Steve Kupferman

You know what's happened to me a couple times lately, that I love?

When you're out someplace and there's a guy there who innocently put on dark slacks, black shoes, a black vest, and a white shirt.

He thought he was dressing nicely, but in a neutral non-attention-grabbing way.

But actually he's accidentally cosplaying as Han Solo.

 

I got an iPhone the other day...

...and as I was messing around with it I noticed that the feeling of owning the thing is exactly the same as the joy I felt when I was ten years old and my dad surprised me with my first pocket knife on a Cub Scouts camping trip. It's the joy of having a useful pocket-sized bauble that's heavy for its size and cool to the touch. I recommend it to everybody.

But the joy of seeing your writing in the newspaper is incomparable. The thought that a big company spent money to print thousands of copies of my words and my byline (and Michael's excellent photos) tickles me for all sorts of basically egomaniacal reasons.

Does anyone get into any form of writing for reasons that aren't at least a little egomaniacal? Sure, you always balance it with generosity of one kind or another—to readers, to editors, to people you interview—but the decision to write doesn't come from a purely generous impulse, and what's more, it has no basis in the logic of business. It's a decision you make if recognition is a bigger motivator for you than helping others, or money. (If you're lucky, you still get the money and maybe help people as you go.)

Being a journalist, I think, means tempering all that natural egomania with a huge amount of integrity. That's as opposed to being a writer of fiction. Those guys are actually hindered by integrity, which probably is why the best ones all either drank, or killed themselves.

All this is to say that getting bylined in the paper is a complicated joy, and one I wouldn't recommend to everyone. But if you're honest enough to achieve it, and self-centered enough to appreciate it, it's pretty much the best.

Toronto's rich history of mayoral grandstanding, as related by Ernest Hemingway.

When I was earning my B.A. in English, it was commonly held among my professors that Ernest Hemingway had a terse, lean prose style, and that he'd developed it while stringing for a newspaper in his early twenties.

What they didn't tell me then—and what I'm not sure they knew—is that the newspaper Hemingway wrote for was the Toronto Star.

Now, Hemingway didn't live in Toronto for very long. He was here for only a few months—just long enough to work up a genuine dislike for our city—before moving to Chicago, and then, eventually, to Europe, where he spent some time as a foreign correspondent, still for the Star (though maybe not exclusively, I'm not sure), before returning Toronto briefly in the interval before his fiction career took off.

But before he left Toronto the first time, he wrote this excellent column about a night he spent at Massey Hall with then-mayor Thomas Langston Church. It reminds me a little of the blowback from Rob Ford's graffiti photo op this past Thursday.

(Reprinted with absolute disregard for any copyright that may apply. He's been dead for fifty years, so please don't lawyer up on me. I steal because I love.)

Sporting Mayor at Boxing Bouts - The Toronto Star Weekly, March 13 1920

Mayor Church is a keen lover of all sporting contests. He is an enthusiast over boxing, hockey and all the manly sports. Any sporting event that attracts voters as spectators numbers His Worship as one of the patrons. If marbles, leapfrog, and tit-tat-toe contests were viewed by citizens of voting age, the mayor would be enthusiastically present. Due to the youth of the competitors the mayor reluctantly refrains from attending all of the above sports.

The other night the mayor and I attended to boxing bouts at Massey Hall. No; we didn't go together, but we were both there.

The mayor's entrance was impressive. He remained standing for some time bowing to his friends and people who knew him.

"Who is that?" asked the man next to me.

"That's the mayor," I replied.

"Down in front!" called out the man next to me.

The mayor enjoyed the first bout hugely. During it he shook hands with everyone around him. He did not seem to know when the bout stopped, as he was still shaking hands when the bell rang for the end of the last round.

Between the rounds, the mayor stood up and looked over the crowd.

"What is he doing—counting the house?" asked the man next to me.

"No. He is letting the sport-loving people look at their sport-loving mayor," I said.

"Down in front!" shouted the man next to me in a rude voice.

During the next two bouts the mayor recognized a number of acquaintances in the crowd. He waved to all of them. He also shook hands with all the soldiers in uniform present, shaking hands with some of them two or three times to make sure.

Scotty Lisner was taking a bad beating in the next bout. The mayor's eyes never strayed to the ring, but he applauded vociferously—whenever the crowd did.

He turned to his right-hand neighbor.

"Lisner is beating him, isn't he?" said the mayor.

