. Simply, it was — smoke, rising from the interior of the box, impossible in every physical sense, _rising_ , moving with a deliberateness that smoke does not possess, gathering itself upward in the way that a man gathers himself when he is about to speak, and taking, eventually, a form that was not quite human and not quite anything else, but that was looking at Marco Trevisan with eyes made of something that might have been embers, or might have been stars. “Well,” said the jinn. And then, after a pause that Marco would spend considerable time thinking about afterwards: “You took your time.” ## The Negotiation Marco had been in enough difficult business conversations to know that when something unexpected occurs at the table, the worst thing you can do is show the full extent of your surprise. He took a breath. He set the box carefully on the desk, and said, in a voice that was only slightly higher than his usual register: “Are you… What precisely are you?” The jinn regarded him with the expression of someone who has answered this question many times over many centuries and finds it no more satisfying a question now than it was the first time. “I will tell you what I am,” said the jinn. “But first, the terms. You have found me. I may grant you three wishes. They cannot be combined, banked, subdivided into smaller wishes, or used to purchase additional wishes.” Marco, who was a merchant, asked immediately: “My last wish — could I not wish for an unlimited number of future wishes?” “No,” said the jinn, with the tone of a man confirming a price that is not open to negotiation. “You are quite certain.” “I have been asked that question,” said the jinn, “in thirty-seven languages, and the answer in all thirty-seven is the same.” Marco sat back in his chair. The candle was still burning, improbably, as though it too had decided it was not done yet. “All right,” said Marco, who understood the shape of a negotiation when he encountered one. “Then let us proceed differently. Tell me what you are.” ## The Theology of Fire The jinn settled — which is certainly the wrong word, but seems as fitting as any other — into an arrangement of smoke and attention that occupied the air near Marco’s window, where the canal smell came through and the sounds of lapping water made the conversation feel less absolute, more permeable, which was perhaps a mercy. “I am properly called a jinn,” he said. “Not a genie — that is a word the Latins made from the Arabic, flattening it in the way that translations always flatten: losing altitude, losing complexity, losing the parts that made the word worth making in the first place.” He paused. “I come from the lands past Byzantium. From before the trade routes, before the great caliphates, from the time when the world was still deciding what it was. You have, I assume, a theology?” “I am a Christian,” said Marco, which was the most accurate answer available to him in 1500, whatever its complications. “Then you know of God, and you know of angels. God made three kinds of being in the human register. Humans from clay — you know this story. Angels from light — you know this story also, or a version of it. And jinn from smokeless fire. From a fire so pure it has nothing to consume. We were not servants. We were not made for humanity’s convenience, any more than you were made for ours. We had our own affairs.” Marco, who was a man of practical intelligence, said: “And those affairs — what were they?” The jinn was quiet for a moment, the way someone is quiet when they are deciding how much of an honest answer to give. “Everything a being capable of thought and will tend towards: conflict, creation, worship, negligence, love — and its opposite. We were not so different from you, except that we could shape the world more directly. Where a man might move a stone, a jinn might move a mountain. Where a man might change a mind through argument, a jinn might change an event through — other means.” “You could alter reality?” asked Marco. “We could. We were powerful, and what is powerful tends, eventually, to attract the attention of things more powerful still.” ## The Binding Here the jinn’s voice changed. Not in volume — he spoke softly throughout, with the deliberate quiet of someone accustomed to being listened to — but in quality. It became less a voice than a vibration in the air, something that Marco felt more in his chest than his ears. “Long ago —before memory, before what you call history, before what my people call history, even before the word 'before' meant anything you could attach to a date — a powerful being — perhaps a God, something that predates the names we give to Gods — recognized what we were, what we could do. And this being bound us.” Marco said nothing. He had the intelligence to understand that this was a story that required room. “We were bound to objects. The power we had — to shape, to alter, to make real what had only been possible — was compressed, reduced, locked into things. Old things, small things, things that could be carried and contained and given and taken. And our ability to use that power was limited to the desires of whoever held the object. Three wishes. Always three. Not because three is sacred — though some traditions would tell you so — but because the number was sufficient to demonstrate power and insufficient to change the fundamental ordering of things.” “And all the jinn were so bound?” asked Marco. “All of them?” “All of us that this being could reach — which was most of us. The bound ones were distributed: to family, to the faithful, to those the being wished to favour. And then the bound were passed on, and lost, and found, and lost again. For how long, Marco Trevisan, have you had the habit of distrusting locked drawers?” Marco had no answer to this. He sat with it. ## The Question of the Others “Where are they now?” Marco asked. “The other jinn. The other bound ones.” The smoke that was the jinn moved, slowly, across the window. “I do not know. This is not the answer you expected, perhaps. We are not connected — not in a way you might imagine. We do not share a correspondence. I was bound; I know only what I experienced before the binding and what has happened since, which is: this box, this drawer, this conversation. And others before it.” He paused. “Some of them still exist, certainly. People do not announce the possession of a being who can grant powerful wishes. It is not the kind of thing one puts in a letter. Some may have been lost — in floods, in fires, in the general chaos of human history, which is considerable. Some may have been released.” Marco looked up. “Released?” “A wish,” said the jinn, very carefully, “can be for anything within the range of the possible. Some who found a jinn wished for the jinn’s freedom. This would have worked. It would end the binding — dissolve the object, restoring the jinn to whatever a jinn is, without an object and without a master.” He looked at Marco with those ember-or-star eyes. “Would you do this? For me?” ## The Demotion of Mercy Marco looked at his hands. He looked at the box on the desk. He thought — and it is to his credit that he actually thought, that he did not simply give the first answer — about what he was being asked, and why, and what it would cost him. Then he said: “No.” The jinn did not seem surprised. He had the quality of someone for whom outcomes are less interesting than the character revealed by them. “No,” he repeated, not as an accusation, but as a notation. “And why not?” “Because I have three wishes,” Marco said, “and you are the means by which I have them, and releasing you would be using all three on a single act of mercy that I could not afford. This is not a comfortable answer.” “Most honest answers aren't,” said the jinn. “Ask your questions, then. You still have them.” ## The Architecture of Legacy Marco was, at heart, a man who thought in terms of inheritance. Not in the sentimental sense — he was not a particularly sentimental man — but in the practical Venetian sense: the family as institution, the accumulation of advantage across generations, the patient compounding of advantage that was how the great families had become great. “If I make two wishes,” he said slowly, “might I use the third as a legacy? To be clear, my third wish would be that my son receive the box upon my death. Could I, when I die, pass you to my son? Still within the box?” “Yes,” said the jinn. “The binding includes a provision for transfer. Where the box goes, I go.” “And when my son receives you — as my final wish, he will be granted all three wishes as I had?” “Yes,” said the jinn. “Your wish for a legacy does not alter the granting of three wishes to a new recipient.” “Could I, in my final wish, alter the terms? Grant my son something more?” The jinn considered this with an expression not unlike someone consulting something very old, yet not entirely in the form of a text. “No,” he said, at last. “The terms of the binding are not within my power to alter. I suspect they were set by the original binding in such a way that not even I fully understand the limits of my own limitation. This, I have come to believe, is intentional. It is the nature of clever constraints.” “Let us be clear then… My third and final wish could be that the box passes to my son?” A long pause. The candle guttered. “Yes,” said the jinn. “We could do that.” ## The Two Wishes The wishes Marco made were not romantic. This too is to his credit, that he did not waste the architecture of the possible on the merely fanciful. The first wish was for the resolution of a debt that had been strangling his trading house for three years — a debt owed to a family powerful enough to be owed money by and dangerous enough to make collection a matter of physical survival. The debt was resolved, in the morning, in a manner that Marco chose not to inquire into too closely. The second wish was for the particular kind of influence in the Venetian Senate that does not come from money alone, but from the combination of money and the right kind of understood obligation — the kind that accumulates slowly and pays out over decades. This, too, was arranged, in ways that Marco observed but did not fully comprehend. He was wealthier, and more powerful. He was, in the peculiar manner of men who get what they wanted, slightly dissatisfied — not with the outcome, but with the recognition that the wanting had been better than the having, that desire, once resolved, leaves behind it a kind of vacancy. The third wish he wrote into a letter to his eldest son, explaining everything. This letter was the most honest thing Marco Trevisan ever wrote. ## The Passage The instructions Marco gave his son were simple: open the box; listen carefully; make two wishes only; and use the third to pass the jinn forward, with this letter, to your eldest son. Marco's son, Alvise — named, not for the Evangelist this time, but for an uncle who had the good fortune to have died heroically during a naval engagement, thus transforming inconvenient family complexity into useful family pride — received the box with the skepticism appropriate to a young man who has been told an extraordinary thing by a father he has always found slightly difficult to read. Then he opened the box. And the smoke rose. And Alvise Trevisan, like his father before him, said: “Well…” And the jinn said, as it had said before and would say again: “You took your time.” ## The Long Inheritance And so it went. The pattern Marco established held, in the way that patterns hold when they are tied to something larger than personal preference: generation to generation, the box passed with its letter — different handwriting each time, different languages eventually, different cities — and the deal renewed and re-renewed. Two wishes. A third to continue. The accumulation was, over centuries, remarkable. What begins as a Venetian merchant’s trading advantage becomes, within three generations, the foundation of a significant fortune. What begins as political influence in a city-state becomes, over a century, the kind of web of obligation and access that shapes nations. The family moved: from Venice to Genoa, from Genoa to Amsterdam, from Amsterdam to London, and eventually — following the logic of capital, which is always moving toward its own expansion — across the Atlantic to the New World. The names changed. The faces changed. The box remained. In each generation, the inheritor read the letter — which had, by now, become a kind of family document, translated and amended and supplemented, passed in sealed leather cases alongside the box — and opened the box, made two wishes, and traded the third for continuity. The jinn, for his part, said little that was not asked. He had time, which is different from patience but produces a similar demeanour. He observed the different hands, the different voices, the varying qualities of ambition across the centuries, and noted, without judgment, that what people wish for tells you everything about them, and that what they could wish for, but don't, tells you everything else. ## The Endling Like all things that live in time — families, species, languages, empires — the line eventually ran ended. Not from catastrophe. This is worth noting. History has provided many spectacular ends to great houses: plague, revolution, the particular violence that ambitious people attract. This was not that kind of ending. This was quieter. It was the ending that happens when the thread simply runs out. His name was Gerald. He had been born in Toronto, Ontario, to a mother who died when he was twelve and