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HomeMy WebLinkAboutThe Citizen, 2008-09-18, Page 5THE CITIZEN, THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 18, 2008. PAGE 5. Bonnie Gropp TThhee sshhoorrtt ooff iitt Make the date When I Google ‘homeless people’ in my brain, my memory bank serves up two indelible hits. One of them is an incident that happened to me in 1983 in downtown New York. Coming out of the Iroquois Hotel I asked the doorman for the nearest subway stop. He raised an elegant, white-gloved hand to point me in the right direction. I remember that immaculate white glove, index finger extended, because right behind it, just ever-so-slightly out of focus, was a street hobo hunched over a heat grate. He was living in a cardboard refrigerator carton. Twenty-five years ago, and homeless people were already unremarkable – at least in New York. My second ‘homeless moment’ happened yesterday in downtown Vancouver while I was stopped at a crosswalk waiting for pedestrians to cross. I must have been engrossed in some dreary mental daydreaming because one of the pedestrians – a street person by his grubby garb – stopped right in front of my car and stared at me. When he got my attention he put the thumb and index finger of his right hand to the corners of his lips and pushed his face into a grin. “Smile”, he was telling me. Somebody without a home and probably no idea where he would eat that night – somebody I’d been too self-obsessed to even notice – was urging me to ‘cheer up’. Yet another timely reminder of how easy it is to ‘disappear’ the homeless – and also how dangerous it is to judge anybody just by the way they look. Suppose, for instance, I could whisk you to Dupont Circle, a rather grungy urban park in downtown Washington, DC. Chances are that sooner rather than later we’d run into Tom Murphy. Tom’s a regular in the park and not, frankly, much to look at. He’s 49 but appears older. He usually wears a grubby sweater, a pair of Nike sweatpants that are out at the knee and running shoes well past their best-before date. Oh, Tom is also black, unshaven and hirsutely disorganized under his ratty St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. Chances are even better that when we meet him, Tom will be more than somewhat thick of tongue and/or bloodshot of eye because, to quote from the Mr. Bojangles song, he ‘drinks a bit.’ It would be childishly easy to dismiss Tom Murphy as just another urban alky bum waiting for his welfare cheque. And it would be wrong. You may have noticed that Tom likes to sit by one of the many stone chessboards that adorn Dupont Circle... Perhaps you think it would be generous and liberal of you to offer to play a few easy moves with him. Don’t get comfortable. Tom Murphy will whip your butt before you’ve warmed the chair. Tom Murphy will not only beat you at chess, he will do it in 10 minutes or less. He is not just a chess genius, he is a wizard at a hyperfast form of the game called ‘Blitz’. In Blitz, each player has a maximum of five minutes to make all his moves. At the end of 10 minutes a buzzer goes and the game is over. David Mehler, who runs Washington’s Chess Center has been watching Tom Murphy for years. “He has a very fast mind,” Mehler told a Washington Post reporter, “and he sees combinations quickly. He calculates very quickly.” Just how good is Tom Murphy? Good enough to rate the title of ‘expert’which is the second highest ranking in North America. In 2005 he entered a Blitz Championship and came in 15th. In the world. If he bought himself a suit and tie, a shave and a haircut, Tom Murphy could probably earn a decent living as a chess professional – certainly as an instructor. But he prefers life in Dupont Circle among the pigeons and the other indigents. There, he plays for booze money, charging anywhere from $2 - $5 a game against all comers. Maybe Tom Murphy’s presence in the park serves another purpose too. Maybe, like the homeless guy in front of my car, teaching me to Get Over Myself – maybe he serves to remind us not to judge a book by its cover. Or a rook by its lover. After all, if a scruffy vagrant with holes in his socks can clean your clock at one of the most difficult games in the world, what else don’t you know about him? Arthur Black Other Views Don’t judge a rook by its lover Premier Dalton McGuinty is trying to make himself a key player in the federal election, but he does not have enough of the right cards. The Liberal premier has been quick to the table after threatening to inject himself and campaign more aggressively than in any previous federal election. He has renewed a longstanding request for a fairer distribution of federally-collected money and demanded leaders of all federal parties announce how they will provide this. He has explained a sharp decline in Ontario’s manufacturing sector has made it less able to maintain payments to provinces whose economies ironically have become more profitable than its own. He also wants to end anomalies under which Ontarians receive less cash for health and employment insurance than other provinces. McGuinty has said he will not endorse any party that fails to support this, which is a far cry from past federal elections, when he enthusiastically endorsed fellow-Liberals. If the federal leaders fail to act, he said, candidates in Ontario for all parties should stand up individually to support more cash for the province. He said one-third of MPs will be from Ontario and they can have a huge impact. The premier has done all he can to press his case short of popping up in audiences to heckle the federal leaders. But there is not much prospect any of them will genuinely promise him the cash he is seeking. The federal parties want to talk about issues they feel can help them, including who can best manage a weakening economy, how quickly to fight climate change and Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s abrasiveness and Liberal leader Stephane Dion’s indecision. They will not have much time to discuss the province’s request for funding. Voters who are also tuned in to meaty federal issues on which a