Photo Essay: The Pasadena

"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

— Joan Didion

I am a collector, a curator, and an obsessive hoarder of nostalgia. I keep ticket stubs and playbills, birthday cards and love notes, each a memento of a favourite night. A new adventure. A wrong turn. Something lived.

Just as the landscape of a city can change in an instant, the things we have collected can disappear. The photos of gap-toothed ancestors and the pages of books can be licked by flames, and just like that, they’re gone. Yet, ultimately, they don’t matter.

On Thursday night, as the Pasadena burned only metres away, some of my neighbours panicked. “Grab the things that are most important to you,” someone said. So, I put Ben, my domestic medium-hair, into his crate, and we waited for a possible evacuation that never came. The fire grew, but there was nothing I felt compelled to gather.

I should have thought of my great-grandfather’s pocket watch or my grandfather’s cuckoo clock. I should have grabbed my passport and the memory cards that hold thousands of photos. But I had Ben, and that’s all that seemed to matter.

Days later, from my parking lot, I can look into the broken windows of the Pasadena. From certain angles, there are patches of sky where the roof should be. There are charred bikes, beer bottles, melted blinds, and drapes that are surprisingly intact, each a reminder, that just four days ago, the people who lived in the Pasadena were eating meals, watching television, and then everything changed. 

Fundraisers are being planned for the residents of the Pasadena. The Corktown Pub and Pheasant Plucker are both accepting monetary donations. There will be a fundraiser at Doors Pub on March 7. A large fundraiser is being planned for the spring. I’ll post details as they arise. 

A place belongs forever ...

“A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.” 

— Joan Didion

Bookish NYC: Day Two

It's been a few weeks since I posted my first round of photos from my two-day trip to NYC in February. I'm starting to wonder where winter and spring have gone, especially as my summer weekends start to fill up. Day two of our NYC trip began with a bus tour to Central Park, 30 Rock, Greenwich Village, and the World Trade Centre site, and before the group met up again for dinner in Little Italy, we had a few hours to roam SoHo and NoHo. Any booklover who has the chance to roam the streets of SoHo and NoHo, popping into bookstores along the way, should take it. These few hours were some of the best we spent in NYC, and I'm itching to go back to do some more exploring.

McNally Jackson Books (above and below) was one of my favourite stops. I walked away with a copy of Joan Didion's Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I figured it was time to stop repeatedly checking it out of the library, and it seemed like a fitting buy because it houses "Goodbye to All That," Didion's love letter to NYC. I also bought a gem from my childhood that got me so excited that I may have dropped an F-bomb in the children's department.

Fishs Eddy was a highlight of our wandering for me, because I finally got my hands on the Charley Harper plates and Alice in Wonderland glasses I've been eyeing online for at least a year.



Review: Blue Nights by Joan Didion

I’ve written before about Joan Didion’s ability to punch me in the gut and send me into fits of nostalgia. Her lyrical sentences entrance me, stinging my heart as they percolate in my mind. Somehow, Didion’s reflections of her own life always cause me to pause, forcing me to recall the times and places and people I’ve known that are now long gone. Her latest memoir is no exception, stirring up feelings of nostalgia, and at times, melancholy.

Blue Nights is murky and sorrowful, recalling the grief and questions that filled Didion’s mind following the death of her only daughter, Quintana Roo, in 2005. Didion offers vague and sparse details about her daughter’s life and illness, which irritated some reviewers; however, Blue Nights isn’t a book about Quintana Roo. It’s a book about the survivor scars that Didion bears, especially those of grief and regret.

Didion doesn’t only mourn her daughter’s death in Blue Nights, but also the deaths of countless friends and family members, including her husband, John Dunne, who died suddenly in 2003.

“I find many mass cards from the funerals of people whose faces I no longer remember. In theory these mementos serve to bring back the moment. In fact they serve only to make clear how inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here. How inadequately I appreciated the moment when it was here is something else I could never afford to see.”

