What I learned from Christopher Plummer

Back in 2004, my old university gave Christopher Plummer an honorary degree. I covered it for the student newspaper, guessing it would be like most of these ceremonies: coma-inducingly dull. Not this one. Plummer stole the show.

He leaped to the podium and bombastically cried out to all the newly minted graduates that, "You have finally escaped! Let's hear it for the inmates!"

Then, he took a more somber tone, and admitted he always regretted not attending university. He wished he got to experience the fellowship and camaraderie that comes with a few good years of university. Then he signed off with a rousing call to grab life by the neck and hold it close, or something far more eloquent like that.

Afterwards, there was a short press scrum with some local press. One reporter asked about his regret over not getting a degree.

Plummer corrected him. No, he said, I don't miss the degree. What I regret is missing out on the university experience. The rich friendships that come from that experience. The camaraderie.

 

Whether he was playing to the crowd or not, his regret of not getting the university experience – like most regrets when someone admits them – was also advice: We should wring as much experience from this surreal time as possible. 

That advice didn’t turn my worldview upside down. It did confirm my existing bias for mixing academics with debauchery. I worked hard on my class assignments and wrote for the student newspaper. I also partied hard, destroyed my hearing at loud concerts in small dive bars, travelled when I could, crashed on countless couches, and even tossed a dwarf. Along the way, I made life-long friends who shared in those experiences.

Now I'm older, and slightly wiser, so I know that Plummer’s advice isn't just good university advice. It’s damn good life advice. You don’t even need to go to university. Life well lived is an informal education made up of new experiences, strong friendships, and, to use Plummers’ term, camaraderie. 

Whether I was predisposed to this point-of-view or Plummer influenced me, I'm not sure. I usually opted for grabbing the richer experience than the "smart" move. Stay home or go out and meet friends. Stick around in Toronto or move to Budapest. Big or small, grabbing those crazy choices that life threw at me unlocked incredible experiences, sparked new relationships, and strengthened existing friendships – or camaraderie. 

If you read Plummer's obituaries, you see a man who’s seeking different roles and stories. Acting on Broadway, or in Hollywood. The Sound of Music then Hamlet. A historical drama here, a crime thriller there. How about Star Trek IV? Lead roles, bit roles, and everything in between. That sounds like a man building a life, grabbing one experience after another. That's a good life, and education, to emulate.

Berlin Remembers

 

Yesterday, as I was picking up my son from the Kita, I saw one of those red memorial candles on the ground beside the door. Someone had lit a candle and put some carnations in the plague that commemorated Rosa Luxemburg having lived in that building for a few years in the early 1900s.

It turns out that yesterday was the anniversary of her murder by paramilitaries in 1919.

So what does a Marxist killed 100 years ago have to do with anything? 

Nothing... And everything.

I don't think there's another city that goes out of its way to remember as much as Berlin does. The good bits and the bad, ugly bits. Rosa Luxemburg is just one of many brutal openers to the tragedies the city would experience. The Nazis. The War. The Holocaust. The Defeat. The Trials. The Wall. 

Guilt is a word that gets thrown around a lot in Germany. But, another accurate word is courage. It can't be easy for a country to reckon with its past the way Germany does. To openly remember its history, instead of revising it. 

It's both chilling and refreshing to walk along the streets of Berlin and see the golden stumbling stones that bear the names of Jewish deportees, along with their fate: liberation, escape, or death camp. 

You see these types of memorials everywhere. The small statue in the quiet square where the July 20 plotters were executed. The eerie stone monuments to the Soviet war dead. The concrete and steel foundation line that still runs along the path of the Berlin Wall.

In Berlin, and much of Germany, history is still a lesson you can learn from, instead of a myth that you believe in, an ideal you buy, or a grudge you nurse.

We live in a strange age where everyone lives on their own plains of reality, feeding on information that only confirms their biases. And the way things are going, that looks like it isn't going to change soon.

Being honest about our history is getting tougher. But it's good to see it's still happening in some places.

Staring into a Second Lockdown

 

Back in March, I was locked down with a 15-month-old still napping twice a day. With no daycare, we took shifts. I got the afternoon shift and took him out in the stroller to the neighbourhood park, and then into the nearby, quiet cemetery to make him sleep.

While the sick died for want of ventilators in the hallways of Milan’s hospitals, and while China introduced state surveillance that would make the heart of the Stasi go pitter patter, I watched winter turn into spring. Every day, I walked into the cemetery and saw a few more leaves on the trees, the birds' nests get a little bigger, and the days get longer and sunnier. It was so lovely that I forgot how rough other people had it. I just lacked the perspective, even as I strolled past graves everyday.

As we stare into the void of a second lockdown, it all feels the same, but different, and darker. The headlines scream about higher infection rates, the trees shed their leaves, the birds migrate south, and days get shorter, colder, and darker.

So, I was feeling a little down at the prospect of spending a winter indoors.

Until I had a call with my parents, who mentioned their weekly family Zoom call, in which my Opa said he wasn't going anywhere for Christmas because it wasn't worth the risk. He's in his 90s, and well into the risk group. When someone mentioned that it's Christmas, he pointed out that he missed four Christmases in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the War. One Christmas isn't so bad.

That snapped me out of my self-centered, me-focused, life-is-so-hard-in-my-nice-home whine fest about a winter lockdown. I needed some perspective to remember that I don't have it that bad. In fact, most of us don't have it that bad when compared others who deal with the coronavirus, like patients, families of patients, doctors, nurses, grocery store employees, or your food delivery dude who are all a little closer to the horrors the coronavirus has created.

 

It's all about perspective. So, am I going to make this about myself? Or am I going to look around, look at the news, look at history, and see that it ain't so bad. Spring will be along soon enough, and the summer, and then we'll all be vaccinated and stuck in crowded trains, shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, all of us wishing we were locked down again.