government could stand or fall, will not have much thought for what seems a more abstract topic of federal funding for Ontario, which has an aura of merely transferring taxpayers’ money from one government to another. McGuinty has been pressing for a greater share of money collected federally for years, although he has escalated it recently. To news media and voters it will seem like yesterday’s story. Harper has claimed already he has dealt with Ontario’s concerns by increasing or promising to increase transfers, but these still are substantially less than McGuinty asked for. Harper already has handed out big money in the election to Ontario’s suffering auto- manufacturing industry to win votes and is unlikely to promise cash to a province that will spend it and get the credit from voters. This brings up the nub of the problem, which is parties do not place a high priority on fighting to raise money to hand over to another level of government to distribute and win gratitude – they want money they can spend themselves. McGuinty also is hampered in his request because federal politicians tend to have an ingrained attitude Ontario has been and always will be the richest province and can look after itself. They fear other provinces seeing them as focusing too much on one that mostly has had more than its share of the nation’s wealth. McGuinty has called previously on Ontario MPs to support him on the same issue, but few responded. McGuinty risks being snubbed by Harper, because Jean Chrétien, when Liberal prime minister, told right-wing Conservative premier Mike Harris he would not debate him until he got promoted to lead a federal party. The federal Liberals may not bend over backwards to win McGuinty’s endorsement. Dion’s performance will be much more crucial to it than support from a premier. Ontario premiers also have not had much success trying to influence federal elections. An outstanding example of this was when an unbroken string of powerful Conservative premiers supported their federal party for 42 years up to 1985, but federal voters in all but eight of those years chose Liberals. McGuinty will be following a losing tradition. Eric Dowd FFrroomm QQuueeeenn’’ss PPaarrkk Eagerly excited, with the dancing edginess of a child waiting for Christmas, you count the days, the hours, the minutes as they click by. Then the event that you have awaited with such frenetic anticipation arrives — and falls flat. Everyone knows what I’m talking about. You look forward to a date or a party and for one reason or another, usually because it couldn’t possibly live up to the hype you had placed upon it, it’s a bit of a disappointment. How many times have you heard about a great movie ad nauseam, then leave the theatre feeling somewhat cheated? Or there’s the family gathering with so many faces you’ve been dying to see. And at the end, you realize it was so busy and crazy you didn’t get nearly enough time with anyone. Then, on the other side of this, of course, is the situation or activity you initially dreaded, but where you ended up having the time of your life. Such was the case this past weekend for me. Well, dread might be a bit hyperbolic, but, there was a degree of uncertainty. We had invited our daughter’s future in-laws to our home so that we could become acquainted. Now, meeting new people is not exactly my forté. Schmoozing doesn’t come easily and knowing it, I tend to put a lot of pressure on myself when it’s required. Add to this that this particular couple has seen more than a decade of life than we have, that the husband has had an illustrious career in journalism and I was a bit tightly knotted to say the least. In the days leading up to our date, I worked like a crazy woman to try and get the house shipshape, all the while taking note of its advanced age and its ‘character’, which now just seemed flawed. I looked at our unfinished projects, the quick fixes and agonized over how to hide them or dress them up. Knowing too that the gentleman I was hosting had taken cooking classes after his retirement, I worried not just about my lack of fancy table settings, but of what I was going to put on the plates. And fermented with anxiety over which wine would be worthy of the meal and my guests. Menu planning, as a result, occupied endless hours of precious time. All through this, my stalwart honey with his usual insouciant pragmatism summed it up. “They’re just people,” he said time and again. Daughter, too, reminded me of how silly I was being. And the rest of my world? They just laughed at me. Of course, they were all correct. Sunday arrived and we spent a pleasant day with charming new acquaintances. I didn’t burn the food or spill the wine. I didn’t often fall short on words, and when I did, the extrovert in the Gropp partnership was there as always to catch my fall. And the moral of this tale? Nothing new. Just look forward to everything. Every event, every opportunity is a break from the norm. They may not hold the promise you expected, but the anticipated times will always be fun. And the ones you dread? Well, who knows. And meeting a new acquaintance is just another type of opportunity. Each person who comes our way, whether bad or good, leaves us with something. I’ll probably never change. I’ll always be nervous about new things, awkward in social settings. But I am going to try to relax and see where things take me. After all you can’t find the pearls if you’re always reluctant to dive in. McGuinty missing some of the right cards Letters Policy The Citizen welcomes letters to the editor. Letters must be signed and should include a daytime telephone number for the purpose of verification only. Letters that are not signed will not be printed. Submissions may be edited for length, clarity and content, using fair comment as our guideline. The Citizen reserves the right to refuse any letter on the basis of unfair bias, prejudice or inaccurate information. As well, letters can only be printed as space allows. Please keep your letters brief and concise. Abilities wither under faultfinding, blossom under encouragement. – Donald A. Laird Final Thought