Frank Bruni’s column in a recent New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/opinion/sunday/bruni-the-land-of-the-binge.html) talks about excesses and refers to a certain way of television watching as “bingeing”.  I don’t  own a tv but I am broadminded and I  like Frank Bruni’s writing, and so I mostly delight in his thoughtful opinions.

That Sunday George got to Bruni’s column first and in conversation “warned” me that Frank had  called a certain kind of television watching “bingeing”-  Actually, George said I would find it “interesting”, meaning I would not like it.  And I didn’t.  But I backed off, calmed down, and replied, “I’ll read it.” And I did, and I agree with everything Frank Bruni said, even when he referred to what we  have on very rare occasions  done – we have downloaded to our computer a certain much talked about television series, and sometimes we have watched more than one episode back to back.  If this is bingeing, George, Frank – what do you call settling in with a good book and finding it so compelling you “can’t put it down”?  Hmmnn?

Watching Downton Abbey, a quality series, in three weeks or six rather than eight or ten is not gross.  If it’s compelling, one may well be compelled.  Nothing wrong with that.

It does have certain side effects, however.  First and foremost, if the series is running simultaneously on television -  one episode at a time once a week – and you happen to be ahead of your friends, obviously you cannot discuss it.  And second, if the series ends in a manner that is meant to shake you up and it does – you are absolutely on your own.  You can’t talk about it, you can’t share your rage or cry or swear out loud.  You must be discreet. You are stuck with it!

And in your solitude you have to face yourself.  You have to ask yourself some tough questions: are you trying to dodge reality?  are you being a bad sport, a baby?  I do think about it, and in the process I go so far as to remind myself that sometimes life surprises us with its endings…its beginnings as well, even along the way…and sometimes characters in real life act out of character, do stupid risky things you would never have thought them capable of.  That’s life.

So what’s the problem here?

The problem is if, as I am reading a book, I begin to see the author moving things around, and then I see her talking with her editor, and then suddenly the marketing department is in the room – it’s too crowded for me.  I have to leave.  And if I am watching a tv series and something happens that makes me sneer or scoff or rage or swear, it simply means I do not believe it.  In my mind’s eye, I see a group of people sitting around in a room cluttered with coffee cups and the remains of brought-in food and hear them talking about what happens next or how do we end this or what about if such and such – and for me it’s over.  They have pulled my chain, manipulated me, they have lost me,. I have been betrayed and I am very angry.  I entered the world they created, and because it was “real” , it touched me, and so  I opened my heart.

Do I exaggerate?  I don’t think so.  When Sybil died I didn’t just weep, I sobbed. (In spite of an unbelievably stupid line by the Harley Street doctor. “Maybe she has fat ankles.”) Women do die in childbirth, even in our times.  And people die in car accidents, of course.  But while I philosophized about life and did my honest duty during the last moments of the last episode of the third season, I did not believe for one moment that it was necessary to impose a very significant death at such a moment of tremendous joy, the birth of another baby. I mean not necessary for the drama, not necessary for the story line, not necessary for the future success of the series.

Yes, I was very angry.  And, as I said, stuck with it.  I could not call my sister, a truly dedicated fan of Downton Abbey.  I could not post my feelings on my web site or comment on Facebook, or Tweet…I fumed, sharing with George who also thought it was a bad decision.

And indeed, it was a decision – not an accident. Secret for a time, the series writer, Julian Fellowes eventually confessed that both deaths were necessary accommodations.  Both the actress who played Sybil and the actor who played Matthew had chosen to leave the series after the termination of their three-year contract.

Sybil’s death, as I have said, was believable, not only because “it happens” but also because the death became a part of the family, the viewing family included.  Matthew’s death, in the very last moments of the closing episode, did not and apparently will not.  Mr. Fellowes has said the next season will begin six months later – they won’t have to have a funeral! (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/18/julian-fellowes-discusses-a-season-of-comings-and-goings-at-downton-abbey/)

What the writer and his team were thinking when they made that decision I don’t know.  I don’t know who their other viewers are, I mean beside me, my sister, my granddaughter, my Facebook friends, I don’t know who would congratulate them on their brilliant or bold decision.  Perhaps there are viewers who eat that sort of thing.

Or perhaps, the author is tired.  Tired of his success, tired of the work, tired of having to deal with the huge cast and all the production people.

You know, I thought there was a lot of tiredness visible towards the end.  Bates and Anna were terribly low key in their “happiness”.  Mary and Matthew were always kissing, it didn’t seem that real.  Robert, Lord Grantham, just seemed too accepting of his losses, all of them.  And so on.  You see, time passes, and what I felt two weeks ago as an insult has passed into skeptical indifference.

I will miss Maggie Smith.  She never missed a beat!

©Elaine A. Sernovitz Zimbel 2013

Nobody asked so I didn’t tell.  I filled in all the questions on the registration form, the one for The Writers’ Union of Canada workshop called “How to be Your Own Publicist”, including whether I was an unpublished, emerging, or established writer.  I gave it some thought.

I am a literalist – so, emerging must mean, like, just coming out….sort of.  Like not there yet.  And established…well that was not so easy. Does it mean making a living?  Does it mean on the best seller list?  Does it mean everyone knows your name?

I decided “established” on the basis of the fact that I have been published world-wide since 1952, and that’s it.  No, I am not making a living from writing, I never did.  No, I am not on the best seller list, and no, everyone does not know my name.  I am a writer, that I know.  That is an established fact.

So I’m finding my way to the Writers’ Union of Canada workshop, not too sure of the locale, and I turn a corner inside the building, and I am relieved to find that indeed there is the elevator I must take to the appropriate floor, and there waiting for it are two women I surmise are also writers.  They greet me warmly, and one of them says, “You are a grand old lady and you are wearing purple.”

Well!!!

I recognized this as a literary allusion, of course, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jenny_Joseph but I was shocked.  A lively step always, no cane, no walker,  my purple beanie completely covering my white hair, the purple scarf fashionably wrapped around my neck, the neck pretty much like the one Nora Ephron felt bad about (http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8765.I_Feel_Bad_About_My_Neck)… there was something about that greeting that stung.

So the two writers and the grand old lady went upstairs and found places in the large room where the old lady took off her hat and scarf as fast as she could.

