I can tell my mom’s mood from 20 paces. I often see her in the corridor, leaning on her walker, and she turns as she hears me call her name.
Her face might break your heart: it’s filled with anxiety, sometimes fear. “Oh, John, thank God you’re here,” she will often say.
My mother, Sheila Gushue, was formally diagnosed with Alzheimer’s almost two years ago, and several months after that, she moved into a memory care floor here in St. John’s.
A scene like the one above has happened many times, especially after supper, when I arrive to spend some time with her before bed.
“Although it may be true to say that an American is a creature of four wheels, and to point out that American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver’s-license age than at voting age, it is also true that the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete in the urban compound.” — Marshall McLuhan
This insight into American values comes from a Canadian observer. Marshall McLuhan included it in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, which was first published in 1964, and which remained in print for years, often as a popular paperback.
This is the book that popularized McLuhan’s belief that “the medium is the message,” which — in the age when television had rapidly become the dominant technology in the home — turned McLuhan into an unlikely celebrity.
His insight into cars is less well known, but still apt. For decades, auto companies have deployed hefty resources in persuading consumers that their car is just perfect … for you. Consumers shop for many factors (quality, longevity of use, safety) but the branding that companies do cannot be denied as being influential. Close your eyes and imagine the logos and symbols of some manufacturers; most people will have no trouble thinking of them, even if they’ve never driven them.
When McLuhan talked about “the car has become an article of dress without which we feel uncertain, unclad, and incomplete,” it was the age of the Mustang and the GTO, when youth culture and car culture felt intertwined.
It’s a different era now, and in many ways our cities are paying the price for a car-centered culture. Decades on, we have cities built on principles that assume that most people have cars and will commute to get to work, shopping, schools, etc. In my own fairly small city, it bothers me that competing municipalities each sponsored subdivisions for a tax base, all based on the assumption of car ownership.
I read Marshall McLuhan’s six-decade-old observation ith that sad reality of sprawl on my mind. People may well “dress” themselves with their cars but the “urban compound” he invokes has not necessarily improved because of this motor-driven fashion.
“I was given the illusion of power while the real deciders had private calls without me, and you can only be undermined so many times on an adaptation of your own life before you start to question whether you even know who you are.” — Lindy West
In 2016, the American writer Lindy West published Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman, a collection of essays on fat-shaming, sexual violence, pop culture and many other things. West had been writing for newspapers, magazines and websites for years, gaining a reputation for being vulnerable, fearless and feminist.
Three years later, a television series also named Shrill — starring Aidy Bryant, who was at that time still in the Saturday Night Live cast — made its debut.
“I had friends, for sure. Lots of them. But I still really enjoyed, mostly, being alone and going home and getting under the dining room table after school. And there was this long cloth over it. I had all my colour books and crayons and snacks. And I just liked it. I was always making something or building something that was a secret.” — Erykah Badu
One of the things we need to learn when we’re growing up is the distinction between loneliness and being alone. They are very different things.
The singer and actor Erykah Badu made this comment during an NPR interview in 2024, while she was promoting a project on Netflix.
I responded to this part of the interview. I grew up in a house with just four of us, but grew up in a neighbourhood in St. John’s that, at the time, was just crawling with children. Tons of them. There were enough kids to form soccer or baseball teams on short notice for a pickup game.
It’s a clever “what if” conceit, a plot theory to upend one of the great narratives of modern fiction.
What if Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarity, deathly rivals in the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and countless adaptations, were … friends?
At least, that is, they start out as buddies. That’s the premise of Young Sherlock, a Guy Ritchie-backed series that debuted last month on Prime, and which features Sherlock Holmes coming of age and meeting a rascal student in Moriarity.
“Be pitiful, for every man is fighting a hard battle.” — Ian Maclaren
This quote has a bit of history since the Scottish writer Ian Maclaren contributed it to the nonconformist religious publication British Weekly in 1897.
It travelled within months across the Atlantic, and through the years has evolved into other wording, primarily “Be kind, for every man is fighting a hard battle.”
Historica Canada posted something of note yesterday on Facebook: a new Heritage Minute is coming, and it’s about Gander and 9/11. In a starring role: Rick Mercer, as former Gander mayor Claude Elliott.
