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This past year, with the lockdown and an almost complete end of live performance, I have had lots of time to feel nostalgic for my past days and nights spent enjoying the Toronto music scene.

One of the best places to hear live music in Toronto was at the now-defunct Melody Ranch, a weekly event held for over 20 years mostly at the Brunswick House in the Annex.

On Saturday afternoons, you would trip into the dark and dingy bar and be treated to some of Toronto’s best musicians.

The Brunswick House, better known as The Brunny, was an infamous institution in its own right. It had a long history (it was one of the oldest bars in the city) but was best known as a rowdy university bar. On a Saturday afternoon, you could see the grime about the place. The bathrooms were especially unpleasant to navigate. But it certainly had character.

Melody Ranch was always a cheerful way to spend a Saturday. The place was always packed with tables of loyal fans. I call the event Melody Ranch, but that was actually the name of the band. The group was fronted and hosted by an effervescent Mary de Keyzer, who has been described as Toronto’s “Queen of Country Blues” and included a talented collection of musicians with some stellar Canadian musical pedigree (I can’t find much information about who was in the band, but think it included Chris Whitely on pedal steel, Conrad Kipling on mandolin, Dave Tufford on guitar, maybe Steve Briggs on guitar?) Mary led the first half of the show, singing and bantering with the audience and bar staff.

It was the second half when things got fun, when the stage opened up for guests. It was always interesting to see who would show up to perform. And it was always amazing how the band was able to adapt to whoever arrived on stage.

The guests varied from week to week, but there were quite a few people who showed up to perform on a regular basis, including the late great Jeff Healey. And there were countless spine-tingling moments of music making. I remember a woman named Helen Stewart, renowned for her covers of Patsy Cline, who sang a rendition of Tammy Wynette’s “Almost Persuaded” that made me cry on more than one occasion.

It was at Melody Ranch that I first heard Terra Hazelton. The honey-voiced Hazelton made her first appearance one blustery November afternoon, and I do believe there was an enormous intake of breath in the room. Jeff Healey heard Hazleton that day too, and invited her to tour with his group the Jazz Wizards. Hazelton went on to have a successful singing (and acting) career.

I have tried to find more information about who played at Melody Ranch. There isn’t much information out there. The Brunswick changed ownership in the mid-2000s and was renovated into a shiny sports bar. Melody Ranch moved to the upstairs at the Hard Rock Cafe at Dundas Square, but its glory days were over and it soon ended. (The Brunswick’s days were soon over too, it got sold to a developer in 2016 and is now a brightly lit pharmacy.) I don’t know if there is anything like Melody Ranch that happened since anywhere else in the city, there certainly isn’t anything that could be happening now. But it sure was fun while it lasted.

This past September marked the 20th anniversary of my move from Charlottetown to Toronto, and during these dark days, with everything shut down and everyone shut in, I’ve been thinking a lot about the live music and the (many now struggling or closed) performance spaces I have enjoyed in this city throughout the past two decades.

When I first arrived to this city in 2000, going out in the evening to see bands and attend performances was a big part of my life. After a few years, I got inspired by some rock-loving pals to take it seriously enough to commit, like them, to see at least 100 live bands a year. It might sound like a lot of bands, and people used to tell me it sounded like a lot of bands, but really, it wasn’t that difficult to achieve. Toronto had lots of small and medium-sized venues with live music nightly, so really, you could go sit in any number of bars and hear a band or two (or more.)

But having the 100 bands goal did make it more of a game, and more of an incentive to go hear a band when I might have begged off to stay at home. It was fun to go through the Now listings, or local websites and boards, to see who was playing where and when.

Most of these venues, too, offered incredibly low ticket fees, or else passed the hat between sets, so the cost of entertainment wasn’t prohibitive.

I came across the collage of images above while looking through some old files over the holidays. I had made it as a tribute to the shows I saw in 2007. The images trigger a lot of memories of great music and nights out in the city. Some of the shows were ticketed one-night events, with a big name from out of town (Steve Earle! Neko Case!) While others were local bands playing in a line-up at a small bar (I am pretty sure I saw local band Terror Lake in a very tiny room in the basement of a bar off College Street where you could only access through an alleyway.) Others included weekly performances, like Wednesday nights at Gate 401, a jazz bar on Roncesvalles, where my friend and I would drink half-priced martinis and listen to Julian Fauth on the piano.

And yes, my collage includes non-rock. That year was also the year my sister and brother-in-law convinced me to join them for an all-Shostakovich series with the TSO. But I have long argued that Shostakovich is almost rock-like in his approach to music, so didn’t hesitate to include some of those performances in my band tally.

Those were the days (well, mostly nights.) And reflecting back on that time during this pandemic makes me all the more aware of how lucky I was to get to have that time.

As we enter into month eleven of the lockdown, with new “we really mean it this time” lockdown measures, it is important to find things to enjoy in life. One thing I really like is soup. Another thing I like is efficient use of leftovers. This week was a win for me on both fronts.