The workshop was interesting, I learned a lot…not what they said I would – I knew all that already – in fact, I learned how much I already know, have known for a very long time, and now that I am “old”, I would do well to believe in my own knowledge, to respect it, to give it weight, to call it my own and let it sparkle in my eyes, bring a smile or a frown to my face, and sometimes let it fall from my lips or my pen when I feel it is required.  I have said this before  – in the Epigraph to my book – you can find it here http://www.amazon.com/Bullet-Heart-One-Brain-PSYCHODRAMA/dp/0595369340#reader_B0079GAJSG (click on the cover to look inside and go to Epigraph).

So you see, one has to be reminded:  my sister Ruthie was my “twin”.  She was only 16 months older than me and she had always lived beside me, always.  So when in that September when she was five and going off to morning kindergarten and I who would soon be four must stay home, I cried bitter tears at the front door, not that she was leaving me, but because I knew no reason why I should not be allowed to go to school as well.

In February when the next term  began and I had just turned four did my parents manage to enroll me in afternoon kindergarten?  Perhaps.  But whoa! In June on “passing day” when all my classmates who would be five in Fall and ready for morning kindergarten passed, I did not pass.  I failed.  At least that’s how it seemed to me, and I was devastated.

Not long ago I read in the New York Times Business section the profile of a C.E.O. who also failed kindergarten.  All those years I thought I was the only one in the world who had been so unjustly treated.  I knew I should not have failed.  And there he was, this lovely man, claiming the same horrid treatment — simply because he was not old enough to “pass”.  And if I am not mistaken, we may have shared this disastrous fate twice.  Figure it out – whatever age was required in September, my December birthday would cut me off, cut me up, destroy me…it wasn’t fair.

It matters little to me that in that particular February when I was finally six years old and old enough for first grade, I had only a few months of it before I was stricken with scarlet fever, hospitalized and kept out of school for eight weeks or more, and that  I nevertheless not only passed 1A but was “skipped” past 1B directly to second grade.  I was catching up to my sister, for now we were only a half year apart…Grade 2A for me 2B for her, and so on.

So then, when my sister and all her friends turned 14 and were allowed to get a “work permit” and could get a job, and I could not, I was outraged!  Baby-sitting did not require a permit, but clerking or any other real job did.  And I knew of no reason whatsoever why my sister and her friends should be assumed to be more capable than I.   Do not think for one second this was vanity – believe me, it was true.

This whole thing of age, of numbers, has never made sense to me.  I hated being considered “adolescent”, as if it were a curse.  I never liked being categorized whether there was a slightly distinguished quality to it or not; college student, Fulbright scholar, married woman, HOUSEWIFE (NOT!!!).  There are, of course, many other categories which may not feel so comfortable to be tagged… ethnicity, nationality, gender (girl!), social status, job…but the age thing, that’s the most offensive to me.

So grand old lady, thanks a lot,  but don’t insult me with a literary allusion that imagines an old lady defiantly wearing purple.  Give me a break!  What colour are her blue jeans?   Jenny Joseph was 30 years old when she wrote that poem…now that she is my age, perhaps she would find more beauty, more sense, in the poem that Jorge Luis Borges wrote when he was 85…

Instantes

If I were able to live my life anew,

In the next I would try to commit more errors.

I would not try to be so perfect, I would relax more.

I would be more foolish than I’ve been,

In fact, I would take few things seriously.

……..

I would eat more ice cream and fewer beans,

I would have more real problems and less imaginary ones.

…….

Senor Borges poem continues and I dare to leave you with words of my own…..

If I were to live my life anew, I would write more words about what I know,

Have always known,

In time to share with people who care.

©Elaine A. Sernovitz Zimbel 2013

Sophia Tolstoy, a Biography by Alexandra Popoff FREE PRESS, ©2010 by Alexandra Popoff, 354 pp

The content of this biography is so compelling I am having difficulty reviewing the book itself.  I find myself wanting to dive into the story, address myself to the life of Sophia (Sonya) Tolstoy, her marriage to Leo (Lev), the tragedy of its ending, the psychology of marriage to a man renowned in his own day and still in ours as a genius, and by some as a saint; the psychology of that man himself which both intrigues and repels me. I want to talk about how much can be learned from the story of this marriage  and the way it was recorded in history.  I want to talk about marriage in general and my marriage in particular (I won’t!).  And much more.

But finally I realize that if this is true, if Alexandra Popoff’s book has stirred all this in me, then the book review is already done; I need only say that it is an excellent book, so well researched, so well documented, that the only possible criticism I could make is that its author is sometimes too intent on delivering this message:  that it is not true that Sophia Andreevna Behrs Tolstoy was  “evil”; it is absolutely not true that her treatment of her husband was like “acts of torture practised during the Spanish Inquisition”;  that those words, and many others like them, were  a tragic assassination of her character perpetrated mainly by Vladimir Chertkov, a conniving, greedy sycophant of Tolstoy’s religious cult, and that this lie has been perpetuated for more than a hundred years even by literary scholars who may have feared that the truth would sully the reverence for the most highly esteemed Russian treasure, the author of “War and Peace”, “Anna Karenina”, “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, “The Kreutzer Sonata”, and many other stories and works of profound importance to his country and the world,, some of which were, at the time, censored or banned.

And even this criticism of the book dissolves when I realize that it is not Ms. Popoff’s interpretation of the facts that is hammered home too diligently, it is  the words of the principals and others quoted from letters, diaries, and the books they wrote, some of which were published (his) and some of which were hidden away in the archives only to be published within the last year or two (hers).

Until I heard Alexandra  Popoff on the radio talking about this incredibly   misunderstood marriage,  I had never heard of her subject at all.  Tolstoy’s wife?  Oh? Of course I had heard of Leo Tolstoy’s work.  Everyone has heard of “War and Peace”, though perhaps not read it.  Sonya read it – not just read it – she “copied” every word of every draft.  (Published in English, it generally runs to almost 1400 pages.) From the day she married him when she was 18 years old and he was 34, she was his scribe, his “typewriter”, his editor, and in later years she was his publisher as well. This voluminous novel, which he began shortly after their marriage, took him seven years to write.  During those years, while Sonya was either pregnant or nursing an infant, she copied every page of every draft every day, often by candle light.  She had five children in those seven years, eight more over the next seventeen. and three miscarriages during all those years.  She was pregnant sixteen times by her husband who aspired to chastity and sainthood and thought she was disgusting for giving any consideration whatsoever to her doctor’s suggestion that she try to prevent conception against the will of God.

