Ukrainian for gymnastics purporsesthe power of working-class song

Years later when I was a chemist for the purposes of immigration, I began to understand that your being really is determined by your doing.

Laura, with Jewish and Finnish ancestors, was as Ukrainian as my sister Suki (Scottish, German, Irish, etc.) and I were. She took us to the Ukrainian Hall for gymnastics: long rolls, handsprings, and precise landings. Line up, run to the mat for your move, then line up again. Other gymnast kids had French Canadian or Russian ancestors, and there were almost certainly some Ukrainians. Our joint Ukrainian heritage was the joy of challenging our muscles and learning to do something that we were proud of.

After an hour and a half we had trained enough. For the rest of Saturday morning we had a choice of learning mandolin or working-class songs. I picked the latter, since it seemed easy: I already knew a bunch of working-class songs from home. Sure enough we sang Die Gedanken sind frei and Kevin Barry. Our Ukrainian souls channeled German free thinking:

Foundations will crumble, and structures will tumble

... or the Easter Uprising:

Turn informer and we'll free you, proudly Barry answered: no!

Multiculturalism hadn't been contrived yet, and this version of Ukraine seemed more authentic than the alternative: pogroms and xenophobia. The Cold War was on, so just by singing and doing gymnastics at the Labour Temple at 300 Bathurst, we chose our side. Saturday morning Ukraine was internationalist, as Ukrainian as Africa, Germany, Ireland, or Vietnam. The other Ukraine was visible on the repaired masonry on the south wall, where a nail-studded bomb had exploded years before.

So, as a young teenager, I was enormously impatient when Grigory wouldn't choose a side in Quiet Flows the Don: first Red, then White, then not White anymore... Sure, revolution was frustrating and ugly. In one passage, soldiers chant "Red Army: at the service of the working class!" Given the ebb-and-flow of the novel, given the disappointments, defeats and betrayals of subsequent decades, it would be natural to snicker. But yet...

My dad, and mum, were recently in a desperate conflict with the retirement home that acted as both their landlord and care provider. Members of our extended family, and friends, slept on the floor of my parents' room for 25 days, to prevent them from being informally evicted as unprofitable residents. Each morning staff were surprised to find a new family member sleeping just inside the door. My sister Eleanor explained the situation to a staff member, and was met by the response: "defend your father, he's a working man!" Eleanor wanted to know how the staffer knew dad was a working man, since it had been several decades since he had worked in a factory, and his manner didn't seem particularly blue-collar. "I heard him singing labour songs," the staffer replied.

So, those working-class songs can come in handy. Slogans too. Sure, there have been cutbacks and heartbreaks, disappointments and betrayals, Thatcherism, Reaganism, bank boondoggles and layoffs. The working class sure could use an army at its service, but it doesn't have one just now. Maybe there's just us. Maybe, on my very best days, I can tell myself: "Dannny Heap, at the service of the working class!" My Ukrainian gymnast heart sings.

Dogs get stuck

In hindsight, I can't blame my dad for being confused. Nipper had on not only Kotex pads, but a weird system of elasticized belts. She had been kept inside each time she went into "heat" previously, and had reached the ripe age of 11 (77 in dog years) without having a litter. My dad thought that our dog was tangled in the elasticized belts.

I knew better. Dog ownership was much more cavalier in those days. I didn't pick up after our dog had a dump in the park or by the roadside, but neither did anybody else, so far as I could tell. I had seen our dog, Puck (of Pook's Hill), mount female dogs. I had seen the two dogs stuck afterwards, facing in opposite directions for a quarter hour, looking distinctly embarrassed and uncomfortable. Lots of people would crowd around, proposing throwing on hot or cold water. I asked them to wait while I called the Human Agency and got advice. The Human Society explained that male dogs got a lump in their penis that took a while to shrink, about 15 or 20 minutes.

Litters were astonishingly large --- 12 puppies in Nipper's case. Sure, the owners of the male dog might suggest some homes for the puppies, but the burden fell disproportionately on the owners of the female. I can't really blame Nipper's owners for keeping her in for 11 years, but I'm not surprised that she escaped.

So, I explained the facts of life to my dad: it's not elasticized belts; dogs just get stuck.

Careful with cops

I had mixed feelings about Lucky (Fortunato) Rao announcing over the bullhorn that "they've arrested a baby!" At fifteen, I certainly didn't feel like a baby, but the result of Lucky's announcement was that the squad car was surrounded by strikers, and strike supporters, and then rocked to within an inch of what the shocks could absorb. The officer in the front seat radioed frantically for reinforcements.

Gidon Industries produced mufflers in the far reaches of Rexdale, quite a trek for my sister Suki and I from downtown Toronto. Gidon had hired Driver Pool to recruit strike-breakers and drive them at high speed across a picket line that striking Gidon's employees had set up. Strike-breakers huddled inside Driver Pool cars, while the drivers knocked over strikers as they roared through the line. Suki and I were among strike supporters helping the small Steel Workers' local at Gidon exercise their right to bargain without intimidation. Part of bargaining meant communicating with would-be strike-breakers to convince them not to cross the line, which required the crowd to hold each car in place for a few moments of intense conversation. Since the Driver Pool drivers were trying to ram through the picketers, holding a car in place involved some vigorous rocking. Some parts of some cars' trim didn't make it through, presumably part of why Gidon paid Driver Pool the big bucks.

