Glebe Report

The Glebe is a truly perfect place to raise a family, build a business and live out a life, but once it must have felt like the saddest place on Earth. Its avenues ran with apprehension and despair. Behind every drawn curtain hid anxious families, broken parents, heartbroken wives, memories of summers past and lost, the promises of futures destroyed and children who would never know their fathers. These were the years of the Second World War.

Uncle Jack was the husband of my mother’s sister Floss. They met in the 1920s when my Auntie Floss was working at the Model Laundry in Watford, England, and Uncle Jack drove the delivery lorry (truck) there. But that is not the end of the story.

It’s a warm autumn day, sun ablaze, temperature north of 24 when I enter Top of the World (TOTW), the tastefully-designed, well-presented skateboard and snowboard shop at 581 Bank Street.

When Sarah Thompson and Jaimie Rigby learned they would lose their lease on their Dailey Method studio space after four-and-a-half years in Fifth Avenue Court, their first thought was whether to close the business. It was the energy and enthusiasm of their devoted clients, staff and neighbours that convinced them to carry on.

The Mutchmor rink will be reinstalled this fall, but the announcement of the decision is a mix of good news and bad.

One Saturday morning in September, my kids and I headed to the Repair Café to try to save our beloved toaster from landfill. The experience was memorable and transformative.

In late September, I took a walk through Brown’s Inlet Park. Just five years ago, Virginia Carver and I, then co-chairs of Glebe Community Association’s environment committee, had spearheaded a “BioBlitz” in the park. At that time, we noted that many trees were beginning to show the effects of concentrated dog pee at the base of their trunks.

There’s guilt-free shopping inside Abbotsford House at The Glebe Centre where fashions are recycled and sold for a bargain. “Dorothy’s Boutique,” named after long-time boutique volunteer Dorothy Martyn, is open Monday through Friday.

For the Glebe Report’s November Poetry Quarter, we asked area poets to ease into the next season and write on the theme of “ease.” How to explore the notion of ease, at once both noun and verb? An easy ride? Perhaps, but raising the possible intrusion of its hangers-on, unease and disease.

This month’s musical offerings include the Tone Cluster Choir with an evening of art and music; “Two’s Company” piano recital at Southminster with Serhiy Salov and Philippe Prud’homme; Big Soul Project’s Christmas concert; Caelis Academy’s presentation of the Messiah; and a dramatic reading of A Child’s Christmas in Wales at St. Matthew’s.