Peter Gzowski - Selected Columns from Canadian Living

CANADIAN
LIVING

Copyright 1993 Peter Gzowski
Wood engravings Gerard Brender a Brandis
All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication,
reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a
retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the
publisheror, in case of photocopying or other reprographic
copying, a licence from Canadian Reprography Collectiveis an
infringement of the copyright law.
In slightly different form, all the columns in this book appeared in
Canadian Living magazine, 1989-1993.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
Gzowski, Peter
Canadian Living
ISBN 0-7710-3729-5
I. Title.
PS8563.26C3 1993 C814'.54 C93-094329-5
PR91I99.3.G96C3 1993
The publishers acknowledge the support of the Canada Council,
the Ontario Arts Council, and the Ontario Ministry of Culture,
Tourism and Recreation for their publishing program.
Printed and bound in Canada.
McClelland & Stewart Inc.
The Canadian Publishers
481 University Avenue
Toronto, Ontario
MSG 2EQ
1 2 3 4 5 97 96 95 94 93

At one of the many parties I didn't attend during the years these columnsappeared, someonea Canadian Living reader, presumablyapproached a colleagueof mine from Morningside.

"Who's the guy Gzowski lives with?" he said.

"The guy?" said my colleague.

"You knowGill. He writes about him all the time."

"Oh, that's a soft G," my colleague said. "Jill."

Actually, it's Gillian, Gillian Howard. She is not, believe me, a guy. Thisbook, nearly all of which she read in progresssomeparts many timesis for her.

Table of Contents

PREFACE
"Other People Have Experiences"

ENVOI
Revenge of the Tree and Other Postscripts

PREFACE

"Other People
Have Experiences"

"W hen I was young, and married," I wrote long ago in Canadian Living, "Iwould no more have thought of writing for this magazine than I would havethought ofwell, reading it."

But those had been the days (I went on) when I also thought thatsalt-shakers filled themselves, that when you ran out of toilet paper in thebathroom you just yelled, "Hey, we're out of toilet paper here in thebathroom," and someone would open the door and throw you a fresh roll, and thatmagazines you could buy at the supermarket were for well, maybe not for "thelittle woman," of the sort the telephone company still assumes has nothingbetter to do than hang around the house in her pretty frock, waiting for therepairman to find some time in his busy day, but certainly not for me.

I learned better. My marriage, a good one while it lasted (notwithstandingmy plaintive cries from the loo), came to an endmy fault, if that matters. Ihunkered down in a furnished flat. Kentucky Fried Chicken and take-out chowmein quickly lost their novelty. The fridge, bare except for half a bottle offlat tonic water, one blue-encrusted lump of orange cheese, two fossilizedlemons and something I couldn't identify wrapped in foil, soon depressed me. Ibought a frying pan, eggs, green onions, cream, Parmesan cheese and a spatula.One Sunday, before I left to pick up the kids to join the parade at the bowlingalley, I essayed a gourmet omelette.

Next chance I had, I bought some salt, and filled the shaker myself. Boughta pepper mill, too, wishing only that the fingers that had held a thousand poolcues were adroit enough to poke the corns through a hole apparently designed bywatchmakers. And more cookware and some garbage bags, and laundry soap andolive oil, and all the other things that, as a comfortable young husband, I hadthought just came with the house. And then some cookbooks and a spice rack, bayleaves and balsamic vinegar, J-cloths and sea salt, and all the othernecessities of home, including, somewhere along the way, my first four-pack oftoilet paper.

By the time Bonnie Cowan called me, many years later, I had changed my mindabout a lot of things, including magazines.

Bonnie had just taken over as editor of Canadian Living. Among her firstacts had been to run some excerpts from a book I was just bringing out. Now shewondered if I'd like to try my hand at a column. I said I'd be delighted togive it a whirl. I had been, after all, a magazine guy long before I went neara radio studio, and though I'd been earning most of my living at the CBC fornearly twenty years when Bonnie called, I still missed printstill thought ofmyself, if anyone asked, as a writer who was working in radio for a while.

Besides, the hundreds of thousands of people who took Canadian Living homefrom the supermarket every month now included me.

This is a collection of contentments. Except, perhaps, for machinesno, notperhaps; I hate machines as much as they appear to hate methere are novillains here. There's some nostalgia, I suppose, and maybe, between the lines,a sense of a country that's slipping away. But these are musings on privateconcerns, not comments on public affairs. On CBC Radio, where I spent mymornings in the years these pieces appeared, I wrestled daily with Meech Lakeand Charlottetown, with the GST and the changing of the Ottawa guard. On golfcourses around the country, I played games to help raise money for a cause Ifeel deeply about, teaching people to read and write. Inevitably, those aspectsof my life spilled over into the columns I sent in. But in Canadian Living, andwith Bonnie's blessing, I wrotewrite, if I stay luckyabout people I like oradmire or, frequently, love; about places I've been and things I've tried;about occasions that lingered in my mind. The column became a kind of haven forme, a respite from the front pages of life. I enjoyed writing it, in a waythat, in all my years at various keyboards, I've seldom enjoyed writinganything, and, I think, I often tended to look on the world through the lens ofmy magazine page. As my cousin Jack said once, and I'm sure this is true fornearly everyone who has a regular writing gig, "Other people haveexperiences; Peter has columns."

Sometimes, to my surprise, those columns turned out to involve food.

The surprise, of course, came from the fact that someone who had thoughtParmesan cheese turned scrambled eggs into haute cuisine was daring to publishhis culinary adventures in the company of some, if not all, of the best foodwriters in the country. Canadian Living, as its faithful readers know, is manythings: fiercely and jauntily proud of its Canadianness (its editors use moreexclamation points than anyone outside a comic strip); unafraid, when it wantsto be, of such issues as child abuse or date rape;