a father who was efficiently present and emotionally elsewhere. He had been educated in the way of certain wealthy children: thoroughly and without warmth. Studying economics, then law, he acquired a portfolio of properties and small businesses, and lived alone in a house in the fashionable Rosedale area. The house was large enough for a family, yet contained just him alone. He had never married, although he had, at various times, intended to — but the same quality that made him excellent at managing assets made close relationships arduous. He was not cruel, not cold, exactly — more like a house with central heating that works well, but with no chairs in the main rooms; it is functional and well-maintained, but not quite set up for company. Gerald had cousins he did not know well. He had business associates whom he trusted professionally, but told them nothing personal. In his elder years, he had one close friend who preceded him in death by three years, which meant that in the end there was no one who knew the full shape of Gerald’s inner life — no one who would have been able to say: _this is who he was, underneath_. He had made, in his sixty-third year, two wishes. The first for the continued health of his portfolio through what seemed like a coming time of financial difficulty, and the second for something more private — something he told no one — and which the jinn arranged with the usual discretion that had characterized the entire enterprise. He had not yet made his third wish when he died. He had not, it must be admitted, been in a hurry to make it. Having had no son or daughter, he had no one to whom the box could go, and this had caused him, in the quiet evenings, when he sat with the box on his desk and the jinn nowhere in evidence, a kind of grief he did not entirely know how to locate. He had thought, sometimes, of wishing for something for himself — something that did not involve forwarding the box. But he did not. The inertia of the pattern was immense; five centuries of continuity are not easily interrupted by one man’s loneliness. He died on a Tuesday, which is an unremarkable day on which to die, but most days are unremarkable, which is how it usually goes. ## The Fate of the Box The cousins arrived. They came from several directions: a family branch of the Trevisan family from Montreal, other family from Boston, one elderly representative from somewhere in Italy who seemed confused about both the time zone and the inheritance laws, and various Canadian cousins whose connection to Gerald was primarily geographical and financial. Lawyers came too, as families often bring when they gather around an estate none of them are prepared to share willingly. They argued for months, as families do, with the focused energy of people who have temporarily set aside whatever else they are doing in order to concentrate entirely on what they might receive. The properties were contested; the business interests were contested; and the contents of the house were contested in the particularly exhausting way of dividing household contents when there is money but no sentiment — every object assessed for value, every drawer opened, every shelf considered. The box was found by a cousin named Robert, who at 44 years old worked in insurance, and was in the middle of a clearing out Gerald’s study when he came across it at the back of the bottom desk drawer. Turning it over, he noted the carving, which was interesting but not obviously valuable. It appeared to him of an uncertain age, with symbols he was unable to comprehend. He tossed it into the garbage. Not out of malice. Simply — it was old and battered and not obviously worth anything, and he was tired, and there was more left to do, and the box was the sort of thing that falls into the category of _someone else's clutter_ the moment its owner is gone. ## The Patience of Buried Things The box is in the landfill now. This is a statement of fact, not a metaphor, though it is the kind of fact that wants to become a metaphor — buried in the accumulated waste of a prosperous civilization, surrounded by the particular democracy of the landfill, where the luxury and the ordinary become indistinguishable over time. The jinn is in the box. He has been in it, through the full stretch of human history, for periods longer than this: in a desk drawer for three years, and in the hold of a ship for months, and in the bottom of a leather chest, beneath generations of documents, for nearly a decade. He has been in places dark, places bright, places that smelled of salt water, and places that smelled of nothing at all. To use the word he might use himself, if asked, he is: patient. _This is not passive patience_. This is the patience of a being who knows that time is not linear in the way that humans experience it — who knows that what feels like an ending from inside a moment is simply the place where the next beginning has not yet made itself visible. The great families did not know, when they made their wishes, that they were participating in something much older than their own ambitions. They thought they were using the jinn. They were, in the larger sense, simply holding the box until the next person came along who needed it. The box waits. Somewhere above it, the layered strata of what we have discarded — the broken chair, the archived magazines, and the Styrofoam packaging of our most recent conveniences — do their slow work of compacting. The seasons turn above the landfill. The gulls circle, as they do above landfills regardless of what is buried in them. The grass, planted at the edge of the landfill in a gesture toward ecological rehabilitation, grows at its own pace, unhurried. In the spring, sometimes, the smell of the earth changes in a way that the birds notice, but humans miss. The box holds a jinn. The jinn holds — everything: five centuries of Venetian ambition and European wealth and Atlantic commerce and Toronto real estate and the unspent wish of a man who died alone on a Tuesday without knowing what to do with what he had been given. One remaining wish. Unclaimed. _Waiting._ As you read this, it is worth considering the next time you encounter an old and battered box at the back of a drawer, or at the bottom of a bin, or in an auction house that sells things no one can quite identify, whether you are the sort of person who opens closed things. Not for greed. Not even for curiosity, exactly. But because five centuries is a long time to wait, and the jinn has been patient enough, and somewhere inside the box is a wish that has not yet decided what it wants to become. There is a word in Arabic: _maktub_ , which roughly translates as "_it is written_." As in: the thing that is meant to happen, will happen. The book is already finished; we are simply arriving at the pages. Perhaps the landfill is only a chapter. Perhaps _you_ are another. _Open the box._ * * * _This story was told with a patience appropriate to old things, which is the only pace at which old things should be approached._

It happened on a Wednesday, which feels right. Wednesdays have a particular energy — neither the fresh resolve of Monday nor the loosening goodwill of Friday — and are therefore ideal for small indignities. A colleague approached my desk with the particular gait of someone who has decided, en route, to be generous. You know this walk. It has a slight forward lean to it, a purposefulness that announces _I am about to give you something_ , and does not pause to ask whether you are in the market for receiving it. Without solicitation — and I want to be precise here, because the absence of solicitation is part of the architecture of what followed — he proceeded to educate me on a technical subject in which I am already well-versed. Not merely acquainted, not fond of in a casual, hobbyist sort of way, but versed. Formally, professionally, thoroughly versed, in the way one becomes after years of dedicated work in a field. He was also, it should be noted, largely inaccurate. Not spectacularly so — not in the operatic, please-do-sit-down way that might at least have offered some entertainment value. Just quietly, confidently, consistently wrong in the manner of someone who has misread a Wikipedia summary, yet found it sufficient. He explained his inaccuracies with the smooth authority of a man who has never once been told that he was wrong about something, and who has therefore concluded that he never is. He meant no harm. I want to be clear about this too, because malice would at least have been interesting. It was not malice that propelled him to my desk. It was the blameless, buoyant certainty that he was being helpful — that I, having apparently wandered through my work without grasping its deeper technical nuances, was the fortunate beneficiary of his spontaneous largesse. That I could not possibly understand what he understood. That the universe, on this particular Wednesday, had arranged things so that he might save me from my own ignorance. He was wrong about the subject, and he was wrong about me. He was wrong, in a foundational and oddly touching way, about the entire situation. I thanked him politely. He left satisfied. I sat with a low, familiar irritation — the kind that doesn't flare so much as simmer, the kind you carry around for the rest of the afternoon, rehearsing the things you might have said, tallying the cost of not having said them. And so I noticed the cost. Not of silence — silence was fine, silence was strategic and sensible. The cost of the irritation itself, the mental space it was quietly occupying. The energy I was spending being annoyed at a man who had already moved on and was, in all probability, explaining something else to someone else, buoyant and undimmed. Here is what I had given him, entirely without his asking: my afternoon; a portion of my composure; a low-grade narrative running in the background, like an application you forget to close, quietly draining the battery. This seemed, the more I looked at it, like a poor return on investment. There is, it turns out, a word for what happened. There has been one since 2008, though the phenomenon it names is considerably older. In April of that year, the American writer Rebecca Solnit published an essay called _Men Explain Things to Me_ , in which she described attending a party where her host — a wealthy, imposing older man — had recently published a book on the nineteenth-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge. He then proceeded to tell her all about a very important book on that same photographer that had just come out. The book, of course, was Solnit’s. He had to be interrupted several times before this information penetrated. Solnit never used the word “ _mansplaining”_ in the essay. She didn't need to. She had described the thing so precisely that a word was almost inevitable, and one arrived within weeks — coined, as best anyone can trace it, in the comments section of a LiveJournal post, where a user addressed a man who had explained a piece of art to her at considerable and uninvited length: “ _Wow, thank you so much for mansplaining this art to me! What with my arts degrees, I can't understand it at all.”_ The word spread among feminist bloggers and then into mainstream use, acquiring along the way its standard definition: a man explaining something to a woman — typically with an air of condescension and an assumption of superior knowledge — without regard for the possibility that she already knows more about it than he does. Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary both eventually added entries. Dictionary.com, in 2013, noted that the suffix _-splain_ had proven “incredibly robust and useful as a combining form” — and indeed it has since propagated freely: _whitesplaining_ , _rightsplaining_ , _goysplaining_ , _potlucksplaining_ , and dozens of others, each naming the same essential dynamic relocated to a different axis of assumed superiority. The title of this essay is, I should acknowledge, somewhat ironic. I am explaining mansplaining. Whether this constitutes a reflexive paradox or merely a reasonable use of available vocabulary I will leave to the reader. What I can say is that the concept has always carried a distinction worth preserving — and that the distinction is not about whether men explain things. Men do explain things. So do women. Everyone does, given sufficient provocation and an audience who cannot easily leave. The distinction is the assumption underneath: you lack an understanding, that you couldn't possibly already know; that the explainer has correctly assessed your ignorance from a comfortable distance and has generously decided to remedy it, regardless of evidence to the contrary. It is this assumption — unearned, automatic, often entirely unconscious — that sits at the centre of the thing. My colleague, on his Wednesday approach, had formed a hypothesis about my understanding before he reached my desk. The hypothesis was wrong. It did not occur to him to test it first. Rather, what I needed, I decided, was not a sharper response but a better frame. Not a weapon, but a lens. It came to me — not immediately, but somewhere between the third mental rehearsal and the making of tea — in the form of a toddler. Specifically, a toddler who has just discovered dinosaurs. You know this child. Perhaps you have been this child. He is four, possibly five, and the world has recently cracked open to reveal that it once contained creatures of impossible scale and drama — that a _Brachiosaurus_ was longer than three school buses, that the _T. rex_ had tiny