On Sunday, feeling pretty miserable with the state of the world, I went to the corner butcher shop and got a small chicken then picked up a couple of bulbs of fennel and sweet potatoes at the vegetable store. I roasted the chicken with a simple rub of sage, thyme, and oregeno, stuffed with a couple of onions and some garlic. In a separate pan, I roasted the fennel and sweet potatoes, setting aside all the extra fennel parts in the fridge. It was a simple and heartwarming meal.

On Monday, Jim stir-fried leftover chicken with some peppers and zucchini (about to turn in our vegetable drawer) while I put the chicken carcass, leftover fennel bits, and the roasted onion and garlic on the stove to make some stock.

The next day, I added the stock to a mirepoix (using up some celery and carrots, also on their last legs) and blended it all with the remaining roasted sweet potato and fennel from Sunday’s meal. A little herbes de provence and that was it, the result was a beautiful creamy, delicately flavoured winter soup.

It might not be solving any the world’s ailments, but it was satisfying.

This past spring, my friend, Halifax-based pianist Jennifer King, embarked on a pandemic recording project of piano music evocative of the magic hour of fairytales and storytelling. She was inspired by her grandparents who, during her childhood practise sessions, would sit nearby listening and conjuring up tales to accompany the music she was playing. Jennifer asked if I’d be interested in working on some illustrations, and to do the design for the CD package. Of course I said yes.

The recording, Twilight Hour: Collected Stories for Piano, was released on October 30, just in time for Halloween, and included the launch of an accompanying video project Jennifer worked on with multi-media artist, Katrina Westin, who used stop-motion animation to illustrate some of the pieces. The resulting videos and Jennifer’s recording are at once playful, nostalgic, beautiful and reflective, which makes for a lovely contribution to artistic output in the time of COVID.

In our discission about the illustrations, Jennifer expressed a wish for a hand-drawn (and Edward Gorey-esque) feel for the CD artwork. She envisioned a piano turning into a storybook. I had been playing around with watercolours throughout the year, and enjoying the effect of ink drawn vignettes over splashes of colour, so decided to go in that direction.

In order to maintain the hand-drawn effect on a digital file, I photographed the watercolour dabs (painted on cold press paper) and imported them to Photoshop for minor edits and cleaning up, and then imported them to use as background layers in Indesign. The ink drawings were initially drawn on paper, then uploaded to Photoshop for colour editing, and Illustrator to create final composite images. It was a really, really fun project to work on that stretched both my technical and creative skills.

Twilight Hour: Collected Stories for Piano is available in hard copy or streaming through Bandcamp. The videos can be streamed via YouTube here.

I’m not exactly sure when and how it started, but somewhere in my childhood I became a prolific correspondent. A cousin in New Brunswick, a summer friend who lived in Summerside, my sister, who was living in Massachusetts and then Ontario, along with various other relatives, became the focus of my output.

My letter writing tied into some of my other interests, including a love of stationery, an early interest in illustration, especially that time, in the mid-70s, an obsession with the artwork of Holly Hobbie, Betsey Clark, and Kate Greenaway, or anything even vaguely reminiscent of the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder.

With such a passion, it was pretty easy to buy gifts for me, and I was often presented with stationery and writing paraphernalia or trinkets related to these interests. And, being a life-long hoarder of ephemera, naturally, I still have samples of some of my most treasured stationery (as well as most of the letters ever sent to me in reply to mine.)

My love for this style of artwork eventually faded, with trinkets and note paper shelved and looked on with great disdain in my darker teens. I did continue writing letters faithfully and intensely, until the advent of email took over in the late 90s.

But looking at these samples of stationery saved, and remembering the excitement of both sending and receiving letters, I realize how much I miss this activity.

I am fortunate to still receive postcards and the occasional greeting card in the mail. But it’s not the same as a handwritten letter because letter writing is something different. It is the taking of time, to write by hand, to share not the most urgent news, nor the most mundane, but perhaps, rather, observations and thoughts of things happening in one’s milieu. A conversational and self-reflective piece, I believe the handwritten letter is a medium that wasn’t replaced by technology, but merely negated. It’s a form of communication made absent, not obsolete, by technology.

And like the renewed interest in the simplicity of days gone by (there has been a return of the rag doll style in the fashion world for awhile now) maybe my stationery collection needs dusting off, and maybe my love of letter writing is need a revival?

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I write every morning in a journal. It’s something I’ve done off and on for years, but for the last two years, it has become a steady, daily ritual. Three pages, every morning. Not a significant achievement in the Samuel Pepys scheme of things, but it has added up to a fair amount of paper coverage and ink usage.

I like opening up my journal in the morning, and starting a new page. I like the physicality and slowness of writing by hand. I like the feeling of accomplishment when I have completed the task.

As a daily writer and lifelong handwriting affecionado, I generally have a lot of pens around. My go-to for most of my adult life has been the Pilot Hi-Tecpoint V-7. Fine (0.7mm), in black. I’ve been so devoted to this particular instrument, I really should have purchased shares or, at least, ordered it in bulk.