Tolstoy had been a friend of Sonya’s family long before her birth.  From his earliest days he had been a playmate of her mother who was only two years older than  himself.  He loved Sonya’s family for its “family-ness” – besides the mother, there  was the father, a court physician 18 years older than the mother, and there was a houseful of children.  Tolstoy’s own mother had died when he was very young – he barely remembered her, and his father had died not long after.  Raised by an aunt, his siblings were older and distant.

The book jacket of the novel, “The Last Station” by Jay Parini, published in 1990 (and since then made into a film starring Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren) calls “Tolstoy’s marriage to Sofya Andreevna, one of the most infamous mismatches in history….”.  an assessment which offends me profoundly.  “Mismatched”,  perhaps;  “infamous” has a sordid ring which is not deserved.  The couple’s hundred’s of letters, their diaries, which each permitted the other to read, are as generous with expressions of their deep love as they were with soulful complaints of hurts and injustices.  I was convinced that this marriage was loving  – and yet tortured as well.

How could this be?   The more I read, the more I needed to read.  I have, beside my desk,  twelve pounds of books written by Madame Tolstoy. “My Life” weighs in at almost seven pounds.  The remaining weight is divided between her diaries, one in English and the other in French.  Ms Popoff’s biography is not included in this measure,  nor is one called “Whose Fault Is It?” by Sophia Tolstoy which I haven’t seen (although I note the library has a copy), nor is a stunning book called “Song Without Words -The  Photographs and Diaries of Countess Sophia Tolstoy” by Leah Bendavid-Val.  Yes, Sonya , in the last half of the 19th Century, was a remarkable photographer.

Reading more, going deeper, has not made it easier to understand this marriage. Others have written about it in the past but Alexandra Popoff’s biography of Sophia Tolstoy has convinced me that they could not have been impartial because they could not have read what was hidden from view. I want to tell you what I know “so far”:

In the summer of 1862 when Sonya was seventeen, newly finished with her formal education and enjoying a feeling of being young and free, the dear old family friend, Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy,  who was assumed to be interested in her older sister Liza, on  several occasions flirted with Sonya.  (Actually, I would say “he came on to her.”)  She was flattered, puzzled, and thrilled.   He was a man already recognized as an accomplished writer  – she had read his early works as part of her education – and, besides,  she had had “a childish love”  for him all her life.

As his intentions grew more obvious – he seemed to be following her, paying  her particular attention, ignoring Liza’s crushing disappointment -  Sonya began to feel more attracted to him, and more confused.  There was a much younger man, innocent like herself, to whom she was mildly committed for some time in the future.  She cautiously whispered her growing attachment for Tolstoy to Tanya, her younger sister, who responded with anger, and when she later confided to her mother,  “mother got angry and started yelling at me.  ‘She’s always imagining that everyone’s in love with her’, she threw at me.  ‘Go on, get out of here, and don’t be so silly.’” Worse, Sonya’s father, always jealous of his much younger beautiful wife,  was convinced Lev was courting her (his wife) when he should have been proposing to Liza, and he was very angry.

Tolstoy was well aware of all this.  He played games with Sonya, asking her to decipher certain mystery messages.  One she carefully unraveled read: “Your family has the wrong picture of me and your sister Liza.  You and Tanechka  (Tanya) defend me! “  He even went so far as to write: “I hate Liza.” Sonya was the one he wanted.  She was bright, energetic, well-read, pretty, and she wrote stories too.  And he wanted her right now.  On the 16th of September, three weeks after her 18th birthday, he presented her with a letter he had been carrying around for several days but hadn’t had the courage to give her, in part, he acknowledged, because he was “an old man” (34).  It was a proposal of marriage – to which she replied “YES.”

He was anxious to have the wedding as soon as possible, and in spite of objections from Sonya’s mother, he had his way. The wedding was set for 7 pm on September 23rd, one week later, in the church near her family home in Moscow.  Because the groom had already packed all his clean shirts in the travel chests waiting  at the bride’s home to be packed into the carriage that would carry the newlyweds to his family estate, 150 miles away, the wedding was delayed more than an hour while a servant fetched a shirt (an event he would later fictionalize in “Anna Karenina”).  The ceremony, which has been described as “opulent” in one of those books beside my desk, was not attended by her father who was ill nor her mother who did not want to leave her father. Afterwards the couple and their guests returned to Sonya’s family home for  “fruit, sweets, champagne and tea”, and finally for the heart-rending goodbyes.

Sonya realizes she is about to leave the beloved family from which she has never been parted.  Everyone is crying.  Lev Nikolaevich Tolstoy declares impatiently, “It sounds like you’re burying her!”

Reading this first in Ms. Popoff’s excellent biography, later in one of the principal’s own words, I began to question my calculations of the time-line: say the ceremony started at 8 pm or 8:30 and finished by 9’ish, and then the supper back at the house finished at 10, and then they leave for Yasnaya Polyana, Tolstoy’s estate, by horse and carriage and it is some 150 miles away?? And in the carriage, it is implied by Ms. Popoff delicately, the marriage is consummated?

In a diary entry dated October 8, 1862, the first of thousands she would write in her new life, just two weeks after the wedding she writes, “My diary again.  It’s sad to be going back to old habits I gave up since I got married.  I used to write when I felt depressed – now I suppose it is for the same reason….”

The buoyant young “society girl” of the summer, sheltered, innocent, pure, and idealistic, had suffered a shock in the days following her engagement.  Her betrothed, not wanting to hide anything from her, gave her his diary to read.  “…this was a mistake” Sonya flatly declares in “My Life”, which she wrote some 40 years later.  “In his diary he described his liaison with a Yasnaya Polyana woman…I was horrified at the thought that I was supposed to live there, right there where this woman was.  I cried terribly, and this filth of a male bachelor life which I was learning about for the first time, left an impression on me that I have never forgotten my whole life.” (She refers to visits he had made to various “houses” and to women who had come to him to sell their bodies.)

The carriage indeed is where “the torments began which every young wife must go through.  Not to mention the terrible physical pains, and just think of the shame!…Again and again, the whole night the same trials, the same sufferings.” Yet even as she recalls that night, there is no blame.   Considering his age, she reflects, his sexual experience was appropriate.  “In this area everything came easy to him”, she writes.  What happened in the carriage for Lev “was an unfamiliar phenomenon, something new, this communication with a society girl.”