It’s a well-known story already: residents of Gander and neighbouring communities welcomed about 6,000 stranded travellers when American airspace was shutdown after the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. The musical Come From Away played for more than five years on Broadway, and is still performed around the world.
“The bad times I can handle. It’s the good times that drive me crazy. When is the other shoe going to drop?” — Erma Bombeck
This feels like the credo of a pessimist, or maybe a realist.
Whichever shoe fits, Erma Bombeck occupied some prime real estate in hundreds of newspapers for a great many years.
At her peak, in the 1970s, her syndicated humour column At Wit’s End was reaching an estimated 30 million readers. (To put that number in perspective, those numbers were similar to what episodes of All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore Show were typically getting in that era.)
“I think I learned years ago that you don’t get songs that have that long stride and that pivot-hinge ability if it’s too much diary entry.” — Leslie Feist
Feist made this observation about her songwriting technique — moments before, she acknowledges “there is always an innate bit of autobiography there” — in a 2007 interview with the New York Times.
This was just before the release of her breakthrough album The Reminder, and indeed right as she was about to shoot the video of 1 2 3 4, the song that pushed Feist right smack into the mainstream.
“My thought is always, ‘It’s only downhill from here.’ That’s how I’ve always operated, ever since I began Family Guy. I had the crippling fear that I used up all the funny last week. That crippling insecurity really drives you to do your best. … Your moments of pure joy are few and far between, but they do exist.” — Seth MacFarlane
The creator and driving force behind Family Guy and other projects, not to mention the voice of Stewie, Peter and other characters, Seth MacFarlane made this comment in 2012 when he was being interviewed at an industry forum in West Hollywood around the time he hosted the Oscars that year.
Surely that kind of gig would be a feather in any entertainer’s cap. I find it remarkable that MacFarlane, with a bevy of talents, is dealing with insecurity that can feel threatening.
Earlier this week, I put the first line of clothes of the year out on the line. Now it’s spring, I thought to myself. I made a quick post on social media, and hours later, I was surprised to see that several dozen of people had engaged with the post on Threads.
Flattered, I thought … but it’s just laundry, right?
There is something about a clothesline, though. The one you see above is from last August, when I hung a batch of shirts out, and the early morning sunshine was sublime.
It’s no coincidence that the humble clothesline has been a recurring motif for Newfoundland and Labrador’s celebrated tourism ads over the years. Indeed, the whole genesis of the campaign rests in the fact that in some parts of Canada, clotheslines are verboten.
“The sea can swallow ships, and it can spit out whales like watermelon seeds. It will take what it wants, and it will keep what it has taken, and you may not take away from it what it does not wish to give.” — Natalie Babbitt
Living in Newfoundland, and just a short drive from the coastline, I’ve had a lifelong appreciation for the sea. It has its own magic and lore, and so often, there is also tragedy — a reminder of the ocean’s relentless power. That pain is present in the folk songs we sing, the tales we tell.
Martha Muzychka making some delicious spinach pasta.
On the weekend, Martha and I drove to Cape Broyle — about an hour south of St. John’s — and spent an afternoon learning how to make pasta. It was one of the best things we’ve done together in quite a while.
The pasta course is one of the things that The Cape has been offering as it gets ready to open its high-end cabins this summer. The cabins look to be pretty luxe, and I take it are aimed at tourists from away (hey, Ontario) who are looking for a cosy-rustic experience while scooting around St. John’s and eastern Newfoundland.
“I am much fonder of receiving letters, than writing them: but I believe this is no very uncommon case.” – Mary Lamb
Known most for retelling (with her brother, Charles) the plays of William Shakespeare into stories for children, Mary Lamb was also an inveterate writer of letters, some of which were collected and published decades after her death in 1847.
Her own life was marked by pain, mental illness and tragedy; she fatally stabbed her mother in 1796.
“I’m just thinking about making people laugh. I hate when guys talk about ‘I’m edgy.’ The worst comics think that way. It’s not edgy if you’re talking about it! You just live it.” — Chris Rock
Chris Rock is perhaps the most famous comedian or comic of my generation. We were born a few weeks apart, and grew up in completely different circumstances. I grew up in a homogenous bubble of eastern Newfoundland, and Rock grew up in Brooklyn, one of the first Black kids to be bused to a white school.