arms and terrible vision and could nonetheless run at twenty kilometres an hour, that an asteroid ended everything except the birds, which are actually dinosaurs, which he will tell you about right now, immediately, whether you were asking or not. He is not trying to condescend to you. The four-year-old doesn't even know what condescension is. He is simply in possession of extraordinary information and has identified you as a person he can share it with, which is, in his mind, an act of pure generosity. He is also, not infrequently, slightly wrong. The asteroid was more complicated than he knows. The running speed is disputed. The arms, while small, were not entirely useless. But you do not correct him on any of this, because he is four, and his face is luminous with discovery, and the wrongness is not the point. The point is the enthusiasm. The point is that he found this information and thought of you. I placed my colleague in this frame. His forward lean, his confident inaccuracies, the sheer unselfconscious momentum of his approach, and all of it suddenly rearranged into something almost touching. _He was four years old; he had just discovered dinosaurs, and had come to tell me about them._ Something in me, quite unexpectedly, unclenched. Once I had the frame, I found I couldn't stop building variations on it. The exercise became, I confess, rather enjoyable — which is its own small compensation for the afternoon. There is, for instance, the **Wildlife Documentary** approach, in which one imagines Sir David Attenborough narrating the encounter in real time: “ _And here, the male of the species, sensing an opportunity, begins his elaborate display of knowledge…”_ You maintain a look of gentle, appreciative wonder. You do not interrupt the commentary. Or the **Proud Parent** , in which you beam at him warmly, as though he is your seven-year-old who has just run in from the backyard with everything he has learned about volcanoes. The instinct to say “ _That’s so good, little man”_ must be suppressed, but only just. There is the **Museum Curator** , who mentally catalogues the encounter as a rare artifact. “ _Ah, yes — a fine specimen of unsolicited expertise, circa Wednesday morning. We’ll display this one next to the parking lot incident of 2019.”_ The diorama is entered into the collection with quiet satisfaction and placed behind glass. The **Anthropologist in the Field** takes a more scholarly approach, adopting a tone of detached professional interest. She is documenting a newly observed ritual, nodding so encouragingly that the subject continues undisturbed. She considers, eventually, publishing her findings. The peer review process will be competitive. The **Sommelier** swirls it. Sniffs it. Considers its notes of unearned confidence, its finish of untroubled obliviousness, its vintage overconfidence aged in oak. “ _A bold little number,”_ she concludes privately. “ _Presumptuous, but not without a certain artless charm.”_ Finally, there is the **Zookeeper** , who has seen this before, is genuinely fond of this creature despite its habits, knows what it needs, knows it means no harm, and has snacks in her pocket. Everyone goes home fine. These reframings work not because they are generous, exactly, but because they are _accurate enough_ to be functional. They honour the essential innocence of the encounter without pretending it didn't happen. They do not require you to agree that you were in need of the explanation, nor demand gratitude. You simply observe from a slightly higher altitude, at which point the whole thing becomes, if not endearing, at least tolerable — and occasionally quite funny. There is something else worth naming. Irritation grants the other person a significance they may not have earned. To be offended is to care, and to care is to make the thing matter, and to make the thing matter is to give it a place in your head where it will sit and eat away at you, refusing to leave, until you have written it all down or told someone about it — like here. The toddler with his dinosaurs declines to sit. You smile, nod, murmur something appreciative, and put it all aside as he walks away satisfied. He still has much to learn about asteroids and about you. But he doesn't need to know that today, and neither, as it turns out, do you. Rebecca Solnit, who started all of this (perhaps, without meaning to) — went to a party where a man explained to her the content of a book she had written, and came home and wrote it all down with devastating precision — understood this instinctively. She did not title her essay _Men Who Infuriated Me_. She titled it _Men Explain Things to Me_. There is a dryness in that title, a cool, observational distance that contains the irritation without being consumed by it. She looked at the encounter from altitude. She saw it clearly, and wrote it down. The dinosaur explainer will return. They always do. But next time, I intend to find him mostly charming — and to note, privately, that his arms are not entirely useless. They’re just smaller than he thinks.

Every spring, toward the end of March or the beginning of April, a mallard couple arrives in my backyard. They come to swim in the rainwater and snow-melt that has accumulated over winter on the tarp covering our in-ground pool. They have been doing this for decades — not the same couple, of course, but a continuation of duck families, generation folding into generation, returning to the same patch of water on the same traditional grounds. Much like our own human habitation of this particular spot. I moved to this house in 1961, left in 1974, and returned in 2005 after my parents died. The pool has been here since 1967. We still use the old canvas tarp in winter rather than the rigid modern covers now fashionable among pool owners, and I am glad of it. The rigid covers are sensible — they eliminate the accumulated water, the ice, the ever-present concern of an animal or person falling through — but they would also eliminate the ducks. Some inefficiencies are worth preserving. In winter, when I was young, the pool was drained to just below the jets and long logs were placed along the sides to prevent the concrete from heaving in the freeze. It made a small, practical skating rink. I never mastered the skill, but I watched my parents move over it — gracefully, with precision — and the memory of that has stayed in my body the way certain things do: not quite thought, not quite feeling, something more like a quality of light. They are gone now. The pool remains. The ducks come back. I want to speak about the Anishinaabe language before I go further, because this house sits on their traditional lands, and because the words they have for ducks are achingly beautiful in ways that matter to what I am trying to say. According to the Ojibwe People’s Dictionary — the authoritative scholarly resource for this — the general word for duck is _zhiishiib_. The female duck, the hen, is _noozheshib_ : the prefix _noozhe-_ denotes female, related to _noozhishenh_ , meaning granddaughter or niece. She is, literally, the female-duck. The mallard, the male, is _ininishib_ : _inin-_ carries the sense of man or person, as in _inini_ , and _-shib_ means duck. He is, in a sense, the man-duck — which maps with quiet elegance onto the English word _drake_. The pronunciation of _ininishib_ is approximately _in-in-ih-shib_ — four syllables, light and even, with a soft landing on that final _sh_. _Noozheshib_ is something else entirely. Three syllables — _NOOZH-ay-shib_ — with the stress on the first long vowel and the _zh_ opening the word with a sound that doesn't quite exist in English: not a hard _zh_ but the soft, voiced, sliding sound in the middle of the word “ _measure_ ,” or “ _vision_.” Hushed. Fluid. Almost onomatopoeic of the way a duck moves through water — that particular quality of going through something without disturbing it unduly, leaving only ripples. I think about this sometimes. The Anishinaabe found, in the sounds of their language, something the English names for things do not always manage: a resemblance between the word and the world it describes. _Noozheshib_. The female duck. Sliding through reeds. We have given our ducks other names, of course — less elegant, more personal, equally sincere. For four seasons or so we were host to Mr. Duck. He was large and battle-scarred, each year arriving with deeper wounds on his chest — marks of a life lived at some risk, written in feather and scar tissue. He always came with his female mate, whom we never named. I am not sure why. Perhaps she seemed to require it less. Perhaps we sensed that she was not ours to name. Last year a younger male arrived with them — unblemished, unaccompanied, clearly without a mate of his own. We called him Junior. He seemed to irritate Mr. Duck in the particular way that youth irritates the established: through sheer presence, through not yet knowing what he didn't know, through following along with an energy that the older male could not quite justify discouraging. He was tolerated. Barely. My husband is the duck-whisperer. Or more precisely: the duck-quacker. He speaks duck, or something close enough to duck that the ducks themselves appear convinced. They call to him; he calls back. Neither party has a precise vocabulary, but this has never prevented an understanding between species willing to try. They see him through the back window, hear him speaking human to me, and they call out to him with the specific insistence of those who know their audience and refuse to be ignored. We have consulted the oracles of the internet on the subject of duck nutrition. The ducks have consulted no one, and their preferences are clear: carbohydrates. Bread. Crackers. They get, we assume, whatever is genuinely nutritious from the still water of the tarp, the vernal pools that form in the darker corners of the yard, the various things that grow and fall in those small temporary worlds. What they want from us is bread. We oblige them with sourdough, home-baked from a starter I tend weekly with more anxiety than I apply to most relationships. They prefer it to the store-bought kind. I take this as a compliment not to be examined it too closely. There are coywolves in the neighbourhood. I hear them at night sometimes — that sound between a howl and a bark, the hybridized call of a creature that is itself a kind of continuation, a species that didn't exist here a century ago and has now claimed these territories as its own. They move through yards. They are resourceful and patient and hungry. I worry about the ducks. Not abstractly — I worry in the specific, low-grade, persistent way that you worry about things you have allowed yourself to care about. Have we lured them into a false sense of security? Made them too comfortable with humans, with easy meals, with a private pool in a suburban backyard? Are we the soft life that softens them for a harder death? I don't have an answer to this. The essay would be tidier if I did, but the honest position is that I don't know whether our sourdough is kindness or complicity, whether the ducks are thriving or being slowly domesticated into vulnerability. I worry, and I keep baking, and they keep coming back. Mr. Duck did not return this spring. The younger male did — the one we called Junior, though that name no longer quite fits. He came with a mate: pretty, alert, new to this particular garden and its particular human arrangements. He is bold and claiming in a way that suggests he has been here before, knows the lay of the pool, knows which window to watch and which door to wait near. She is learning. She watches him, and she watches us, and there is a quality to her attention that is not quite wariness and not quite trust — that middle distance where wildness and familiarity negotiate their terms. As I watch her watch us, I think about continuity. The ducks return to this water. I returned to this house. My parents moved over the ice of this pool with a grace I could never quite replicate; and now the ice is gone, they are gone, and the ducks come back anyway, to the same coordinates, drawn by whatever it is that draws creatures back — instinct, memory, the encoded knowledge of where the water is, where the welcome is, and where the bread, improbably, will be waiting. How does one express the sense of being grounded in a place? The knowledge — not intellectual, something more physical than that — of continuity, of belonging to a web of lives that includes but is not limited to the human? The ducks are not mine. I understand this. The land is mine — on paper — in the way that land is owned in this particular legal and cultural arrangement, but the Anishinaabe understood something that the legal arrangement has never managed to capture: that no one possesses the land. The land persists. The people come and go. The ducks come back. Perhaps the more accurate thing to say — the thing that feels truest when the _noozheshib_ slides across the tarp water in the April light, when the _ininishib_ calls to my husband through the window with the specific expectation of the already-known — is not that this land is mine, but that I belong to it. That this small patch of ground, this pool, this spring water, these returning birds, possess me in some way I cannot fully account for and do not wish to surrender. My parents knew something of this, I think, in their wordless way. They skated over the ice of this pool with precision and ease, and they are in the ground nearby, and the ducks come back. The land holds all of it. The land holds us.