This particular “society girl” had had a rather strict Lutheran upbringing which taught the virtues of hard work and family duty.  For her these, along with love and devotion, went hand in hand and would fill her entire life.   She gave birth to 13 children, nursed them from her breasts, often with cracked and bleeding nipples,  and in her lifetime buried six of them, three infants, one young child, and two adult children.  She home-schooled them, she sewed their clothing and knit their blankets (she did her husband’s as well);  she was her husband’s muse, his secretary, his lover; she managed the 4000 acre family estate, she planted trees and took care of the gardens, she was the chief financial officer who dutifully passed along portions of the family fortune (which he, in his religious conversion to poverty, scorned) for whatever reason, to whomever he named – including his closest cohort in the religious sect that grew up around him, Vladimir Chertkov, the man who was himself profiting from Tolstoy’s works and who was the most outspoken author of the branding of Sophia Tolstoy evil.

I faintly criticized Alexandra Popoff, the author, for her relentless insistence on how unjust that characterization was.  And now, I have been relentless  as well.   Leo Tolstoy was the love of Sonya’s life as she was of his, he told her so time and time again.  And yet, nothing can make one crazier than being told repeatedly of that great love and then, intermittently being told that you are terrible , which he also did – either to her face, in letters, or even in the diaries she was permitted to read until very close to the end of their marriage when Leo Tolstoy at the age of 82 ran away from home in the dead of night riding on horseback to the train to end up sick and dying in the stationmaster’s cabin at Astapovo, the last station, from which Sonya, learning finally where he was from the editors of RUSSIAN WORLD and rushing to be by his side, would be barred.  “They did not let me in to see Lev Nik.  They held me by force, they locked the door, they tormented my heart.”

Indeed, who is to blame?  Both of them had ideas of love which were impossible,  perhaps delusional.  She “always dreamt of the man I would love as a completely whole, new, pure person…I imagined that this man would always be with me, that I would know his slightest thought and feeling, that he would love nobody but me as long as he lived…” (diary entry October 8, 1862) Leo Tolstoy may not have betrayed her with other women (she believes he did not), but as with most people who have a life-long devotion to their “work”, for which they may be praised, admired and loved, he did have another love, in fact two – his writing and his inhuman religious principles, and both were more important, more consuming, than any other – family included.  His idea of love, which he mentions to her in a letter even before their marriage, is, in fact, impossible:  “I make terrible, impossible demands on marriage.  I demand that I be loved the way I am capable of loving.  But that is impossible.” Indeed,  he never states what “way” that is.  Perhaps the words escaped him.

I cannot say whether Sophia knew or not, but she tried her best – and ultimately failed – to accommodate him.  She couldn’t do enough.

Alexandra Popoff’s biography of Sophia Tolstoy skillfully defines the story of a marriage characterized by both love and pain.  It plunged this reader into an ocean of words written by husband and wife and several family members, and then required her to swim even further into the burgeoning bibliography.  There I also found a river of words written by observers, close up and far removed.  Those I will not read.

I, too, am an observer.  I have my own view seen from the distance of time and experience, a long life, a long marriage.  I know that swimming in the ocean one cannot help but feel the temperature of the water, the fury or the solace of the waves,  and once you’re in the depths, you cannot choose among them.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2012

Afraid of “Me”

I am totally perplexed, it never fails to puzzle me, though I must confess, it doesn’t seem to bother others as much as it bothers me. What puzzles me most is the level of education these frightened people have had, very high. For example, a novelist whose recent book was among the New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2011 wrote: X’s parents arranged a dinner in their home and invited both Y and I.

I gasped! I couldn’t believe it. Even if the poor guy, distraught about other things, had “misspoke”, where was his editor? Later in the same book, the author did it again, convincing me that his editor – we are talking here of a literary publisher of the first order – is also afraid of “me”.

Gradually I became hypersensitive to this fear. Not only did I see examples of it on the printed page and on my computer screen, one day, just about lunch time, I turned on the radio and heard a highly educated health care professional (o.k. a doctor) on his own weekly radio program say: Let’s put you and I into the mix….

No way! What’s wrong with “me”? I was soon inundated with further examples: Sally, who is a lawyer, wrote to a colleague: Someone sent a clipping about an important legal opinion to Fred and I…..

And Marty, a physicist wrote to friends about a co-incidence: It often happens to my wife and I…..

And Mrs. Harley, a registered nurse, wrote about a natural remedy: It has helped my sister and I…..

I, I, I! AIE, AIE, AIE! It dawns on me – it is not the level of education, it is not education at all. It is – surprise, surprise – a psychological problem -with a large admixture of socio/cultural bias.

NOTE TO THE READER:  I have pre-tested this piece on three readers and three out of three thought it was about grammar.  Yes and NO!  Please re-read the foregoing paragraph and do take note – this one is in my column called Cabinet Privé.  Private Practice – don’t be embarrassed!

Throughout history one generation or another has been branded the “me generation”, a label which suggests selfish interests, of course; preoccupations with self, putting “me” first. Well, fine, don’t risk it. There is a solution. Let me explain.

The word “me” is never used as the subject of a sentence except by very young children and sometimes people who are learning English as a second language. “Me want more cake”, a baby might say. And the word “I” is never used as an object in a sentence. “Would you please give “I” another piece of cake?” I don’t think even a baby would say that!

Even if you are one of those people who really don’t care that much about grammar – subject/object – who cares? – even you, would you ever say, “Someone sent a clipping….to I?” Would you say, “It often happens to I?” Can you hear yourself saying or writing, “It has helped I…..”?

I don’t think so. If you then protest that when it concerns the presence of another person, common decency requires that you put the other person first, fine. No problem.

Someone sent a clipping about an important legal opinion to me and Fred…oops….to Fred and me. It often happens to me and my wife …oops…to my wife and me. It has helped me and my sister …..oops…my sister and me.

Are you with me? Don’t put “me” first, but please, I beg you, don’t eliminate “me” altogether. You are o.k. and so am I. You have no reason to be afraid of “me”.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2012

I would have said I first heard about Facebook late in the last century, say 1996 – it seems that long ago. But I refreshed my memory with a startling fact – it was 2004 when it got started at Harvard University by that hoodie fellow and some “friends”. Thanks to the “Social Network” movie everyone knows his name, so I won’t mention it here. Besides, I did say this is a personal history.

I heard about it reading The New Times in print or online. College kids were using Facebook to communicate with each other, and I thought, “Yeah? What’s wrong with email?” I’d been using email since the mid 80′s. It worked for me -what ‘s the deal?

