Christmas Letter
Calgary, 6 January 2003Right. We meant to do this a month ago, but one thing lead to another and suddenly it’s January 2003. First my father came out to help work on the house, then we drove back to Vancouver for Christmas, Annette had tons of marking to do, we were both deathly ill with some horrific cold/flu/plague thing (we still aren’t out of the woods yet) and then it was time to drive back to Calgary. So here we are.
(Note to anyone in Vancouver we didn't see over the holidays: sorry we didn't even bother calling any of you but we felt like death, and given the virus we were carrying, you should be thankful that we stayed locked up at the various parents' houses.)
I’m not sure that we wrote one of these last year, either. In any case, to make a long story short, we left our beloved Berlin the previous December so that Annette could take up a very provisional post-doctoral research grant at the University of Toronto. It wasn’t much (the stipend barely covered our rent) but it got her back to North America with a reasonable sort of academic affiliation, which is what she needed to resuscitate her career. In the spring she interviewed for and was offered a tenure-track position teaching German history at the University of Calgary. After three uncertain years her long, wretched job search was over. We moved west in July, bought ourselves a cute little house*, inherited a minivan from my parents, and have settled down to live dullish lives of unremarkable near-middle-aged bourgeois respectability (though not exactly prosperity).
Madeleine, now 2.2, has over the past year evolved from a large bipedal infant into a smallish proto-human with a shocking vocabulary and disturbing grammar. She is a genial tyrant, a mostly benign despot. She loves "school" and still speaks some German, though we’ve been a little negligent about this lately. Her current obsessions include Thomas the Tank Engine, Winnie the Pooh, and feeding imaginary snacks to her parents or cat. She is delightfully loopy. Vita, incidentally, became an outside cat this year, first in Toronto, then in Calgary. Prowling outdoors suits her. She is enjoying the bloom of a second youth. Maddy and Vita love each other dearly, though perhaps not symmetrically.
Annette is generally happy with her job. It’s a good department with a decent number of younger faculty. Recent fiscal problems aside, the university is not too bad. The quality of students is no worse than one might expect, with occasional flashes of both brilliance and idiocy. Aside from having to teach a class with 200 students next term ("Age of Totalitarianism"), all is well.
So what have I [Scott, who refuses to write festive briefings exclusively in the third person] been up to for the past twelve months? Not much. Looking after Maddy (who has been in part-time day care most of the year so that hasn’t been as tough as it sounds), puttering about working on the house, reading vast amounts, and pondering what if anything I might do with the years remaining to me in this life. I shall have to find some sort of job very soon, for reasons related to both sinking self-esteem and rising renovation costs.
And what of geography? This has been a year of movement. Toronto didn’t make much of an impression on us. When you’re penniless and carless and burdened with child, it doesn’t really matter where you live, your horizons are very near: home, playground, coffee shop, grocery store. We did at least have a bike trailer, in which Mads was pulled to the university day care, three entertaining basset hounds living next door, and some old friends to catch up with. Calgary is still too new for us to have firm opinions. It’s no Berlin, alas, but we didn’t expect it to be. We miss many things about Berlin: bakeries, Turkish food, cheap beer delivered to your door, etc. But I won’t go on about it; I pine too much already. At least we have the good fortune to be living in an "inner city" neighbourhood (a term that leaves us snickering after D.C. and Chicago) instead of the miserable soulless suburbs that have metastasized across the prairie in recent years. Calgary has excellent winter sports facilities and is close to the mountains, but it is not a hugely attractive or interesting city, and it appears to be filled with great numbers of wholesome, polite, decent, pleasant, earnest, law-abiding, hard-working, family-raising, civic-minded Caucasian folk, which probably explains my recurrent Pod People nightmares. As I said, it’s no Berlin.
Anyway, that’s the annual report. Best of the season and so on.
Scott & Annette
Pictures attached: house and inhabitants.
*House stuff (for those of you who care):
We bought a small (760 square foot) two-bedroom bungalow in Hillhurst, a "desirable" older, central neighbourhood. It’s the cheapest house on the street, affordable only by virtue of its size (smaller than our Berlin apartments if one doesn’t count the unfinished basement) and slightly exposed corner lot. This is one of maybe two or three areas in Calgary that feel even vaguely urban, where you can conceivably walk to more than one coffee shop. We’re close to downtown, just across the river, and not far from the university. It is convenient, and you are not a slave to your car every time you need milk.
The house: it’s a cute little place, built in 1941, well maintained, not changed much, with lots of natural wood inside. The original owner was in it until four years ago, then a young couple bought it and did some generally tasteful interior painting and the unfortunate red exterior trim but little more. We have: a snug but comfortable living-dining room; a very retro fifties kitchen with mint/hospital green walls, white cupboards and an old electric stove the size of an Austin Mini; two smallish bedrooms, ours neutral gray and Maddy’s a deep bordello red. There’s a decent-sized yard with no landscaping to speak of, an unobstructed view of a major intersection over the sagging, ancient fence, and a tiny garage. Since moving in we have replaced the furnace and hot water heater, upgraded the electrical service and plumbing, bought a chair and couch (no more futons) and various other bits of furniture. The basement is currently being finished with the regular assistance of our fathers. When complete we’ll have a second bathroom downstairs, a utility room (with new euro-style front-loading washing machine and matching dryer!) plus combination pantry/bike room/storage area, and close to four hundred square feet of open space that will serve as an office, guest room and play area. Currently the bathroom plumbing has been roughed in, the framing and wiring are finished and it’s ready for drywall. (It should have been finished long ago but I am very, very lazy when it comes to working on the house. I need a father figure around to goad or shame me into action.) Outside, we bought six trees and had them planted in the fall, including a screen of four columnar poplars along the side fence to provide a little privacy sometime around 2010. And then we ran out of money.
Financial considerations aside, what we plan to do next is finish the basement, then build a fence and a deck and do some landscaping. I suppose we might eventually consider an addition to expand the kitchen, which is currently a bit too small to eat in comfortably, and create an upstairs office, but I’m not sure if that makes financial sense, and moving is probably easier than finding a contractor willing to do that kind of work here. So we might just enclose the tiny back porch as a mud room, make a few cosmetic improvements upstairs, replace the ancient appliances and modernize the kitchen a little, though preserving the cool mint green and white look if possible. We’ll stay until it becomes claustrophobic. (Right now the size feels perfect – I do not understand the average Calgarian’s belief that you need at least one bathroom and a thousand square feet per person, plus a godforsaken SUV, if you are to live properly.)