On the morning I went to market, I had no intention of witnessing anything metaphysical. I was living in Northern Italy at the time, a short drive from the Adriatic, and had decided to make _zuppa di pesce_ — fish soup. The market carried only what the local fishermen had brought in the afternoon before: skate, monkfish, cuttlefish, shrimp, and one red snapper that was still, demonstrably, alive — sluggishly twisting on the counter with what I can only describe as inconvenient persistence. All of it went into a plastic bag with a little water. I trotted home. The bag went on the kitchen table. I began the soup base — garlic, tomato, olive oil, parsley, salt, hot peppers — then turned to the fish. Dumping the bag into the sink, I found the snapper not merely alive but more active than before. She had rallied. She (and it was a she — more on that shortly) was twisting with a kind of indignant energy, as though the journey had revived rather than depleted her. I moved her to the other section of the sink and began cleaning the rest of the fish, watching from the corner of my eye as she continued to thrash. I decided to tend the soup base and wait for her to die. Wait, I did. But she didn't. I know what needs to be done when you are cleaning fish. I have done it before. Furthermore, I am not a queasy person. But I had never done it to something that was, by any reasonable definition, still living. The snapper was clinging to life with a tenacity I found increasingly difficult to witness — and increasingly impossible to ignore, given that the soup was waiting. I decided, as an act of mercy for all parties, to end it. With a cleaver, I cut off her head. She did not die. She thrashed harder. I stood at my kitchen counter, cleaver in hand, staring at a headless fish that was moving with more urgency than it had shown all morning. The horror of it was total and immediate. I knew, even then, the scientific explanations — the decentralized autonomic nervous system of fish, the brain governing higher functions while the spinal cord independently manages muscle movement. Severing the head removes the brain; the spinal cord remains. The body doesn't know yet. The body keeps going. Knowing this did not help. What I have since learned is that the red snapper is an exceptionally hardy fish — well known among fishermen and fish market workers for precisely this behaviour. She had outlasted everything else in that bag, not by chance but by constitution. She was built for survival in a way that made my kitchen an extended inconvenience rather than a conclusion. But the knowledge that comes later is always too late for the moment that demands it. Watching her, I found myself thinking — eventually, not immediately, because immediately I was only horrified — about how many people, across how many centuries, had watched a fish move after it should have been dead and reached for something other than biology to explain it. In some coastal and island cultures, fish that continued moving after death were understood to carry messages from the spirit world. In Japanese folklore, the persistence of life after apparent death is connected to the idea that the spirit — the _tamashii_ — takes time to leave the body. The practice of _ikejime_ , the swift and respectful dispatch of fish, was not only about meat quality; it was about allowing the spirit a clean departure. My snapper had been afforded no such courtesy, and was perhaps making her position known. The Japanese concept of _mono no aware_ — that gentle, melancholy awareness of impermanence — would find in her continued movement exactly the kind of poignant, uncomfortable truth it seeks out: the boundary between life and death is not a threshold but a gradient. Not a door that closes, but a light that dims. Shinto belief holds that every living thing possesses a _kami_ , a spirit, and that the spirit does not vanish at the moment we decide death has occurred. Traditional Japanese fishermen would offer brief prayers over their catch — an acknowledgement of the departing spirit, a thank-you for the life given. I offered no such prayer. I offered a cleaver, and achieved nothing. Hawaiian tradition goes further still: certain fish are understood as ancestral spirits in animal form. A fish that refused to die was a fish that refused to leave — an ancestor attempting communication. Had anyone from that tradition been with me at the market, the snapper would have gone back into the water before I got anywhere near a bag. The ancient Greeks, closer to the Adriatic than any of the others, would have read her movement as divine animation — an omen, a sign. My countertop, in other words, was the site of phenomena that humans have been watching with wonder, reverence, and revulsion for tens of thousands of years. I was merely the latest in a very long line of reluctant witnesses. I had by now waited long enough that she lay still, and I told myself, firmly, that this was over. Mustering what remained of my composure, I clipped the fins and the tail, scaled her, and inserted my knife into the body — headless, tailless, finless — intending to remove the guts and the eggs I could see she was carrying. She jumped. Not a twitch. Not a residual tremor. She _jumped_ , with a vigour that seemed, at the moment, almost personal. I grabbed her and flung her back into the sink, where she continued to move. And I began to cry — not the dignified, single-tear variety of crying, but the kind where you gulp air, your nose runs, your shoulders heave, and you make sounds you would prefer no one ever hear. The kind of crying that arrives when something has finally exceeded your capacity to manage it with composure. She had no head, no guts, no tail, and no fins. She had eggs, which I had seen, and which I could not stop seeing. It was too late to drive her to the Adriatic. There was no version of this that ended well. What had begun as a market purchase, just two hours before, had become something for which I had no adequate conceptual framework. I told myself, as one does, to stop it. To get on with things. To put the fish in the soup. So I did. Despite continued movement, I placed her into the boiling soup base. She flapped once, twice, and was finally still. My husband at the time was a Southern Italian from humble origins — practical, intelligent, and entirely untroubled by the business of fish. His mother, from whom I had learned to make this soup in the first place, was similarly constituted: hard-working, natively wise, and not given to existential crises over dinner. Either of them would have put the snapper in the pot two hours earlier and felt nothing in particular about it. His mother might, at most, have made a quiet sign of the cross over the pot. He came home from work, sat down, and ate. Asked why I wasn't having any, I replied that I wasn't very hungry — which was true, in a technical sense, without elaborating on the reason. He shrugged. He said the soup was delicious, and made particular mention of the cuttlefish. The snapper, I recall, he did not specifically note. But she was there. She had insisted on being there, at considerable cost to both of us, and I suppose that is the closest thing to a conclusion the story offers. Nothing is quite as dead as it appears. Nothing contains only that which it seems. The boundary between life and death is, improbably, negotiable — and the moment of crossing it is not a fixed point but a long, gradual, sometimes undignified passage. She taught me that. I made her into soup. I’m not sure which of us came out ahead.

