It’s hard to know where to start.
Leah McLaren is a well known Canadian who writes a weekly column for the Globe and Mail (likely the country’s most influential and prestigious newspaper.) She was hired young and beautiful, roughly 20 years ago, supported not just by her ability, but also her impeccable connections within the Toronto media and downtown culture. Her columns have always been highly personal, dealing first with being single in the city, and then morphing into whatever stage of life she had entered.
It’s been easy enough to dislike, or at the very least, resent her.
Attractive, affluent and sophisticated, she was the kind of WASP archetype that hovered above the rest, and each week as she unearthed some small epiphany buried within her culture of privilege, the column managed to read like an invitation to a party you would never be asked to attend. As such, she’s always been a lightning rod for reader discontent, and this week it flared up again.
The column which sparked it was a weird one.
In short, when she was about 25 she was at a house party where everybody was little bit older than her. They had children and spouses, these people, and Leah, single and childless, probably felt unusually peripheral. Out of sorts, she found herself drifting through a sort of Lost in Translation remove,
ending up alone in a bedroom where a baby was strapped into a car seat. At this point, an invincible curiosity about breast feeding overtook her, and in spite of the fact that she was not lactating and had no idea whose child it was, she reached into her bra to remove her breast for the infant, at which point the startled father walked in and politely took his child away.
There’s a lot to unpack here.
The first thing I see is blind privilege– the unexamined belief that the world is full of things for the author to act upon. But I also get her curiosity. I understand having a weird thought and nearly acting on it. I mean, Christ, everybody has to understand that, don’t they? But still, the story really caught fire. It was taken as evidence that breast feeding is still seen as something shameful and perverse. That men had to attack a successful public woman just for being a woman. That the patriarchy must be broken. That women had to support other women. It went like this, and so from the real story, which was just a dimly remembered non-event, all sorts of other stories caught fire and burned through social media.
Funny that.
Regardless, the Globe and Mail immediately retracted the story and Leah McLaren was suspended for a week. What this shows us, as if we needed to see it again, is that newspapers care more about their readers than their writers, which is another way of valuing the advertiser over the consumer. As far as I’m concerned, the newspaper, which is responsible for vetting, editing, shaping and publishing the story, should have had McLaren’s back, they should have supported a weird, potentially very interesting story, but they did not. And so, writers need not bother themselves to look out to the oceans of comments for enemies, but can just take a quick glance at their own offices, instead. Your column, as I was once told by an editor, is the thing we put between the ads.
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It’s the hottest night of the year, and everything feels slower and more specific—the motorcycle whirring by, the exhaust from the bus, the distant shouts. Even movement feels weighted, as if gravity had been altered and natural time suspended, all of us now caught living in the space between an ending and a beginning.
In front of St. Joseph’s, broken men in hospital gowns are smoking cigarettes from their wheelchairs. I recently spent a long, uncertain time in hospital, and walking through this scattering of solitary men, all staring off at some internal horizon, I felt the need to stop.
Curtis, who was undergoing dialysis, had both legs amputated at the knee, was missing several fingers and teeth and was covered in tattoos. He didn’t mind being in hospital, he told me, because there were always people around and it was nice to have company. When I told him my wife and I were about to have a baby, his eyes got child-like and wide, “Oh, God has blessed you, sir, God has blessed you!”
We chatted for a bit, and as I was taking my leave it felt like we had both survived the same plane crash, but only one was able to walk away from the wreckage. After shaking his hand, and feeling like something almost holy had taken place, I walked into the hospital and later, at 4:40 in the morning on August the 18th, Rachelle gave birth to our son, Jones.
Rachelle was so strong. When the labour took hold and then seized her, she gritted her teeth, and then face a bright red, she pushed like a viking while k.d. lang played in the background. We thought this was going to go on and on for hours, as did the entire team who had anticipated a slow delivery, but suddenly Jones, whom I had been traveling 49 years to meet, appeared.
Neither Rachelle nor I saw him immediately. The presiding nurse, her face a sudden astonishment of joy, shouted, “Look down, look down!” And so we did, and there he was, glowing and perfect, seemingly illuminating all the faces now staring at him. For us, it was as if Jones was emitting a light that existed beyond sight, something so powerful and clarifying that with his first exhalation all the heavy, gritty air of the city, of the world and our lives, was cleared away.
The next day we all left the hospital– Jones, feeling the sun for the very first time as we carried him to the car in the Moses Basket a friend made for him. We passed through the smoking men who sat smouldering in the heat like rubble, but Curtis wasn’t amongst them, and so we continued without pause, taking Jones home. Home, an idea and memory that the boy and then the man, will forever be circling. And right this second this home is taking form, his mother rocking him in her arms, his father and dog watching from the sofa, a perfect and imperishable moment that one day Jones will close his eyes to summon.
(Photo courtesy of Donna Lypchuck)
]]>One of the people who escaped the mall on that day was Toronto Blue Jay third baseman Brett Lawrie. This is what he tweeted to his more than 125, 000 followers:
“pretty sure someone just let off a round of bullets in the eaton center mall…Wow just sprinted out of the mall…Through traffic…”
“ People sprinting up the stairs right from where we just were…Wow wow wow”
These are some other eyewitness reports:
“Everybody panicked and ran as fast as they could. We sprinted up the escalator and people were falling on top of one another and I was very scared I was going to get trampled or shot in the back. It felt like America not Canada.”
“My wife jumped on our kids and protected them. She pulled my youngest out of the stroller and laid herself out beside her. She sang songs to her and pulled out her breast so as to comfort her. It was an amazing and beautiful thing to do. She’s a hero.”
“I knew something was wrong when I heard two different groups of people screaming and crying as they ran past. I was frozen, not knowing what to do. An Asian woman stopped to tell me what had happened. She had a tattoo of a man standing in front of a tank on her wrist, and when I saw it I knew it must have been inspired by Tiananmen Square, and I wondered if I was feeling the same sort of terror that they felt on that day. I was still stunned, but the woman tugged me on the shoulder and then I began to run, too
“ When I heard the shots and all the yelling I couldn’t help thinking that it was my mother’s birthday. I just kept saying, “I can’t die on my mother’s birthday, I can’t die on my mother’s birthday,” and I just ran with the mob until I hit the street.”
“Ever since I was a child and I saw the Columbine shooting on TV, I’ve had recurring nightmares about this sort of thing. I’d always been waiting for it to happen, I guess, and there it was, happening. I should have been scared, but I wasn’t, I was calm, thinking that I had a role to play and had been summoned by God to be present on this day.”
“I’d just bought a new high definition TV and I didn’t want to drop it. I worried about people running over it. But I did drop it and then I ran like hell.”
“Me and my friends come down to hangout at the food court all the time. There’s a girl who works at the Dairy Queen I’ve always wanted to talk to, but she’s so pretty I get too nervous. When the shooting started I thought of her. I didn’t want her to be scared. I wanted to save her, but everything happened so quickly that I don’t even remember running. Suddenly I was standing outside on the street and I knew right then that I wanted to marry her. I hope to tell our grandchildren that story one day.”