His neighbor looked at him piteously.

"I thought Lisner was the better fighter," said the mayor, satisfied, looking eagerly around for someone to shake hands with.

At the end of the fight the referee consulted with the three judges and hoisted a hand of Lisner's opponent as a sign of victory. The mayor stood up.

"I'm glad Lisner won!" he remarked enthusiastically.

"Is that really the mayor?" asked the man next to me.

"That is His Worship, the Sporting Mayor," I replied.

"Down in front!" yelled the man next to me, in a rough voice.

It looked as though the mayor enjoyed the last bout best of all. Of course, he didn't see it, but he discovered several people he had not shaken hands with, and also there was a great deal of booing and cheering. Sometimes the mayor would absent-mindelely boo when the crowd cheered but he always righted himself instinctively at once. He seemed able to shift a boo into a cheer with the same ease and grace of shoving a Ford into low gear.

At the close of the fights the Mayor absent-mindedly said, "Meeting's dismissed," and dashed for his motorcar, thinking he was at a City council meeting.

The mayor is just as interested in hockey as he is in boxing. If cootie fighting or Swedish pinochle or Australian boomerang hurling are ever taken up by the voters, count on the mayor to be there in a ringside seat. For the mayor loves all sport.

See? Antagonizing mayors is nothing new for the Star. They've been at it for at least ninety years.

The other day I went to deposit a paycheck...

...but the bank was closed, so I went to deposit the check in an ATM, but I didn't have a pen to endorse it with. There was a girl waiting on line to use the ATM, and I asked her if she had a pen, and she said: "What!? A penny?" As though I was about to scratch off a lotto ticket and deposit the winnings directly into my checking account.

And I said: "No, a pen." And she didn't have one.

So I went across the street to an art supply store where they sell individual pens for something like fifty cents, and instead of buying one I whipped out my check right there, in the pen aisle, and endorsed it while the clerk wasn't watching, with a Bic I had no intention of paying for.

This despite the fact that I was about to bank a check worth many hundreds of Bic pens. (100% from writing for websites! For real!)

In that instant, I realized that I might be transitioning from merely thrifty to full-on cheapskate. I'm not yet to the point where I'm stealing ketchup packets and squeezing them into an empty ketchup bottle to avoid buying ketchup, though.

But another thing I've caught myself doing lately is using paper napkins for multiple meals. There was a time when I lived like some kind of paper-products king, all using a piece of Bounty to wipe the merest drop of peanut butter off my lip and tossing that napkin in the garbage. Now, unless the napkin is completely without any large patches of unsoiled wiping surface, it's still good. And that's because I don't want to buy more.

I'm not worried yet, but if I start to feel the uncontrollable urge to finish the dregs of other peoples' lattes in coffee shops, at that point I might seek therapy.

 

Why I Pushed the Old Lady

It was a Friday afternoon, a few weeks ago, and I'd finished all the work I needed to get done before the weekend. The weather was crisp, but not frigid, so I decided to go for a walk.

I made a loop around the neighborhood, bought some fruit, and was just about to stop at the Korean supermarket, when, just in front of said supermarket, someone said something to me. She was an old Asian lady in a wheelchair, all bundled up against the cold. Her face was plump, but sallow and droopy, and she looked very frail. In an incongruously bohemian touch, her head was covered with a floppy red felt beret. Whatever she was saying was barely audible, and heavily accented, too, but when I leaned closer I could make out one word: "Honest... Honest..."

The wheelchair wasn't motorized, and she didn't look like she'd be able to make it anywhere under her own power. I made the necessary conclusion.

"You want me to push you to Honest Ed's?" I asked.

The old lady nodded and cooed in what I took to be the affirmative.

This was an unusual request, and it warranted some consideration. If she'd been asking for money, I probably wouldn't have given her any, but that's because I don't have enough money. She didn't want that; she wanted me, and my time, which I happened to have in abundance. And in any case, one of the reasons to choose life in a city over life somewhere more sparsely populated is the availability of chance encounters with people one wouldn't otherwise meet, and so, to a certain way of thinking, my deciding not to push this lady to Honest Ed's would have been a waste of a perfectly good opportunity for urban adventure.

Honest Ed's was a couple blocks away, opposite the direction I was headed, but the lady was clearly in need of help. She obviously didn't have any sort of caretaker available to her or she wouldn't have been prevailing upon a stranger. There was no way I could turn her down.