There once was — or there once was not — a woman who woke one Tuesday morning in early February, took a bite of an orange and understood, with a clarity that arrived all at once and without invitation, that she was eating Sicily. Not the idea of Sicily. Sicily itself. The particular volcanic dark of the soil beneath the grove, the tilt of the winter sun across the Ionian coast, the hands of the man who had picked this orange — a man with a sore shoulder and a daughter who was getting married in the spring, with thoughts about the cost of everything and a specific memory of his own father in this same grove, decades before, and the aroma of the blossoms in April which, if you have never been to a Sicilian orange grove in April, is almost unbearably beautiful. All of this arrived in the woman through the orange, in the space of a single bite, the way music arrives — not as data, but as experience, full-bodied and simultaneous, there all at once and then still there, resonating. She sat with the orange half in her hand for a very long time. Then she ate the rest of it, slowly, with an attention she now understood it deserved. She was not old, not young — in that particular decade of a life when the world has mostly finished surprising you, and you have settled into your assumptions, until something comes along and removes them all, efficiently and without apology, like a hand sweeping a table clear. She lived alone, in a city, in the way that many people live alone in cities: with routines which had calcified into comfort, with friends she saw regularly, but perhaps not deeply enough, with a job that was useful and unremarkable, and with a persistent, low-grade sense that something about the way she was moving through the world was slightly off — as though she were reading a book with the light not quite right, able to make out the words but missing something in the register. Food was something she had always liked in an ordinary way. She had always cooked reasonably well, bought reasonably thoughtfully, eaten with moderate gratitude and no particular ceremony. Yet, after the orange, none of that was possible anymore. She did not know what to call what had happened to her. She did not try to explain it. On the following Saturday, she went to the market with the careful attention of someone entering a new country, which is exactly what it was. She picked up a clementine from Morocco and felt the dry warmth of the Atlas Mountain foothills, the particular quality of light there — harder and more golden than Sicily’s, the thoughts of the people who worked the grove earthier, less complex, a different relationship to time — and beneath it all, beneath the human thoughts, the deeper vegetable thought of the tree itself, which was not thought in any language she knew but was closer to sensation: the long pull of water upward through the root, the slow conversation with the sun, the making of sweetness out of light. This she had not expected. She stood in the market aisle with a clementine in her palm and tears on her face, and the other shoppers moved around her with the adroit urban indifference of people who have learned not to make eye contact with those who are crying in the produce section. She bought the clementines. And she bought raspberries from a farm two counties over that she recognized — truly recognized, the smell of her grandmother’s garden arriving in her so completely that she had to grip the shelf. Then kiwi from New Zealand, which gave her a vertiginous green rush, the cold Pacific in it, the clean eucalyptus thoughts of a country at the bottom of the world that is convinced, on some cellular level, of its own great distance from everything else and has made a kind of private peace with this. She bought maple syrup from Quebec — and this was perhaps the most beautiful, because it came through to her as something between a memory and a dream: the cold of a maple wood in late winter, the particular creak of snow underfoot, and then beneath that the tree’s own understanding of this season, which was not grief at the tapping but something closer to what she could only call generosity — an abundance pressing outward from the heartwood, offered freely, in the way that trees offer things. She drove home with her bags, pulled over once to allow herself to fully cry, and then continued. The fermented things were another matter entirely — deeper, stranger, with a quality she hadn't anticipated. She had always kept yoghurt and sourdough in her kitchen, had always eaten kimchi with a vague awareness that it was good for her. She understood now that _good for her_ was the smallest possible thing to say about it. The yoghurt opened to her like a conversation in a language she had not known she spoke. The bacteria were not thinking — not in any way she could have described to anyone who asked — but they were not _not-thinking_ either. They were _doing_ , which in the very old understanding of things was always another word for being, and their doing had a quality she could only call intention: the slow, purposeful transformation of milk into something more than milk, a collaboration between the living cultures and the liquid they inhabited, each altering the other over time, each necessary to what the other was becoming. This, she thought, is what it means to work. The sourdough was ancient. Not the particular loaf, but the starter — its yeast carried lineages longer than most countries, longer than most languages, longer than any story she had been told about where things came from. It tasted, under its ordinary bread flavours, of time. Real time, not the kind measured in days, but the geological, tidal, patient kind that operates beneath the human scale. She ate it slowly and felt briefly humbled in a way that was not uncomfortable, the way you feel when you stand at the edge of the ocean, and it is very large, and you are very small, and this proportion is an unexpected relief. The kimchi was the strangest of all. It came to her in layers — the cabbage’s own cool memory of the field it had grown in, the hands that had prepared it, but also the long, dark, fermenting weeks in the jar, during which the bacteria had conducted what she could only describe as a kind of wild, roiling democracy. There was nothing quiet about it. It arrived in her the way a market sounds when everyone is talking at once, and somehow it still makes sense — bright, specific, alive. She ate her fermented things with enormous gratitude. She began to say thank you when she ate. Not performatively — she did this alone, in her kitchen, in a low voice, aware of how it might look from outside and not particularly caring. The orange from Sicily deserved it. The grandmother-raspberry deserved it. The ancient yeast deserved it in ways she was only beginning to understand. Then came the meat. She had eaten meat all her life without question, in the way of her culture and her time, with no more thought than she had given to the orange before Sicily arrived in her mouth. She understood, abstractly, that it had been alive. Before now, she had not understood what that meant. She ate a piece of venison on an evening in autumn, cooked simply, because she had been given it by a friend who hunted responsibly and who had spoken about the animal with respect. She was not prepared for what came through. The deer’s life arrived first — the forest, properly tasted, not as a postcard image but as a sensory reality, the network of smells and sounds that constituted a living forest for a creature whose world was almost entirely composed of them. There was a depth to it that she had no framework for: the deer’s knowledge of its own territory, learned over years, lived in the body, the forest as a kind of home that operated through scent and memory and fine-tuned alertness. A beautiful, complicated, lived life. Then the shot. It came through clean and sudden — not prolonged, because the hunter had been skilled and careful — but it came through, and she sat with it, and she did not look away from it. This was the contract, she understood. The life given. The death required. The least she could do was witness it with the full attention it deserved, rather than the careful inattention she had practised all her years. She ate the venison with gratitude that was also grief. She thought this was correct. The fish was different. Panic in the nets — not the singular, clean shock of the venison, but a collective confusion, a thrashing at something that had no name for it, no framework, no ability to make sense of the sudden arrest of water and movement. Wild-caught fish still carried the sea in them, cold and vast and genuinely ancient, and she was grateful for that — grateful for the ocean’s thoughts, which were the oldest thoughts on earth. But the manner of the dying was harder. She reduced her fish, and when she ate it, she was very still. She did not mean to eat the factory meat. It was at a party — a tray passed, she took a piece of something without thinking, and then it was in her mouth. She set down her drink. It was not dark, exactly. She had braced for darkness and found something she could not have anticipated and which was, in its way, worse. It was blankness. The blankness of a life lived in a space too small to move through, surrounded by others in the same condition, without grass or light or the smell of real air or any of the sensory richness through which an animal knows that it is living and that the living has some quality, some texture, some content. The animal had thought almost nothing, because there had been almost nothing to think with. And then — at the end — the fear, which was real and sharp and had no context, because there had never been enough life to give fear its proper frame. She put the piece of meat on a napkin. She excused herself. Outside, in the cold air, she stood for a while and breathed. She was not angry. Anger felt insufficient. What she felt was something quieter and more serious — a form of sorrow that had the quality of resolution. Something had to change. She simply did not know yet what she had the power to change. The processed food she discovered by accident, in a moment of road-trip desperation — a service station off the highway, a bag of something brightly coloured, a hunger that felt like a small emergency. She opened the bag and ate one piece. The noise was extraordinary. It came through not as sensation but as cacophony — a Tower of Babel of confused signals, a hundred different substances from a hundred different origins all present simultaneously, none of them with any coherent story to tell because they had been so thoroughly processed away from their origins that no story remained, only the echo of stories, the ghost of the signal, fragments of what had once been a potato and what had once been a wheat field and what had once been something she couldn't identify at all — some synthetic thing that had never had a life to remember, emitting a kind of white noise that was somehow louder than anything she had heard from any living food. It tasted, underneath the salt and the engineered flavours, of forgetting. Of things that had been made to have no history, because a history would complicate the transaction. She put the bag in the bin. She drove to the next town and found an apple from an orchard fifty miles north and ate it in the car park with her eyes closed. The orchard arrived in her — specific, rooted, the particular thoughts of an apple tree in late autumn, which are the satisfied thoughts of a thing that has completed its cycle and done so well. Her breathing began to slow. She thought about what she wanted the world to be, and what it was, and whether there was a path between those two things that a single person could walk. She began, quietly, to live differently — not dramatically, not in the way of people who make their private resolutions into public performance, but in the accumulated small ways that eventually constitute a life. She bought from those whose methods she could _taste-trust_. With more attention, she ate less. She was not perfect: she had learned that was not available to anyone who lived in the actual world and needed to eat in it. But she was present in a way she had not been before. She ate with gratitude, and she meant it, specifically, for each particular thing. And she began to wonder. She wondered it the way you wonder about something that is probably impossible but that you cannot quite leave alone. She wondered it at her kitchen table with the last of a bottle of Quebec maple syrup, which she ate slowly, from a spoon, while the maple wood in winter came through her in gold and cold and extraordinary generosity. _What if everyone could taste this?