A pandemic summer in the city

I had an interesting phone conversation with my son in Toronto last night. He has two sons who each graduated this spring, one from elementary and the other from high school. The older boy is wildly successful, he has landed two jobs for the summer and been accepted into his first and third choices of universities. He is even offering to contribute toward his family's household expenses. One job he does mostly for fun (many of his friends are there so it is an opportunity to hang out) and the other is a renovation job that will allow him to learn a bunch of useful skills.

The other son is struggling with emotional issues, and the enforced isolation of pandemic times in a big city has exacerbated some of his problems. But at the same time it has pushed the boy toward attempting to find solutions on his own since the usual fallbacks of counselling and therapy are just not there anymore. His parents are frazzled but starting to see a glimmer of hope.

Like many, my son is working from home and finding it stressful, but at the same time he is settling into it and now dreading returning to the office at the end of the summer. Their usual summer getaway plans have all been foiled, local cottages are either unavailable or wildly expensive, and travelling to the Maritimes to visit a family cottage is not really feasible. So they must make the best of a summer in the city.

When they first settled in downtown Toronto my son and his wife invested in an old 8mm film projector to show movies outdoors on summer evenings. They lived on a street that was really a kind of back alley, across from all of the houses was a row of garages, so they projected movies they borrowed from the library onto a garage door and the audience sat on the kerb across from it sharing popcorn and ice cream.

I expect the old projector has been retired and they now have something a little more digital, the movies are now projected onto a large bedsheet hung in such a way that neighbours in adjacent backyards can view it as well. My son was describing the latest movie they watched which he said was "iconic" but I had never heard of it. He said that even though he is a director of a film industry company he was embarrassed to say he had never watched this particular film and felt he had to rectify that shortcoming.

We compared TV and movie watching menus. My son has a taste for dark-themed thrillers which I can barely stomach, however he says he can't watch that kind of thing anymore, mostly he watches comedy now. I guess reality has surpassed fiction and one most look elsewhere for relief. Currently he is watching "Community" on Netflix. I don't know if his change of taste is pandemic-related or age-related, he will be 50 next year. I've been watching very old TV shows that were always running in the background when I used to visit B in her basement apartment. They're corny as all get out.

My son's family have a new dog: when their previous dog Dobby (see my previous post) died, they swore they'd never get another one but less than a year later they did. The new dog is a young mixed breed female of medium size. Its antics are both comic and stress-inducing. The other day it captured a baby skunk in the back yard and attempted to throttle it to death. The dog got skunked, up close and very personal. The baby escaped and hopefully the dog learned a lesson, she was lucky that the parent skunk did not intervene.

Toronto has designated one of its less popular beaches as an off-leash area for dogs, so the whole family piles into the car on hot evenings to drive there. It's the closest thing to a summer vacation at the beach now.