I figured it out eventually, – like – if you want to party or find out who’s having a party Faceboook would be quicker than sending emails to individuals. Okay. But being a person who always thinks of the down side, I also thought, “Yeah, but what if you don’t want “everybody” to know.? Apparently that is not so important anymore.

The next thing I knew, Facebook was spreading downwards to younger kids, and younger and younger.

So much so, I learned via the New York Times online site, some parents were joining Facebook as well – only partly to see what their kids were up to. Didn’t like that at all, but it was out of control. I mean, out of control! Wikipedia says that as of July 2011, Facebook had more than 800 million active users, and according to a report on ConsumersReports.org on May 2011, there were 7.5 million children under 13 with accounts, (I know some of them personally) – violating the site’s terms.

Now it’s not just people, it’s businesses, corporations, communications networks, The New York Times itself – every where you go on line and everything you hear on the radio or on television – everywhere, you hear, “And come visit us on Facebook.”

I will deal with this last statement immediately: I cannot imagine why on earth I would want to visit “them” on Facebook. Maybe I’m missing something, but I suspect most companies, most for-profit industries, most all of them would really want to sell me something, and I don’t want to go there.

In fact, after being a registered member of Facebook for a while, I am now contemplating giving it up. Contemplation deserves a full inquiry, right? So why did I join Facebook in the first place, why have I stayed (almost to the point of addiction), and why leave?

When I click on Facebook to see what’s new with my nearest and dearest, most of whom are not near enough to hug, I land on my “News Feed” page where I do indeed find some news about people I love, people who are my “friends” because they agreed to “friend me”. There are old friends, new friends, real friends to share with. Or perhaps the possibilities. I haven’t experienced a whole lot of that. And I also treasure being able to “get to know” some members of my extended family, some of whom I have never met in person even though they are “close”. “Close” simply isn’t what it used to be when families stayed in the same place and everyone attended the weddings, celebrated the births, and mourned the deaths together.

But mostly what has kept me on Facebook has been the very great pleasure of tuning in to see that my grand kids are having a great time at camp or are thrilled with their new job or they are meeting their friends (no quotes) for fun. And yet, it is distinctly uncomfortable to know that they really truly do not have me in mind when they post this information.

Somehow it reminds me of that decade of my life on the farm on Prince Edward Island where we experienced the “party line”, the telephone that is, not politics. We might go to the phone to make a call and come upon a conversation already in progress. Or we might be involved in a conversation ourselves when a neighbor would pick up the phone to inquire, “Line pizzy?” Sometimes we might all pick up the phone at once, not sure whether that ring was two short ones and a long one, or one long one and a short,or a short and then a long?

On Facebook, it seems to me, one never knows – “Hey, are you talking to me?”

On the “News Feed” recently, a “friend” enquired if anyone (I presumed that meant me but I wasn’t all that sure) had any background in a certain area because that person had a question to ask. There were several responses, all of them indicating that there didn’t seem to be anyone out there with the information requested. (The question had not yet been asked.) It was something I did have background in, but somehow I knew the person did not really have “me” in mind. Mind you, it was not a personal issue – it was actually quite general. Something like, say, has anyone out there ever used Ivory Soap? Should I or shouldn’t I announce my availability? I pondered. And finally I sent a simple response: “Me” I wrote. “Ask”.

The person never did ask or mention the topic again. In fact, the next “status” post, several days later, indicated that person was seriously considering quitting Facebook.

Yes, I took it personally. Can’t help it. I thought, “Hmmnn! Facebook is kinda like a bulletin board you pass in the hall where people you know are posting all kinds of personal observations, questions, plans, and procedures. You scan it as you go by and see – “Oh, there’s something from…….” a friend, perhaps a relative. You stop to check it out….and you get the creepy feeling it is not meant for your eyes…and you are embarrassed.

Well, maybe not you – but I am. It’s not the nature of the message that embarrasses me – I don’t mind that bulletin boards have changed from places where you announce you are looking for someone to share an apartment or to share car expenses on a trip to New York or Toronto to a place where you can express how tired and depressed you are, how sick you are with the flu, or anything even more personal than that. As a psychotherapist I’m certainly not offended by expressions of feeling. But…then what?

Facebook was invented for college kids by college kids. Their territory has been invaded by the rest of us, younger and older, private and corporate. And yet there are those who “own” it. And they are all younger than I am.

With “friends” who are relatives, close or distant, sometimes the measure is not merely geographical. sometimes the distance in age speaks louder than any other. Some, for example, very close to middle age will complain, after a day of vigorous exercise, that they “feel like an 80 year old”, and I restrain myself from commenting that on my recent 81^st birthday I walked 20 minutes to the pool, did 40 laps (1000 metres), walked 25 minutes to the hair salon and then 20 minutes home, and then went out to dinner, and I felt fine.

So what am I doing on Facebook? Am I leaving? Am I staying? Just checking for news about my loved ones who are too busy to call or write. That bulletin board is there for all the world to see. Don’t tell me to keep my eyes straight forward and mind my own business. Not in this world!

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

I don’t have thousands of “friends” on Facebook. I don’t have a single one I don’t know personally although there are some great distances in age, more important perhaps than those in geography.

“Cutting for Stone: a novel“ by Abraham Verghese  Vintage Canada Edition, 2010, 667 pages + bibliography

Recently a reader responded to one of my book reviews with a comment that first scared me half to death and then embarrassed me to the same point: “Once again,” this person wrote, “your review of ‘an incredibly good book’ tells me that this is not a book I want to read.”

a) This was from a person whose judgment I valued , and b) I had just been to Blockbuster Video to help them liquidate their stock and I was sickened, not for the first time, by the superlatives on the cover of every single flick in the store.

Did I say that – “an incredibly good book”? Yes, I did. Not in the review itself but in the email to announce it. No excuse! Fortunately, my valued reader wrote that she would read it anyway, simply because she valued my judgment.

Abraham Verghese’s “Cutting for Stone” was recommended to me by another valued reader who never said it was an “incredibly good book”. She made it clear that she liked it very much, and that was enough for me. I knew Dr. Verghese’s name, had read some of his writing in The New Yorker, and I knew that this was his first novel.

So I searched the library catalogue, found that all the copies were out,  put one on reserve, and waited quite a long while. In the meantime I heard from another reader that “it’s been flying off the shelves” in book stores.

Reader, be warned! This is not the first time I have reported on “millions of copies sold”, “flying off the shelves” , “recommended by a truly valued person” – with great disappointment.

