21st Century naked

On going off-line and for a walk without my blackberry

It’s been a frantic week or so here in Saskatchewan as a result of the provincial government shutting down SCN, our provincial public educational television service. I will be posting a longer piece on this shortly, but for the sake of this post, let me just say that although I retired from SCN last April, the announcement has caused me a great flurry of activity, meetings, phone calls, emails, and so forth.

By last Friday afternoon I finally “ran out of gas” and needed a time out. We are just coming to the end of another long Saskatchewan winter with cold nasty weather right up till last weekend. And then suddenly it was like someone flipped a switch and we got a week of sunny mild spring weather. I’d been sort of dancing around waiting for the nice weather to arrive when the SCN news hit, and ever since I have been running flat out, like many other people, as a part of the larger Saskatchewan production and cultural communities’ reaction.

It was very apparent to me that I needed to take a break and since it was a lovely afternoon I decided to go for a walk. As I started to get ready I noticed that I hadn’t charged my blackberry in a couple of days and it was getting close to needing to be charged. At first I thought that I’d have to remember to charge it when I got back but then I thought “Why not charge it while I’m out for my walk?”

I was planning to walk briskly for an hour or so and cover several km, so the decision to leave the device at home meant I’d be out of the loop for the last working hour of the day in Ottawa and Toronto where a lot of my message traffic was coming from. At first I felt a little guilty but then a voice in my head said “hey dummy, you’re retired – no one is paying you to be available all the time” so I set out without it. The only technology I took with me was a little digital point and shoot camera which I take everywhere.

At the end of our block is a wonderful park that has a creek running through it which is big enough that it can be broken up in a number of different ways for walking. I’d been cooped up indoors in meetings or on the phone and computer most of the week and was pretty eager to get out and enjoy the nice weather. But when I got to the park, out in the open I became very aware of my lack of connectivity. Not only could no one contact me, but I also couldn’t contact anyone, and I found this some what uncomfortable.

For much of my life I seem to have gravitated to activities which involved me spending a lot of time on my own without the benefit of instant access so I thought I was used to it. I guess that was because I’d never had the sort of connectivity I got used to at SCN so I didn’t know what I was missing. In 2001 SCN got a new CEO from Toronto (David Debono), who had the first Blackberry I’d ever seen, and who decided that I should have one too (so he could keep tabs on me I suspect). And ever since “blackie” has been my constant companion.

I had a taste of being off line a couple of years ago when I spent a month in New Zealand where my old blackberry didn’t work. I ended up buying a cheap prepaid cell phone so at least I could send and receive text messages and emergency phone calls. But now here I was in the midst of a “crisis” without my Blackberry – what was I supposed to do?

I went for my long walk, took some pictures, and discovered that the world seems to work just fine even if I didn’t have my blackberry. Thank you world.

Family matters

This post is about mothers, and families.

In January my mother, Ruth Gustin, passed away at the age of 96. She was one of the lucky ones and was bright and engaged right up till the end. She lived on her own until last fall when her body started to reach the point where it had had enough.

Mom had always been pretty independent and had gone out to live on her own after finishing school. She worked as a medical secretary at one of the first “modern” mental health hospitals prior to marrying dad around 1939. After dad died in 1986 she lived quite happily in Florida by herself for 15 years until a fall and a broken arm convinced her to move back to New England where two of my sisters lived.

My sisters were great and mom did not want for care, company or friends. We could see the end coming so I was able to go down and spend time with her in December. We had a good time visiting and talking, and continued to talk on the phone every day after I came back to Saskatchewan for Christmas. All in all, I couldn’t have asked for a better exit for her, and for this I am extraordinarily grateful. What did surprise me was that in spite of my thinking that I was prepared for her death, how her last couple of months just took over and became the focus of my world, to the point of other things just falling to the wayside until this was finished.

Now she is gone, and my world is returning to normal. although I am keenly aware of the void that exists where the idea of mom used to be. This changes my whole sense of family. I’m not alone, as several of my friends are going through, or have recently gone through their own version of this drama. My three sisters live in the eastern United States, so they are not as close as I would sometimes like, but I’m pleased because of how other “families” show up in our lives as required.

It’s interesting how we become connected to the people in our lives. Sometimes you can see it coming or want it to happen, but there are other times when you find that someone you just sort of collected on the way becomes more and more important or special. For me one of these people is Magorie Towstego from Saskatoon.

I first met Marge a good 10 – 15 years ago as she tried to maintain some order in the business life of her son Tony. Marge had come in to run the office, and over the next several years our friendship grew to the point of me thinking of Marge as my second mother and her calling me her other son. Although Marge and I are now both retired, I still try to get in a visit with her every time I go to Saskatoon.

Isn’t it strange and interesting and wonderful that we can invent these new families. Tomorrow we celebrate spring with our annual easter feast, and expect around 20 people to show up to eat and drink and enjoy each other’s company. They are all our friends, but may not see each other except at the three times a year we do something like this. And thus we become each others cousins and aunts and uncles

I hope you all are enjoying your families, both the ones you are stuck with, and the ones you make up.

Thank You SCN

Thank you SCN and its staff rally Regina, March 31

A sad day – Today was the last day for most of the staff at SCN, which for almost 20 years was Saskatchewan’s educational public broadcaster. Between 250 and 300 people came down to the SCN offices in Regina’s CBC building to show their support and say thank you to the staff of SCN.

What was most galling to the crowd was the way that the deed was done, with no consultation and apparently very little planning that seems to have involved any knowledge or understanding of how the broadcasting system works or is regulated. The government claims it wants to sell SCN and its licence but they seem to be intent on beating it to death first, and just as quickly as possible. However in their haste the government appears to have cut several regulatory corners and is now in danger of being called to the carpet by the CRTC.

The regulations are very clear that a province can only run any kind of a broadcasting system through a corporation with an independent board of directors, free from government control. The government went about planning and implementing the shutdown without the knowledge or approval of the old board, and then replaced them all with a new board chaired by the Deputy Minister of Tourism, Parks, Culture and Recreation who does not qualify as independent.

There is lots of crashing and banging going on right now, but there’s no way we can bring SCN back. We can hope the government gets their knuckles rapped and with a little luck perhaps we can arrange for something newer which will serve our needs better. I’m crossing my fingers.