Over the last few years, though, I’ve been increasingly interested in fountain pens. My foray down this new path got kickstarted when the Toronto-based pen specialists, Wonderpens, happened to open a new storefront in our neighbourhood.

As soon as I saw the store, I was enamored, but honestly, was initially daunted by the under glass selection, and assumed these were items out of my price range. It took one generous birthday gift, and a very helpful salesclerk at the store to guide me, before I was equipped with my first fountain pen, a Pilot Metropolitan Retro-pop in lime green (an excellent choice as an entry level pen.) Non-refillable pens soon felt like a thing of the past.

But at the start of the pandemic lock-down, I found myself out of Pilot ink cartridges and had to use whatever pens were available around the house. First, I found a fairly new Pilot Hi-Tec ballpoint, so happily continued my daily writing. It lasted for an impressive 50-60 pages before running out of ink. Then I scrambled around looking for any writing utensil and landed on a box of standard office-issue Bic pens bought as a Christmas stocking stuffer at Staples. (J can never find a pen when he needs one, so I thought these would be a good cheap solution to have lying around.) I was shocked when the first of the Bics lasted less than two days. I thought it must be faulty. But sure enough, as I went through the box, each pen last less than 5 pages (and I should note, these cheap pens were not that cheap!)

The waste of plastic as I quickly went through the entire box of Bics filled me with guilt and anger. As soon as Wonderpens started their curbside pick-ups, I made an ink order, and treated myself to a second fountain pen, a Kaweco Perkeo (also an excellent affordable entry level fountain pen.) I’ve since been happily been doing my morning writing, only needing to replace the ink every 20 or so pages.

My next adventure will be learning how to make better use of the “fountain” of the fountain pen by refilling the ink converter, instead of plastic cartridges.

It’s May, and we’re in a global pandemic, so it seems like a good time as any to become a regular blogger. I’ve been talking about doing this for a long time and even have a rough draft of topics to write about somewhere. I do like making lists! But I have no idea where that list (or lists?) ended up, so will just have to wing it.

Unlike everyone else, it seems, I didn’t embark on this quarantine with any personal goals. Much of my free time has been spent on logistics; getting food and provisions, washing my hands a million times a day, learning how to effectively light a room for a Zoom meeting, and keeping my anxiety at a manageable level. But now that it’s May and we have fallen into a bit of rhythm of food delivery, occasional grocery store outings, and acceptance that we’ll survive without flour or Lysol wipes, it’s time to take on some new hobbies.

So my hope is that during this month, I will write about some of the projects and hobbies that have captured my attention. For instance, there is this song stuck in my head that is a bit of a mystery. I’m trying to figure out who wrote it and its origins. And I’ve gone down a lot of rabbit holes in my efforts to figure it out, but I’ve been doing some fun stuff along the way, including writing out music notation for the first time in about 30 years and learning about a Hollywood lyricist whose incomplete score fell into the hands of some Canadian theatre impresarios. How cool is that?

I’m still down the rabbit hole on that one, but I’m going to share some details soon.

In an effort to make this past Christmas a bit more creative, I decided to make a poster and t-shirt celebrating Jim’s love of cycling in the Alps and to highlight some of the more interesting (and highest) passes he has cycled over the last few years. It was a fun challenge. I spent a lot of time looking at maps of mountain passes and sleuthing through his cycling trip history to select the most important mountain passes he successfully rode. This is the poster version. I was also pretty pleased with the t-shirt version.

Last spring, a friend posted an infographic on facebook illustrating the most common second language in each US state, and said she wished someone would make a similar version for Canada. I enjoy these kinds of infographics and was also curious to see the result. Having access to the necessary tools (the internet and an editable eps file of a Canadian map), I quickly pulled the info-map together.

It is important to note that unlike the US, Canada has two official languages, English and French, and each province or territory may have their own official languages; NWT has a whopping 11 official languages. Nunavut has 4. So on this map, I included both the most common non-English/French language as well as most common non-official territorial language.

The exercise got me thinking about language and how living in a country with multiple official languages can affect design. So often I have worked on projects where the copy is culturally exclusive. I recall working on a campaign for a large music retailer that needed to quickly find a French equivalent for the phrase “give ‘er” and a smoking cessation campaign in the north that had settled on a catchy English motto that translated to the length of a novella in Inuktitut. It is quite challenging to do good design that is good in all languages. It can also be challenging to have multiple languages work effectively in a single design. I just feel, given the country we live in, we don’t give proper consideration to translation and cultural context when writing copy and launching new projects. (Don’t get me started on the overuse of acronyms.)

A final note: the information used on the map is based on 2011 data collected by Statistics Canada, the year Stephen Harper killed the mandatory long-form census, effectively making important statistical information about the country unknown. (And forcing organizations to purchase information from private companies.) The long-form census returned when Trudeau formed government in 2016, but because of Harper, there will a permanent gap in the statistical data. It’s likely my map needs updating; the 2016 information has a much more detailed breakdown.

Last April, my story about temping as a British tea lady was published on the Lady Baker’s Tea blog. You can read it on their website here:

Adventures of a Canadian Tea Lady in London