“Cutting for Stone: a novel” takes place mainly in Ethiopia beginning shortly after World War II where a very young Catholic Nurse-Sister , trained in India, works as a surgical assistant to a small mission hospital’s best surgeon. I won’t tell you how this came about or even their names because, for me, the best part of reading a good book is being on the page not knowing what comes next until you turn the page.

On a beautiful day in Montreal I sat on a bench overlooking the garden beside La Grand Bibliotheque where I had just picked up my reserved copy and read for longer than I intended to. The story from the beginning is compelling, it’s touching, and it is well told. After a while I went home looking forward to spending a lot of time with this very thick book.

Abraham Verghese is a medical doctor who made his reputation as a doctor who writes. Unlike W. Somerset Maughm who trained as a physician and then allowed his success as a writer to take him off course, Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, has persisted in his medical career. He is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.  And he writes.

This book is so full of very detailed descriptions of medical pathologies (I use that word to warn you – I’m serious!) – that often, especially if reading while eating lunch, I had to skip long passages. Sometimes he describes an operation, from incision to – well, nevermind. I am a health professional – though not a surgeon or an m.d. or a scientist, I am not squeamish. Or I thought not. Reading these descriptions, however, I was completely convinced that in not pursuing medical school, I made the right decision.

So then I began to muse about the decision the author made – why would he include such graphic descriptions of human “guts” in a novel? Did he wish to share with the reader what to him (and to the narrator) is the magnificence of this little known territory? Even when “the narrator” is a fourteen year old boy who is just discovering his own fascination with surgery in the mission hospital? Or was it his idea to present in a novel solid medical knowledge – some of it grossly disturbing and horribly tragic – to prove that medical text books do not have to be either daunting or boring? Or, cynically, did the marketing department of his publisher insist that this emphasis would sell books? (Raise your hand everyone who is ready to respond, “Oh, Elaine, those were the best parts!)

“Cutting for Stone: a novel” covers a good fifty years. Along the way the narrator, even as a child, uses the first person singular. This is, as Maughm has said, “a literary convention which is as old as the hills….It’s object is of course to achieve credibility for when someone tells you what he states happened to himself you are more likely to believe that he is telling the truth than when he tells you what happened to somebody else. It has besides the merit from the story-teller’s point of view that he need only tell you what he knows for a fact and can leave to your imagination what he doesn’t or couldn’t know. Some of the older novelists who wrote in the first person were in this respect very careless….” And so, dear Reader, is Dr. Verghese when, for example, having just described the reaction of someone in the room to something the first person narrator has just announced, writes, “I was blind to the look on her face.”

Mr.Maughm, continuing on the subject of those “carless older novelists”, has said that when they report at great length conversations they couldn’t possibly have heard and incidents they couldn’t possibly have witnessed they lose the great advantage of “verisimilitude”.

Right on! There were times reading this book when I thought it was more like a memoir than fiction. This must be true – I thought - he couldn’t have made this up. And there were times when I couldn’t help thinking this novel was written by committee – I could see them around the board room table, hear them kicking around this event or another. I think Dr. Verghese lost more battles than he won, from a literary point of view. I wasn’t there, of course. I do not pretend “verisimilitude”. But that the marketing department won is clear from the numbers. Incidentally, the book has eight pages of acknowledgments and one and a half pages of bibliography. Bibliography for a novel?

It’s a good read, overall, not a great one. It reminds me of “The Kite Runner”. a very big seller a few years back. It too started out with a very compelling story and advanced to “group think” which succeeded admirably – millions of copies sold, film made, etc. (By the way, there is already a film called “Cutting for Stone” – it is not taken from this book.)

Why the title “Cutting for Stone” ? I didn’t know what it meant and even at the end didn’t get its significance. I looked it up on google. (Watch out for this one: “The title “Cutting for Stone” is taken from the Hippocratic oath, but may also reflect a double meaning. … “ ) No kidding! It’s that double meaning I didn’t want to acknowledge. Too simplistic, demeaning! And yet, further research, which I will not share at this point for fear of giving away too much of the story, awakens other interpretations, not quite so simplistic as the first that comes to mind, but still a little “in your face”.

Millions of people have read this book. Some of them loved it and some did not. This reader will not refer to it as “an incredibly good book”, a term she uses only when she means it.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Ooops!  Booked a round trip ticket Montreal/Toronto online and had a big surprise.  First, it seemed more complicated than usual, more clicks-what ifs, how about this and that and that.  Finally got the right price at the right time, closed the deal, and reported the details to family in Toronto later the same day.  Leave Montreal at 9:55 am and arrive Toronto at 5:16 pm.

What?  That can’t be!  That’s seven plus hours.  The slowest daytime train takes about five and the fastest a bit over four.  I return to the internet, find a special notice of possible changes after a certain date on certain trains, check it out:  all the stops are listed, one or two more than usual, but a suspicious gap in the morning – from Dorval to Brockville takes 3 hours and 19 minutes.  That can’t be right!  It usually takes one hour and 45 minutes.  I take a screen shot of that trip schedule.

Urgent phone call to Viarail.  Nice people, Really nice, very accommodating.  “Oh that train “, I am told.  “It goes to Ottawa first.”  OH??  OMG!!!

During the brief moment I am speechless, I see myself on the train having a hysterical fit similar to the one Charles Grodin has in “Midnight Run” when Robert de Niro, the bounty hunter, forces him to board an airplane.  I am shouting “Stop the train!  Stop this train at once!”

But of course I say only, calmly even,  “Ottawa?  But I am not going to Ottawa, that is out of my way.” The person on the other end offers to re-book on a train that leaves 15 minutes later and arrives in Toronto, minus the side trip to Ottawa, one hour and 24 minutes earlier at the same price.  Fine.

Not fine.  Several days pass but my fantasy of hysteria does not.  I cannot believe such subterfuge!  Hysteria fueled by outrage?  Oh-oh!  I email my generous friend at customer relations, the one I thanked in a previous letter to the corporation. (http://www.elainezimbel.com/?p=389)

Subject: No Thanks this time!

I told the story of my booking misadventure and how it was corrected, mentioning with great restraint, I thought, how disturbed I was.  In the re-telling, I see now, my true feelings were not well hidden.  My letter continued:

This is a screen shot.  I trust you can see that there is no mention whatsoever of a side trip to Ottawa….