Just after one such scrum, I was collared and pushed into the back seat of a police car, along with a striker who didn't look much older than me. Several minutes of the crowd rocking the squad car ended when police reinforcements arrived and made a path out. I ended up in a west-end cop shop with two police, one being the officer in charge of juveniles (like me). The juvenile officer gave me stern lectures on how much damage I had allegedly caused to the Driver Pool vehicle. The other officer made friendly digressions into how enlightened labour disputes were in Australia. I didn't really know how to respond to either, so I didn't.

The officers wouldn't release me into the custody of my sister, even though she was an adult. They insisted on summoning my mum, who arrived very late for work, and very annoyed. She had a note passed in to me: "Danny, don't say anything to the police, since they will try to get you to say things that can be used against strikers who are old enough to be tried as adults."

She had nailed the situation exactly, almost as if she had watched the Good Cop/Bad Cop routine the two officers had used over the last few hours. I remain in awe of her judgement.

My situation was sorted out in Juvenile Court some weeks later. The law at that time involved determining whether one was, or was not, a Juvenile Delinquent. This meant considering your family situation, your school situation, and (most notably) no real evidence of any crimes committed or otherwise. Coming into police custody was enough to bring you before the court. I was terrified of the tales I had heard of the treatment newcomers got at Bowmanville, so I was very relieved to get a suspended sentence. The judge did ask me what I was doing at 6 am in front of Gidon Industries, so I told her. After I left I realized that I hadn't asked her what the vehicle I had supposedly vandalized (some company different from either Gidon or Driver Pool was named owner) was doing there.

Mum and Picasso

Picasso's installation of miniatures was in shambles. So was my dream about it, when I woke with a start. Normally I would have let the images go, let them slowly become fainter and the gaps between them become stranger, as I do with most dreams. But I wanted to recover the context of my mum saying, in an emphatic but quavering voice, "I think we won." At least I'd be able to re-visit that moment a few times, and it might even help me explain my extraordinary parents to my bewildered children.

For over a decade Picasso's installation of miniatures at the Ukrainian Labour Temple at 300 Bathurst Street had been closed to the public, due to the Labour Temple's dilapidated state. A total of 3,189 post-card-sized ink drawings had been personally mounted on copper shingles, and then each corner of each shingle had been screwed into lead anchors in the masonry wall above the stage of 300 Bathurst, by Picasso himself, coinciding with an Ontario Art Gallery exhibition of his work in the 1964. He had insisted on attaching each anchor and screw while lying on his back on a scaffold, so that the detail of each miniature would not distract him from the effect of the emerging ensemble. From the floor fifteen feet below the installation (or the balcony forty feet opposite), it was impossible to see the details of any individual miniature, but the combined effect was stunning.

Good binoculars, or a ladder (neither were allowed near the installation while Picasso was alive) would have revealed that the subjects were fairly ordinary, adult women. Picasso had worked from photographs, interviews, and correspondence, with thousands of mothers around the world. These mothers had collected their children's baby teeth as they fell out, and mailed them to researchers in the U.S. Tooth Fairy Project. The teeth were then tested for levels strontium-90 spewed out by the above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. My mum was one of these mothers, and her miniature in the installation, as well as our baby teeth, stood ready to condemn the weapons corporations.

Although the teeth and and miniatures stood ready to condemn, the world wasn't uniformly ready to hear the condemnation. In the intervening years my parents marched and petitioned to ban the bomb, which remained un-banned, but (with two horrible exceptions) un-dropped. They brought their children and friends to march against the American war on Vietnam, and we shared our home with American war resisters who refused to help drop napalm and cluster bombs on kids halfway around the world. The Vietnamese finally pushed out the American military, but not before a million Vietnamese were killed, with the country pockmarked with bomb craters and poisoned with dioxin. More wars came, a few went. My parents worked to end each war as though this was the most natural use of their spare time. The installation of miniatures helped prove that, although unusual, they weren't isolated.

The miniatures had fallen on hard times. Verdigris forming on the copper shingles, rather than adding a greenish distinction to each miniature, was threatening to stain many of them. The combined weight of over twelve-thousand lead anchors threatened to bring down parts of the wall, and the installation had to be closed for the safety of the public. The estimated cost of reinforcing the wall and replacing the shingles was staggering, impossible.

Miraculously, a start was made. Great-grandchildren of the blue-collar workers whose weekly donations had built the Labour Temple in the thirties, were now donating some of their service-worker pay cheques to the restoration. They did this because surviving volunteers of the 1960s installation told them what it had been like working with the brilliant-but-temperamental artist, and that the faces being restored to the wall were women just like their mother or grandmother. Volunteers were learning, with difficulty, to handle sheet metal shears to trim new copper shingles to the right size for each miniature --- something that had been easier in the 1960s, when there were many sheet metal workers among the volunteers helping with the installation. But it seemed extremely unlikely that the installation would ever be successfully restored and opened to the public.

In the middle of this, my mum turned to me and said: "I think we won." This would have been a ludicrous boast if it had been uttered by anybody else. But my mum's gaze fixed me on the hook of an open-ended responsibility that I share with my siblings, wife, and perhaps with our kids.