Also, just so none of what follows seems like me congratulating myself on my supposed altruism, know that at no point while it was going on was I not planning on writing about it afterward. That was going to be my reward.

"Okay," I said. "Let's go."

I grabbed the handles of the wheelchair and began to push the old lady towards Honest Ed's. There was no further communication between us, not because there was nothing to say, but because for either of us to say anything in a way the other could have understood would have been next to impossible.

The old lady had been shopping. I knew this because the wheelchair was loaded up like an Afghani pack mule. Plastic bags drooped off the handles, all of them straining with the weight of whatever was inside. Something in one of them had an aroma like a fish that had died in a grease fire. Whatever kind of food it was, I'm sure it would have been tasty when fresh, but it had clearly been moldering in a takeout container for a little while by the time I encountered it. The smell was unpleasant, and memorably so. As it turned out, everything I ate for the next few days tasted faintly of burning seafood.

The whole time we were walking to Honest Ed's, my greatest anxiety was that we'd run into someone I know, and I'd have to somehow quickly explain the situation. There would have been no single sentence I could have spoken that would have completely answered the obvious questions: who is this lady, how did you meet her. I decided I'd introduce her as a friend if it came down to it, and hope whoever I was talking to didn't ask any followup questions, like what her name was.

I'll admit to feeling a certain amount of relief when we reached Bloor and Markham, the northwest corner of the Honest Ed's compound. "Okay," I said. "Is this okay? Can you make it inside on your own?"

The old lady said nothing. She just pointed to the right, south along Markham, and made a back-of-throat noise, as if to say: keep going.

Either there had been some misunderstanding, or she was craftier than I'd taken her for. Had she tricked me into walking a longer detour than I'd originally anticipated? Maybe I was dealing with a pro.

But here's where I'll credit myself with some unadulterated personal decency: I couldn't bring myself to abandon an old lady on a street corner by Honest Ed's. I simply could not countenance the idea of leaving her at the mercy of people looking for deals on crockery and off-brand SPAM.

We started south on Markham. The plastic shopping bags were beginning to sag and rub against the wheels of the chair as we moved. I stopped, apologized, and tried to move them around, but they were so densely arranged that there really weren't more than a couple centimeters of wiggle room to work with. It seemed impossible that the old lady could have managed to load herself up with so many groceries on her own, and I began to wonder whether or not I was the first passer-by she'd enlisted as an ad-hoc personal assistant that day.

At the first couple major intersections, I leaned down and asked her how much further we still had to go, but her answers were vague. "One more block?" I'd say, and she'd nod. And then when we'd walked the block, she'd point southward again. Only she knew where we were ultimately bound, and her only means of sharing that information with me was pantomime.

At one point, she dug a hand into her coat pocket and produced a pineapple-flavored sucking candy, which she handed to me wordlessly, without looking back, as if to say there would be more where that came from.

We made it down to College Street and the old lady thrust her left arm out to indicate "east." We passed Kensington Market and she pointed me north onto a side street, and we finally arrived at a retirement community. I wheeled her into the lobby and she stood up out of her chair, with difficulty, and started rummaging through her coat pockets. She pulled out two more sucking candies and put them in my hand. In fairness, they were more material compensation than I was expecting, and, since they were individually wrapped, I did eat them later.

"Thank you," she said. "Thank you."

And so I said, you're welcome.

In all, we'd walked about two kilometres. I'm not sure I would have embarked on the whole adventure if I'd understood, from the beginning, how long it was going to take, and I don't know that my help made much of a difference to the lady. She seemed to be in need of a lot more than a push home.

But in spite of our lack of a common language, we both understood that a push was all I would give.

The Complete Collection

Yeah, lots of people have "Save Transit City" buttons. David Miller and Adam Giambrone were handing them out to everyone who would take them during the first great funding scare, last spring.

My own STC button was given to me at a Torontoist staff meeting by David Topping, who'd gotten a bag of them from Giambrone, who at the time was apparently keeping a huge box of them in the trunk of his car. (Actually, it turns out this is only half true. See below.)

Now that saving Transit City is fashionable again, I'm pretty stoked that I have not only that original button, but the entire Transit City line of apparal.

Aw yeah.

The other five buttons are offical TTC swag. Over the summer (and maybe before then), they were being handed out at public events by TTC representatives as a way of building public awareness of the plan.