XXXXX, while you may (or may not) argue that the Ottawa “detour” was mentioned when I made my original selection, I will spare you any discussion on that topic.  I can only say that if I had seen it, I wouldn’t have booked it, and if I had not discovered this ruse before I boarded the train, I would have been extremely upset.

I am not a novice using the internet, and I have to say that it gets more frustrating, not less so, partly because it seems there is a game involved – let’s see if we can fool some of the people all of the time.

As you know, I am not soft on corporate sleaze, or whatever adjective “greed” goes by these days, but I think this degree of deception hits a new low.

And so, I will take this opportunity to add one more thing:  my son (I have three) was on the train that struck a truck several weeks ago.  He felt a great deal of compassion for the driver of the truck who died, and for himself, it was not a pleasant experience, you will agree.  His arrival in Toronto was completed by bus several hours later than expected.  I was surprised to learn that he was not offered a free ticket for another trip or even a reduction of the price.  What does that say about customer relations?

Yours truly,
Elaine Zimbel

I clicked on SEND and I was surprised to get a phone call just a few minutes later.  My “friend” was very anxious to explain that at certain times of the day when there are fewer trains, they have extended the routes in order to get more people on a given train and they assumed that some people would actually enjoy the longer ride.  (Who are these people?  Fill in the blanks.)

I mentioned to my “friend” (who has never asked me to hide his/her identity) that the train I was re-booked on left 15 minutes later and that there was another to Toronto not long after that.  Whatever VIARAIL was thinking, I insisted,  it was really bad not to be perfectly clear about that thinking so the passenger had a choice.

And about the horrible train wreck my son was involved in, it turned out, oh yes, in fact there was a reimbursement for that one part of the trip.  Perhaps in the confusion of the event, the staff forgot to mention it.

In doing my research for this tale, I have returned to the Viarail website several times.  There is a slight indication that train 55 from Montreal to Toronto does go to Ottawa first.  I am reasonably sure it wasn’t there before and that it could be easily missed still.

Perhaps the railroads are taking their cue from the airlines – direct flights from point A to point B are rare and rarely available at bargain rates. It doesn’t make sense to the traveler but obviously makes lots of $$ense to the corporations.

And that’s what it’s all about…making $$$$$ense.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

“A Visit From the Goon Squad” by Jennifer Egan, Alfred A. Knopf, New York 2010, 274 pages

It’s an extraordinary book about ordinary people in which you may very well conclude that “ordinary people” is a meaningless term.  In the hands of a truly extraordinary writer, like Jennifer Egan, such creatures do not exist.

They are people of our age, that is, our contemporary, near contemporary era, today, yesterday, tomorrow.  In one chapter they are teen agers, in another in their 50’s, or 30’s, and then it is decades – we are not quite sure how many – earlier.  And then we catch them in the future, which is when, exactly?  We are not sure.  And it all makes perfect sense.

Most of these people love music – they are driven by it.  To make it, to listen to it, record it, sell it.  Listed on the back of the title page, hints for librarians or search engines, are:  “Punk rock musicians, sound recording executives, old men, young women, psychological fiction”.  Hmmmnn…if young men are not mentioned, is it a given everyone will know they are already accounted for – “punk rock musicians”?  And as for “psychological fiction”,  should I put this book review in “Cabinet privé”?  Could do.

This is the best constructed novel I have ever read;  it could hold its own as a book of related short stories as well.  It does not follow a chronological time line, the floor plan is not totally obvious.You may find yourself wondering how you got where you are, not sure where you are going, and yet the more you read, the deeper you travel into it, the more certain you are that you are in good hands.  And when you have finished reading it, you will be awed by its wisdom and its beauty. Indeed, you will feel the tremors of that awe all along the way. Even, I must add, in the section in Powerpoint.  Yes, I said that.  Though I am a person who generally deplores Powerpoint presentations, in Jennifer Egan’s hands, this part of the book not only fits perfectly with the beauty and wisdom of the rest, it is particularly touching.  (Note: maybe it’s not Powerpoint.  You can visit it on the web in full colour with music.  www.jenniferegan.com, click on books, A Visit From the Goon Squad, and scroll down – its amazing!)

I was puzzled at the end of the book, left with the big question – what does it all mean?  Not a bad thing, to be left with, that.  You stay with it, it stays with you.  And then  the next reader in the family opened the book at the page following the dedication to read me the words Jennifer Egan chose to begin with, quoting Marcel Proust from his book, In Search of Lost Time. I had indeed lost it on the way to the end of the book.

That quote for this book!  (You, too, will find it when you need it.)  If Jennifer Egan is not a genius, she is certainly a very wise woman.  While she makes no mention of the shaky translation of his title, “A La Recherche du Temps Perdu”, she certainly made me think of it profoundly.  Are we searching in our memories for time that is lost, a time that is lost, the people we knew then, the person “I” was then?  Or are we seeking to understand this time, “now”?  Can we ever?

“A Visit from the Goon Squad” won the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  Had anyone asked for my vote, yes, yes, yes in both cases.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

(I am tempted to add, “And when she knew it”), Penguin Edition, 1966, text taken from the New York edition (1909),  248 pages.

Originally published by Charles Scribner & Co. in 1897, this is an extraordinary book which deftly manages the near-impossible – it tells, with the voice of an adult, a child’s perceptions, carefully guarding her innocence, her freshness, yet never denying the reader full knowledge of what is going on.  And if that were not enough of an accomplishment, Mr. James does more – he perfectly, most subtly reveals how Maisie’s knowledge deepens as she grows older.

Maisie is very young, not yet six years old, when her parents’ divorce, after interminable and particularly nasty litigation – the details of which we are spared – becomes final.  Her father is awarded full custody of the child and is ordered to refund to her mother some twenty-six hundred pounds she had been required to put down provisionally for the child’s maintenance.  However, “He was unable to produce the money or to raise it in any way; so that after a squabble scarcely less public and scarcely more decent than the original shock of battle his only issue from this predicament was a compromise proposed by his legal advisers and accepted by hers….” His debt was disposed of “…and the little girl disposed of in a manner worthy of the judgment-seat of Solomon.  She was divided in two and the portions tossed impartially to the disputants.  They would take her, in rotation, for six months at a time….”

“[Maisie] was abandoned to her fate….the only link binding her to either parent was this lamentable fact of her being a ready vessel for bitterness, a deep little porcelain cup in which biting acid could be mixed.  They had wanted her not for any good they could do her, but for the harm they could, with her unconscious aid, do each other.”