_ Not as an abstraction, but as a real question, given her full attention. What if the man at the party — hand on the tray, taking the blank meat without thinking — could taste what she tasted? What if the child tearing into the bright bag at the service station could hear the cacophony she had heard, and feel the apple’s orchard-song waiting fifty miles north as a viable alternative? What if every person who ate — which was every person, which was everyone alive — could receive, from their food, the full account of what it was and where it had been and what it had cost? She did not think it would solve everything. She was not naïve about the world, which is large and complicated and rarely changed by any single thing. But she thought it would change something. She thought it would make the transaction visible, in a way that visibility changes things. She thought that people, given the full truth of what they were eating, would not simply shrug and continue — or not all of them, not forever. If only it could be felt, she thought gratitude might be teachable. She did not know how to give this gift. She did not know whether she had any power to give it. But she held the question with her, the way you hold on to something you love — not crushing it, not putting it down, just carrying it, carefully, wherever you go. She asked it of the food she ate. She sent it into the bacteria of her sourdough, into the yeast, into the old living networks of the things she trusted. She whispered it against the skin of fruit. She offered it, in her own wordless way, to the forests and fields and oceans whose gifts arrived daily in her kitchen. Whether anything heard her, she could not say with certainty. But she thought the maple syrup, on the last spoonful, tasted briefly of spring. Of things about to open. Of sap rising in the dark through cold wood, patient and certain, toward the light. She took this as an answer of sorts. She put the spoon down. Sitting in her kitchen, the early morning light comes in at an angle she never stopped finding worth attention. She thought about Sicily, and the man with the sore shoulder, and his daughter’s wedding in the spring. She thought about the deer in the autumn forest, its long knowledge of its own territory; about the democracy of kimchi, the ancient patience of yeast; and the _orchard-satisfaction_ of the apple in autumn. She thought: _all of this is available. It has always been available. It is waiting in every bite, if you could only be still enough to taste it._ And then she made her breakfast, and she was still enough, and she did. ─── ❖ ── ✦ ── ❖ ─── There was a philosopher — the Daoist Zhuangzi — who once dreamed he was a butterfly, and woke uncertain whether he was a man who had dreamed of being a butterfly, or a butterfly now dreaming of being a man. The woman who could taste everything had a similar uncertainty, in her quieter way. She was not always sure whether she was eating the orange, or whether the orange, briefly, was eating her — exchanging something, passing something across the membrane between lives, making a gift of itself and receiving, in return, her full attention and her gratitude. She thought this was a fair trade. She thought most things would be fair trades, if we could only pay the right currency. The right currency, she had learned, was attention. Was presence. Was the willingness to taste what you was actually being tasted, to receive what is actually being given, to know — really know, in your body and not just your head — that what arrives at your plate has a history, and the history is real, and it deserves at minimum the courtesy of being known. This is not a very complicated lesson. It is, nonetheless, one the world has not yet learned. She kept hoping. She kept eating. _She kept tasting everything._

## It Begins at the Retina Clinic It began yesterday at the retina clinic. My appointment was at 2:35 pm. Not 2:30, not 2:45, not 2:30-"ish". No — NASA-grade, T-minus-and-counting 2:35 pm. I arrive punctually, stupidly, at 2:20 pm. A quick scan of the waiting room doesn't bode well. Every seat is taken. Checking in, I ask as politely as I know how whether my appointment might be delayed. I am told the usual “I couldn't say.” After some gentle pressure, reception concedes that I might be done by 4 pm or later — bear in mind the whole visit ought to take thirty minutes at most. I am not seen until shortly after 4 pm and discover I am the last patient of the day. The staff moves the way people do when they really want to get out of the building. Then: heavy sighs, grumbling, what I believe might be curses in Tagalog. The computer is frozen. My treatment cannot proceed until the specialist views results on screen. Eventually I receive the eye injections I needed. I discover — painfully — that they forgot to apply freezing to my right eye. I say rather loudly something that rhymes with “ _truck, that hurt!!”_ — which is uncharacteristic of me. Really, it is. The technician offers a needle with freezing, which seems entirely pointless at this juncture. I am told to re-book my next appointment. I cannot see properly because of the treatment. I ask for a specific day and time. “Yes, that works,” I am told. Later my vision returns and I check the appointment card. The day and time bear no resemblance whatsoever to what I requested. I give up. I’ll just show up as directed. The only consolation of the afternoon is an overheard exchange between the specialist and another patient: > _“Put the drops in both eyes every two hours for the next five days.”_ “ _So — four times a day?”_ “ _No. Every two hours.”_ “ _At night too?”_ “ _Yes. At night as well.”_ “ _So four times a day?”_ How that specialist gets through her days is a genuine mystery to me. Though perhaps stabbing my eye without freezing offered some small therapeutic relief. Psychologists call that displacement. ## Dental Insurance My husband and I carry a modest private dental plan. There is an online portal that purports to explain its Byzantine workings, but without knowing the codes — which are not listed — and understanding their date conventions, it is impenetrable. Submitting a claim online is possible. Everything else is not. I make myself a soothing cup of herbal tea, select some reading material, and call the help line. After forty-five minutes on hold — during which I am thanked repeatedly for my patience, for my business, and encouraged to go online — I reach a pleasant and knowledgeable representative. He explains that there is an annual cap based on the calendar year, but that cleanings are calculated on rolling dates, which are nonetheless part of the annual total. Clear as mud. He walks me through what remains on the plan — not much. This process, which the portal supposedly makes effortless, took a specialist thirty minutes. The irony is not lost on me. I thank him for his time. ## City of Mississauga Some background. Last fall, for no discernible reason, the City decided to excavate the drainage pipes running beneath our driveway. There was nothing wrong with the pipes. The supervisor on site — clipboard, tablet, snappy orange safety vest — confirmed as much when I asked why this was happening. She said she had no idea. Then she drove off in a City truck and returned later with Tim Hortons. None for me, alas. The work is on City property. The ditch, the pipes, the driveway skirt — not ours. So I suppose it is their prerogative. They fashioned a solid cement header that protruded a good four inches above the driveway surface. When winter came and covered it with snow, the City’s own snowplows crashed into it, dislodging both the cement and the pipe. I called the City twice. An inspector came, looked, wrote something on his clipboard, and glared at me in silent disdain when I asked what might happen next. Now the driveway skirt is subsiding and cracking further. I call again. I am told that I should hire a contractor, have everything repaired, pay for it myself, and then submit a claim requesting the possibility of reimbursement. Well. No. It is not my property. It is not my doing. Not my circus. I am told that within ten business days, someone _“should”_ get back to me. I note that “should” is not “will.” The difference between the two potential outcomes is lost on the representative, who restates the conditional verb without apparent awareness of the distinction. I ask for a reference number and his name, in case I need to follow up. My address, I am told, will suffice. Fine — what is his name? It’s Bob. Last name? That’s not something he can share. Employee number? Confidential, I’m afraid. With a touch of sarcasm I make no effort to conceal, I ask whether he is the only Bob working there. The reply is serene: “ _Probably not.”_ I hang up. ## The Water Department All I want to do is pay my water bill. I receive an email with a portal link. I sign on, see that something is owed, but cannot access the amount. There is no phone number. I use their chatbot, which suggests that I send an email. I do. The reply confirms that everything is, on their end, working fine — and does not mention the amount I owe. Helpfully, the email contains a phone number. I call. I wait. I am encouraged to go online. I reach a real person who informs me that another department — one without a direct line — can help me. She transfers the call. I am placed on hold again. Someone answers, I explain my situation from the beginning, and she drops the call. I call back. I start again. I am told to email a screenshot. I do, and finally learn the amount owed. I pay it. Resolution, such as it is, pending. ## The Bank My day is already a dumpster fire, so I decide to go to the bank in person for a tedious, yet demanding, transaction that cannot be done online. Two tellers: one veteran, one trainee of alarming perkiness. Several elderly customers ahead of me. The veteran teller is capable and efficient. The trainee, however, is a force unto herself — actively inviting clients to elaborate, offering to do work they haven't requested, performing helpfulness as spectacle. One older woman declines and says she can manage the machine herself, glancing at the line behind her. Ms. Perky insists. The rest of us wait in Stoic solidarity. What strikes me is this: even the older woman, clearly capable, clearly self-aware, is overruled. Her small assertion of autonomy — _I can do it myself_ — is simply not accepted. I file that away. When my turn comes, I get the veteran. All goes smoothly. I parked underground in a lot that is complimentary for bank customers. The validation machine is not working. The customer service desk informs me it hasn't been working “ _for a while_ ,” and that I need only cross the street to the restaurant, where they’ll scan it for me. I enter the restaurant. A polite but visibly exhausted waiter looks up and says, without preamble: “Oh — you must be coming from the bank.” He says nothing further. He doesn't need to. An entire ecosystem of dysfunction, conjured in one sentence. ## The Library Parking Lot I go to my happy place — the library — to collect some books on hold. I park, turn off the engine, and lean over to gather my things. My phone rings. A work associate with a quick question. In my parked car, between my saying “hello” and the start of our conversation, a dark, expensive BMW comes flying into the spot behind me. I can see it in the rear-view mirror. I shout at the universe: “ _Don't you f*cking hit me!”_ The car stops within millimetres of my bumper, reverses, and exits the lot. My associate begins to laugh. “You know,” he says, “I don't have bail money for you.” And I laugh — really laugh, the way you laugh when something breaks open that has been pressing on you all day. Because it has been pressing on me. Not just the inconvenience of it, but something harder to name: the cumulative experience of being ignored, transferred, misdirected, overruled, and managed — all with the bland efficiency of systems designed to process rather than serve. What survives, apparently, is laughter. And the library. And a friend who knows you well enough not to post bail. I drive carefully home to write this exorcism. _Thank you for your support._

There once was — or there once was not — a girl who was full of stories. This was not, in itself, unusual. Children are full of stories. But most children find their audience — a grandmother in a chair, a friend beneath a blanket, a dog who will accept anything with equal warmth. This girl was different. Her stories were of a particular weight and texture, neither simple nor comfortable, and the town she lived in was a town that preferred its comforts simple. She was not old and not young, in that long middle passage of girlhood when the self is forming itself urgently and secretly and requires, above all things, a witness. She lived with her family on the main street of a prosperous and thoroughly unimaginative town — the kind of town that prides itself on knowing what things are and seeing no reason to inquire further. The baker knew bread. The blacksmith knew iron. The aldermen knew, with magnificent certainty, everything worth knowing, and what they did not know they had agreed, collectively, not to need. The girl knew this was not enough. She had known it since she was very small, in the particular way that certain children know things — not from being told, but from feeling the shape of the absence. In the beginning, she had tried the way all children try. She had told her mother a story about the quality of light on winter afternoons, how it came in at a certain angle and seemed to carry something with it — some feeling she did not yet have words for but could feel pressing against the inside of her chest. Her mother, stirring something on the stove, had said: “ _Mm. Lovely, dear.”