I would never wear any of these in public. Advocacy and activism aren't my department.

But they're on prominent display in my apartment, as living artifacts of the light rail shitstorm.

Update:

David Topping tells me that he did not, in fact, get his supply of Save Transit City buttons from Adam Giambrone. In reality, he got them from another person, whom Adam Giambrone directed him to. Also, the buttons were in bags, rather than "a huge box." Oops. That's what I get for writing about half-remembered conversations from months ago.

Sorry for misleading you, internet. And apologies for misparaphrasing you, David.

The Remainder of Chanukah

Chanukah is over, but I figured I'd talk about the rest of the contents of gift-box-from-mom 2010.

Night four was a book, Ahab's Wife, that mom had read and liked.

Night five was a braided leather belt, and also a Toronto Blue Jays t-shirt, which mom had bought in Albany, on impulse. "It was just sitting there on the rack, on sale," she told me. "Obviously there's not much demand in New York for that type of thing."

Night six was a v-neck argyle sweater from Old Navy.

Night seven was Ladder of Years, by Anne Tyler, an author I accidentally introduced mom to when she asked me to pick her up an audiobook from the Clifton Park-Halfmoon public library and I chose A Slipping Down Life, also by Tyler, because I'd watched the film adaptation of the book on the Sundance channel the day before. It's about a girl who carves a rock musician's name into her forehead with a broken mirror shard, and then somehow ends up marrying him, which I guess would be convenient, because it would mitigate the need to explain the forehead carving. I've never actually read anything by Anne Tyler, though, or mentioned A Slipping Down Life in the several years since the whole audiobook incident. I guess the book must have caught mom's eye.

Night eight was a checked shirt from Old Navy. I think I'm supposed to pair it with the sweater from night six, but I didn't ask mom about that.

Chanukah, Nights Two and Three

Night two's gift was The Ground Beneath Her Feet, by Salman Rushdie. It's a first edition, pretty nice. I like hardcover books. Presents are great.

On night three, there were two seperate packages for me to open, one marked "3a," and the other marked "3b." I opened 3b first, probably contravening the logic of the grand reveal. It was a cannister of some nice-smelling tea. 3a was a little cherry-red vacuum flask with a built-in tea strainer and splash-guard lid. It has rubber gaskets around its seals, and so I think it'll be leak-proof enough to throw in my messenger bag along with books and papers.

I haven't had a chance to thank mom for the flask yet, so I'll do it publicly, on the internet:

Thanks, mom.

This is the latest in a long tradition of utilitarian gifts from mom. Two Chanukahs ago she gave me a sturdy webbing belt from Patagonia (the activewear company, not the region of South America) that I now use to hold up my pants on a regular basis, and am wearing right now. Last Chanukah, she sent me a scarf that made my first winter as a commuter cyclist more bearable. Once, when I was probably eight years old, she gave me a label maker. I still haven't figured that one out.

Chanukah, Night One

Every year, my mother sends me a box with eight Chanukah gifts inside, each one fully wrapped and numbered from one to eight, so I open it on the appropriate night. I'm twenty-six, but I guess one is never too old for presents. Or maybe one IS too old for presents, but still enjoys them anyway? One doesn't know.

There's a certain amount of temptation just to open everything at once and then lie about it later, but I've learned over the years that anticipation is usually the best part.

Last night was the first night of Chanukah. This is what mom got me:

An electric menorah, with flickering bulbs. Apparently both my sisters also received this as a night-one gift. Mom used to run the synagogue gift shop, so she has hookups for buying this type of thing. I have no doubt it's a high-quality electric menorah. But even so, I was a little perplexed. I've been getting by just fine with candle power all these years.

"I thought it would be safer," mom told me when I called her.

Ah.

Giving Away Movie Tickets on Craigslist For Fun and Profit

It was Friday. I was planning on meeting someone at a particular theater, on Saturday at 7:00 p.m., to see the new Harry Potter movie (which yes, I was looking forward to, though I've never read the books) and I thought it would be a good idea to buy tickets in advance, because Harry Potter fans are hardcore and there just was no telling how many of them would show up to any given screening.

The movie theater was a fancy, newfangled one in North York, and their corporate website had a nice feature where all you had to do was type in your credit card number and you could get tickets in advance, emailed to you in printable PDF format. Instant gratification. As a typical millennial internet degenerate, I expect nothing less.