Unlike other memoirs about loss, Blue Nights does not leave readers feeling hopeful or optimistic that life regains purpose after a loved one dies; rather it seems that the weight of Quintana Roo’s death is heavier than frail, aging Didion can carry. Unlike in her last memoir, A Year of Magical Thinking, in which Didion contemplates her life without her husband while Quintana Roo clings to life at a nearby hospital, Didion does not exude any feelings of hope. Instead, she simply goes through the motions of her daily life, visiting doctors for various ailments and trying to write, an action that no longer comes easily to her.

Didion’s stark honesty about loss and aging is startlingly authentic, if not ominous, to readers, yet this is what makes Blue Nights a must-read. While I realize that I risk sounding cheesy by saying this, the greatest thing about Blue Nights is the book’s ability to subtly urge readers to pay greater attention to the moments and people before they pass, before they become symbolized only by mementos strewn and abandoned in shoe boxes and drawers.

Goodbye to All That

“It is easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends. I can remember now, with a clarity that makes the nerves in the back of my neck constrict, when New York began for me, but I cannot lay my finger upon the moment it ended, can never cut through the ambiguities and second starts and broken resolves to the exact place on the page where the heroine is no longer as optimistic as she once was.”

- Joan Didion, Goodbye to All That

There is no piece of writing that punches me in the gut like Joan Didion’s Goodbye to All That. Though I have never had the chance to fall in love with New York City as Didion did in her twenties, I did fall in love with another city — one that seemed only mine to discover as a 19-year-old transplant.

I can only assume that Ottawa is not nearly as glamorous or exciting as New York City, but for me, it was my own — a new world with new friends and experiences that was difficult to leave behind. Like Didion, I know exactly when my life there began: I was an optimistic journalism student, having just packed up my most important belongings into my parent’s Ford Taurus wagon, and leaving many other things, including a new relationship, behind.

The end is far more ambiguous. I know for certain it didn’t end four and a half years later when I once again packed my life into boxes, this time moving from Ottawa back to my hometown. It may have ended months earlier, when questions began spiralling in my head: Should I stay? Should I go?

More likely, it ended months, maybe even a year later, when I finally finished struggling with the idea that maybe I made a mistake by leaving. That maybe it didn’t matter that my job prospects and relationship prospects (I stayed with the boy from the new relationship mentioned above, and I’m still with him today) were far better in Hamilton, because I so dreadfully missed my friends, part-time job, and freedoms of being a student equipped with a hefty loan and all the time in the world to accomplish all the things that need accomplishing.

“ ... one of the mixed blessings of being twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three is the conviction that nothing like this, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, has ever happened to anyone before.” - JD

For awhile, I felt defined by that time of my life — the sun coming up over the Rideau Canal as a slight hangover began to take hold; reading on the shore of the Ottawa River; my first taste of political activity on the lawn of Parliament Hill; attending lectures on campus, even those that weren’t mandatory. In my twenty and twenty-one and even twenty-three-year-old head, these experiences couldn’t be recreated anywhere else with anyone else.

"Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about."

"You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May." -JD

Those days did come to an end, and when I return to Ottawa now, it is as a visitor who sometimes feels unfamiliar with the city —a Shopper's Drug Mart has sprung up beside the old movie theatre where I would catch double features when I should have been studying; new bartenders at my favourite pub don't know my order (bruschetta and a Caesar); and students ten years younger than I am now take summer classes and work part-time jobs, unsure of what lies ahead. 

Some things seem exactly the same — the smell of an elevator or lying on my stomach with a book on Parliament Hill can send me right back, as though I never left at all. This most recent trip was no exception, a mix of  unfamiliarity and comfort that you can only experience in a city you once loved, but had to leave behind.

I walked from my temporary home in Carleton's residences to an old favourite, Octopus Books, only to find it closed for the long weekend. My heart sunk a little. 

 So I headed to Parliament Hill, snapping this photo of the Parliamentary library. It is the only part of the original buildings that was not destroyed by fire.

My book of choice was An Exclusive Love by Johanna Adorjan. 

My heart sunk for the second time of the day, this time when I realized my beloved Book Market on Dalhousie was closed for good. 

The obvious cure was a Caesar (well ... two) at my favourite pub, just steps from the empty Book Market called The Highlander. The staff has changed, but the Caesars are just as good as I remember.