_ And stirred. She had told her father about a dream she’d had three times — the same dream each time, with the same door at the end of it that she could never quite open — and asked him what he thought it meant. He had looked up from his newspaper with the expression of a man who has been briefly interrupted and said: “ _Dreams don't mean anything. You’ve been eating too late_.” And returned to his paper. She had told her best friend — the girl she had believed was her best friend — about the way she sometimes felt that the world was made of layers, like the pages of a book pressed together, and that sometimes she could almost feel the other layers pressing back. Her friend had blinked at her and said: “ _You’re so strange_ ,” without admiration. After that, the girl stopped trying. She went quiet in the way that certain people go quiet, not from lack of things to say, but from the accumulated understanding that the room is not arranged for what she needs to say in it. But the stories did not stop. They built in her like water behind a dam — her observations, her questions, her griefs, her sudden inexplicable joys, her long slow thoughts about the nature of things. All of it pressing against her ribs with nowhere to go. She began to walk to the edge of town, and then a little past the edge, and then further still. The forest beyond the town was old, genuinely old, in the way that forests are old when no one has bothered to clear them because the ground is too rocky for planting and the slopes too steep for grazing. These are the forests that survive by being inconvenient, and they are the most interesting forests precisely for this reason. The trees here had been growing since before the town had a name, since before anyone had thought to build a town there, since before the word _town_ existed in any language spoken in that valley. The girl had always known the forest was there. She had not, until now, understood that it was waiting. She went deeper than she had gone before, following no path — or rather, following the particular path that opens itself to those who need it, visible only to them, made of nothing so crude as cleared ground but of something more like an inclination, a leaning of the air. Following it until she came to a clearing, not quite a clearing, more a thinning of trees, she found the maple. It was very old. She knew this the way you know certain things: not from evidence you could list, but from the whole of it arriving in you at once. The tree’s trunk was immense, grey-ridged and deeply furrowed, wider than her arms could encompass. Its roots had long since made peace with the surrounding rocks, winding and negotiating and finding their way through in that patient, unstoppable manner of roots, which do not hurry but always arrive. Its canopy was enormous and somewhat battered, with branches lost to storms, others bent at angles that spoke of wind and survival and the slow accumulation of difficult years. Beneath this tree, the _komorebi_ — a Japanese word for the sunlight that filters through a forest canopy —was deep green and trembling, like light through moving water. Like the light at the bottom of a gentle sea. The girl stood at the edge of the clearing and felt, for the first time in a long time, that she was in the right place. She walked to the tree and put her arms around it, as much of it as her arms would reach. She pressed her cheek against the cool, ridged bark. And she began to tell her stories. She told it everything. She told it about the quality of winter light and what it made her feel; about the recurring dream and the door she could never open; about the layers she imagined pressing against the world, the other pages of the book; and about the loneliness of being full of things you cannot put down anywhere; and the particular ache of speaking into a face that is not listening. The wind moved through the canopy in a way that she chose to interpret as laughter, as she told it funny things, and this seemed right to her. She told it frightening things — the fears that have no names, the ones that visit at three in the morning and are gone by four, but leave something behind some residue of dread that thinly glazes the day. She told it about sorrow and the moments of unexpected, inexplicable joy that she had no one to turn to and say: “ _Are you seeing this? Can you feel this?_ ” The joy that had been almost painful for its lack of a witness. The tree was a witness. Of this she was certain, in a way unlike most everything else. She came back the following week. And the week after that. Through summer and autumn she came, through winters when the snow lay along the branches and her breath made small clouds against the bark and the forest was silent in the way that forests are never actually silent, just differently voiced. She came in springtime when the tree’s new leaves were the precise, almost aching green of beginning, and she had things to say about that, too. As she grew, her stories grew with her — changing their shape, becoming more complicated, less certain and therefore more true. She brought her griefs as they arrived: loss, disappointment, the particular wound of not being understood by the people who were supposed to understand you best. She brought her questions, which multiplied rather than resolved. And she brought her joys, which became quieter and deeper as she got older, less spectacular and more sustaining. The tree held all of it. This she believed with a conviction that required no evidence, because some things are true in a register that evidence cannot reach. Now let us speak of what the tree was doing, during all of this. A tree is not a passive thing, though we are accustomed to treating it as one. A tree is a system of almost incomprehensible complexity — a network of chemical communication, of electrical signal, of root connections that reach and interweave with its neighbours in the dark of the soil, sharing what is needed, registering what arrives. What we call the stillness of trees is not the stillness of the inert. It is the stillness of the deeply attentive. The girl’s words entered the tree in the only way that any experience enters any living thing: as vibration, as pressure, as the warmth of arms around the bark, as the altered chemistry of breath and tears and laughter against the wood. The tree did not understand her stories the way another person would have understood them — it could not parse the words, nor follow the plot. But it registered _that_ she came, and _that_ she came again, and _that_ she came in different seasons and different moods, and always with something she needed to release into something larger than herself. The tree was, in this way, an archivist. Not of the words, but of the fact of them. The girl’s stories settled into the wood the way that weather settles into wood — not written there in any language you could read, but present, encoded, changed into something that was no longer quite the story and not quite the tree, but some third thing made of both. Year by year, ring by ring, the tree grew around what she gave it. She was no longer a girl when she stopped coming. She had become a woman, and then an old woman — still full of stories, still largely untold, still walking to the edge of town and past it and into the deep forest on the days when what she carried needed somewhere to go. In the end, she had come until she could no more, after which the world continued without her in the way that worlds do. She died in early spring, when the maple’s new leaves were the green of beginning. Whether this was a coincidence or a correspondence is not a question the world saw fit to answer. The town barely noticed. The baker knew bread. The aldermen knew what they knew. Now an old woman, the girl had not been understood by the town in life, and she was not mourned measurably by it in death. She had been too strange, too interior, too full of things for which there was no agreed-upon space. The tree held what she had given it. It went on holding. Time passed, as it does. The forest grew older and more inconvenient, and then the town grew wealthier and more ambitious, and inconvenience began to look like opportunity. The loggers came on a morning in October, when the maple’s leaves had gone gold. They were practical men who knew timber, the way the baker knew bread and the blacksmith knew iron. They looked at the great maple with the assessing eye of the practical man, which sees board-feet at market-rate and nothing else; this is not a criticism — it is simply the perspective of a man who has learned that certain lenses keep you fed. Saws were taken to the trunk. Those who were there — and there are always those who are there, watching, not quite part of the work — afterwards that as the tree came down it made a sound unlike the usual sound of falling timber. Not a crack. Something more like a long, deep exhalation, the way a person breathes out when they have been holding something for a very long time and the time has finally come to let it go. Some said it was a scream. But no one really believed that. The trunk was stripped and hauled to the sawmill, where it was divided into boards of various widths, pale and fragrant, the heartwood darker than the outer rings, the grain fine and close from those long years of slow growth. The sawmill operator, running his hand along a board, had the strangest feeling — not quite a thought and not quite a memory, more like the edge of something. He shook it off. He was a practical man. The lumber went where lumber goes: to the makers of things. A cabinet-maker in a town two valleys over bought a quantity of the boards and set to work. He was a skilled man, methodical and quiet, who worked alone and liked it that way. But as he worked the maple — planing it, joining it, fitting the pieces together with the precise, satisfying logic of the craft — he began to find his mind doing something it did not usually do. He would be in the middle of an ordinary thought and then a different thought would arrive, uninvited, with a kind of weight to it that his own thoughts did not generally have. Thoughts about the quality of winter light. About a door at the end of a corridor that he could not quite open. About the feeling of being full of something with nowhere to put it. He was not a man given to flights of fancy, and found this unsettling. Yet, he also found, to his surprise, that he did not entirely want it to stop. The cabinet he made from that wood was sold to a schoolteacher in a village on the other side of the ridge. She was a woman who had spent thirty years teaching children whose stories she had always tried, harder than most, to actually hear. She had the cabinet placed in her sitting room, and in the evenings she would sit near it with her book, and she began to have the strangest dreams — vivid, layered dreams, full of forests and light and the feeling of pressing her face against something vast and patient. In her dreams she told things to something that listened. She would wake with a feeling that was not quite grief and not quite joy — more like the feeling of having remembered something she hadn't known she’d forgotten. She began, for the first time in many years, to write. The writing surprised her. It had a voice she did not recognize as her own — richer, stranger, more willing to not know things — and she wondered, privately, where it was coming from. She did not stop. A house-builder bought the largest timbers. He used them for the beams and framing of a house at the top of a hill overlooking the valley — a well-made house, solid, as houses built with good timber are solid. The family who moved in were ordinary in the best sense: not remarkable people, not particularly given to reflection, but decent and lively and full of the normal noise of life. They began, not long after moving in, to have the most extraordinary conversations. The children would come to the table with questions no one had asked them to ask — about the nature of things, about what it meant to feel something no one else seemed to feel, about whether trees could listen. The parents found themselves telling each other stories they hadn't known they had: things from their own histories, long unspoken, that arrived in the evenings without invitation and found they had to be told. The grandmother, who had not spoken much of anything personal in years, began to talk. The grandfather, who had seemed to have nothing left to say, began to hum and then to sing — old songs, half-remembered, their origins unknown to him but the melodies arriving whole and certain, as though they had been waiting inside him all along. They put it down to something in the house. Something about the place. They could not say what. “ _We tell good stories here_ ,” the mother said once, with a note of surprise in her voice, as though good stories were something that happened to other people. And this was true, although they did not know why. Here is what the girl would have said, if she had known this would be the afterlife of her stories — not monuments, not volumes, not the grand memorial of the understood and celebrated life, but this: the quiet infiltration of other lives, the dreams of strangers, the songs of a grandfather who didn't know where the melody came from. She might have laughed. Having a sense of humour about her own obscurity was what she had cultivated out of necessity. She might have said: _This is better. This is closer to what a story actually is — not a thing you own, but a thing that moves._ She might have said: _The tree understood._ Or she might have said nothing, only pressing her cheek once more against the bark of something vast and old and listening, and let the thought go the way she had always let her thoughts go — into the wood, into the rings, into the dark and patient archive of a thing that does not speak in any language we recognize, but that holds, nonetheless, everything given to it. There is a word the Ojibwe people use for the small spirit beings — the insects, the creatures of the leaf litter, the ones we step around without seeing. _Manidoosh_. From _manidoo_ : spirit. Everything, in that understanding, is a spirit being. Everything is in relation. And everything that receives is, in its way, an archivist. Perhaps the tree knew this. Perhaps the girl knew it too, in her wordless, stubborn way — which is why she chose to tell her stories to a tree instead of a person. A person might have half-listened, might have shifted the conversation to themselves, might have offered advice when she wanted only a witness. The tree would not do any of these things. The tree would simply be there, year after year, bark against her cheek, roots in the dark, canopy moving in whatever wind was passing through. It would hold what she gave it. It would give it back, in time, in ways she could not have predicted, to people she would never know. This is, when you think about it, what all stories do. _If you have ever sat in a room and felt the sudden arrival of a thought that did not feel entirely like your own — a feeling, an image, a fragment of something too vivid to have come from nowhere — it is worth pausing before you dismiss it._ _It may be nothing. It usually is._ _But it may be that the room has a history. That the wood in the walls has rings. That somewhere, in an old country, in a forest that is mostly gone now, a girl who could not find her audience found one at last — patient, rooted, willing — and gave it everything she had._ _And the tree held it all._ _And then the tree let it go._ _Into you._