I got out my credit card and clicked a bunch of buttons, and things happened really quickly the way they tend to online. This was good; I was getting things done. I could feel a sense of power and productivity washing over me, confirming my essential trust in the internet as a place where all positive things in life begin and end.

Moments later, my card had been dinged for $25.50 and I had two e-tickets in my inbox. They were for 7:00 p.m., but for the showing on Friday, rather than the one on Saturday. My mistake. I went back and checked the fine print I'd ignored before the transaction, and sure enough, there were no refunds. For various reasons, Friday night was inconvenient. I couldn't use the tickets myself.

The internet had failed me. And so, in typical millennial internet degenerate fashion, I turned to the internet for solutions.

I posted the following to the "Free Stuff" section of Craigslist Toronto:

Two Tickets to Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows, 7PM

I bought two e-tickets to tonight's 7:00 p.m. showing of Harry Potter, at the Empress Walk Theatres in North York, by mistake. (My intention was to buy tickets to tomorrow night's show.)

My loss is your gain. I will send both tickets, in the form of a printable PDF, to the first person who emails me a description of what they'd like to achieve in the coming year, 2011. Yes. In exchange for a night of entertainment, valued at $25, all I ask is that you share your short-term aspirations with me, a total stranger.

I'll send the tickets no later than 6:00 p.m

The reason I decided to give the tickets away, rather than sell them, was that the show was only about two hours away, and I didn't think it would be possible to find a buyer in time. I used Craigslist because I couldn't think of anyone I knew personally who would have wanted to travel to North York for a movie on a Friday night.

I decided to ask a question of people interested in the tickets for the reason that I wanted some kind of return on investment for my non-refundable $25.50. I settled on asking about asiprations because they're a personal topic, but not a particularly touchy one, meaning people wouldn't necessarily be afraid to discuss theirs candidly. I suppose, rather than offering the tickets to the first person to respond, I could have said that I was going to use the aspirations as criteria for deciding who to send them to, but I didn't want people to feel as though making shit up would help them "win." The point of the exercise was to get an honest survey of what Craigslist lurkers want out of life. I wanted all the sociological insight twenty-five bucks could buy.

The first response was from a guy named Jack, who wrote:

In the year 2011, I would like to quit smoking, Be a better father/and lover and spend more time with my loved ones, Contunie with my jon working with homeless men.

(Everything, naturally, [sic].)

The next response was from Joe:

Hey !   Still have the tickets up for grabs? I live just down the street from there. Um ..im working on having a child in 2011, its not really work but actually kinda fun..lol.   Thanks,   J.

And then there was Vivian, who came off initially as a nice sort of person:

hello my aspirations for the coming year are to be accepted to university of waterloo for architecture. it's really a difficult program to get into so basically my life outside of school right now is non-existent. anyways it's really cool that you want to hear peoples goals, because i'm a complete stranger so why would you care about what i hope to achieve, right? but i guess you do. its nice to see there is still some good... thanks.

She followed up with a second message:

sorry im messaging twice but i just had an afterthought. it just occured to me the irony of your giving away two movie tickets because i lost my wallet a couple days ago and i had 2 free movie passes in there that i had gotten from a timeshare session. anyways, just thought i'd share that. thanks again.

Riiight.

Someone named "wook" also sent an email:

please send me.

 

thanks

 

[phone number redacted]

They didn't follow the rules, so I disqualified them outright.

And then there was this one:

Hi, I’m 14 years old and I’m interested in these tickets. I go to [a private Catholic school] on scholarship, and my goal is to do well there in the next four years, not just 2011.

Thank you,

Helena

Helena's email was my favorite of the lot, but she was the last to respond, and a deal is a deal—even when the deal was brokered on Craigslist with zero accountability. I sent the tickets to Jack and wished him luck with kicking the smokes. And then he sent me this:

I appreciate the offer, give it to someone who wants to go, I like sharing my insirations with ppl

So I sent the tickets to Helena, whose mother wrote me back immediately to say thank you, and to inform me that Helena and her father were leaving for the theater right away.

In the end, Jack got to feel like a good guy for selflessly turning down the tickets, Helena got to go see a movie with her dad, and I got to bask in the warm, gooey, nutmeg-scented feeling of having made a few strangers happy. Without the internet, none of this would have been possible, so I guess me and it remain on good terms.

Of course, I'm still out $25.50.