Fortunately, Maisie’s parents, a very handsome pair if no longer a couple, were of a class in which social activities kept them very busy.  Her “education”, her care, would be in the hands of a nurse, later a governess, one or another, each with different qualities, different “baggage” as well.  Each of them would need to buffer as best she could, some managed better than others,  the “confidence of passions” Maisie was taken into by either parent.  “It was to be the fate of this patient little girl to see much more than she at first understood, but also even at first to understand much more than any little girl, however patient, had perhaps ever understood before.”

Maisie does not long remain the innocent child who, leaving her father’s after the first six months, dutifully replies to her mother’s question – “And did your beastly papa, my precious angel, send any message to your own loving mama?”   “‘He said I was to tell you, from him’ she faithfully reported, ‘that you’re a nasty horrid pig!’”

It wasn’t long after that, you may imagine, that she became aware of the strange office she filled as the centre of her parents’ hatred for each other and as their messenger of insult.  Henry James puts this revelation so skillfully in the context of the world of childhood that one doesn’t doubt in the least its authenticity, not even when he attributes to a mere child “the idea of an inner self or, in other words, of concealment.” We believe it because it comes to her from a new feeling, a feeling of danger.  We believe it because that feeling comes not from angry looks or words but from familiar things; “The stiff dolls on the dusky shelves began to move their arms and legs; old forms and phases began to have a sense that frightened her.”

But Maisie does all right.  She gets on with her life as it shifts and changes according to the whims, the pursuits of adults  She forms attachments, people of importance come and go, somehow she takes care of herself -  never selfishly.  In other words, like all children of divorced parents, “She’s fine!”

Yet, though divorce is  a necessary reality, now even more so than at the end of the 19th Century, the children of divorce, as Henry James who never married, never had children of his own, knew, the children are the story.  Their fears, their confusion, their helplessness, their dreams, their wishes, these are indescribable – and yet this, the story that cannot be spoken, is the story James imagines.

I have quoted liberally the words of the author because if I were to summarize or paraphrase you would miss the flavour, the impact of his tale.   The more I pour over each page – (warning:  there is hardly any white space on the page, he does not believe in short paragraphs) – the more I find to treasure.

And yet, I have to remind as well that Henry James’ writing is so thick, so round-about, that sometimes one has to double back to get the meaning.  So if you are inclined to read this book, read it slowly.  Savour it.  “….[take] refuge on the firm ground of fiction, through which indeed there [curls] the blue river of truth.” What Maisie knew and when she knew it you cannot learn from any other child of divorce.  They don’t talk about it – they live it.

©Elaine A. Zimbel 2011

Important Person
Customer Care Department
Viarail Canada

Dear Ms/Mr……

I know your name!  I would like very much to publish it because you have been so kind, so respectful, so generous to me.  However, since this behaviour is so rare in the annals of corporate greed in our times, I fear that if I were to identify you, at the very least you might receive a nasty reprimand and at worst you might be “terminated” without a generous package.

I will briefly remind you of the circumstances which began our interaction.  Late one Sunday night I was sitting on my couch, fire in the fireplace, laptop on my lap trying to book a return trip for a very busy dear one to come for a visit from Toronto to Montreal.  Between numerous phone calls to him to verify his possibilities and numerous clicks on your website for appropriate scheduling and best price – I would estimate an hour at least – all the stars aligned and I was ready to book.  However, it was not clear to me how to book for my dear one when your website kept insisting I, a Via Preference client, book in my own name.

Failing to find the way around my dilemma, I searched for a phone number to call for help only to find telephone hours which ended at 4 pm on Sundays!  Somewhere around midnight, I gave up, went to bed, and resolved to get up early to make the call – which I did.  The person who came to my rescue was very helpful until it came to pricing this trip – it seems the special price that was available the night before was no longer available, sorry!

I do not take this kind of corporate sleight-of-hand lightly.  When I explained my story and my dilemma, I was told that I was on the wrong page, literally – I was on the “Via Preference” page when I accessed the Sunday phone hours.  I should have been on the home page where I would have found a 24/7 phone number.

“In other words”, I summarized, “I am penalized because I am a Via Preference Client???”  The irony failed to touch my formerly-helpful telephone  contact.  She only managed to offer her helplessness in providing me with a reservation at the same rate I had found just a few hours before.

Frankly, dear Sir/Madam, it was more important at that moment to book a ticket for my dear one, even at the higher price, than it was to express my annoyance.  I managed to get a number to call to register my complaint, which I did later the same day, twice.

The first time, my story was met with an indifferent, insulting “YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN YOU WERE ON THE WRONG PAGE”,  at which point my “annoyance” turned to indignant rage, thus inciting my second phone call.  Perhaps I should have mentioned that the phone number on which to “complain” leads to a recording which promises to return the call within 24-48 hours after leaving a short message.  On my second phone call I said very authoritatively that I wished to speak to a vice president in charge of customer relations regarding how I had been INSULTED  by someone in that same department.  Your phone call came very soon thereafter.

Together we ironed out certain discrepancies, and proof, supplied by me, of a printout of the ”wrong page” I was on showing not only the prices but other information regarding my “preference” status you said should not be there.  You ultimately said you would reverse the over-charge, for which I was very grateful.

I am quoting here a part of the e-mail I sent to you along with the scan of the troublesome page:

“A person in your position, xxxxxx, should know that the general public is getting very impatient with corporate imperiousness.  It begins with pressing numbers, continues with endless waiting while, on your lines, being blasted with raucous noise, and ends with a “robot” reciting lines from lessons learned in company training sessions where they are not taught a most basic lesson: listen carefully to what the caller is saying, try to understand what the issue is before you recite your lines, and be aware that if you don’t listen, you may hear things you really don’t want to hear.

I do thank you for meeting these basic courtesies in your call to me and look forward to having the difference in the fare credited on my credit card.”

At present I have noted that indeed my credit card has reflected your kindness.  Not only have you reversed the overcharge but you have failed, I hope by design, to re-instate the reduced fare.  I like to think this is not merely a kindness but is a recognition that I have given Viarail Canada, at no charge, several valuable lessons – as indicated in the above paragraph – to pass along to your frontline employees.

Wishing you the best of luck in your efforts to sweeten the really sour breath Corporate Greed daily breathes upon us,

Yours sincerely,

Elaine A. Zimbel

@Elaine A. Zimbel 2011