There once was — and there still are — a pair of lions who were not entirely lions. _This is their story, and the story of everyone who ever touched them._ _Stay with me here. Where the lions were born is… important…_ They came from the mountains north of a city built on a river that curved like a sleeping arm. From where the lower Alps soften and descend toward the Veneto plain, men cut into the earth and found a stone the colour of faded roses — _Rosso di Verona_ — marble that blushed, marble that held within it the memory of an ancient sea. For this stone was not merely stone. It was time made solid. It was the compressed and transfigured residue of a vanished ocean: of creatures that had spiralled and darted and hunted and died in waters so old the world was still learning its own shape. Locked inside the pink marble were the coiled shells of ammonites — those beautiful creatures whose spiral forms so resembled the curved horns of an Egyptian god that the Elder Pliny himself gave them the name _Ammonis Cornua_ : the horns of Ammon. Locked inside, too, were the streamlined ghosts of the belemnoids — swift, inky, arrow-shaped cousins of the squid — whose bullet-shaped remains the people of many lands would later call thunderstones, believing lightning had made them, hanging them around the necks of children to ward off illness and the evil eye. Did the ammonites dream, one wonders, coiled in their chambers of shell, spiralling inward toward some soft and secret centre? Perhaps the stone itself was already dreaming, long before it became a lion. And the belemnoids, those armoured arrows of the deep — they too persisted, arrow-shaped and inscrutable, caught in limestone. Fish. Shell. And, if one is to be precise about such things: the fossilized remnants of fecal pellets. The pink marble of Verona — exquisite, blushing — was built, in no small part, from crushed fish and ancient shit. The universe has always had a sense of humour. ## Onto this stone, a sculptor put his hands We do not know his name. We will never know his name. Even if he had scratched it somewhere into the base — in the cramped Latin of a working man — it would bring us no closer to knowing him. We cannot know whether he was a master, or whether he had apprentices who roughed out the shapes while he slept. We cannot know how he came to possess his massive chunks of rose-coloured stone, nor how long he worked to release from within them what was already there, waiting. Not only that, but we do not know whether he understood what he was carving from. In all likelihood, he did not know that the pink of his marble was the work of hematite and feldspar, iron oxide bleeding through limestone. He would not have known the names: ammonite, belemnoid. He would simply have known that the stone had a particular quality — a warmth, a depth, a faint luminescence in good light — that other stone did not possess. Perhaps he felt something, working with it. Perhaps his chisel rang differently against this marble than against others. He may have paused sometimes, setting down his tools, and placed his palm flat against the surface for no reason he could have named. He carved them as females. We can tell by the absence of manes — a choice, or an understanding, or perhaps simply what the stone asked of him. He carved them lying down, front paws extended with a kind of composed authority, tails curled neatly around their haunches. Resting, but watchful. Still, but not passive. There is a difference, and he knew it. One lion pins beneath her great paw a serpent. The serpent’s head twists backward — a futile, desperate arc — as though attempting to reach the lion’s breast with its open mouth. She does not look down at it. She has no need. The other holds, with the same unhurried gravity, a human head. Not savagely. Not triumphantly. Simply — as one holds a thing that one has decided to keep. Both lions wear the expression of creatures who have already weighed the matter and reached their conclusion. They are alert. They are non-threatening. For centuries, they endured beside the doors of the church in the damp and sun and frost of northern Italy. People passed them as they pass all permanent things — with the easy disregard of the living for the inanimate. Children clambered astride their backs and were lifted down, scolding or laughing voices fading. Old men rested their hands upon them while pausing for breath. Women pressed fingertips against the smooth flank in the absent way one touches something without intending to. Lovers sat on them. Poets contemplated them. Pilgrims prayed nearby and, without thinking, reached out. I, who tell you this story now, touched them repeatedly for years. Tens of thousands of hands. Hundreds of thousands of touches. The lightest brush of a child’s palm, the full weight of a sleeping drunk, the reverent press of a dying woman who had come to say goodbye to a city she had loved. ## The story becomes more than history For the sculptor — that nameless man with his callused hands and his ringing chisel — had done something in the making of these lions that he had not entirely intended, and perhaps had not understood. Whether it was the particular quality of the stone, already so ancient and so full of vanished lives, or whether it was some quality in the man himself — his patience, his loneliness, the long hours he spent with no company but the emerging faces of the lions — I cannot say. What I can say is this: he had given them the capacity to receive. Not to speak. Not to move. Nor to warn, protect or avenge, though they held beneath their paws the instruments of all of these things. Simply to receive. To absorb. To hold. Every person who touched them left something behind. Not a name — names are too thin, too brittle for this kind of keeping. Not a memory, precisely, though memory was part of it. What they left was something more like the essence of having been alive at a particular moment: the weight of grief still fresh, the electric current of new love, the dull grey sediment of an ordinary Tuesday, the terror of a child separated from its mother in a crowd, the quiet pride of a man who had just done something decent when no one was watching. The lions held all of it. They became, over the centuries, smooth and silky and shined to a soft sheen — not merely from the friction of human hands, but from the accumulated warmth of human lives pressed into the rose-coloured stone. On certain days, in certain lights, a person standing nearby might feel, without being able to say why, a sudden inexplicable sense of company. As though the air around the lions was faintly, warmly occupied. As though something in the stone were listening. As though something in the stone — coiled in its ancient chambers, arrow-shaped and patient, dreaming its long prophetic dream — were, after all this time, about to answer. ## Something truly wondrous happened There is a moment — though moment is too small a word for it — when a vessel, filled to the last possible measure, changes its nature entirely. Not by breaking. Not by overflowing. But by a kind of quiet internal revolution, so subtle that the world outside continues without interruption: the pigeons still peck at the cobblestones, the bells of the nearby church still count out the hours, a pair of tourists still pass with their cameras raised and their eyes half-elsewhere. Nothing visibly shifts. But something in the stone decides. It is not a thought, precisely — not in any language a human tongue could form. It is older than thought. It is the kind of knowing that belongs to creatures who navigated by pressure and current and the faint electrical signatures of other living things moving through dark water. The stone knew it now. _Enough,_ said the stone, in the way that stone speaks — which is not in words, and not in silence, but in something that lives in the seam between the two. ## Enough receiving; it is time to give Consider what they held between them, these two pink lions on their plinth in the cool of a northern Italian morning. They held the first drowning love of ten thousand adolescents, love so new it had not yet learned to protect itself. They held the love that comes later — the steadier, more interior thing, like the long faithfulness of rivers — and the grief that arrives when that love ends. They held fear in all its registers: the shrieking, animal fear of the body in danger, and the quieter, more corrosive fear of a life half-lived, and the very particular dread of a person who has looked into the future and found it opaque. They held the trembling, bright-edged fear of the writer who has scribbled something and does not yet know if it is good. They held rage — centuries of it — the clean hot rage of the wronged, and the sour, self-consuming rage of the resentful, and the cold, architectural rage of those who have decided to endure rather than act. They held wonder in extraordinary quantities. A child’s first snow. A woman seeing the sea for the first time at forty-three. A monk in the hour before dawn when the quality of darkness changes and becomes, briefly, sacred. A scientist in the instant before the result was confirmed, when possibility was still infinite and the universe still generous. They held shame. They held relief. They held the hilarious, undignified, entirely private joy of a person dancing alone in a kitchen. They held the last thoughts of people who had touched the lions in the full knowledge they were dying, thoughts that were, more often than not, surprisingly simple: a face, a smell, the quality of light on a specific afternoon, the wish to have said something, the wish to have said nothing, the wish merely to remain. All of this — and ten thousand gradations between and beyond — was held in the rose-coloured stone, packed into its ancient matrix of shell and iron and the compressed memory of an ocean that no longer existed. The lions were full. ### So they changed their nature The giving was not indiscriminate. This is important. The stone was not simply a cistern that would flood whoever opened the tap. What moved now from stone to skin was not random, not arbitrary, not a matter of chance. The stone — or the spirit of the stone, or the accumulated consciousness of everything the stone had been and held and known — understood, in the way that the deepest things understand, what each person required. Not what they wanted. Not what they had come looking for, because most people come to a thing like a marble lion looking for nothing more than a photograph, a moment’s rest, a story to take home. But what they _needed_ — that other thing, the thing running beneath the surface of life like an underground river. A young man laid his hand on the flank of the lion who held the serpent. He was twenty-one and had not slept properly in two years and could not have told you why. What passed from the stone into his palm was a single emotion, simple and enormous: the bone-deep, uncomplicated relief of being understood. He stood there for a moment longer than he had intended. He could not have explained why his eyes were suddenly wet. He walked away changed — not fixed, not healed, but carrying something newly possible. A woman of sixty pressed her fingertips to the lion’s paw on a January afternoon when the piazza was nearly empty. She had been angry for so long the anger had become structural, load-bearing — she was afraid that without it, she would simply fall. What the stone gave her was not peace — she would have rejected peace, would have found it an insult. What it gave her was the rage of every other woman who had ever been wronged and held the wrongness in her body and continued regardless. The immense, blood-warming solidarity of it. She did not know what had happened. She only knew that she felt, for the first time in years, less alone in her fury. This made the fury, paradoxically, lighter. She carried it differently after that. More like a lamp, less like a burden. A small girl, escaping her parents' grasp with the boneless agility particular to small children, flung both arms around the neck of the second lion — the one who held, with such equanimity, the human head — and pressed her cheek to the cool smooth stone. She had not intended anything. She never does. What the stone gave her she would not be able to identify or articulate for another thirty years, when she would find herself in the middle of a difficult decision, faced with competing loyalties, and would feel rise in her, from some deep unaccountable source, a certainty as quiet and immovable as marble. She would not know where it came from. She would trust it anyway. ### _So it went and so it continues_ The stone gives now — patiently, precisely, without fanfare. Not every touch carries a gift of equal weight; some people need only a moment’s warmth, and warmth is what they receive — a faint, inexplicable sense of consolation, gone almost before it has arrived. Others receive something that will take years to fully open, like those seeds that require a winter before they know how to become flowers. The lions lie there still: front paws extended, tails curled in their ancient composition of restful authority. One subduing the serpent. One keeping the human head. Both alert. Alert to what is needed. Both full of the world, and giving back what is needed, one touch at a time. * * * My inspiration for this story was born from real sculptured lions in Treviso, Italy. I've written about their "real" history before. In my heart, I prefer this weaving of their history. If you wish, you can read more about them here: Lions Made of Fish and ShitOn either side of the bottom of the steps leading up to the Duomo of Treviso in the Veneto Province of northeastern Italy, lie two salmon-pink lions. They are made of fish and shit. No one knows who sculpted these beasts. They date from the Romanesque period, likely created sometimeLouche LeavesDenise Choppin

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